while interesting in theory, suck, and here's why:
--The entire world of Environ is one giant anachronism (flying nucleus-things coexisting with giant robots and hawks...it's like an Adderall fueled-mashup), so you have no basis to expect players to understand what constitutes an anachronism in the context of a mission. Why am I being punished--literally--for not knowing that I'm supposed to kill fire elementals but not flying amoebas? How the hell should I know when either should, could or would have existed?
--exacerbating the above problem, the penalty for killing the wrong creatures is huge, and there's no healing mechanism in place besides killing creatures...you see how this could be an issue?
--I'm not the only one who feels this way about anachronism missions. Game reviewer Tom Chick, over at Quarter to Three, writes:
"Unfortunately, some of the missions are awful. The meteor punching isn’t bad compared to the “fix anachronisms” missions. These are about the worst thing A Valley Without Wind can inflict on new players. You walk into a huge room that spans several screens, and it’s populated with about twenty monsters. Some of them don’t belong. To pass the mission, you have to kill the monsters that don’t belong. If you kill a monster that does belong, the mission fails.
The problem is that for all the helpful reference info, new players will have no idea which monsters don’t belong. I’ve done far too many of these missions, and I still have no idea what the criteria is for an anachronism. Sometimes a given blue blob belongs. Sometimes it doesn’t. Whatever ecology is at work in A Valley Without Wind, it isn’t clear when it most needs to be clear."
http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2012/04/25/a-valley-without-wind-punching-meteors-in-the-face/--I'm on the first continent, and the four missions currently available to me are all anachronism missions. I'm 0 for 6 in attempts, and regardless of difficulty or whether I just suck, at this point my interest in playing AVWOW is rapidly diminishing. Do I need to start over to avoid these things, wait it out for new missions to spawn, or what?
Please dont mistake me for a hater. I got in early on the beta and watch (and continue to watch) the game evolve with great interest. I think AVWOW contains 's a lot of good ideas, it's just that
execution and
feedback require work. The major problem with AVWOW is that there is very little about it that is intuitive. I don't think it's a question of budget limitations. Games like S.P.A.Z. and The Binding of Isaac are examples of micro-budget indies with clean, intuitive design.
I just went back in and checked and you're correct re: indicators, so I removed that from my post.
Thanks for the swift reply
VV
