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Managed to play for an hour this morning before I had to get on with some work. But mixing the abilities is great fun to experiment with. I picked up the (1hr in ability spoiler?)Charm when it came up and this thing is pretty great for combat. Jaunt is super useful too. What fun abilities and combos have people spotted?
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May 21, 2014 12:47
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The "Your functions overload when you unequip them" limiter is super dumb. You can just disable it between switching setup, and it's completely neutered. It's just... a minor inconvenience.
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May 21, 2014 13:00
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I am enjoying the game part of this game but holy poo poo I needed that sword guy to shut up, so I put the sound through my controller and turned the volume down to zero. Problem solved.
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May 21, 2014 13:12
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Anyways, I beat this last night. I started enjoying the combat significantly more when I stopped thinking of it as "bastion with a time-stop ability" and more "a turn-based tactical RPG with a unique ATB-esque system". It really is heavily turn-based - yeah you can act without using Turn() but it's almost always the wrong idea except in specific circumstances, generally those involving enemies that either die in one hit or which are dodgy. While I enjoyed the variety of the abilities and that the game heavily encourages you to experiment by locking backstory behind putting each thing in various slots, the problem I ran into is that there seems to be little reason to do anything other than hitting enemies with the Crash and Purge debuffs then backstabbing them with Cull, which will kill virtually every enemy in the game in one round. Yeah, I could dick around with enemies and reduce their damage and buff myself, or I could just murder them in two hits then Jaunt away. Maybe this problem goes away in NG+, I dunno. There definitely could've been more encounters with much stronger enemies fought alone like the one near the beginning, because this problem wouldn't be as severe if the combo wasn't capable of killing any given enemy in one Turn(). The story was pretty great right up until the ending. I'm not saying it's bad or good. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. It was just kind of... abrupt? I mean, I guess it was understandable given that they seemed to exist in some weird one-city world which would have made Red the last living human (since here, "going to visit the country" is apparently a euphemism for "is dead"), but it seems like the jump from "well the process is stopped we can remake the world" to "red offs herself and uploads herself into the transistor" was really sudden. If they add bonus challenges with more backstory in them like they did with Bastion I hope they explore this more. Overall it's an excellent game and actually far less like Bastion than it looks like at first glance. I can definitely see why they didn't put this game out first - it has a lot of weirdness (not necessarily bad weirdness, just weirdness) in it that probably would've turned people off of it before they gave it a chance.
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May 21, 2014 13:12
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gannyGrabber posted:I am enjoying the game part of this game but holy poo poo I needed that sword guy to shut up, so I put the sound through my controller and turned the volume down to zero. Problem solved. Came here to write this - I can understand if he were to talk about some specific things (plot or setting wise), and, seeing that he's the narrator of the story, he should talk, but seriously, every step Red makes it's "There used to be people here", or "Remember when we used to walk here", or some other... Regarding skills Load() + Bounce() = set up multiple loads in one place and then detonate when enemy comes close (or you can lure mobs to it). Kills pretty much everything without trouble.
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May 21, 2014 13:26
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eithedog posted:Came here to write this - I can understand if he were to talk about some specific things (plot or setting wise), and, seeing that he's the narrator of the story, he should talk, but seriously, every step Red makes it's "There used to be people here", or "Remember when we used to walk here", or some other... If you got killed and woke up as a sword you might be feeling a little nervous-chatty too.
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May 21, 2014 15:03
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Oxxidation posted:If you got killed and woke up as a sword you might be feeling a little nervous-chatty too. I didn't play much (just beat the first boss) but I also feel it's his way of coping with the fact that Red is mute, a way of filling the silence that he'd be forced to hear otherwise. It's not as elegant as Bastion's narration, but hardly a deal-breaker.
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May 21, 2014 15:06
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:So.. is anyone else having a bug where the game keeps playing but only shows a black screen unless I alt-tab and then go back to it or is that just me? That and the occasional stuttering are fairly annoying. Yeah I played for an hour and this issue came up constantly. It's a bit of a pain since I'm trying to play with a gamepad. Going to have to leave it for a while till this game gets a patch.
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May 21, 2014 15:10
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Reasonerr posted:Update to help resolve the lagging/hitching/freezing issues. This appears to have worked for me. I had just started the game this morning, and it was already annoying in the intro, so it's much appreciated.
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May 21, 2014 15:12
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I'm enjoying this. I actually hated Bastion, so I was very apprehensive about getting this, but so far its great.
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May 21, 2014 15:20
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In regards to the narration: There are two moments (at least, I only found two) where Red addresses the narrator directly while interacting with terminals and they have a conversation. They're some of the more powerful moments in the game so if you care at all at least leave subtitles on.
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May 21, 2014 15:21
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Fair Bear Maiden posted:So.. is anyone else having a bug where the game keeps playing but only shows a black screen unless I alt-tab and then go back to it or is that just me? That and the occasional stuttering are fairly annoying. Yeah I've been having that bug a bit with the black screen on cutscenes. I find that it tends to happen when you've alt+tabbed out at some point earlier in your game session. (Note: possible fix posted above) The stuttering only seems to happen at one point, which is odd, but yep they need patches for them, hopefully quick. Also, that sword can talk to me all goddamn day and night as far as I'm concerned 
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May 21, 2014 15:22
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IncendiaC posted:Regarding the ending, I liked the suggestion that Agent Kool-Aid posted earlier where Red restores more of the city before realizing the city's people are gone for good and she can do nothing to restore them. But I think the reason that Red can't restore the dood is because his trace data is corrupted. I get the ending you are trying to "paint" and Im all for it. What use is a blank canvas if you have no color.
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May 21, 2014 15:28
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Just played a little of this (wanting to play more, but alas, exams!), and goddamn is it good so far. Only played about a half hour and came away very impressed. It's just so cohesive! Everything works so well together - the music, the voice, the aesthetics... Looking forward to getting back to it!
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May 21, 2014 15:31
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Any fix to the freezing every 20 or so seconds? Makes it really annoying to play.
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May 21, 2014 15:48
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^ Try thisReasonerr posted:Update to help resolve the lagging/hitching/freezing issues. The OP should probably have this somewhere.
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May 21, 2014 15:53
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Is there just the one ending, or is it like Bastion? I just finished it and I'm wondering if I need to try to fart around with saves to get back to the last point at the endgame. I really liked the game, but I found the start was a bit abrupt. I think it would really have benefited from you being able to just wander around Cloudbank for a little while before the story itself got underway, to help me get a little more invested in the city and its populace. There's parts like the city being destroyed by the process, the parasol woman who you knew before the Camerada tried to kill you appearing as a boss, and the weirdness of Cloudbank in general that really would have benefited from being able to get familiar and invested in the setting from the start, rather than familiarising yourself as you go along. I get that the whole 'learning about the world throughout the story, from a blind start' thing is a valid approach and it's how they did it in Bastion too, but it didn't really work that well for me here. The final bossfight is fantastic. I was worried you'd get a worse ending if you broke the containers with people in them, but that didn't seem to be the case and I'm not sure if they're even breakable at all.
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May 21, 2014 15:54
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President Ark posted:In regards to the narration: There are two moments (at least, I only found two) where Red addresses the narrator directly while interacting with terminals and they have a conversation. They're some of the more powerful moments in the game so if you care at all at least leave subtitles on.
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May 21, 2014 17:10
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This game was really fun and I can't wait to play ng+
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May 21, 2014 17:15
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Stack 3 Void, use Mask with Load+Ping, then Cull with Breach. This utterly destroys pretty much every enemy, even the final boss.
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May 21, 2014 17:17
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1stGear posted:Stack 3 Void, use Mask with Load+Ping, then Cull with Breach. This utterly destroys pretty much every enemy, even the final boss. Load + Breach and Crash is an excellent combo for early/mid game. Place a Packet on a close enemy, hit it with Crash, then spawn another Packet about where the Packet+enemy will land. 500+ damage to a good radius chews up a lot of things.
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May 21, 2014 17:30
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Through a mix of reading function backstory and exploring for terminals and dialogue in the final area, I've kind of pieced together the plot? Most of it's behind spoilers. Cloudbank is a city that can almost trivially rewrite itself. No idea about personal quarters, but the weather and the sky and the construction of new architecture are all matters of popular vote. And some people don't like that. The Camerata are generally high-ranking Cloudbank maintenance staff, and all dissatisfied with how Cloudbank operates. "When everything changes, nothing changes." Given unlimited power, some people will forever lean on what they like, like Red headlining at the Empty Set or clear skies. Some people will keep changing their pet project and never be satisfied. And, y'know, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance - if there's a landmark that a lot of people like, it can come down one day if the opposition can work turnout. The Process is how they're going to pull this off. The Process is Cloudbank's maintenance routines, brought out from behind the curtain and operating on a scale much closer to real time. They weren't meant to work this way, and have gotten far out of the Camerata's control. It looks like currently they're turning Cloudbank back to its default settings. If the Camerata had a complete Transistor, the Process would be less of an issue, but... The Transistor is not fully understood by the Camerata or anyone else. It dates back before the living memory of Cloudbank and may have been used to create it - it was found in the outskirts by the Camerata's engineer. It has the ability to absorb people's personalities even without physical contact and may have hacked Red's voice out of her. The Camerata were using it on people with certain skillsets who could plausibly disappear - firebrand journalists, daredevil quarterbacks, cops three days from retirement, et cetera. With their abilities combined in it, it would be the ultimate admin tool, and since you can talk to any trace you knew well in life, they may also have been developing relationships with all of them. So basically the Camerata wanted to take control of Cloudbank, dissatisfied with what the popular vote was doing to it. They would do it by emancipating its maintenance routine - the Process - and constructing a failsafe admin tool - the Transistor - by absorbing useful people into it. But the Process got out of whatever control they had and they lost control of the Transistor while trying to complete it.
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May 21, 2014 18:46
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So, I just experienced my first big glitch where Red suddenly heads to the corner of the screen, but luckily she came right back, so that's okay! Also now that I'm following along with the thread, a lot of the function combos that people suggest are making things almost too easy. Hitting an enemy with Void+Crash and then Cull+Mask is a killer. I was also using Cull+Get for a while because it meant I could get two hits in with Cull, but I don't have enough Turn() time with my current setup to go that route. Maybe I can hook Breach to a passive slot when I have more memory.
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May 21, 2014 18:49
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While I found the game to be very pretty, good music and wonderful narration... I found it lacking in a few ways: The combat - the combination system, the battery charge, the passive powers... All excellent and inspired. However... the 'freeze time' weapon plans essentially undoes all of that, considering your attacks negate how fast the enemy moves (unless they teleport or cloak). I think I would have preferred it had that system not been in place, and instead the attacks were faster; more like in Bastion. The way the story in this game is conveyed... is also not as good as it was in Bastion. I mean, you have all these people/abilities in the Transistor - but there's no... emotional connection to them... unlike how it was done, again in Bastion, e.g. in this game, these people are given a descriptive biography, but in Bastion the narrator uses only a few sentences to describe Percy... and yet the latter feels more like a character than any of the Transistor people. Hell, it goes to show that I could remember Percy and the Bird-boy and the four brothers from Bastion more than I cold recall anyone in Transistor. Basically; improved in some ways, changed in perfectly creatively accecptable ways, but also altered in dissapointing ways, too.
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May 21, 2014 19:11
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Samovar posted:While I found the game to be very pretty, good music and wonderful narration... I found it lacking in a few ways: I don't think you used enough ellipses. The storytelling in Transistor is definitely a lot more oblique and detached than Bastion's, and I can see battle-lines being drawn over that difference. I think they both work, just in their own ways.
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May 21, 2014 19:30
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I'm pretty sure the backstory of Transistor being more vague is deliberate, given there's an explicit jab when you leave the final Backdoor, the socially-awkward-fourth-camerata guy was apparently talking about the Transistor's true purpose and you missed the speech, which the Narrator asks him to repeat because you missed it (he doesn't). So they know there's something you don't know which is deliberately not being told.
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May 21, 2014 19:36
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I am incredibly disappointed by Transistor, because the plot failed to deliver. Maybe good storytelling was too much to expect, but Supergiant did set a strong precedence with Bastion. Combat is alright, the game is incredibly pretty and the music is cool. However, all of those elements are there to support the plot, because the game is incredibly linear and doesn't have any gameplay outside of combat. Bastion nailed it with awesome narration and simple, but lovable characters and story. Transistor has none of that. I didn't empathize with any of the characters. The dude trapped inside the sword was super annoying and borderline creepy in his obsession with Red. Red herself has no personality because she is a silent protagonist. On top of that, she is already defined and cannot be replaced by the player. None of the other "characters" matter because their story is completely unrelated to the main plot of the game. The game is a fountain of interesting ideas that are not connected by anything. The idea of a city in a ever changing flux open to popular vote is cool, until you realize that the antagonists are a bunch of incompetent disgruntled garbage men, who also double as some kind of fashion hipster mafia . Your reasons for confronting the final boss are completely asinine, and so is Red's ending. Her actions literally make no sense because she is not developed enough as the character, and neither is her love interest, the half drunk, half dead sword man. The entire game feels like a bad anime, where character's emotions mean more than the setting and the plot. Really, really disappointed. edit: spoiler tags, gently caress! Captain Gordon fucked around with this message at 20:12 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 20:09
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Captain Gordon posted:I am incredibly disappointed by Transistor, because the plot failed to deliver. Maybe good storytelling was too much to expect, but Supergiant did set a strong precedence with Bastion. I found there is just way too much stuff which is introduced but then ignored to get away with the argument that "It's meant to be vague, fill in the blanks!" which I suspect is what they were trying for. Tried and failed. Massive spoilers for the entire game ahoy: So who is this guy in the Transistor? Why did he refuse selection? Why does he have those bandages all over his arms? How does he know who the Camerata are right from the start when they are ostensibly a secret society and the first time they meet is a failed assassination attempt? What was the deal with the Spine? Was there a reason there was more than one of them? Why does our fellow in the Transistor go a bit crazy when one is nearby? How did Royce and Red get sucked into the Transistor? Was it the Cradle? What the gently caress is the Cradle? Why do they then have to have a admittedly cool but pretty simplistic turn-based duel inside the Transistor so that one of them can get out? Does anyone else think that on the whole it probably would have been better for Royce to win that duel and get back to the real world? Because Red kind of just left the entire world processed and there's no one left to actually use the Transistor anymore. Too much of the plot happens too quickly without an appropriate setup. It looks nice, it plays nice, and it sounds amazing, but I suspect I'll be listening to the soundtrack more than I'll be replaying it, even though it's short. And on that last note is anyone else disappointed that the soundtrack only has the instrumental pieces for most of the tracks? I wanted an extra loop for each song with Red humming the melody. 
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May 21, 2014 21:07
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Meiteron posted:Does anyone else think that on the whole it probably would have been better for Royce to win that duel and get back to the real world? Because Red kind of just left the entire world processed and there's no one left to actually use the Transistor anymore. I think it's pretty heavily implied (or even outright explained) that using the Transistor to repaint the world or whatever doesn't actually bring any of the people back. Royce winning doesn't change that.
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May 21, 2014 21:15
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I did not like the way they developed the sword husbando character, specifically because of things like his bio. The game expects you to care about him like he is still a person and not a person stuck in a huge fuckoff sword, but they deliberately don't tell you anything about him because he is supposed to be ~shrouded in mystery~ which is pointless because they never bother elaborating on it.
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May 21, 2014 21:26
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Glazius posted:The Process is Cloudbank's maintenance routines, brought out from behind the curtain and operating on a scale much closer to real time. They weren't meant to work this way, and have gotten far out of the Camerata's control. It looks like currently they're turning Cloudbank back to its default settings. If the Camerata had a complete Transistor, the Process would be less of an issue, but... What have you got for this? My impression was that the Process are a complete species unto themselves, not some subordinate component of something else, and alien to Cloudbank. See: the final act, in Processworld, with the Clucker concert (  that scene freaked me out), Young Ladies brooding over One (minor and largely irrelevant, I know) thing I wish had been fleshed out is- what the hell is "selection", and what is the significance of the fact that dead guy refused it? Speaking of the Limiter notes, has anyone managed to get all of them/complete all the challenges and (I'm guessing) unlock the final door? Captain Gordon posted:Transistor has none of that. I didn't empathize with any of the characters. The dude trapped inside the sword was super annoying and borderline creepy in his obsession with Red. Red herself has no personality because she is a silent protagonist. On top of that, she is already defined and cannot be replaced by the player. None of the other "characters" matter because their story is completely unrelated to the main plot of the game. While Red been a cypher in what is, ostensibly, her story is one of my big complaints with the game, this isn't entirely true- she's not totally silent and she is, very lightly, developed: through her interaction with the consoles. Weak, yeah, but it's there. There's her bio, too, but that's a really lovely way to tell a story so I'm disqualifying it.  Captain Gordon posted:character's emotions mean more than the setting and the plot. I don't think that's necessarily a bad mode to work in. And, if you approach it with that viewpoint- that the objective was to evoke a sense of melancholy, loneliness and loss (Thou Art But A Warrior: Post-Cyberpunk edition) then it's very nearly perfect. The oblique, tangential, show-everything-tell-nothing storytelling style they adopted is a pretty poor means of communicating information, but it works brilliantly at building atmosphere. Unfortunately, it all falls apart at the end, with the Shittiest Denoument in the History of Narrative™. There's an entire chapter that got lost on the cutting room floor there, and it cripples what should be the climax of all that atmosphere and buildup.  I hope Supergiant do a post-mortem at some point, just to explain what the hell they were thinking with that.
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May 21, 2014 21:34
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If the city is the entire world, and "The Country" means death, why does sword-dude keep asking Red if they should skip town? There's also been a lot of evacuation going on, so there has to be other people alive somewhere.
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May 21, 2014 21:43
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People are definitely going to defend the storytelling as oblique, but what bothers me in this game is not that the storytelling was oblique but that the treatment of all the ideas was so, so shallow. There are so many ideas that are just thrown out to the player and then hardly explored or never explored again that I hesitate to even try to list them all. Another way of putting it is that this game is full to bursting with well done set-up, but they apparently ran out of time/inclination to do any of the pay-off. Anticlimax is practically the main motif of the story now that I think about it. Kudos for doing something ballsy I guess, but it's hard to call it satisfying or well-done. I did enjoy this game overall, but if this is going to be Supergiant's storytelling approach going forward I'm going to be much more hesitant about buying their next game sight unseen/at full price. No Mods No Masters fucked around with this message at 22:05 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 21:59
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Autonomous Monster posted:What have you got for this? Well, in Fairfield Royce tells you about the Process, that it's basically bringing background stuff to the foreground. I think of it as taking routines that, say, change buildings (Creep) gather news (Snapshot) provide security (Cheerleader) or manage child processes (Younglady) and giving them a physical presence. Royce is documenting how this looks, and also side effects of the reification like the Badcells, which in the computer world would be waiting for garbage collection or something. The Cluckers listening to a dead stage at the Empty Set is another one of those side effects. Maybe they're representing everybody's subscription to the Empty Set video feed, just waiting for something to record. My idea that they're borne out of the Cloudbank maintenance routines is a little reinforced by the first place the Process takes over centering around the admin building. Also the Transistor, the omni-admin tool for Cloudbank, is running programs on them.
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May 21, 2014 22:04
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Having completed the story, I find myself a little disappointed. Like everyone else on earth, I can find little or nothing to critique about the sounds, graphics and atmosphere. However I do not think I can be alone in feeling a relative lack of emotional attachment to this game. There were flashes where I felt connected to the story (the poster early on, the terminal conversation where red had actual input, the ending (which may have just been shock due to suddenness)) - but they were flashes in between large amounts of what is frankly pointless chatter from sword dude. It felt like he spent the majority of the game alternating between "hey red you remember that thing that you and I did way before the start of the game that the player has no knowledge of yeah good times" and saying "woah look at how this has all gone to poo poo". The former of which is frankly purposeless speech since the player has no connection to what's said and red makes no perceptible reaction, and the latter of which rather wears off after a while (yes we get it sworddude this set of high rise buildings is also turning white). For anyone who wants to compare it to the narrator from bastion: even though he was only speaking to himself (it seemed), he still related several different perspectives and some incidentally interesting information about the history of the world - sworddude didn't relate one fact (except the flavour of flatbread he liked) that I found myself caring about (this is possibly a result of the setting not really having a history per se, everything changes after all). I found the bios more interesting than him. A jargogle fucked around with this message at 22:25 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 22:21
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So finished the game in about 6 hours. It has a nice atmosphere and the overarching plot (not the love story, but the whole camerata thing) is pretty interesting, even if it's a bit cryptic. Didn't really enjoy the gameplay enough to warrant a replay or ng+, but it was worth the $20 for sure. I honestly didn't even realize that the narrator was supposed to be Red's boyfriend until close to the end. I mean yeah, the hints were there, and I thought that was a possibility, but he goes from narrating to throwing out random "I love yous" and such - the transition was so grating that, well, it felt like he was just drunk or something. So for me, the ending was very sudden and didn't have the intended emotional impact. When it became clear Red was going to kill herself to live forever in the transistor, I should've been shocked or something, but I didn't really care, because the dude seemed like a drunken rear end in a top hat hitting on a girl at a bar rather than someone she actually knew. THE PWNER fucked around with this message at 23:37 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 23:01
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I think I'm completely stuck in an area. I'm back in the The Stage and having ran past The Spine and ran into the one area that you take the Passthrough to get to the Challenge Room Portal. After fighting some enemies below the portal I can't go back and I see no way to progress. If this game did bug out on me I'm done with it, it really is shallow and mediocre.
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May 21, 2014 23:03
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I liked the love story.
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May 21, 2014 23:07
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Ok, so what about this short theory? The city is the front end of a webpage/server used by a lot of people, and the process is the back end. The Camerata guys were a bunch of admins/CJs/Editors that decided they wanted to change the webpage because they didn't like it or something by taking control of the most influental people/users on the server. Then the process got out of control and began deleting the front end. The transistor gives you read functionality through most of the game, but switches to read/write permission near the end. All metaphors, of course. Basically the game is a metaphor for the dangers of javascript. Broken Cog fucked around with this message at 23:24 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 23:20
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 09:13 |
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I'm struggling to find the fun in this combat system. The flow feels really disjointed, attacks have very long windown requirements when not used in Turn(), and I absolutely hate the downtime that comes after using Turn(). I love the art, music, visual design, and story, but I'm finding myself loathing the gameplay. It may prevent me from finishing the game, which is a real travesty.
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May 21, 2014 23:35
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