Arcen Games
General Category => A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 => Topic started by: Penumbra on March 18, 2012, 01:02:19 pm
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Let me start off with saying I absolutely love these missions. They rely on a completely different strategy than anything else in the game. Very compelling and interesting.
That being said, I think there are two problems with them. One, of the three upgrades you can have, only one of them gives any benefit to completing the mission, mana. Second, the penalty for losing is very harsh.
These two things combined almost require the player to glyph-swap to either an expendable character that has a lot of mana or a specially upgraded one.
The harshness of failure is part of what makes this mission so much fun, it makes you play carefully and cautiously. However, the "lose the character that is important" is easily mitigated by the glyph-swap. So the real penalty is mission failure.
Having to figure out which person in town is expendable isn't that much fun.
In a regular mission, like a battle ground or boss tower, the only way to judge failure is the same "culmination of mistakes" behavior that eventually leads to character loss throughout the whole game. This seems fair to me since the player is given many opportunities to reassess strategy.
The "rescue survivor" missions have already added the concept of being given only one shot at success. There, failure can be defined as losing the NPC. Here, the players wants the survivor and play carefully because they don't want to lose the opportunity. Because these missions never come back, there isn't even the simple mitigation of the glyph-swap.
If the "Journey to Perfection" missions where modified to act in a similar manner, they would be much more fun. First, being required to glyph-swap would be removed. Second, a real penalty of losing the mission would be imposed.
I believe a similar concept to be moved to "Lava Escape" missions as well, as that is another favorite mission of mine that I am forced to glyph-swap before attempting. The penalty of loosing the character outweighs the fun I have in playing them.
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Basically, make it so that if you are "knocked out" you lose, but that you don't lose the character. That's what you mean, yes?
Others have suggested that for the lava escape, and I think it could work well here.
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Yes, that's it exactly. Being prepared for loosing a character is no punishment at all, since you can pick which one you loose.
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Would it help or hurt if the ability to glyph swap were rarer?
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Would it help or hurt if the ability to glyph swap were rarer?
Well, I think that's a bit irrelevant, really. You should:
a) need to take a character with you that you care about not losing when there is risk of losing the character; or
b) not have a super high risk of losing the character.
If the lava escape and journey to perfection just knock you out, then there's no risk of losing your character. And that seems fine. But when you're assaulting a dangerous keep, or going through a heated battlefield mission, you're going to want to have a solid character with you. There you're at risk of losing your character, just not in a way that is sudden and arbitrary.
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Maybe you could trigger a mission failure if the player gets hit but keep him alive and expect him to leg it back to the entrance if he wants to keep his character? Obviously the one hit kills would be disabled then.
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I like the idea of "knocked unconscious" and getting saved by the Ilari (ie, forcibly ejected from the mission). There's no reason to have a time penalty.
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I think this swings the balance too far the other way, it automatically make these missions even easier than normal missions.
If there is literally no way for me to die in them, then there is no risk to these at all. They would remain difficult from a skill perspective but in practice I can just keep trying them for no penalty.
Currently the only missions that can be failed (rather than abandoned) without "Death" are battlefield missions, and that's fine, because it is dependent on things beyond your control
The rescue survivor mission is different in that it's the death of the other character that is the concern, not getting a lumbermancer is a lot more of a problem than not getting a couple of arcane ingredients.
Personally I'd say if you did this you need to lower the reward for these missions as well, low risk low reward.
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I think this swings the balance too far the other way, it automatically make these missions even easier than normal missions.
If there is literally no way for me to die in them, then there is no risk to these at all. They would remain difficult from a skill perspective but in practice I can just keep trying them for no penalty.
Currently the only missions that can be failed (rather than abandoned) without "Death" are battlefield missions, and that's fine, because it is dependent on things beyond your control
The rescue survivor mission is different in that it's the death of the other character that is the concern, not getting a lumbermancer is a lot more of a problem than not getting a couple of arcane ingredients.
Personally I'd say if you did this you need to lower the reward for these missions as well, low risk low reward.
Won't the mission disappear if you fail it? If not, it should, then your risk is losing out on the rewards altogether.
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Won't the mission disappear if you fail it? If not, it should, then your risk is losing out on the rewards altogether.
Yes, you should loose the mission entirely, along with any potential reward. Loosing the time it took you to do that mission instead of another one is the penalty.
I think this swings the balance too far the other way, it automatically make these missions even easier than normal missions.
In that regard it is already easier. Since your upgraded character isn't beneficial to succeeding (or, at most marginally so) a glyph-swap removed the penalties altogether. It only took two scrolls, no matter how many times you needed to attempt the mission. You swap once to march "Ensign Jimmy" to his death, and are given a fresh new Red Shirttm whenever needed. Your super character would be waiting patiently back at home. It's was a time-sink instead of a penalty.
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What tigersfan and Penumbra said.
Lava escape is inherently an easier sort of mission in general, because if you can do it at all you can do it fast. But the journey one is "more expensive" no matter what, because if you can do it at all it probably takes way longer than your other sorts of missions.
Either way, I don't think there's a way to get around this sort of thing without the unconsciousness thing. The simple fact is that this game isn't built around instant-death being much of a factor (but, again, death over time). So either these remain niche content that almost nobody does, or they require lots of glyph swapping. These are bloody fun for some of us, so I wouldn't want to just not do them. But no way am I risking my main character on them, either, so that adds a time tax to all of them. And for lava escape, I can't just do them when I find them while exploring, unless I'm exploring with an underdeveloped character. So that wastes even more of my time as a player.
Having the mission literally fail and disappear if you make one mistake in these things is still pretty harsh: you didn't get anything from your time investment with that mission, and you can't even try it again. But on the other hand, it's not got all that over-harshness of the current system.
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Also with secret missions you need to locate another secret mission entrance which introduces a bit of risk as well.
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What tigersfan and Penumbra said.
Lava escape is inherently an easier sort of mission in general, because if you can do it at all you can do it fast. But the journey one is "more expensive" no matter what, because if you can do it at all it probably takes way longer than your other sorts of missions.
Either way, I don't think there's a way to get around this sort of thing without the unconsciousness thing. The simple fact is that this game isn't built around instant-death being much of a factor (but, again, death over time). So either these remain niche content that almost nobody does, or they require lots of glyph swapping. These are bloody fun for some of us, so I wouldn't want to just not do them. But no way am I risking my main character on them, either, so that adds a time tax to all of them. And for lava escape, I can't just do them when I find them while exploring, unless I'm exploring with an underdeveloped character. So that wastes even more of my time as a player.
Having the mission literally fail and disappear if you make one mistake in these things is still pretty harsh: you didn't get anything from your time investment with that mission, and you can't even try it again. But on the other hand, it's not got all that over-harshness of the current system.
This is all great, and I'm glad you're saying it. I like high risk missions that you can fail instantly, but I don't really like losing characters to that instant failure. A happy medium is exactly what's needed. I have found exactly one of these new missions so far, and I sat there invulnerable watching a few espers float around my head for a minute or so, and then just ran off screen and left the mission area. Too much risk, especially at tier 5 where as soon as I move each esper will fire 3 projectiles at me. That's a lot of dodging.
If having some penalty between character death and being knocked out with no long term effect is desirable, you could introduce something that removes just one upgrade level and forces you to repurchase it. Call it 'wounded' or somesuch thing. This still gives you the option of using a non-fully upgraded character, and then you're not losing too much, whereas taking your max upgraded character in and failing means you may have to spend 64 or 128 upgrade stones again. But at least you don't have to spend 500 stones or whatever the average amount is to fully upgrade a new character.
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If having some penalty between character death and being knocked out with no long term effect is desirable, you could introduce something that removes just one upgrade level and forces you to repurchase it. Call it 'wounded' or somesuch thing. This still gives you the option of using a non-fully upgraded character, and then you're not losing too much, whereas taking your max upgraded character in and failing means you may have to spend 64 or 128 upgrade stones again. But at least you don't have to spend 500 stones or whatever the average amount is to fully upgrade a new character.
This would have the exact same effect as losing the whole character, as I would just glyph-swap to avoid it. The upgrades really don't have much to do with either the Perfection or the Escape missions on purpose. Forcing the character into a lava suit for the escapes and the "don't fly" towers for the Perfection missions are there to normalize their difficultly as well.
I can't just do them when I find them while exploring, unless I'm exploring with an underdeveloped character. So that wastes even more of my time as a player.
Any sort of character penalty that causes more time lost than glyph-swapping will discourage play of these awesome missions.
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Any sort of character penalty that causes more time lost than glyph-swapping will discourage play of these awesome missions.
Personally, all that argument does is make me want to remove glyph-swapping.....
Alright, I generally try to avoid restating my opinion, but let me put it like this.
Losing at worst 15 minutes of my time means nothing to me.
Losing a few resources that will quickly spawn elsewhere means nothing to me.
Losing the mission means nothing to me (I mean if we take battleground as an example I purposefully lose those so that something worthwhile will spawn)
If you remove the risk of death I probably won't play these missions. They will be boring rather than tense. If my reaction to failure is "meh" and searching for the next one then all the fun of them has been sucked out. For the record this is also the reason that I don't switch characters before trying them.
The problem I have, I think, is that changing it will only effect people who like these missions anyway, if you can't do the missions removing the risk isn't going to make you play it, you will continue to avoid them, at best you might try two instead of one before giving them up as too hard. And If you are choosing to do a mission that threatens instant death then that is a choice you made and you should accept the risks associated with it.
...the more I think about it the more farcical it sounds....we are removing death arbitrarily for two missions, if the Illari can save me from these why can't they do it at other times? Are we going to change the death message to "The Illari decided not to save you this time, shame you weren't being chased by lava....."
Now having finished being snarky, obviously I don't expect this to have changed anyone's mind as clearly we have different mindsets, my reaction would be to remove the ability to avoid the risk not simply remove the risk.
And it doesn't even have to be through limiting transfers, if the death of a character actually made a difference to your settlement that would be something, as it stands you have your main character and then a nigh infinite number of sacrificial pawns whose deaths mean nothing. Which is I suppose a separate issue.
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Any sort of character penalty that causes more time lost than glyph-swapping will discourage play of these awesome missions.
Personally, all that argument does is make me want to remove glyph-swapping.....
That's basically my first reaction as well, but one lesson we've learned in developing this game is that any kind of really permanent heavy loss drives most of the audience (of this game) away, and either that bit of content (or the entire game, if it's a core thing) has to be a really niche-appeal thing or it has to be changed to not have that kind of loss potential. This was disturbing to me since I like making high-consequences stuff, but since I'm not aware of an alternate sentient species with higher risk-tolerance to which to market the game... ;)
If the game does well, then we can add more niche stuff to it, kind of like how hybrids and exos and other more-threatening stuff was added to AIW way post-release.
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A few notes in response:
1. Glyph swapping isn't going anywhere. That's hugely important to other aspects of the game, some of which haven't really come up yet. Nor is that going to get less frequent or harder to do; so that's really not something that's up for debate. This argument needs to be looked at in light of that part being set in stone.
2. When you get right down to it, anything is arbitrary. Why are enemies one-shotting you and you one-shotting them? It's arbitrarily done because it's fun and tense. It's a different way to play.
3. What these missions are not meant to be is something that is only for the hardest of the hardcore. Yes, I don't expect any but hardcore platformers to really enjoy lava escape, because they will lose a lot and losing isn't very fun. But losing AND then getting a kick in the pants on top of it (or losing AND having to waste time going to town to swap a glyph) is punitive to the player. It's very much not what this game is about, or what it has ever been about, as the core experience.
4. If these were just one-off experiences that weren't any fun for the non-hardest-core, that would be one thing. But I'm the sort, come to that, who plays on Hero rather than Chosen One, but I really love the journey to perfection and lava escape missions both. Talk about tense! Thing is, if I lose, I just want to have lost an opportunity, not actively pushed backwards in the rest of my progress.
Really what it boils down to is suddenness. If I am on a mission or any sort, or an expedition, and things are going poorly, then I can flee to town. I can give up and go away. If I don't do so, then that's my own fault if my character dies. It's a choice, and an interesting one. But for lava escape and journey to perfection, what they mostly do is make the bulk of people avoid them with characters they care at all about. The missions are fun, but there is no way to sense that something is going poorly and then retreat or push on. That's fundamentally at odds with the rest of the game.
Which, from a gameplay standpoint, is great: we want varied modes of accomplishing goals, and the more fun ways of doing missions there are, the better. But if some come with insane extra risks for no additional reward, that's a problem.
But you're right there is a problem with consistency. The unconsciousness thing bugs me, too, even though I was halfway through implementing it. I'm going to do something else instead -- basically make it so that you can choose to play as an avatar instead of as yourself on these missions.
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Terraziel, turns out you did convince me. We need the death to always be permanent, period, and we also need to not introduce something with the complexity and hokiness of an avatar.
Really the problem is the hassle of switching between characters in your settlement, and the travel time of running back there and then to the mission again. But the ability to swap out characters at will is still ripe for abuse. So I'm still thinking.
Here's the goals that I, personally, have for whatever gets done here. These I'm pretty much unwilling to compromise on, but varying solutions that meet all the criteria I'm open to.
1. Death must remain permanent. When you are controlling a character and that character dies, they remain dead. Period. No unconsciousness, no "extra lives," no take-backs of any kind. No way to control a remote robot that does the dangerous work for you. Period. This is central to the game.
2. The ability to switch between characters is equally important. Building up a stable of varied characters is something I want to encourage, and will play into later strategic decisions further down the line. It may seem trivial now, but longer-term this is going to be a central mechanic of the game.
3. We want to maintain a variety of gameplay styles, including some of which are naturally going to be more niche. However, we don't want to needlessly exclusionary with those modes. The JTP and LE missions are both fun for certain types of personalities, and we want for people with those personalities to enjoy them. But having a lot of the playerbase scared off of even trying them is not good. That was why we made the mark 1 of all the turrets and starships free to players at the start of AI War: players wouldn't take a risk on something unknown if it was perceived as having too high of a risk or opportunity cost.
4. Making the player run around a huge amount in order to "play optimally" but at the expense of their own time is bad bad bad. This is like why knowledge raiding was such as bad thing in AI War and we had to change it to be more hardcore and interesting. And Penumbra is absolutely right that, as it stands, JTP and LE missions at the moment fall prey to this. Because they are fun, and the optimal way to play them is to go and swap the glyph to some nobody and then come back and do this mission. Which is the core conundrum, and what is broken about the current implementation at the moment.
So right now, #1 and #2 are being handled properly. #3 is being handled properly except that we're scaring some people off. #4 is really badly mishandled right now with these two mission types, and I'm not sure yet what to do about it.
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Alright, as far as number 4 is concerned, if we accept that switching characters is the optimal way to do it, then the obvious solution is to just run with it.
Set up a "character swap" terminal inside the mission prep area, so essentially a long range glyph transfer, and just let people do it, make it take a glyph transfer scroll as "ammo" if necessary, if you limit it to the mission prep area for these missions then it is not particularly abusable at the very least it is probably easier to actually go back to your settlement rather than seek out a particular mission type. I mean arguably this removes the opportunity for the "new" character to die getting to the mission but given that you only ever need to traverse a single chunk there and back to the settlement it's not really a major problem.
For number 3, how about applying a similar logic to the Vortex missions? so initially you can take 3 hits in a Journey mission, but after completing a few it goes down to two, then 1.
For Lava Escape it could be that simply the speed of the lava increases, or maybe the complexity of the level increases, so that the initial missions are more or less a single straight line, then more branches and dead ends are added as you complete them.
This would ease players into the missions, on Journey missions allowing them to retreat if they think they are in over their heads, for lava missions....well it would at least help them figure out if they like that sort of challenge, but I can't think of a good way to allow players an out in them, maybe simply providing an elusion scroll in the initial ones.
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These are all really good points.
Keith, what kind of havok would we be talking about for a "switch character" terminal of that sort? It basically brings up the existing View NPCs buttons that you already have in the planning menu, but then has an extra button which is "swap characters" or something.
We'd have to switch some things about the NPC records, and physically move both of the characters into and out of their respective chunks on the server and then alert the various clients on both sides. For the player instance data itself, not much would change except the entity it is controlling, which we already do when somebody dies or whatever else.
Thoughts?
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Maybe I'm too late to convince anybody, but I really think you want something along the lines of unconsciousness at least for lava escape missions, and maybe also for journey, although I haven't tried it yet. I also want to argue that you don't want missions to disappear when you fail them, although that perhaps could be something affected by strategic difficulty.
With the greatest respect, I think you guys are kind of misunderstanding this issue because you come at it from the perspective of really highly-skilled platform gamers. It seems like you're able to play true platforming games and seriously expect losing lives to be a rare event. For most players --- I think I fall somewhere in the range of the average --- platforming is a really hard skill and the way you play a lot of the time is throwing a lot of lives at learning a level and getting past it. I think ruling out this kind of play will effectively gate off missions with instant-death situations from most players --- basically, it seems to me that it says if you don't know how to beat the mission already, you shouldn't try to practice and get better.
I'd be very happy with a solution that replaces only the instant-death part of the mission with unconsciousness, leaving other traps and ways to take real damage. I'd also be happy with leaving lava escapes as they are now and creating a kiddie version for players like me, which I suggested some time ago. Or anything else, really, that wouldn't make me feel like such a chump for wanting to try a mission type I don't have any talent for.
Of course, glyph transfering and using a lot of new characters remains a way around the hard cost of losing a character, but at a significant cost in terms of the atmosphere of the game. I've done it and won a lava escape, but after learning everywhere else in the game that I'm supposed to protect my characters I feel like I'm doing something horribly wrong when I wind up back on the selection screen a dozen times in five minutes.
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Keith, what kind of havok would we be talking about for a "switch character" terminal of that sort? It basically brings up the existing View NPCs buttons that you already have in the planning menu, but then has an extra button which is "swap characters" or something.
We'd have to switch some things about the NPC records, and physically move both of the characters into and out of their respective chunks on the server and then alert the various clients on both sides. For the player instance data itself, not much would change except the entity it is controlling, which we already do when somebody dies or whatever else.
It would mean generalizing glyph-transplant so that the target npc doesn't have to be in the same chunk (or any loaded chunk) which is a significant amount of havoc at this point but not excessive. It's just the server/singleplayer processing of it, since the multiplayer-client processing of it already doesn't require that either the using or the target entity's chunk be loaded because it has to be processed for everyone in order for them to be up-to-date on who is running with who.
Other than that, it's just a matter of making this entity which pulls up the view-npc interface and a bool for that where clicking on an npc literally triggers the GlyphTransplant ability (or, if you prefer, a clone of said that is identical except it requires no item).
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Martyn van Buren: It is a very good point that practice is the road to mastery, and anything which makes practice impossible makes a mission infeasible for anyone who isn't already a master.
And you're right that Terraziel and I are both terrible ones to design a solution here. He plays on Chosen One, for cripes sake, and is clearly far more skilled at the combat side of this than I. I'm not a perfect platform gamer, but I lose maybe three lives in my average playthrough of a new 2D Mario game on my first try. So I come at it from the perspective of wanting it to be a fun and interesting challenge the first time, because the first time is all there is.
With most of the game, these are not at odds. The difficulty level allows for levels of granularity that let us all have an experience that matches our own individual blend of skills, learn, and get better. These two mission types tend to preclude learning because they are so all-or-nothing, though.
When the currency you are playing with is your life, in this sort of fashion, that's really kind of problematic. Having no margin for error is great for existing masters, it's fun and tense and interesting. But these really do preclude anyone but existing masters learning them.
Perhaps that's the way it should be, I guess: maybe these are just those optional hardcore side jaunts that nobody but the top 10% should even bother trying to play. But a big part of me thinks that this really is a fun sort of mission to play, and would be interesting to more than 10% of our audience. So gating it off behind extreme difficulty is basically just "stepping in it" the same way that nightmare mode did in that other game.
Bleh.
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Keith, what kind of havok would we be talking about for a "switch character" terminal of that sort? It basically brings up the existing View NPCs buttons that you already have in the planning menu, but then has an extra button which is "swap characters" or something.
We'd have to switch some things about the NPC records, and physically move both of the characters into and out of their respective chunks on the server and then alert the various clients on both sides. For the player instance data itself, not much would change except the entity it is controlling, which we already do when somebody dies or whatever else.
It would mean generalizing glyph-transplant so that the target npc doesn't have to be in the same chunk (or any loaded chunk) which is a significant amount of havoc at this point but not excessive. It's just the server/singleplayer processing of it, since the multiplayer-client processing of it already doesn't require that either the using or the target entity's chunk be loaded because it has to be processed for everyone in order for them to be up-to-date on who is running with who.
Other than that, it's just a matter of making this entity which pulls up the view-npc interface and a bool for that where clicking on an npc literally triggers the GlyphTransplant ability (or, if you prefer, a clone of said that is identical except it requires no item).
Yeah, and we're past the point where we can do something like that prior to 1.0.
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I'd also be happy with leaving lava escapes as they are now and creating a kiddie version for players like me, which I suggested some time ago. Or anything else, really, that wouldn't make me feel like such a chump for wanting to try a mission type I don't have any talent for.
I think creating the separate mission type is probably the best solution, or at least strikes me as the way most likely to please everybody. The lava escape missions are sort of the far end of the platforming scale, putting something in the middle ground so that people can get a similar experience, and then choose whether or not they can or wish to go up to the lava version seems fair to me.
With the Journey missions, though obviously as noted I am a poor example, I find these to be less about skill and more about planning, "instant death" sounds bad but as long as you proceed slowly and carefully I think anyone should be able to do them on their chosen difficulty. If my previous suggestion for easing people into them is implemented all the more so.
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Martyn van Buren: It is a very good point that practice is the road to mastery, and anything which makes practice impossible makes a mission infeasible for anyone who isn't already a master.
And you're right that Terraziel and I are both terrible ones to design a solution here. He plays on Chosen One, for cripes sake, and is clearly far more skilled at the combat side of this than I. I'm not a perfect platform gamer, but I lose maybe three lives in my average playthrough of a new 2D Mario game on my first try. So I come at it from the perspective of wanting it to be a fun and interesting challenge the first time, because the first time is all there is.
With most of the game, these are not at odds. The difficulty level allows for levels of granularity that let us all have an experience that matches our own individual blend of skills, learn, and get better. These two mission types tend to preclude learning because they are so all-or-nothing, though.
When the currency you are playing with is your life, in this sort of fashion, that's really kind of problematic. Having no margin for error is great for existing masters, it's fun and tense and interesting. But these really do preclude anyone but existing masters learning them.
Perhaps that's the way it should be, I guess: maybe these are just those optional hardcore side jaunts that nobody but the top 10% should even bother trying to play. But a big part of me thinks that this really is a fun sort of mission to play, and would be interesting to more than 10% of our audience. So gating it off behind extreme difficulty is basically just "stepping in it" the same way that nightmare mode did in that other game.
Bleh.
What about making it based on difficulty level? I know for me, I'm more with MvB on this one. I've never completed an entire Mario game, so I'm not a great platformer, but the idea of these missions does sound fun, and I'd like to play them some time, but I'm not likely to because the chance of failure is so high. So, what about if I set the platforming level low, I wouldn't necessarily lose a life, and maybe just get knocked out. But someone on "I'm already the guy", if he were to fail loses the character AND maybe even loses the mission and can no longer attempt it.
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I think the problem here is that the glyph transfer concept as it is is not very compatible with the mission concepts from GTA (which is what we have). There's a reason GTA3 was the first one to really nail the formula perfectly: making death something you recover from instantly (albeit without weapons) allows you to try crazy-hard missions (among other things), learn from your mistakes, try different approaches etc. The glyph model + character specific bonuses is part of a very different model, suited more to the parts where you build up resources and eventually take down the overlord: you have to think tactically, constantly consider the possibility of defeat, retreat when the odds are against you etc. The goal is to synthesize these 2 models, and I don't know if you can set too many preconditions for that synthesis.
If we try to be more precise, the real problem here is the character bonuses from stones and losing them when we lose a life. Losing character bonuses is a drag because suddenly you're forced to do a lot of grinding. And if you think about it, do we really want that to be the threat? Yes, it's something that makes you tense -- you don't want to lose this character you've built up because you'd have to grind all these houses. But is that a good thing? Maybe that's not a good threat. The threat of death should perhaps come from somewhere else.
So here's a slightly different model. It doesn't necessarily obey the points, but I don't know if that's a bad thing. Your glyph can only inhabit each of the characters that are currently in your settlement. If a character dies, he's mortally wounded and you can't occupy his body, but the Ilari are slowly healing him. Alternatively he's dead but his soul gets reincarnated/inserted into a wanderer in the settlement and that takes time (but allows for the vengeful ghost concept + no unconsciousness). But his upgrade points aren't lost -- that's a threat that just translates to grind. But what happens once all of your bodies (which are now the equivalent of 'lives') are killed and awaiting reincarnation? Your settlement is defenseless and either you get luck and a wanderer strays into your settlement (a random event that's unlikely), or a lot of time passes by without the ability to do anything. Any missions you wanted are now gone, some CP has been gained without acquiring any precious resources (enemy tier might become higher), and in the post 1.0 game as I imagine it, the enemy will move without you being able to respond.
How does this model handle the missions at hand? The cost of losing one life isn't so great since the modifiers you had for that character will come back once that character reincarnates. So the cost is just a small bit of CP, which is not too bad. But if it's the last living guy in your settlement, the cost will be much higher, so you'll be much more careful.
This also suggest for a catastrophic loss of a survivor as a serious random/punishment thing. That's equivalent to taking away a life.
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Re: Glyph swapping terminals.
I know this is being thought of purely from a gameplay perspective right now, but give a little consideration to the story and lore side of things here. I, the brave glyphbearer risked life and limb to explore the fractured world and rescue some survivor huddled in a dark basement full of rampaging beasts, then took them back to a settlement where they can be protected and nurtured... Until I need an expendable body to send into extreme danger, then I just call them up against their will to run from rising lava or fight monsters so strong that one touch is instant death. Meanwhile I'll be back in the settlement sipping tea and waiting to hear word of their demise.
It... doesn't exactly feel heroic, does it? And yes, the base mechanic of swapping for high risk missions already has this implication as well, but having a little terminal to just teleport them in and take them over really sort of brings it to the forefront.
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What about making it based on difficulty level? I know for me, I'm more with MvB on this one. I've never completed an entire Mario game, so I'm not a great platformer, but the idea of these missions does sound fun, and I'd like to play them some time, but I'm not likely to because the chance of failure is so high. So, what about if I set the platforming level low, I wouldn't necessarily lose a life, and maybe just get knocked out. But someone on "I'm already the guy", if he were to fail loses the character AND maybe even loses the mission and can no longer attempt it.
I'd thought about this and the concern I had was that it wasn't granular enough, I mean, not to sound silly but by lowering the difficulty... you'd lower the difficulty not just the risk, and then if someone finds the lava too slow they have no choice but to up the "risk" as well, getting the balance right would be complicated at best.
Re: Glyph swapping terminals.
I know this is being thought of purely from a gameplay perspective right now, but give a little consideration to the story and lore side of things here. I, the brave glyphbearer risked life and limb to explore the fractured world and rescue some survivor huddled in a dark basement full of rampaging beasts, then took them back to a settlement where they can be protected and nurtured... Until I need an expendable body to send into extreme danger, then I just call them up against their will to run from rising lava or fight monsters so strong that one touch is instant death. Meanwhile I'll be back in the settlement sipping tea and waiting to hear word of their demise.
It... doesn't exactly feel heroic, does it? And yes, the base mechanic of swapping for high risk missions already has this implication as well, but having a little terminal to just teleport them in and take them over really sort of brings it to the forefront.
Lets be clear I suggested it and I don't like it for much the same reasons, but If it's the price to pay, one shall pay it, I just won't use them. I suppose it's arguable that it's actually pretty sensible from the settlements perspective, who do you send on Operation: Certain Death? cannon fodder, not your elite troops. Not very heroic obviously but perhaps indicative of the moral collapse caused by the apocalypse.
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Terraziel: I agree on the need for some sort of middle of the road mission, as well as the fact that difficulty isn't granular enough. However, I also think that completing a lot of the mission in question then making it ALWAYS harder is also a bad thing. "Congratulations, now you've done a lot of something you've liked, so now we've turned it into something that has a lot more risk and that you therefore don't like!"
I think what we really need to do is make two new mission types: lava escape lite, and journey to something-less-than-perfection. Completing these two a few times would then unlock the ultra-hardcore versions that the hardcore could complete, basically with more risk but otherwise the same general idea of gameplay. Nobody is missing out on anything, and we keep the same general model.
Bluddy: You make some good points, as always, but in this case there's just no way we could switch up the model to that degree and have any sort of a sane 1.0 version. And honestly I don't think that particular sort of change would be very positive, because it would actually increase the penalty for death (settlements getting low on settlers, etc), the CP ever increasing without your getting tier orbs would fundamentally break the game (making it possible to lose), and various other problems. That's a whole other game you're basically describing, and it would take months to get there.
Given that you have to go explore some houses and other buildings every so often anyhow, just looking for all sorts of things, the loss of upgrade points isn't normally a giant deal in the first place unless you are really sending guys through the grinder. Which, as you pointed out, the game is encouraging you not to do as much as it can. Which really does make these two missions kind of incompatible with the rest of the game, as you pointed out.
BobTheJanitor: Agreed on the thematic issues, but as you alluded to those are somewhat secondary.
TLDR: I think we need to think of new, less-hardcore rules for these types of missions. And then make those the ones that get unlocked early, and these hardcore versions unlocked as an optional alternative by winning those ones a bit.
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So we've got something like "Water Escape" as martyn_van_buren's lava escape lite: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=6318
It gives you an Acid Gills instead of a heatsuit, and so the water doesn't harm you, but it does majorly slow you down and make things harder. If the water reaches the exit at the top of the level before you, then you lose the mission but nothing bad happens to you personally.
So how would it work for "Journey To Perfection" lite? One idea: you're guiding some sort of "flying buddy" to the exit. AA missiles don't notice him, but they do notice you. Your damage against enemies is increased, but the damage you take is not. However, one hit will kill your buddy, and he sticks really closely to you. If he dies, you lose.
Therefore, in both missions you still retain the usual risk of death: get hit by a lot of monsters and you die. But on the other hand, there's not any form of instant death condition in either. For that matter, this could become the SOLE method of journey to perfection, in my opinion. But lava escape is still interesting outside of watery escape, potentially.
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Or maybe both of these just need to be plain-out altered. Heatsuits make you invulnerable to lava, but don't aid your movement in it. This would be helpful for a number of places, where falling in the lava isn't therefore going to be death-in-5-seconds, but rather making you super easy prey for monsters. That wouldn't really make the lava flats any easier, for instance, but it would turn the existing lava escape into the proposed watery escape pretty much in one go.
And then just changing JTP to be the "guard your buddy" type of mission where he's at one-shot risk and you're not, and we've got ourselves another mission that is more in keeping with the general spirit of the game, while still retaining the hard challenge of actually completing these things.
The stakes are lower, making things less tense in a lot of respects, but that's... well, that's in keeping with the rest of the game, too. "Death is supposed to be the culmination of a series of mistakes," as I keep saying over and over again. And right now even the existence of lava without some defense (heatsuits not protecting you at all) is counter to that. Heatsuits could even just reduce the damage from lava by something like 100x, so instead of 5 seconds to escape you have 500 seconds, which is 8.3 minutes. If you can't get out in 8 minutes, then you pretty much have it coming to you. ;) That would keep the tenseness of "lava always damages me," while making it so that lava isn't such an instantly-deadly threat.
Thoughts?
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It depends on just how crazy the crazies are. Crazies are what I call you people who like really difficult games. :)
If water escapes get added as an easier version of lava escapes, is anyone going to play lava escapes? It seems like lava escapes would need better rewards because otherwise why would anyone play the permadeath version? But maybe there really are people who would risk permadeath for no good reason, in which case those people would probably get upset if the hard versions went away entirely.
I think adding easier alternate mission types is the way to go, as long as you make the existing harder types give better rewards. Then people like Terraziel get the difficulty and consequences they like, while people like van Buren get the opportunity to try out new missions as well as the incentive to improve at those kinds of missions so they can move up to the harder versions with the better rewards.
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For what it's worth, I have to argue against the terminology being tossed around. 'Hard' is being used as if it were equivalent to 'failure means instant death'. That's not a measure of difficulty. Learning calculus is hard, but if you get a problem wrong your professor doesn't instantly headshot you.
Take another hard platformer, Super Meat Boy. If every time Meat Boy died, he got teleported back to Meat City where his glyph had to be transplanted into Meat Guy, who then had to trek back across the overworld to get back to that screen and attempt it again (hopefully he saved enough upgrade stones!) would that in any way make the game harder? Of course not! It has zero impact on the difficulty, which comes solely from the actual platforming skill test. All the rest of that is just adding some inconvenience and a time sink.
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But the problem with "Journey to Perfection" isn't that you fail in one hit, that's what makes it fun. The problem is that I have to warp home before playing it, which is annoying. Letting me get hit more times or having the lava just be water robs from the challenge.
The problem isn't that they are too hard.
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The problem isn't that they are too hard.
That's exactly what I'm saying! It's not hard or easy at all. It's just inconvenient. It's a risk vs. reward system where the risk is that you might have to waste some extra time beforehand to swap glyphs, or afterwards if you fail and are forced to swap glyphs.
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The problem isn't that they are too hard.
That's exactly what I'm saying! It's not hard or easy at all. It's just inconvenient.
Yes, post collision. We're on the same page, Bob. :)
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Learning calculus is hard, but if you get a problem wrong your professor doesn't instantly headshot you.
Hmm, coulda fooled me.
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Hmm, coulda fooled me.
You think you're going to save money going to a reasonably priced community college, but you always end up paying for it somehow...
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Strongly agree with Bob and Penumbra. A lite version should have the same challenge as the hardcore version, but work in such a way that you can try it again and again if you have to. Anyway glad to see that is not just my issue.
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What about rather than having a 'lite' version of the harder missions (or as well as, because more missions is never a bad thing), you instead had x 'practice runs' per mission? An optional way of taking on a mission from the world map, which gave you 0 reward and used up one of your x for that mission, but allowed players less confident in taking on a mission to try it a couple of times first before jumping in for real?
Or, taking the idea from another angle, a way to tackle the mission for real but with no risk of perma death and only a fraction of the reward.
Although that second one does feel rather the same as introducing lite versions of missions - but I think the problem for me, there, is that if they're completely separate missions you have all the problems of them seeding in that fashion. For instance, for someone one or more lava escape missions may seed before they ever see a water escape. And then, even if they tackle the water escape first and succeed, so take on the lava - dying in the lava mission may have the exact same consequence it does now for them; they'll simply never play lava escapes again. (Which admittedly may not be a problem from a game design standpoint, if the argument is that they have the kiddies version to play with instead - but it's not much different to hiding lava escape entirely from people at lower platforming difficulty settings.)
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Or maybe both of these just need to be plain-out altered. Heatsuits make you invulnerable to lava, but don't aid your movement in it. This would be helpful for a number of places, where falling in the lava isn't therefore going to be death-in-5-seconds, but rather making you super easy prey for monsters. That wouldn't really make the lava flats any easier, for instance, but it would turn the existing lava escape into the proposed watery escape pretty much in one go.
And then just changing JTP to be the "guard your buddy" type of mission where he's at one-shot risk and you're not, and we've got ourselves another mission that is more in keeping with the general spirit of the game, while still retaining the hard challenge of actually completing these things.
The stakes are lower, making things less tense in a lot of respects, but that's... well, that's in keeping with the rest of the game, too. "Death is supposed to be the culmination of a series of mistakes," as I keep saying over and over again. And right now even the existence of lava without some defense (heatsuits not protecting you at all) is counter to that. Heatsuits could even just reduce the damage from lava by something like 100x, so instead of 5 seconds to escape you have 500 seconds, which is 8.3 minutes. If you can't get out in 8 minutes, then you pretty much have it coming to you. ;) That would keep the tenseness of "lava always damages me," while making it so that lava isn't such an instantly-deadly threat.
Thoughts?
Having said all that, I think on second reading I'm all for simply changing the core missions themselves.
As an aside, personally I don't buy that perma death is remotely necessary for difficult platforming challenges to remain fun. Super Meat Boy, Mario, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Shinobi even - all remain compelling, challenging and fun without any sort of perma death mechanic. (Admittedly in Shinobi 3DS one can play on the hardest difficulty setting which does, in fact, have a perma death mechanic... but it's optional and adds an additional layer of replayability more than anything.) In Metroid, death is somewhat more permanent - if you die you return to the last save - but getting there is anything but instant, and all it costs is time.
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I'll start by saying that I think the current missions should be left alone and intermediate ones added, as opposed to just changing the current missions.
The water escape idea is pretty much exactly what I was going to suggest, going on the logic of "an acid water flood is threatening a cache" so unsurprisingly it gets my vote.
The changes to Journey missions...well I don't know about anyone else but I despise escort missions, and you already have a form of them in rescue survivor missions. That said having something else doing the dying is about the only obvious way of doing a light version of the Journey.
Now as a more overall point.
Strongly agree with Bob and Penumbra. A lite version should have the same challenge as the hardcore version......
I think this thread is getting complex, because personally, I don't think you do agree with them, Penumbra at the very least seems to be concerned with the "hardcore" versions getting simplified, not the light versions.
To comment on BobTheJanitor's point here, no the risk or lack thereof doesn't change the difficulty of the challenge at hand, but it does change the difficulty of the game over time though (assuming briefly that people didn't just switch to cannon fodder) the difference between the two would be one would have a long term impact, your character dying in a lava escape loses you that character and whatever investment you have built up there, simply losing the rewards for a water escape does not.
At this point the tediousness and dubiousness of glyph swapping is travelling old ground, so it doesn't really need going over again. suffice to say it does break the system.
A lite version should have the same challenge as the hardcore version, but work in such a way that you can try it again and again if you have to. Anyway glad to see that is not just my issue.
Now this could just be misinterpretation on my part, but the question that this raises in my mind is, Where is the failure? If you can just try again and again at the Same mission till you succeed then you are guaranteed to succeed eventually, or get bored and give up obviously. I have no issues with lite versions of the missions reducing the risk, but removing failure is a tad much, rather at the very least it is unbalanced.
I mean don't get me wrong I understand where you are coming from, very few if any games gives you only a single chance at completing a platforming challenge but that is because they as linear games have to to let you continue through the content, in AVWW's case however failure IS an option, if I fail at any given mission (even if I die) my game continues and I simply have to try another mission.
....What if the maps for the "water escape" (or whatever is decided on eventually) mission were made from hand-crafted interchangeable portions? That way you have the ability to learn the portions of the map through failure or success across multiple missions, rather than within one mission.
A lite version should have the same challenge as the hardcore version......
Now after all that, it comes down to this point. What even IS the challenge? what is the core thing you are trying to keep?
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All right: I've made my decision on how to proceed. Thanks for all the feedback, guys. Here's what's going to happen:
1. I'm going to be changing the existing lava escape and journey to protection missions in subtle ways to remove the risk of instant death, but not to remove any of the existing challenge or to create intermediate versions.
2. For lava escape, the two changes are both super simple:
a) Heat suits will reduce the amount of damage you take from lava by 10x. Meaning you have 50 seconds to live while in lava (more if you've upgraded your health at all with health stones), but you'll hardly be able to move.
b) If you have been submerged in lava for 5 consecutive seconds, you lose. If you die, you lose.
(Note: when the mission is failed, the lava instantly and quickly starts receding, so you should have ample time to get out of the lava itself; the risk of death is still very much here, because you can't dodge enemies effectively while stuck in the muck of lava, and if you get stuck too long and don't figure out how to get to a ledge as it's receding you'll die; but you can still defend yourself, and it's not remotely an instant-death sort of thing).
3. For Journey To Perfection, there will only be two very simple changes:
a) You'll be (thematically speaking, not visibly) holding a glass bauble or something similar to that. Some sort of little magical doodad of something important that you're carrying. If any player character takes any damage during these missions, their glass thing breaks and thus the mission is instantly lost.
b) Your ability to one-shot enemies is retained, but their enhanced damage to you is removed (it's just not part of that whole "perfection" bit).
(Note: this is just as hard as the existing version, in the sense of it being challenging to win. But it doesn't preclude practice or learning mastery. And it doesn't require lots of extra trekking or encourage rampant glyph swapping or whatever. Also, your risk of death on these missions is the same as on any other mission, and perhaps a bit more than usual because of all the monsters here. But it's not an instant-death sort of situation if you've got featherfall on in particular, and that's the key difference).
4. I'm really not inclined at this point to make a "lite" and a "hardcore" version of these, because that's inherently fragmentary to the playerbase, and the hardcore versions wouldn't actually be harder, they would just be more penalty-plentiful. Everything else in the game actually just changes literal difficulty, not the severity of penalties, when you change difficulty levels or go into some dangerous area, etc. And that's definitely how I want to keep it. There will always be some people who prefer some parts of the game to others, and that's fine, but having basically differences in scales of penalty is not fine.
So here we are. This is what we're going to implement.
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Ok, fair enough.
The only possible issue I see with the lava escape one is that waiting around for the mission to end, assuming you fall in, could be tedious, what with being slowed and blinded.
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Yep, I think that could also be the case, yeah. It may need to have a condition of "if anyone has been in lava for 5 seconds, then you fail." I think that would be better, actually. Then you could skirt into and out of the lava some, but you wouldn't have a free pass with it. And then I could make the reduction in damage from lava only 10x, rather than 100x, come to that. Striking more of a happy medium.
Will edit the post above to reflect these ideas, thanks. :)
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This sounds perfect to me! These missions all had a time-sink component built into them at the beginning as far as I was concerned. Now you have moved the time-sink to the end, and only in the case of failure! All the challange seems to be preserved while leaving death as the "series of mistakes" penalties. I will now be able to leave the platform and action difficulties up high all the time, and that is awesome.
About the heat suit immune to lava change, is that only lava escape missions? Or is that property just moved from the advanced to the basic version now?
Edit: Ah, that works too.
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b) There will only be one such glass, and you pick it up at the start of the mission. If you drop the glass, it breaks, so you can't swap it out in MP. Therefore everyone is protecting one player who has the glass and is trying to make it to the end, in MP.
It's not a critical issue, but FYI this will make the mission way easier in MP if you have a decent-sized group: the others can simply clear the way while the ringglass-bearer hangs around in the staging area (or some early-on obviously-safe area in the journey chunk) and then makes their way to the switch once it is found.
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This sounds perfect to me! These missions all had a time-sink component built into them at the beginning as far as I was concerned. Now you have moved the time-sink to the end, and only in the case of failure! All the challange seems to be preserved while leaving death as the "series of mistakes" penalties. I will now be able to leave the platform and action difficulties up high all the time, and that is awesome.
Glad you like it! It took all of us collectively to come up with this; I certainly wouldn't have come up with this on my own any time soon. :)
About the heat suit immune to lava change, is that only lava escape missions? Or is that property just moved from the advanced to the basic version now?
Both the advanced and basic heatsuits will get this reduction. It's not a huge advantage, really, because in someplace like lava flats the utahraptors will rip you apart while you're slowly climbing your way out.
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b) There will only be one such glass, and you pick it up at the start of the mission. If you drop the glass, it breaks, so you can't swap it out in MP. Therefore everyone is protecting one player who has the glass and is trying to make it to the end, in MP.
It's not a critical issue, but FYI this will make the mission way easier in MP if you have a decent-sized group: the others can simply clear the way while the ringglass-bearer hangs around in the staging area (or some early-on obviously-safe area in the journey chunk) and then makes their way to the switch once it is found.
Good point. I edited the original to just have simpler rules to implement and play by. "If anyone takes any damage, you lose instantly." Simple enough. :)
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b) There will only be one such glass, and you pick it up at the start of the mission. If you drop the glass, it breaks, so you can't swap it out in MP. Therefore everyone is protecting one player who has the glass and is trying to make it to the end, in MP.
It's not a critical issue, but FYI this will make the mission way easier in MP if you have a decent-sized group: the others can simply clear the way while the ringglass-bearer hangs around in the staging area (or some early-on obviously-safe area in the journey chunk) and then makes their way to the switch once it is found.
Hmm, for that matter: what would stop someone in single player from simply not picking up the glass, clearing the chunk, going back, picking up the glass, and then going to the switch?
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Oh, ok, if it's anyone-takes-damage that works :)
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b) There will only be one such glass, and you pick it up at the start of the mission. If you drop the glass, it breaks, so you can't swap it out in MP. Therefore everyone is protecting one player who has the glass and is trying to make it to the end, in MP.
It's not a critical issue, but FYI this will make the mission way easier in MP if you have a decent-sized group: the others can simply clear the way while the ringglass-bearer hangs around in the staging area (or some early-on obviously-safe area in the journey chunk) and then makes their way to the switch once it is found.
I think this issue will come up even if everyone had a glass, since losing the glass doesn't remove that player from the mission. Now, if every monster in the perfection mission had 100x life and piercing and it was the glass thingy allowing you to one shot things, then everyone could carry one without multiplayer becoming super easy.
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See my change above: I went the meanest way possible, which I think is appropriate: if anyone takes any damage at all, you all lose. That's the spirit of difficulty I like, versus the sort of punitive "okay, now you also have 15 minutes of grinding to do as punishment" sort of penalizing I don't like.
I'm still a mean DM, just a certain kind of mean. ;D
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I'm still a mean DM, just a certain kind of mean. ;D
Mean but fair. :)
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I'm still a mean DM, just a certain kind of mean. ;D
Mean but fair. :)
I don't like to just outright kill players. When I'm DMing for a boardgame or pen and paper in particular, my strategy is always this: push the party to the brink of death, and then see if they'll topple over into the abyss. So long as they don't many any/many mistakes, they'll always win. But I like to push that margin for error as absolutely as low as I can get it while still having the experience be fun, for something like Descent: JitD in particular.
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Sounds like a perfect fix to me; thanks a lot for spending the time on coming up with it!
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I'm still a mean DM, just a certain kind of mean. ;D
Mean but fair. :)
I don't like to just outright kill players. When I'm DMing for a boardgame or pen and paper in particular, my strategy is always this: push the party to the brink of death, and then see if they'll topple over into the abyss. So long as they don't many any/many mistakes, they'll always win. But I like to push that margin for error as absolutely as low as I can get it while still having the experience be fun, for something like Descent: JitD in particular.
I'm experiencing this weekly in a friend's game of Hackmaster. It's absolutely brutal, but whenever we manage to survive and make it somewhere, the accomplishment is all that much sweeter.
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My extra favorite thing to do is join into the tactical discussions. Of course I don't give away my hand or any tricks I have up my sleeve, but I help with the math and the tactics and the analysis. And most of what I say is sound, and I'm genuinely feeling like one of the adventurers. However, I advise things as if I didn't know what was in my hand (not to make them specifically fall into traps I have in my hand, usually, but just to help them fall into it if they would have anyhow). That's always interesting, because they know to take my tactics advice with a grain of salt, since I'm technically playing as the bad guy. But on the other hand, a lot of the advice is really sound...
I delight in the duplicity of that, because it's so counter to the way I normally do things, I think. :)
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Reverting way back to the original topic, some comments on these missions. Now that they're doable (and I'm glad I never tried them before or I would have run out of characters in my settlement, yikes) I have been trying them every time one pops up. I have just now finally managed to finish one. There's a reason why too. To truncate a line from Batman (no not that movie, the other one), "I have given a name to my pain, and that name is Bat--" And it's not the frosty ones or the fiery ones, it's just the bog standard bats. They're so hard to see on so many of the game's backgrounds that I never notice them until they've already lost the mission for me. Argh! They're the epitome of this (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoddamnedBats). (Warning, swearing. Double warning, TV Tropes link, beware of endless clicking) If they were just a bit more visible, it wouldn't be a problem. As is, the 'challenge' they provide is of the worst kind, where sudden failure can come unexpectedly and without feeling like you the player could have done anything to avoid it.
Also, I wouldn't mind if that 'knocked out' idea came back if it would just fade the screen to black and warp you back to the mission staging area. Having to hunt back out through a maze-like room with no minimap after failing one of these seems needlessly cruel. Survivor rescues could benefit from that as well. If you manage to lose the survivor early on, you still have to pointlessly crawl your way back through to the mission exit. An in-mission option to abandon the mission and instantly be warped outside would sure be nice.
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Whew, those sound like some mantis issues to me. I'm a little tied up with some stuff that I think is more pressing at the moment, but aside from the bat visibility issue (come on, that's the only thing they have going for them), but the other ideas are worth discussing at least. A way to quickly exit missions you've failed I'm less sure about, but hmm. That becomes too much of a "get out of jail free" card and breaks the sense of place in a lot of respects, I think.
What I do think would also make a good mantis idea is a "visibility enchant." When you're wearing it, then a bright green line gets drawn from your character to the center of mass of any enemy character that is within a certain range, for instance. That way you're not having stuff sneak up on you in the same way.
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I wish I took a screenshot of this, but I am unsure if this was a bug or me just getting really really unlucky. but I entered the mission only to discover I was in a single very small room packed with about 30 monsters inside. I loosed the moment I sent out my first attack there was no way to win. The room in question was small enough to fit entirely inside the screen.
So is this a bug? or intended, and if so that is one hell of a middle finger to the player haha :)
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I wish I took a screenshot of this, but I am unsure if this was a bug or me just getting really really unlucky. but I entered the mission only to discover I was in a single very small room packed with about 30 monsters inside. I loosed the moment I sent out my first attack there was no way to win. The room in question was small enough to fit entirely inside the screen.
So is this a bug? or intended, and if so that is one hell of a middle finger to the player haha :)
This just happened to me as well. Underground Journey to Perfection set me up for failure. I entered a a tiny room packed full of enemies and was hit in less than a second. I did screenshot it. Glad this didn't kill my character ;D
(http://i.imgur.com/qdKyw.jpg)
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I wish there was a way to disable ride the lightning for the duration of the mission without dropping it from the inventory. I trigger that spell a lot by accident but I don't want to be without it until I return to the settlement.
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I wish there was a way to disable ride the lightning for the duration of the mission without dropping it from the inventory. I trigger that spell a lot by accident but I don't want to be without it until I return to the settlement.
Drop the spellgem just outside the mission?
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Drop the spellgem just outside the mission?
Yeah pretty much this. Remember you can even drop it in the mission itself and though it will vanish when the mission ends, you can go get another copy from the unlimited supply at the crafting table.
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Remember you can even drop it in the mission itself and though it will vanish when the mission ends, you can go get another copy from the unlimited supply at the crafting table.
Yeah but that means you're stranded deep in the area without a part of your mobility (may be a major one if it's in the lava flats).
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Yeah but that means you're stranded deep in the area without a part of your mobility (may be a major one if it's in the lava flats).
True. In that scenario I would probably take off my heat suit and rely on triple jumping and storm dashing to get me to the exit. You'll almost certainly take less damage from the ambient heat than you would trying to dodge raptors and lava pits with only one jump.
On the original point, I agree it might be nice to have a way to temporarily disable effects that activate themselves from your inventory. Maybe a toggle somewhere. And then maybe mini could be toggled back on as a double tap down. I still miss that every time I come across a little gap.
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This was a bug that was fixed in the latest version. Thanks!