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What are the most unwelcome bottleneck levels? As in you got progressed into a really hard/annoying level on the main-path and can't back out? Mass Effect 2 forced you into the somewhat hard Horizon mission after recruiting the first set of allies. Then a short time later without warning you get shoved into the nightmarish Collector Ship mission. You can technically delay the mission but the conditions to trigger it are pretty complex. It's nice when a game says after a certain point you will enter "irreversible-bumfuck-alley" so do clean up any side-content to prepare.
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Oct 12, 2019 19:54
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| # ? May 8, 2024 07:36 |
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You always get the Collector Ship exactly six missions after Horizon.
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Oct 12, 2019 20:41
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Assassin's Creed III. When you first get to New York, you're immediately accosted by a mission to kill one of the Templars, which you can't really back out of. It takes all of sequence 9, you're stuck in an area away from the main map for most of it, and you're railroaded even worse than usual.
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Oct 12, 2019 20:45
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the most unwelcome bottleneck levels? As in you got progressed into a really hard/annoying level on the main-path and can't back out? Assassin’s Creed 2 has the boat level. It’s DLC, but if you have the DLC you’re forced into it, and I had the PC version, which came with the DLC baked in. That poo poo was both really hard and really not fun at all.
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Oct 12, 2019 20:50
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the most unwelcome bottleneck levels? As in you got progressed into a really hard/annoying level on the main-path and can't back out? I always felt bad cause I bummed around and did all the side missions right before the final mission and I didnt realize they werent kidding when they told you time was of the essence. In RPGs thats usually just an expression!
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Oct 12, 2019 20:57
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If you do everything before the Reaper IFF then you're golden. It's possible to take Legion to Tali's trial before the endgame. I wonder what kind of mission was so important that Shepard had to take their entire team, including the benchwarmers, leaving the Normandy defenceless.
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Oct 12, 2019 21:01
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Inspector Gesicht posted:If you do everything before the Reaper IFF then you're golden. It's possible to take Legion to Tali's trial before the endgame. I know that now but my first playthrough on release I did not.
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Oct 12, 2019 21:03
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Rimworld has this caravan mechanic to go visit other civilizations to trade or attack. But you should never actually use it because my god there is something in the code to make a raid spawn in the second you leave. By the time you can afford to let a few colonists leave and have the defenses to make up for it, you wont actually need to bother with those things.
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Oct 12, 2019 22:10
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the most unwelcome bottleneck levels? As in you got progressed into a really hard/annoying level on the main-path and can't back out? Ace Combat 7 has a couple varieties of this, and both are terrible. One is a mission where you have a time limit to accrue a certain number of points, with various targets being worth arbitrary amounts. there are a few of these, and every single one makes you attack land / sea targets to have a hope of hitting your objective, which neuters your air-to-air weapon options so you can't use the fun toys. The other is a mission in the early-mid game, where you have to fly "low" to avoid being satellite targeted by cruise missiles. In a mountain range. In clouds. I don't see the fun in being forced to fly with zero visibility in an area where cliffs are everywhere. You get targeted in ~6 seconds of being out of cloud cover and the missiles aren't able to be dodged as far as I could tell. Leal posted:Rimworld has this caravan mechanic to go visit other civilizations to trade or attack. If you wait until right after a raid it's a lot less likely to happen. Usually what happens is you go "hey, I'm pretty settled in, I've got some free colonists, I'll send them out", all the while the odds of a random event are steadily increasing. It's a coincidence for sure, but it does feel like it happens more when it's inconvenient because that's what you remember.
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Oct 12, 2019 23:23
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the most unwelcome bottleneck levels? As in you got progressed into a really hard/annoying level on the main-path and can't back out? Almost all of my Shining Force 2 runs ended when I'd accidentally lock myself into the Chess Battle after a long trek without saving so it's either try beating the chess army (and always failing cause I'm bad at games) or loading the last save from however long ago that was.
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Oct 12, 2019 23:49
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I wonder what kind of mission was so important that Shepard had to take their entire team, including the benchwarmers, leaving the Normandy defenceless. Space beer run, dude.
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Oct 13, 2019 00:58
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Now posted in the correct thread   I'm so pissed off with Control again, if the core game and world weren't so strong I'd have dropped it out of frustration at multiple points. For such a high tier game, it's stunning how badly the checkpoint system is designed for the tougher segments when the load times are easily the most hosed of any I've seen this generation. I'm near the end, and there's a long segment where you have to sequentially shut down a particular type of obstacle. But each one takes long enough that you can't do it with enemies around, so you clear out each wave, shut it down, and move on to the next one. But there's no checkpoint after each one, so you have this 10+ minute sequentially-harder combat sequence that you have to restart from scratch with minutes of loading time over and over, and the combat's twitchy enough that you might just get instakilled at any point along the way if you're unlucky. This game is an all-time hall-of-famer in so many ways, but drat does it feel like the devs are doing their best to make you hate it at times.
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Oct 13, 2019 02:10
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Okay, Gears 5: - Having enemies that can instantly kill you, skipping the usual down-but-not-out state? Risky, but not automatically a bad idea. - Allowing these enemies to also instantly kill allied NPCs, leading to an automatic game over? Now there's a bad idea. - Giving these enemies a whole buttload of health with only brief periods of real vulnerability? Please stop. - Putting all this together in a small cramped arena where that enemy can just make a beeline towards your cornered NPCs and mulch them immediately? Well gently caress all this then.
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Oct 13, 2019 10:34
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the most unwelcome bottleneck levels? As in you got progressed into a really hard/annoying level on the main-path and can't back out? Mad Max. There is a main quest where you have chase down a war wagon and destroy it on a race track in order to obtain a better engine for your car. The big rig is protected by other cars and is really fast and has a bunch of armour, and because its set on a race track you have no freedom in route or how to approach it. And, IIRC, when you die/fail the mission your checkpoint is the very start of the race, which sounds fine except that if you didnt beat the big rig then you probably want to make adjustments to your (customisable) car to improve your chances. Which you cant do because the checkpoint is AFTER the pre-race car customization screen. So it would be a cycle of fail mission, manually load earlier save, start mission, adjust car to make success more likely, fail mission and so on.
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Oct 13, 2019 10:52
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SiKboy posted:Mad Max. There is a main quest where you have chase down a war wagon and destroy it on a race track in order to obtain a better engine for your car. The big rig is protected by other cars and is really fast and has a bunch of armour, and because its set on a race track you have no freedom in route or how to approach it. And, IIRC, when you die/fail the mission your checkpoint is the very start of the race, which sounds fine except that if you didnt beat the big rig then you probably want to make adjustments to your (customisable) car to improve your chances. Which you cant do because the checkpoint is AFTER the pre-race car customization screen. So it would be a cycle of fail mission, manually load earlier save, start mission, adjust car to make success more likely, fail mission and so on. To be fair that quest is pretty heavily red flagged as a starting point of the end sequence, IIRC. Also, since the latter part of the game clearly has some missing content-issues and V8 engines appear so late they might as well not be in the game at all, I can see how someone beelines into V8 engines without the explosive spear-thingies, and gets completely stuck.
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Oct 13, 2019 11:03
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I just blew the car up with the thunderpoon, ie the only thing worth using when in the car. Dunno how I'd do it if I didn't have ammo though. I guess it's one of those 'way too easy if prepared, way too hard if not' things
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Oct 13, 2019 12:25
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Der Kyhe posted:To be fair that quest is pretty heavily red flagged as a starting point of the end sequence, IIRC. It is flagged as an important story quest, but not necessarily as the start of the end sequence (and completing it doesnt lock you out of side stuff, I'd actually argue the end sequence really starts a mission or two later), but even knowing that its an important story quest doesnt mean that you know exactly what load out to take for the Magnum Opus to beat the quest the first time you try. If the checkpoint was just before accepting the mission so you could fiddle with the loadout every time you failed then... Well it would still be a lovely brick wall of a mission, but I probably wouldnt remember it whenever anyone asks about lovely missions or the Mad Max game. As it stands, if your magnum opus is maybe too heavy and slow to even possibly complete the mission you have to manually load an earlier save to swap out to lighter armour and ram plate or whatever. What makes it extra lovely if i remember right is that its not even a "real" race; The war rig doesnt actually drive the track in a way you can keep up with it by good driving, it does its own route and burst out at you at certain predetermined places on the course, sticks about for a set time, then accelerates off and disappears. I ended up beating it by taking the biggest engine and nitros I had access to (and I did most of the side stuff as it came up, so I had some good poo poo) and the thunderpoons, and the lightest shittiest everything else. Basically you want the magnum opus to be a turbo charged glass cannon explosive harpoon delivery system. I enjoyed Mad Max overall, but that mission definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Oct 13, 2019 12:52
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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are the most unwelcome bottleneck levels? As in you got progressed into a really hard/annoying level on the main-path and can't back out? the bit in ff tactics where you have to fight whatshisname alone with Ramza can be a game ender if you didn't know it was coming
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Oct 13, 2019 15:29
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I've recently been playing a lot of Borderlands 2 with the fan-made balance patch, which improves the game considerably. However, there's one thing that it really can't help with - Badassasaurus from the Torgue DLC. This is a remarkably poorly designed boss. -Most Borderlands bosses spawn flunkies for you to shoot if you get downed so you can stay in the fight. Not this guy. -There is no cover in his arena of any kind. -He resists all but two damage types. -Ignores at least one character's action skill. -Want to whittle down his health a little faster with slag? Too bad, he's immune. -Critical hit spots are tiny, seldom exposed, and most of them disappear after you hit them too many times. -Will occasionally reflect bullets back into you. The areas of his hitbox that do this have no clear difference from the rest of him. So you've got essentially no options besides a straight-up damage race - and Badassassaurus is making GBS threads out huge amounts of area-of-effect damage constantly. Since there's no cover, the only thing you can do is sprint to avoid it, which makes it harder to actually size this guy up (to find critical spots and so forth) and pick up supplies (you're completely exposed, so there's really no time.) My character had some survivability tricks - I can't imagine what this fight would be like on the higher difficulties with a more fragile character like Zer0.
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Oct 13, 2019 17:04
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StandardVC10 posted:I've recently been playing a lot of Borderlands 2 with the fan-made balance patch, which improves the game considerably. However, there's one thing that it really can't help with - Badassasaurus from the Torgue DLC. This is a remarkably poorly designed boss. I think you can jump behind one part of the ring barrier by the entrance and completely cheese the fight that way, unless the devs have fixed that issue. EDIT: Obviously this does not make that boss any less lovely, since you more or less need to abuse the game engine to pull this off.
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Oct 13, 2019 19:34
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dead cells is not a healthy game to play for someone who likes to stick to a single title until it's done i got to 2BC and i think i've hit a wall but i keep compulsively coming back to it anyway, long after the point when there's anything left for me to unlock or work toward
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Oct 14, 2019 00:09
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StandardVC10 posted:I've recently been playing a lot of Borderlands 2 with the fan-made balance patch, which improves the game considerably. Out of curiosity, what does the patch do and what do you like about it?
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Oct 14, 2019 00:51
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Riatsala posted:Out of curiosity, what does the patch do and what do you like about it? Drop rates are increased somewhat and your character generally feels a bit more powerful at higher levels relative to enemies; some classes of gear that were almost never worth using have been improved to make them worthwhile.
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Oct 14, 2019 01:31
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Indivisible - There's a button that when held has Ajna do a prayer stance on the world map, which is pretty cool. And it ties into game mechanics since if you pray in front of a shrine you can save! Pretty rad. Unfortunately the moment you reach the second shrine in the game you're forced into a cutscene, and even worse is the same button you hold for praying also skips cutscenes. Oops. Luckily it's at the start and maybe 10 seconds from the first shrine, but I hope they don't make a habit of this. Especially since forcing you into a cutscene/fight right before you can save is kinda lame by itself.
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Oct 14, 2019 13:08
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Eclipse12 posted:Yeah, this bothers me too. In a high enough level in Diablo 3, even a simple swarm of bugs has literally billions of HP. Judging by how little damage the NPC soldiers do to it, it could kill every human on the planet and they wouldn't even be able to stop it. I read somewhere that Blizzard's goal was to make the followers useful, but not so strong they were required. It was hard to tell how much damage they were actually doing, but it felt like they were mostly hitting the mark through the campaign for me. At the end game and working up the Torment levels, the followers did effectively zero damage and I had to switch them to only procs for minor crowd control. There is a unique item or set that lets you occasionally call in all three followers, and that seems like a waste to me. Giving up equipment slots for three times zero damage.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:23
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D3 is composed entirely of PYF thing dragging this game down. It's been however many years since launch and I'm still real disappointed in how badly that property was mangled.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:36
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Diablo 3 owns, sorry haters.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:51
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Perestroika posted:Okay, Gears 5: The first time I watched one of the slightly buffer steroid monsters just reach up and swat the robot out of the sky I just laughed and laughed
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Oct 14, 2019 18:53
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Making you instantly lose the game anytime anyone on the team dies, when those characters can get one-shotted and also skip the downed state, and when those characters can be controlled by AI, seems like not the best decision
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Oct 14, 2019 19:11
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In war people get one spotted all the time so it makes sense
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Oct 14, 2019 19:17
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Agent355 posted:D3 is composed entirely of PYF thing dragging this game down. It's been however many years since launch and I'm still real disappointed in how badly that property was mangled. Despite being a huge D2 fan, I didn't play D3 until this year. I enjoyed it. Especially playing Path of Exile afterwards made me appreciate a lot about D3 (being able to respec whenever I want being able to farm/craft the gear I want). But I know I read a lot of references to massive overhauls that Blizzard had made to the D3 looting and crafting, so it sounds like the earlier game might have been a mess.
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Oct 14, 2019 21:07
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It's still a huge mess that has about 15-20 hours of entertaining content and then a dead end brick wall of a horrible post game with no replayability at all. The things it delivers on well are not what makes a compelling ARPG loot game (for me) and I'd love to see all the good poo poo from other modern ARPGs put into a D4 with D3's excellent gamefeel. The best way I can describe D3 fairly and not in some angry video game nerd rant is that it looked at Diablo 2 and took all the wrong lessons about what made it fun and how to improve it. It's some alternate reality ARPG that was designed by people who don't really like ARPGs or what made them unique and compelling in the first place. Some people are going to be like 'man this game is my jam I love it so much' or more likely 'yeah it's pretty good I guess cool.', but for my money it's just a huge waste of time. Every now and then I get the urge to play more PoE and I'll put 100-200 hours into a league trying out a few new builds that weren't possible when I played before, things I've never seen or done before, attempted the huge mountain climb that is the end game long-term goals, and have a really good time. Every now and then I get the urge to play D3 again and I'll do like 4 hours tops before I realize there is really nothing new here at all and I"m wasting my time hoping the game was somehow better than I rememered. That's pretty much the difference in D3 vs other modern ARPGs. That said: D3 is like a regular topic of conversation in this thread and I don't wanna walk down the old roads again so I'll just drop it here. I wasn't gonna respond at all but I feel bad if I don't respond when somebody quotes me. that doesn't apply to the handful of goons who are going to quote this bit explicitly trying to get me to guilt-respond
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Oct 14, 2019 21:29
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Agent355 posted:It's still a huge mess that has about 15-20 hours of entertaining content and then a dead end brick wall of a horrible post game with no replayability at all. So it's an ARPG? Like once you finish whatever it calls a story it's just a loot treadmill with nothing new except where you kill things. Whether it's in a map you played to get through the story, in a special map you got by grinding the original maps to get parts for, or a special zone unlocked by jumping through hoops Your skills stay the same, the enemies are from the same pool with the same modifiers, it's just the same game. Whether it clicks and you spend 1000 hours doing it or it doesn't and you bounce off after the basic story. But at the end of the day the gameplay is the same at hour 1000 as it was at hour 20 when you got all your skills
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Oct 14, 2019 21:38
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I enjoyed doing some rifts and whatnot while I was working night shift but eventually I was playing it and realized I just wasn’t having fun. I was playing to tick off boxes on the bounty list but wasn’t enjoying myself. Then I kept playing it because it’s not like I had anything better to do, because my job on nights is “sit in a room in case something happens”.
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Oct 14, 2019 21:59
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Agent355 posted:It's still a huge mess that has about 15-20 hours of entertaining content and then a dead end brick wall of a horrible post game with no replayability at all. D3 is a monumental improvement over D2 for the simple reason of ditching character builds. You can experiment with abilities all you want and swap on the fly, and that's the number one reason I just can't stomach D2 or similar games anymore.
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Oct 14, 2019 22:32
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I enjoyed doing some rifts and whatnot while I was working night shift but eventually I was playing it and realized I just wasn’t having fun. I was playing to tick off boxes on the bounty list but wasn’t enjoying myself. And if you really hate yourself you can play ladder/season and start over at level 1 every so often. Or hardcore to just start over every time you die
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Oct 14, 2019 22:39
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I enjoy playing 10-20 hours every year or two but it doesn't have a lot of staying power for me. Starting over with new seasons absolutely makes sense to me since the main fun of the game is the progression, not really the end state. e: it was definitely real bad at launch though.
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Oct 14, 2019 22:59
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I like D3. Speaking of loot games, I'm playing Borderlands 3 and it's driving me crazy because they hide little chests EVERYWHERE so I spend more time trying to climb to the top of every building and cliff in sight, rather than playing the actual game. Too scared I might miss another tiny little safe!
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Oct 14, 2019 23:10
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Overcooked 2 is a wonderful, cute, and light hearted co-op game that my girlfriend and I have spent hours playing and which balances fun and hectic everything-is-falling-apart panic in delightfully equal measure. The new game + mode introduces 4-star challenges that in some cases can only be approached through straight out abusing exploits, and in every case turns the game into a joyless masochistic grind. A well balanced challenge would have been welcome, but more than tripling the points required for the next star rating down is ludicrous.
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Oct 14, 2019 23:22
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The Moon Monster posted:I enjoy playing 10-20 hours every year or two but it doesn't have a lot of staying power for me. Starting over with new seasons absolutely makes sense to me since the main fun of the game is the progression, not really the end state. The fun part to any ARPG is making swift progression, seeing your character improve as your build begins to come together, and achieving whatever goals you set out to make for that class. When this feedback loop slows down and upgrades are few and far between, the endgame gets boring. New seasons reset the clock on progression every few months so that you can again feel the rush of achieving quick gains in your character build, which are amplified thanks to seasonal gimmicks and each classes' rotating free set. If "the main fun of the game is the progression, not really the end state" for you then seasons should make perfect sense, because that's where advancement is most rapid.
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Oct 15, 2019 00:15
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