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Optic Staff has been a thing in the past and it rules. I think it's a drop from one of the bosses in hell so it can be hard to find. I'm definitely going to boot Deathstate up again, thanks for the continued support!
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Dec 22, 2016 04:45
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Speaking of rogue For y'all who are in the We Need To Go Deeper beta, we recently have undergone what I'm calling the Progression Update! For a lot of ya, this is a major component we haven't had any form of yet (meta game progression and mid-game progression), so hopefully this should inspire some newfound play sessions, which we are in dire need of to see how some of this new stuff feels. But here are the highlights of the recent update:  The Progression Update: The Deets  - The Catalog is now up! All of that gold you pick up from caves has thus far been useless. But now, the gold your team accrues on a playthrough carries over to an in-game catalog where you can use that gold to permanently buy new equipment for use in your starting loadouts, and loads and loads of customization items! - Your depth record is now tracked and saved, and used to unlock new customization items in the catalog! - Customization is fully implemented! You can fashion up your own adventurer however you please with your unlocked customization items. - Lootable bodies can now be found in caves! Dead bodies are strewn throughout caves, each carrying an item you can choose to equip or swap out one of your own items for, allowing for mid-game strategy turnarounds and helping give characters a small sense of progression via updated loadouts throughout the game. - Two new loadout items to be discovered! - End-game looping ala Nuclear Throne, with each loop making the game more challenging and adding to your overall depth score. (and loot value ramps up as well, hoo mama) - Lottsa other balance/bug fix stuff, which I've detailed in full here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/307110/discussions/1/353916981474631685/ Get back in there and mess with this poo poo yo!
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Dec 22, 2016 06:49
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Irony.or.Death posted:I cannot even imagine how hosed the difficulty in Deathstate must seem if you don't know about the dodge. Pretty easy, honestly; I could usually make it to the middle of the game on... Lunatic mode, or whatever you call it. More Angry Mode.
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Dec 22, 2016 06:55
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This might seem like a strange review in contrast with my drubbing of Hero Siege, but it goes to show just how important pacing is in games. I think I understand the complaints about Gungeon's pacing better now because of this as well. On the eleventh day of Roguemas, the RNG gave to me... Eleven beasts exploding Ten guns a-gunning Nine beacons beeping Eight bosses slaying Seven heroes sieging Six chambers firing FIVE ANGRY BEES Four junky exos Three jingling coins Two blighted crabs And a feisty little deity    I don't know about you, but I don't need my games to be super complicated. I mean, my favorite games are ones with plenty of depth and discovery to them but I'm also okay with a very simple loop if it's fun enough. Overture kinda toed the line with me for the first few minutes, and I thought I was ready to put it down after a few runs. And then, an hour and a dozen runs later, I realized it had more of a grip on me than I expected. Overture is a 2D arena twin-stick shooter based around traditional fantasy classes and monsters duking it out. There's no story whatsoever here, you pick a class and you go kill things. Every floor is a big open square full of randomly-generated terrain, items, and monsters for you to traverse, collect, and murder respectively. Once you find and defeat a giant slime miniboss you are ushered to a boss arena, and if you are victorious you move on to the next floor to repeat your rampage. The first thing you need to know about Overture is that it goes fast. Your character can cross the screen in an instant, your weapons are rapid-fire like machine guns, and enemies will swarm you with only a moment's notice. Barrels explode their contents over the entire screen in great chaotic flashes and the blood and corpses pile up until you can no longer recall what the floor looked like. While it has light RPG and roguelike elements this feels most like a bullet hell game, with you weaving in and out of enemy hordes as you eviscerate, perforate, or incinerate everything in sight. You'll need to be pretty on point with your reflexes to keep from getting overwhelmed, because the many denizens of whatever this place is are relentless. Spiders, trolls, skeletons, necromancers, knights, and more fill the levels, and once you wake them up they will hunt you until you are dead. There's a huge variance in how fast they are and how they attack, with spiders being just as fast as you and melee-focused, while cyclopses are incredibly slow but hurl flurries of difficult to dodge projectiles. It's important not to get trapped and move intelligently, because you move faster in the direction you're firing so backpedaling or circle-strafing is not going to save you here. Killing monsters earns you experience towards leveling up, making your basic attack and your special attack more potent and you a little sturdier. The equipment you find also helps with this, split into five slots and conveniently swapped with one button when the simple comparison prompt appears. Items pop out of bosses or racks or chests, and there are even NPC minions you can free from crates to battle for you. You'll also pick up health and mana vials to replenish your bars, and gold to unlock more of the game's two dozen classes. This is where the game actually hooked me, because of the impressive variety to the classes. Each of the four archetypes (warrior, thief, mage, shaman) have half a dozen specific classes within them, like barbarians and templar for the warriors and rangers and bandits for the thieves. Everything about these classes, from their attacks to their speed to their stats, is wildly different. Whether it be the constant piercing attacks of the peltast or the endless deluge of poison bubbles from the witch, every time you start the game with a new character you'll be treated to an entirely new experience. I haven't even finished unlocking all the classes, but I got hooked on trying out each one and pushing further and further with the ones I liked. The allure of new gameplay helped me overlook the small frustrations of getting mobbed or trapped by particularly difficult attack patterns. Overture is a tough game, though ultimately fair because if you find yourself taking too much damage or not doing enough, you can keep killing easier monsters and hunting loot until you feel more up to speed. It's not exactly the prettiest game either unless you miss old 8-bit RPGs, but the graphics keep things as clear as they can in the chaos. I doubt you'll be spending dozens of hours plowing through the hordes with new characters but the frantic fun is good enough to keep you busy for awhile, and that's all I really ask of games like this.
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Dec 22, 2016 07:03
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Another screenshot-o-rama from Deathstate! It's my favorite game in its genre, from its aesthetic to gameplay - but primarily its difficulty! I have terrible reflexes, I can't get beyond the second area in Nuclear Throne, etc - I've beaten this one three times! On the easiest difficulty, but it's actually doable for me! That is amazing! Anyways -  Dude got stuck in a wall, poor guy!  Too Many Bullets!    Most of the unlocks left to me now are on the higher difficulties - gulp - and endless mode, which I need to try out - and I still want to beat the game with the scientist and the laser-rave-eyeball-tentacle beastie, so there's plenty to do~
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Dec 22, 2016 07:56
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Bert of the Forest posted:For y'all who are in the We Need To Go Deeper Any plans for a local co-op mode? I pretty much only play locally with friends, so online/lan-only is a bit of a bummer.
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Dec 22, 2016 09:35
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I haven't had much time to slug away at MythicaRL as I've managed to just get a new job  but I just wanted to post this to assure everyone I'm not dead and plan to keep going.
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Dec 22, 2016 13:31
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Pollyzoid posted:Any plans for a local co-op mode? I pretty much only play locally with friends, so online/lan-only is a bit of a bummer. No immediate plans yet, sorry. It's on our roadmap wishlist but it'll depend on the demand for it. I'm the same way myself since most of the time I play games with my fiance' or brother locally, but indeed the majority of folks play the on-lines these days so that's what we focused on delivering first. 
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Dec 22, 2016 15:32
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Woah! Seems like tis the season for roguelike patches! We just pushed a quick hotfix for this: StrixNebulosa posted:
And the fact that some camera changes made Starcreep completely unplayable. He's back to garden variety unplayable (depending on your willingness to live dangerously, that is.)
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Dec 22, 2016 15:39
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Sodomy Non Sapiens posted:I haven't had much time to slug away at MythicaRL as I've managed to just get a new job Awesome, congrats on the job! The hard drive with my game on it got corrupted, so I'm temporarily out of action. Let that be a lesson to you folks -- don't just use source control, also have redundancy, some kind of backup that doesn't rely on the same hardware and preferably isn't in the same place as your normal storage.
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Dec 22, 2016 15:43
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Awesome, congrats on the job! Sorry to hear it  It's a good rule to always, always, always have an offsite backup for your important data. It can be as simple as cloud storage or a flash drive on your keychain, in some cases. Hell, you can send small enough files to yourself as attachments via e-mail or message program, if you're really in a pinch.
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Dec 22, 2016 16:23
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superh posted:Woah! Seems like tis the season for roguelike patches! Here's a fun little crash, the game hung like this mid combat.  Also, the starchild was able to buy Othello's skull and put it in, is that... okay?
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Dec 22, 2016 16:35
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Unormal posted:White-hot babe of tortoises Caves of Qud patch slated for Friday. Any chance of Qud on iOs for xmas? or being able to test it for you? 
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Dec 22, 2016 16:51
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It's here, the final day of Roguemas, just an hour or so before the big Steam sale. Thank you to all for reading along and sharing your opinions on these titles, and I hope that at some point I mentioned something that was new to someone. If you enjoyed these reviews and would like more outside of the realm of roguelikes, I have a curation group where I've cataloged the 259 reviews I've written. For now, please bask in this extensive writeup of a game I am utterly wretched at, and MERRY ROGUEMAS HO HO HO On the twelfth day of Roguemas, the RNG gave to me... Twelve mutants shooting Eleven beasts exploding Ten guns a-gunning Nine beacons beeping Eight bosses slaying Seven heroes sieging Six chambers firing FIVE ANGRY BEES Four junky exos Three jingling coins Two blighted crabs And a feisty little deity    I remember getting controller-throwing angry at games when I was a kid. Sometimes it was because they were too hard, sometimes they were unfair, and sometimes I was just being dumb about something. It's been a long time since I last felt that kind of rage boil up within me, but Nuclear Throne sure does take me back. It has a vicious streak that runs deeper than even its peers on Steam, and yet that might just be one of the reasons I keep coming back to it. Nuclear Throne is the story of some plucky little mutants blasting their way across an apocalyptic hellscape to reach the throne of legend. There's a whole lot of far less plucky mutants standing in their way, and plenty of guns and things that explode to help you get past them. As a frantic twin-stick shooter you'll be dodging gunfire and explosions while blasting every foe you can find on the cramped, maze-like maps to open a portal to the next murderbox. It's a long journey, fraught with traps and monsters, but loads of secrets to uncover as well. And you're not going to see any of it for a very, very long time. Nuclear Throne is hard. I'm sure you can name plenty of games that you think are hard or that took you awhile to master, but none of that matters because this one is just going to kick you in the dick over and over and over. Every new enemy you meet might very well tear your face off instantly and force you to claw your way back to it just to figure out how to beat it. You're going to shoot the wrong thing and blow yourself up despite having full health and plenty of bonuses. Your weapons are going to run dry and your foes are going to laugh as they flay you to pieces. All of this is by design, because Nuclear Throne is a game that you learn and practice and eventually master to an incredible sense of gratification. Just getting the first few bosses down feels like an enormous accomplishment, in large part for all the things you need to remember to survive. For being such a modern twin-stick shooter this game takes a lot of inspiration from ancient roguelikes that had all sorts of weird, arcane rules to remember if you wanted to succeed. Here you have to know what explodes, what is weak to what, what all the enemy attack tells are, and so on. Forget a single point and you risk instant death. Does that sound fun to you? It isn't at first, but just like the best roguelikes it instills this dogged determination in you to overcome such adversity. There are a load of characters to unlock, each with drastically different playstyles to learn and master. Seriously, these mutants can eat guns, explode corpses, warp reality, and more. Collecting radioactives dropped from enemies can level you up and give access to powerful mutations but pickups in this game vanish fast, pressing you to play bold and dive deep and probably die again trying to grab some rads or ammo. You can carry two weapons plucked from an impressive lineup of machine guns, shotguns, explosives, beam weapons, and grander things. Finding an effective pair for any situation and balancing their ammo use is yet another challenge to keep track of, one complicated by the single weapon chest in each level you'll usually have to work with. You need to make every shot count, and you won't really have the luxury of avoiding weapons that don't click, at least at first. If you've gotten this far into the review without running for the hills, Nuclear Throne is the game for you. It's hard, it's cruel, it's relentless, and it comes at you at such a pace that you'll have little chance to prepare or recover. But it's ultimately fair, and the hours of study and practice it demands are rewarded with mastery and tantalizing secrets. I've had a hard time getting into Nuclear Throne because it's honestly not quite the style of roguelike I enjoy. Starting out you're going to be chipping away at the same enemies in the same levels in the same order for hours, lacking any real variation besides the weapons you find and the layouts of the maps. There isn't really any exploration to speak of until you learn what you're looking for, and even then it's just a particular trigger hidden among the scenery. I'm going to keep at it though, because there's a lot to see and do here behind a pretty towering difficulty curve, and I'm just starting to peek at the wonders that lie there.
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Dec 22, 2016 18:01
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if binding of isaac is great because it's a game where it can be crushingly unfair but also sometimes just hands you the keys to victory even if you're not very good (i feel like this is an underappreciated design trick), nuclear throne is good because it goes in the opposite direction. no matter how good your drops are the only thing that will keep you going in the game is your skill, and when you die it's basically always a fair death that's on your shoulders because you made a mistake leading up to it (at least iirc, it's been a while but i'm pretty sure during the dev cycle that vlambeer actively worked to eliminate/minimize the chances of unfair deaths)
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Dec 22, 2016 18:21
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That's reasonably accurate. It is still possible to get level layouts that are drastically less fair than others, which of course makes you much more likely to die. One notable example is having the Big Dog (level 3 boss) level be a wide-open arena with plenty of snipers on the other side of Big Dog, which means you have to be constantly juking around their spreadshots while unable to really strike back at theme because there's a gigantic three-headed metal bulldog in the way. But I would say that's a vanishingly rare case, and even then you can make your own cover if you take the Hammerhead mutation (which lets you dig into walls) or if you have an explosive weapon. Nuclear Throne is very hard. You need to really understand what are and aren't safe actions if you want to survive, and unfortunately most mistakes are communicated by killing the player. And there are so very many ways to make mistakes, so a new player is going to be dying a lot. I would say that if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, watch a video or two of the gameplay. Watching a skilled player makes a huge difference in your own skill level and can really smooth out the difficulty curve. Even when mastered, Nuclear Throne is a fun game, so I wouldn't worry much at all about "ruining" it for yourself.
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Dec 22, 2016 18:30
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Catsplosion posted:Any chance of Qud on iOs for xmas? or being able to test it for you? Yeah, it's up in testflight, I'll be updating the build sometime in the next couple weeks, if you want to shoot me your apple ID e-mail to support at freeholdgames.com
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Dec 22, 2016 18:57
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Please tell me android is happening in parallel, I would love to never get work done again.
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Dec 22, 2016 19:00
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Irony.or.Death posted:Please tell me android is happening in parallel, I would love to never get work done again. It kinda is but I need like 800-900mb of ram, and every Android vendor in the universe has the max heap for an app set to 512MB; newer generation iOS devices give you enough head room. All the devices are strictly able to run it but you have to root them and change the max heap, so it's looking bad for an Android release unless I can really crunch overhead down, or release it for just rooted devices (terrible).
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Dec 22, 2016 19:02
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the only point at which nuclear throne gets old is when you get good enough that looping is a given, you're playing purely for score attack and you get tired of the very-lategame score attack optimal weapon choices(ultra shovel/SPC, ultra shovel/ultra grenade launcher, wall cheese strats with something like an ehammer/guitar, maybe also YV shovel/ultra shovel ultra A). but at that point you probably have hundreds of hours invest in the game already so you've already gotten more than your money's worth.
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Dec 22, 2016 21:10
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Yeah, I logged over 100 hours into Nuclear Throne, almost all of that real play time (as opposed to idling), and I never reached the point where I felt I was playing purely for score attack.
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Dec 22, 2016 21:19
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Any advice for starting out in Tales of Maj'Eyal? My experiences with roguelikes are Caves of Qud (I suck, but goddamn, am I excited for the new patch), Dungeons of Dredmor, Sproggiwood, some Pixel Dungeon on my phone, and then a ton of games that aren't really roguelikes (Spelunky, FTL, etc).
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Dec 22, 2016 21:45
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Any advice for starting out in Tales of Maj'Eyal? My experiences with roguelikes are Caves of Qud (I suck, but goddamn, am I excited for the new patch), Dungeons of Dredmor, Sproggiwood, some Pixel Dungeon on my phone, and then a ton of games that aren't really roguelikes (Spelunky, FTL, etc). TOME is cool and fun. The key idea of the game is that 95% of all the enemies you will fight are chaff that you will reap with no effort. The other 5% are rare and/or unique enemies who get skills similar to players and will decimate you if you let them. There is no food clock or any consumables. Instead you get infusions and runes that cooldown on use. Status effects will end most of your good runs, so stock infusions which clear them. You get a quest journal and I advise you to follow it since it outlines roughly the order you should do the dungeons, but feel free to explore other places at your leisure (you unlock some stuff this way). Also, do not get into fights on the overworld. They are designed to murder you so avoid them until you know what you are doing. Most of the races and classes start locked but get revealed through play. Or, if you are impatient like me, you can edit a certain config file and get them all instantly.
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Dec 22, 2016 22:02
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SettingSun posted:TOME is cool and fun. The key idea of the game is that 95% of all the enemies you will fight are chaff that you will reap with no effort. The other 5% are rare and/or unique enemies who get skills similar to players and will decimate you if you let them. There is no food clock or any consumables. Instead you get infusions and runes that cooldown on use. Status effects will end most of your good runs, so stock infusions which clear them. Thanks for the info! It's gonna be a roguelike christmas this year, I think, so I'll be digging in deep with this game. I don't think I'll be doing any config-file editing. What's the deal with the live chat feature? You're playing a single player game... online?
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Dec 22, 2016 22:08
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All of the towns except Last Hope have two dungeons next to them which are intended to be done first. You don't have to do all of them on every character but it can be a good idea to squeeze out extra loot and experience from doing more than just your own starter dungeons. Trollmire in particular I always go through as it has an easy bonus boss.
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Dec 22, 2016 22:10
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:What's the deal with the live chat feature? You're playing a single player game... online? You can chat with other people, and every once in awhile the developer will use his godlike powers to trigger events for everyone playing at the time. It's super cool.
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Dec 22, 2016 22:13
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Too Shy Guy posted:You can chat with other people, and every once in awhile the developer will use his godlike powers to trigger events for everyone playing at the time. It's super cool. That is legitimately awesome, wow.
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Dec 22, 2016 22:14
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Jazerus posted:All of the towns except Last Hope have two dungeons next to them which are intended to be done first. You don't have to do all of them on every character but it can be a good idea to squeeze out extra loot and experience from doing more than just your own starter dungeons. Trollmire in particular I always go through as it has an easy bonus boss. Just gonna give a shout-out here to madjack's Dungeonmans for letting you just instantly conquer any dungeons that you outlevel, giving you all the experience and loot you would have gotten had you tediously run through the dungeon and killed the boss, just in a few seconds instead of 15+ minutes.
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Dec 22, 2016 22:18
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are there any other games that do the "whimsical godmins" thing other than tome and ss13
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Dec 22, 2016 22:20
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:That is legitimately awesome, wow. The developer, Darkgod, is in chat a whole lot so if your game bugs out you can usually ask him directly to lend you a hand. He calls his players minions, which I find is simultaneously patronizing and adorable. 
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Dec 22, 2016 22:29
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I'm kind of surprised at people saying that Nuclear Throne is always super fair, I actually find it less fair than Gungeon by a good margin. Once you hit the Junkyard, it's easy to get instantly killed by a completely offscreen enemy that you've never seen before. You'll be looking at a weapon, and then a spray of bullets flies in from offscreen and you're dead, bam. Or even worse, you're standing by a car, and somebody detects you from offscreen and blows up a car that's on the edge, causing a carsplode chain reaction that kills you. And once you get to the snowfields, it's much more about "did you try and find good guns?" than before, because if you have a crappy gun the enemies move fast enough to charge straight through your bullets and get to you before they die. Or die next to you, if it's a robot, which kills you. Maybe high-level players are just jigging back and forth at all times in case of bullets? Oh, I almost forgot about the PORTALS! About one in fifteen times, just beating a level will kill you, and the portal will cause anything near it to explode. Maybe GOOD players say "Well, just don't stand near anything explosive when clearing a level," but A: you may not necessarily know that the enemy you're fighting is the last one, B: the explosions reach farther than you would expect, and C: the idea that after you've cleared all threats is one of the most dangerous times in the game is nowhere near a reasonable thought for someone to have. I've only beaten Nuclear Throne once, but I've beaten Gungeon five times just consecutively. (Gungeon, incidentally, tests all the bullet patterns it fires at you, and if at any point they would be literally unescapable, it deletes some. Which is a really pleasant feature.) In addition, Throne has several weird meta-ish things to do to maximize your XP gain and gun acquisition, like how to get big chests, that isn't explained or hinted at anywhere. I got spoiled and it definitely made the game a lot easier, but Gungeon has... what, the key thing mentioned earlier? That I didn't know about and have never done. I suppose the fact that the two chests will have a passive item and a gun is helpful, but that's all I can think of, which I consider to be a big difference from Throne's "the rad canister has XP, but if you skip it you'll get LESS XP, but if you skip it twice and beat the miniboss you'll have MORE XP" deal. I know it sounds like it, but I'm not knocking Nuclear Throne. It's a really great game, and I love the speed and madness of it all. But "scrupulously fair at all times" isn't a descriptor I would apply to it. (Unrelated: both Throne and Gungeon have some issues preventing the multiplayer from being just perfect, and that makes me sad. At least, last time I played Nuclear Throne.)
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Dec 22, 2016 23:01
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Any advice for starting out in Tales of Maj'Eyal? My experiences with roguelikes are Caves of Qud (I suck, but goddamn, am I excited for the new patch), Dungeons of Dredmor, Sproggiwood, some Pixel Dungeon on my phone, and then a ton of games that aren't really roguelikes (Spelunky, FTL, etc). I've beaten ToME on Insane and can go into much more depth than this (so feel free to ask about things) but in terms of absolute #1 priority "these will increase your survivability a hundred times over" kind of stuff: 1) As soon as you start the game, leave the dungeon you're in, and go shopping instead. Your first priority is to find better infusions. Heal + Shield + Phys. Wild is a legit way to start, as is Heal + Phys. Wild + Teleport, or Heal + Phys. Wild + Movement if you're going antimagic. The only completely non-negotiable infusion is Physical Wild, which will be your #1 way of dealing with stuns and dazes until the midgame. When comparing infusions of the same kind, the best infusion is the one that matches your primary stat and has the lowest cooldown. An infusion that has a big effect but a long cooldown is a trap and will get you killed. Your second priority is to find as many items with +health as you possibly can. This stat is better than everything else that can possibly spawn on a non-fixedart item until, like, a third of the way through the game. It will keep you alive. You'll also want a lantern with +4 or +5 light radius by the time you start finding unlit dungeons, but lanterns with a big light radius and +hp are a very common combination and the two egos use different slots so that's not usually too hard. 2) Use a zone order guide. This one is pretty good: https://te4.org/wiki/Recommended_Zone_Order_Progression 3) Use a mod or an .ini tweak to unlock all the classes and races immediately. The starting classes are boring as hell once you're comfortable with the game and the requirements for most of the unlocks are stupid, random, and tedious. (And the less bored you are, the less likely you are to die of playing on autopilot. )
Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 23:03
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Unormal posted:It kinda is but I need like 800-900mb of ram, and every Android vendor in the universe has the max heap for an app set to 512MB; newer generation iOS devices give you enough head room. All the devices are strictly able to run it but you have to root them and change the max heap, so it's looking bad for an Android release unless I can really crunch overhead down, or release it for just rooted devices (terrible). gently caress 
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Dec 22, 2016 23:07
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John Lee posted:I'm kind of surprised at people saying that Nuclear Throne is always super fair, I actually find it less fair than Gungeon by a good margin. quote:Once you hit the Junkyard, it's easy to get instantly killed by a completely offscreen enemy that you've never seen before. You'll be looking at a weapon, and then a spray of bullets flies in from offscreen and you're dead, bam. quote:Or even worse, you're standing by a car, and somebody detects you from offscreen and blows up a car that's on the edge, causing a carsplode chain reaction that kills you. More seriously, I make a habit of doing controlled detonations of all cars I encounter just to make certain they can't surprise-asplode me.quote:And once you get to the snowfields, it's much more about "did you try and find good guns?" than before, because if you have a crappy gun the enemies move fast enough to charge straight through your bullets and get to you before they die. quote:Or die next to you, if it's a robot, which kills you. quote:Oh, I almost forgot about the PORTALS! About one in fifteen times, just beating a level will kill you, and the portal will cause anything near it to explode. quote:Throne's "the rad canister has XP, but if you skip it you'll get LESS XP, but if you skip it twice and beat the miniboss you'll have MORE XP" deal. I'll accept that manipulating big weapon chests is kind of obscure, though there is a between-level hint "Have you tried not opening weapon chests?". I don't really think it's worthwhile, though. You trade a guaranteed weapon at level N for a chance at getting 3 weapons instead of 1 on a future level. Those weapons may potentially be higher-tier, but the payoff is so fuzzy that I consider it to be more of a compensation for missing the original chest rather than something that skilled players should angle to try to do as much as possible. quote:(Unrelated: both Throne and Gungeon have some issues preventing the multiplayer from being just perfect, and that makes me sad. At least, last time I played Nuclear Throne.) TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 23:14
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John Lee posted:I'm kind of surprised at people saying that Nuclear Throne is always super fair, I actually find it less fair than Gungeon by a good margin. Once you hit the Junkyard, it's easy to get instantly killed by a completely offscreen enemy that you've never seen before. You'll be looking at a weapon, and then a spray of bullets flies in from offscreen and you're dead, bam. Or even worse, you're standing by a car, and somebody detects you from offscreen and blows up a car that's on the edge, causing a carsplode chain reaction that kills you. And once you get to the snowfields, it's much more about "did you try and find good guns?" than before, because if you have a crappy gun the enemies move fast enough to charge straight through your bullets and get to you before they die. Or die next to you, if it's a robot, which kills you. Maybe high-level players are just jigging back and forth at all times in case of bullets? Oh, I almost forgot about the PORTALS! About one in fifteen times, just beating a level will kill you, and the portal will cause anything near it to explode. Maybe GOOD players say "Well, just don't stand near anything explosive when clearing a level," but A: you may not necessarily know that the enemy you're fighting is the last one, B: the explosions reach farther than you would expect, and C: the idea that after you've cleared all threats is one of the most dangerous times in the game is nowhere near a reasonable thought for someone to have. you get good enough guns to win quite handily every single run in NT and the idea that if you don't get good enough guns by the time you get to the frozen city is pretty wonky. in what situation are you getting so close to snowbots that you can't kill them before their charge reaches you? I made this video of me beating lil hunter repeatedly with only the revolver because someone else on SA said that you just lose to him if you don't get lucky with weapons, and I wanted to show that that's definitely not true-and even that's a much more reasonable claim than "snowbots are unfair if you don't get a good enough weapon", especially since while fighting lil hunter you also need to clear out enemies, snowbots included! ps: snowbots only have 15 health, the same as a scorpion-an enemy in the very first area of the game you are expected to be able to kill with the revolver-and thus die in only 5 revolver shots, the only difference is they are a tougher test of your reaction time/positioning! John Lee posted:In addition, Throne has several weird meta-ish things to do to maximize your XP gain and gun acquisition, like how to get big chests, that isn't explained or hinted at anywhere. LazyMaybe fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 23:16
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Glad they fixed it, getting killed by exit portals was one of the reasons I stopped playing
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Dec 22, 2016 23:19
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Speaking of roguelikes, any tips for Caves of Qud? I've got a handle on Dungeonmans and TOME, but I'm not sure about Caves yet.
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Dec 22, 2016 23:20
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the only thing in the junkyard that has a good chance of killing you from offscreen is the sniper and they have a really hard tell to miss. the first death is how you learn
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Dec 22, 2016 23:20
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Mr E posted:Speaking of roguelikes, any tips for Caves of Qud? I've got a handle on Dungeonmans and TOME, but I'm not sure about Caves yet. Axe Marauder with Carapace and Freezing Hands is a good newbie build. Put all your points into improving those two mutations. Freeze enemies (which slows/paralyzes them) and then chop them apart. If you want a more mage-y build, Light Manipulation + Temporal Fugue (and then max Ego) is fun. Combine it with Evil Twin and you'll get into multi-way laser death raves between you, your evil twin, your good clones, and your evil twin's evil clones.
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Dec 22, 2016 23:26
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John Lee posted:I know it sounds like it, but I'm not knocking Nuclear Throne. It's a really great game, and I love the speed and madness of it all. But "scrupulously fair at all times" isn't a descriptor I would apply to it. Speaking as someone who favors Gungeon heavily over Throne, the thing is that Throne is completely fair but leaves it up to you to figure out the rules. Everything you mentioned is something you can mitigate with caution and experience, but it is more than likely going to kill you the first time. In my opinion that's perfectly fair for a roguelike, I have no expectation of doing a perfect run the first time I play. What sets Throne apart is how many times you have to die to learn all the intricacies, and dying to the same thing multiple times like exploding cars because first you didn't know and then later you didn't remember and then even later you made a risky play that didn't work out can feel unfair. As much as I love Gungeon, sometimes it just doesn't give you what you need to (reasonably) beat a run, and I don't think that's fair for a roguelike. I'm okay with it because the rest of Gungeon is superb and as I've gotten better at it it gets harder and harder for the RNG to gently caress me. But in comparing them Throne is definitely the fairer of the two, just in a way that can be terribly frustrating.
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Dec 22, 2016 23:43
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