Personally, I'd welcome any new skill just for the sake of it ^^. However, with the recent tendency of culling everything which doesn't see much use and/or adds execution difficulty, I'm inclined to argue against the runner in favour of other skills, simply because I fear the runner would get the axe one day soon again and it hence wouldn't be worth anyone's effort - neither for those implementing it by programming, nor for those implementing this skill into their levels. Like with radiation and slowfreeze, it certainly will be possible to find some cool and unique uses for runners, perhaps in combination with other skills. But you and me both know these couple of cool levels won't matter when it comes to cutting stuff again
.
Unfortunately none of the three arguments you mentioned really convince me, and I'm going to tell you why:
1) Separate lemmings/a worker from crowd. Yes this can be achieved many other ways. So what? More ways to do that (a very important thing in the game) the better.
Here you say it yourself: Many other skills can do this, too. "The more the better" doesn't make sense, a skill needs to have some own ground it covers uniquely. I consider the differences between floaters and gliders or stackers and stoners pretty minor already (depending on release rate, both stacker and stoner can cause lemmings to slip by the barrier they create). But at least the glider interacts with updrafts and has an angle to it, and stackers and stoners differ so far that one can be assigned in mid-air, is lethal, and climbers can't go over it, whereas the stacker has both the upside and downside that climbers can go over it.
A skill however which only does something other skills can do as well, without covering its own specific territory, doesn't justify its inclusion on its own.
But wait, why do I say "only"?
Because this doesn't do much for me either:
2) Does other things in conjunction with other skills. This, which is sort of unique to this skill I find quite a cool feature of the game. It adds another level of complexity which can lead to lots of other interesting things. Which Lix and L2 demonstrates to some degree. I think there is even more potential there.
This is the same argument I made for timed bombers ("they're cool with cloners!"), and yet that didn't cut it
. Because once again, a skill needs to be able to stand on its own. Timed bombers may be cool with cloners indeed, yet if they're used consistently they require blockers to be part of the skill panel too (and you only can choose a maximum of 8, after all) if they're not supposed to become an execution-based annoyance.
This is the same for the runner: While it may create specific interactions with e.g. the jumper, it's the jumper skill doing the actual work here, with the runner merely being an amplifier which doesn't contribute anything to the level by itself. This means that anytime you wanted to have this effect of the lemming jumping further, you'd have to make two of your eight skills jumper plus runner right from the getgo.
the most important one
3) Makes timing and precision a LOT nicer/easier to achieve.
Ehm, no, most definitely NO. Timing and precision are made easier by framestepping, that's it. Because Lix has this feature, that may be the reason why the runner is not as annoying there.
If you play original Lemmings 2 however, most of the levels I've seen which feature the runner are horrible timing-messes - I remember at least one each from the Cavelem, Egyptian, and Sports tribe ("Take up archery"). A tiny timing mistake, i.e. the runner being too slow or too fast, and you had to restart the whole level (with L2 not even having a replay feature). Also, assigning another skill to a currently running lemming was very fiddly and, if you wanted to be on the safe side, basically always had to be done in pause mode (which was switched off as soon as you picked a skill).
So you see, it's not the runner itself which creates these timing advantages, it's the engine it's used on. Depending on whether you have framestepping or not, the runner can simply accelerate levels, which you may enjoy, or create a total execution nightmare.
If you have more experience with Lix than with Lemmings 2, I understand that your focus in this regard is different. And of course NeoLemmix has all these features which can compensate for the original runner's drawbacks. But that still doesn't give the runner any
advantages, it simply does less
damage in NeoLemmix.
With framestepping, you can basically make an excuse for any execution-based stuff, because where's the problem if you can always rewind? ^^ This argument can be used for timed bombers, radiation / slowfreeze, and was also employed in the turning teleporters debate ("just let a lemming walk through, then you'll see the direction it's facing"). However, this is not the philosophy of the people in charge of NeoLemmix currently; they want to crack the code of the puzzle, not "waste time" (in their view
) with getting the execution exactly right. That's the reason why they want to rely on framestepping and clear physics as little as possible.
The runner however tends to make framestepping absolutely necessary in any level which is based on relative time and space between lemmings.
Which is why I think this is exactly the wrong way round:
I like this kind of feature/user friendliness much better than the actual "user friendly features" (clear physics mode etc).
The runner is not a user friendly feature; framestepping is
. And it's framestepping which can make the runner acceptable. But "not annoying" plus "does something other skills can do, too" plus "is good in interaction with other skills" do not really speak for the skill itself, in my opinion. Hence, adding it to NeoLemmix is something I'd consider bottom priority of almost every other skill I could imagine.
When it comes to removing skills however, I'm completely on your side. The runner has been part of Lix for a while, there are levels which use it and are dependant on it, so it should stay. It's like the "height-gaining platformers" debate, where platformers keep their behaviour too this day, even if some of the Lix creators may regret having created the skill that way
.
