Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


just now getting into this and while it's enjoyable enough, there's a few things that bug me.

bt monster encounters can be resolved by just walking away? for real? that kills all of the dramatic tension that's supposed to happen when you get swarmed and dragged into the tar arena. is there any downside to just saying nope and walking away from the monster encounters? it seems like that's actually the most efficient way to deal with a BT area because it then clears ALL the BTs out. just get caught on purpose and then slowly march outside the zone. what am i missing here?

i wish the game was less episodic, or that you had more autonomy in deciding in what order you wanted to help the various cities. fragile/higgs are the two most interesting characters for me, and having all of her plot just dumped on me in chapter 3 has made the rest of the plot feel very slow. i guess i also don't like that it feels like the game goes out of its way to give the actual explanation for all of the poo poo that's happening, instead of leaving some of it as unexplained mystery. i'm just about to go to edge knot city and i feel like i have a handle on 90% of the plot at this point, which just feels kinda underwhelming after the bizarre way the game opens

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Intel&Sebastian
Oct 20, 2002

colonel...
i'm trying to sneak around
but i'm dummy thicc
and the clap of my ass cheeks
keeps alerting the guards!
Make a DS movie or HBO series you cowards

night slime
May 14, 2014

Freaking Crumbum posted:

just now getting into this and while it's enjoyable enough, there's a few things that bug me.

bt monster encounters can be resolved by just walking away? for real? that kills all of the dramatic tension that's supposed to happen when you get swarmed and dragged into the tar arena. is there any downside to just saying nope and walking away from the monster encounters? it seems like that's actually the most efficient way to deal with a BT area because it then clears ALL the BTs out. just get caught on purpose and then slowly march outside the zone. what am i missing here?

Later on you can't do that based on some missions requirements, like not being able to drop stuff. I mean, a lot of the game mechanics are contingent on you not knowing at first and learning more about them, but it was still a fun experience to me.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
There is no lasting consequence for just running away if you get caught, no. Sam's stamina (dark blue bar) will drop like a rock after and the kiddo won't be happy but that's about it. The idea I think is that if you do get caught then your cargo is going to suffer, because the rain picks up and destroys the containers and it's much easier to get knocked over while you're trying to waddle away from danger. The boss BTs move kind of slow though so it doesn't really end up that way in practice.

edit: Also, there are some deliveries where the target items are inside a BT zone, meaning you can't get caught because loose cargo sinks into the tar when the boss spawns and doesn't come back until it's gone. I wish there were more mandatory ones that were like that.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Mar 10, 2020

WaltherFeng
May 15, 2013

50 thousand people used to live here. Now, it's the Mushroom Kingdom.
Tbh getting caught by gazers takes way more time than simply avoiding them. Plus if you get into the habit of delivering like 300 - 600 kg cargo you dont want BTs loving you up

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


CJacobs posted:

edit: Also, there are some deliveries where the target items are inside a BT zone, meaning you can't get caught because loose cargo sinks into the tar when the boss spawns and doesn't come back until it's gone. I wish there were more mandatory ones that were like that.

that's literally not true tho. i just did the mission where you have to take the fossil samples to the evo-devo person and those are all in a BT zone and right after i picked up the last case, a BT grabbed me and dragged me to the middle of the area and triggered the monster encounter. i dropped all of my loot on the way but was able to get back over to it and pick it all up as soon as the fight started and then just trudged my way to the edge of the zone. so even if your loot does sink into the tar, it's not an instant thing. i don't even mind the monster fights except they just take way too long (the boss monsters have too much health imo) and it's always faster to just escape, even if you're trudging through black BT goop


night slime posted:

like not being able to drop stuff

that would be the only thing i can think of that would invalidate the run away strategy, as your loot get forced-dropped if you get caught.

overall the game is a solid C+. i'd probably rate it higher if i had never played breath of the wild, but after playing that game, no other open world walking simulator can compare

rabidsquid
Oct 11, 2004

LOVES THE KOG


Freaking Crumbum posted:

that's literally not true tho. i just did the mission where you have to take the fossil samples to the evo-devo person and those are all in a BT zone and right after i picked up the last case, a BT grabbed me and dragged me to the middle of the area and triggered the monster encounter. i dropped all of my loot on the way but was able to get back over to it and pick it all up as soon as the fight started and then just trudged my way to the edge of the zone. so even if your loot does sink into the tar, it's not an instant thing. i don't even mind the monster fights except they just take way too long (the boss monsters have too much health imo) and it's always faster to just escape, even if you're trudging through black BT goop


that would be the only thing i can think of that would invalidate the run away strategy, as your loot get forced-dropped if you get caught.

overall the game is a solid C+. i'd probably rate it higher if i had never played breath of the wild, but after playing that game, no other open world walking simulator can compare

you picked all of the cargo off of the ground before you got grabbed ergo it could not have been sucked into the tar. stuff sam has picked up is handled differently, even if you only pick it up for a second to throw at a mule or whatever

edit: this game is absolutely nothing like breath of the wild other than they're both open world, i feel like if you're making this argument you had no hope of enjoying this game.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
It would be nice if there were some lasting consequence to running away just to keep people from trying to cheap it out. WaltherFeng is right, spawning the boss doesn't save time, but for some people it is easier to run away from one big thing than 30 small things. There are some BT zones where you face more than one boss at once (occasionally you get a zone with like four lion dudes in it)- Maybe they could have the area just compound on itself and get more and more jam packed each time you run away until you deal with the problem.

Zazz Razzamatazz
Apr 19, 2016

by sebmojo

Intel&Sebastian posted:

Make a DS movie or HBO series you cowards

Not empty quoting

night slime
May 14, 2014

rabidsquid posted:

you picked all of the cargo off of the ground before you got grabbed ergo it could not have been sucked into the tar. stuff sam has picked up is handled differently, even if you only pick it up for a second to throw at a mule or whatever

edit: this game is absolutely nothing like breath of the wild other than they're both open world, i feel like if you're making this argument you had no hope of enjoying this game.

I remember they're going to (Zelda BOTW ending spoilers) rebuild Hyrule in the end. Wonder if the Zelda sequel is just Death Stranding rebuilding roads lol.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


CJacobs posted:

It would be nice if there were some lasting consequence to running away just to keep people from trying to cheap it out. WaltherFeng is right, spawning the boss doesn't save time, but for some people it is easier to run away from one big thing than 30 small things. There are some BT zones where you face more than one boss at once (occasionally you get a zone with like four lion dudes in it)- Maybe they could have the area just compound on itself and get more and more jam packed each time you run away until you deal with the problem.

honestly i think it would have been more thematic if the boss encounters were just an endless space that kept repeating eventually and you couldn't leave without killing the monsters, since beaches are supposed to be supernatural and don't have to follow our puny human expectations of distance

and i wasn't pre-disposed to hate DS, but this and botw are very similar in my subjective opinion. pretty much any game that primarily utilizes an open world and gives you the mechanical autonomy to explore it at your leisure is going to get compared to botw for me.

like i said, my biggest disappointment is how compartmentalized the story becomes, and how they directly explain all of the stuff that's initially spooky & mysterious. every setting detail that's initially a cool weird thing ends up getting 30 minutes of exposition at some point or another, and it made everything just feel like game mechanics for game mechanics sake. like timefall exists because they needed a reason to explain why your ladders and cars couldn't just clutter the game space forever, but they go and explain what it is and why it's there and how it works and it doesn't feel like a cool weird detail, it just becomes "the reason to explain why your ladders and cars couldn't just clutter the game space forever"

Freaking Crumbum fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Mar 10, 2020

Necrothatcher
Mar 26, 2005




I kinda read Timefall as a way to force the player to take rain seriously. In real life it sucks and is demoralising when you're caught in it, but in videogames it's usually just aesthetic. Timefall degrading your stuff makes you suddenly feel worried when you hear a distant rumble of thunder.

rabidsquid
Oct 11, 2004

LOVES THE KOG


locking you in an endless boss arena when you might not even have a weapon seems like a really bad idea

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


rabidsquid posted:

locking you in an endless boss arena when you might not even have a weapon seems like a really bad idea

I CAST FIST

also, piss

edit: also lol the unger sections clearly give you infinite respawning weapons, this is a solved problem

night slime
May 14, 2014
You can shout for weapons in the boss fights. Other Sams throw them at you. Mostly useful except when you get a bunch of power skeletons thrown at you.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
It seems to only work when you're in online mode however. In offline mode Sam just taunts the boss, I couldn't get the game to throw me a bone with 'fake' white BT Sams.

In general it seems to me that they wanted to make forced combat encounters very rare, so that when you're in one you really feel like you're playing something different. I know I felt like I was out of my element the first time the game handed me some guns and said "Alright buster, do you know how to play third person shooters with a controller? Good luck!"

edit: Freaking Crumbum's suggestion does have merit imo but they'd need to change how boss encounters work a little. A way to 'non-lethally' defeat boss BTs may have gone a long way a la (post-edge knot spoilers) crossing the tar belt by avoiding the whales until you reach Amelie.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Mar 11, 2020

night slime
May 14, 2014
I think that's because they're other players. I think the guns are meant to be from the shared or lost cargo thing.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


night slime posted:

You can shout for weapons in the boss fights. Other Sams throw them at you. Mostly useful except when you get a bunch of power skeletons thrown at you.

do you actually have to press the shout button? on the very first fight by port knot the white ghosts kept popping up and i am 99% sure i wasn't pressing the touch pad. i think they automatically shower you with poo poo once you use up whatever weapons you had.

do different preppers need different numbers of likes to progress their star levels? example: the collector has been at 1.75 stars for me for days, and no matter how many deliveries i make to him, the star progress bar barely moves. but all of the preppers around heartman i was able to hit 5 stars with just their intro quest and a handful of random deliveries

RudeCat
Aug 7, 2012

The rudest cat for the rudest jobs


Yeah, some people really sit at a star amount and then once you push past that wall it goes fast. The collector just really wants to "be impressed" with you I guess. Get him more nerd poo poo

Capital Letdown
Oct 5, 2006
i still cant fix red text avs someone tell me the bbcode for that im an admin and dont know this lmao

Freaking Crumbum posted:

do different preppers need different numbers of likes to progress their star levels? example: the collector has been at 1.75 stars for me for days, and no matter how many deliveries i make to him, the star progress bar barely moves. but all of the preppers around heartman i was able to hit 5 stars with just their intro quest and a handful of random deliveries

This is usually a 'Go back to a private room to rest, and read the emails from that person, and the next delivery will earn stars' situation.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


Capital Letdown posted:

This is usually a 'Go back to a private room to rest, and read the emails from that person, and the next delivery will earn stars' situation.

thats the thing, the collector is one of those guys you never officially "have" to meet and he doesn't seem to have plot relevance. i've found no quests directly involving him, i just stumbled onto his cave inside the canyon by the mule camp. he never sends me email or anything.

by the same token, i'm about to go to edge knot & there's still like 3-4 map squares that are not unlocked & don't appear to have any delivery options. are those post game content squares or what brings them online?

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
The Collector is a weirdo, you have to do all of the quests specifically given from his terminal before he'll stop being a baby and chat with you further about the UCA (the reason for this is because he has a specific final quest that gets you to 5 stars). As for the rest, some preppers require finding a piece of their lost cargo in the nearby area and taking it to them as the opener to your conversation.

edit: And if he doesn't have any orders at his own terminal, try the Lake Distro Center, Cosplayer or South Knot City to see if there are any orders for him. I don't really like how meeting new preppers works, it's weirdly clunky.

RudeCat
Aug 7, 2012

The rudest cat for the rudest jobs


There's a couple of preppers, one in the mountain the other over looking the valley/plains area. Sometimes you'll find cargo for them lying around but otherwise you'll have to just go looking for them

Listerine
Jan 5, 2005

Exquisite Corpse
I didn't even realize the Ludens Fan was there until after finishing the main game and going back to max out connection strengths.

RudeCat
Aug 7, 2012

The rudest cat for the rudest jobs


Yeah I've tried getting deliveries for some of them and "losing" it along traveled areas and such to give people more clues that they're out there.

Ruffian Price
Sep 17, 2016

Capital Letdown posted:

This is usually a 'Go back to a private room to rest, and read the emails from that person, and the next delivery will earn stars' situation.

And don't worry about wasted deliveries, the likes you've already got still count once you get past the progression gate. You'll probably rocket straight to almost four stars, then another delivery gets you a gameplay present and almost five stars, then you get the pantstar

skooma512
Feb 8, 2012

You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.

Capital Letdown posted:

This is usually a 'Go back to a private room to rest, and read the emails from that person, and the next delivery will earn stars' situation.

This. For First Prepper, Veteran Porter, Collector, and Novelist's Son never do a delivery until you get an email until you get to like 3 stars.

Talorat
Sep 18, 2007

Hahaha! Aw come on, I can't tell you everything right away! That would make for a boring story, don't you think?

RudeCat posted:

Yeah I've tried getting deliveries for some of them and "losing" it along traveled areas and such to give people more clues that they're out there.

That's such a cool idea and really plays into the way the game develops community. I love it.

night slime
May 14, 2014
IIRC one of the codec side mission requests at the beginning is to the Ludens fan.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


just got through the whole sequence of edge knot city, and it made a lot of the game feel pointless. like is there any real reason to do any deliveries outside the mandatory plot missions? you get given enough baseline equipment to progress from the story missions, and although the upgraded versions are nice, they don't really seem to make much of a difference. i mean you can't fail boss encounters (both because you can't die and because friendly sams just infinitely chuck weapons and ammo at you) so ... like ... why would i even bother to run the non-mandatory delivery quests?

i dunno, as i look back over what i spent 50 hours doing in this game, almost all of it seems to amount to "pointless time wasting" and it's underwhelming

null_user01013
Nov 13, 2000

Drink up comrades
"I played this game for 50 hours, what a waste of my time!" is the gamer's motto.

GreenBuckanneer
Sep 15, 2007

I spent 130 hours before I stopped playing....I need to go back and finish the plat since I'm so close but I had a lot of fun.

Dr. Stab
Sep 12, 2010
👨🏻‍⚕️🩺🔪🙀😱🙀
If you didn't have fun playing the game, it was still a waste of time even if it gave you equipment to beat the final boss.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


AxeManiac posted:

"I played this game for 50 hours, what a waste of my time!" is the gamer's motto.

it feels like a lot of the challenge in this game is predicated on the player not knowing they're never in any actual danger of failing anything (see: just walking away from BT monsters being completely viable). i like to feel like all of the effort i spent playing a game was necessary to beat it, so having all the effort turn out to be unnecessary feels cheap. i dunno, maybe that's HK playing 12-dimensional chess with my expectations and actually the game being pointless is the entire point you philistine but it just doesn't feel good

rabidsquid
Oct 11, 2004

LOVES THE KOG


you can just walk away from all the enemies in breath of the wild except for the end boss :v:

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


rabidsquid posted:

you can just walk away from all the enemies in breath of the wild except for the end boss :v:

for sure, but can you walk away from the ganon blights and still get credit for defeating them? because that's closer to what i am talking about

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
The actual reason to do it is because you want to fulfill the goal you've been given of connecting everyone to the UCA, because you care about the game world you've been plopped into, but if the emotional aspect misses the mark for you then there's always the mechanical aspect: Upgrading connections gets you improved tools to make the journey easier. Simple as that. Sure you don't need to do it in order to beat the game or get a good ending, all Standard Orders are optional, but would you suddenly want to if they forced you to? imo it's good that they give you the vital tools through the plot deliveries and leave all of the incremental improvement to the side for people who want it.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Mar 12, 2020

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


CJacobs posted:

The actual reason to do it is because you want to fulfill the goal you've been given of connecting everyone to the UCA, because you care about the game world you've been plopped into, but if the emotional aspect misses the mark for you then there's always the mechanical aspect: Upgrading connections gets you improved tools to make the journey easier. Simple as that. Sure you don't need to do it in order to beat the game or get a good ending, all Standard Orders are optional, but would you suddenly want to if they forced you to? imo it's good that they give you the vital tools through the plot deliveries and leave all of the incremental improvement to the side for people who want it.

mostly it hit home when i died in the middle of the boss fight with the giant BT and the only thing that happened was that i had to swim back to my body and i was right back in the fight, boss had the same health level, friendly ghosts still throwing guns & ammo at me. it just felt so anticlimactic, which then made me pontificate on how the difficulty of the game in general is very illusionary, which then made me wonder how many other systems largely only exist because the player is told "you should do this" and you might not stop to test whether or not there's actually a hard boundary to anything.

i dunno, i still feel like the game parts are pretty underwhelming and what HK should have done was taken Sony's millions in funding and high profile actors and just made a movie. i greatly enjoy the zany plot shenanigans, but the actual game is pretty meh. mind, the last HK game i played was MGS2 back in like 2001 or whenever it came out, so i don't have context for whether or not all of his recent games have borne out the same way.

also i didn't get upset with the whole princess beach thing but i was mad about how sam treats fragile at the end. you could see how hurt she gets right before "no, we're square, you don't owe me anything" and it made me mad at sam for being such an oblivious cad

edit: so i think i'm appropriately invested in the plot, the game part just isn't very fun

night slime
May 14, 2014
You get e-mails and info reports and learn more about the plot/characters through leveling up people with deliveries.

Someone said to me it seems like a game where you make a lot of your own fun and I think maybe they were onto something. I cannot enjoy something like Minecraft for the life of me, but this game is just structured enough that I enjoy going around harassing MULEs and stealing their poo poo and making deliveries.

I think the game is made in the heavily divided way it is so that people who aren't good at video games can brute force through it and just enjoy the cinematic aspect without being burdened by 500 missions.

Beyond all the graphics and plot and tools, the gameplay has a very basic relaxing collectathon feel to me, which is part of what I enjoy so much about it. It's like a N64 game or something.

night slime fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Mar 12, 2020

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!

Freaking Crumbum posted:

mostly it hit home when i died in the middle of the boss fight with the giant BT and the only thing that happened was that i had to swim back to my body and i was right back in the fight, boss had the same health level, friendly ghosts still throwing guns & ammo at me. it just felt so anticlimactic, which then made me pontificate on how the difficulty of the game in general is very illusionary, which then made me wonder how many other systems largely only exist because the player is told "you should do this" and you might not stop to test whether or not there's actually a hard boundary to anything.

i dunno, i still feel like the game parts are pretty underwhelming and what HK should have done was taken Sony's millions in funding and high profile actors and just made a movie. i greatly enjoy the zany plot shenanigans, but the actual game is pretty meh. mind, the last HK game i played was MGS2 back in like 2001 or whenever it came out, so i don't have context for whether or not all of his recent games have borne out the same way.

also i didn't get upset with the whole princess beach thing but i was mad about how sam treats fragile at the end. you could see how hurt she gets right before "no, we're square, you don't owe me anything" and it made me mad at sam for being such an oblivious cad

edit: so i think i'm appropriately invested in the plot, the game part just isn't very fun

I should say I do agree with you to some extent, the game puts up a great illusion of difficulty but even on hard mode there's really nothing to worry about. Sam being a repatriate means that it is basically impossible to permanently screw up, aside from voidout craters making future trips through certain areas more difficult. I understand the frustration with the game implying you need to take extra precautions everywhere you go and then not really following through, but imo it doesn't need that to still be enjoyable. If you destroy the cargo on a plot delivery wherein the cargo is one-of-a-kind you do get an actual "restart from your last save" game over, so there is room to punish failure outside of boss fights... but it doesn't need any more than that I feel. The punishment for unpreparedness is all short-term stuff like Sam being exhausted until you rest, and so on. If you run out into the world with no supplies you're going to feel it, but the game's not going to go out of its way to make playing it actively unpleasant, and I don't really mind that.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Mar 12, 2020

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply