Hah hah, I really had no idea yesterday, I guess. There is a point where you grok the game, and suddenly not only it isn’t a hard game, but the other way around, it’s kind of easy. Much like the base game, I guess there is a inverse difficulty curve, although here it’s more about understanding the metagame.
Obviously leveling up the characters with time help, but the main reason I changed opinions is because I stopped hoarding the metacurrency, as a dragon on top of a pile of gold, and started spending it, as there is no reason to hoard it.
More exactly, if you buy, let’s say, 4 delay_loop.time at the start the game changes totally. It’s 6000 points, but that’s still much less in comparison with the points you can get with the almost assured 5-man escape you get by doing it, so it’s really cheap.
If you use them to stay at low corruption levels, you can really loot all the environments, and with said loot you can craft even more delay_loops to stay at level 1 or 2 corruption for a loong time. Because the new enemies spawn with the coming of a new corruption level, that means once you kill all the enemies with the first two characters, you can do the other three with the levels basically devoid of enemies, just sprinting from A to B.
And the mule is too freaking good, you can collect an arsenal full of gold weapons in that lengthy first run and then the rest of characters will have the best weapons, ammo, medkits, etc.
The delay loop time item should be limited to one max bought per character run (that’s still 5 per group-run) and cost twice as much, and the Mule inventory size should be halved. Oh, and I would increase the cooldown of the engineer turret by 50%, she doesn’t have to bother repairing other turrets with it.
I’m 7 hours in to the base game and I can see why everyone likes it so much. It’s dense though - you really have to pay attention to keep on top of what you’re trying to do and where and why.
… and done. Have to admit I have little idea what that ending was about :/ I would have tried out other endings but I don’t seem to have any saves now :(
Is the Mooncrash DLC save to jump into without finishing the main story? I played the game for about 10 hours and loved it but somehow never finished it. Is the DLC standalone enough both in difficulty and story to play on its own?
Good question, I tried loading up my save game but apparently I stopped right before some super strong enemy without being able to back out of that area. Not really the best place to get back into the game. Maybe I should just start but the DLC seemed like a good opportunity to get back into the controls of the game.
The DLC makes the game into a roguelike where you can play it numerous times with random enemies. It extends the playability of the game and adds a random element to those who have done the main story. However, the story is still the best way to experience the game for the first time and the best way to learn all the elements including how to beat any super strong enemies.
If you want to get back in and seem to be stuck at your save game, I would suggest a restart. However, don’t let me talk you out of the DLC, just experience the main story first.
I got back in with a restart, on easy difficulty, because I found on normal the first time I got frustrated. Easy or whatever the lowest dif is is pretty much perfect for me.
I’m torn. On the one hand, you have your basic fork in the road decision to make. Like probably everyone, I installed the nullwave thing in the Heart of the Coral and activated the two arming keys, then went to the bridge to confront Alex. At that point, I chose to take off and nuke it from orbit, as it was the only way to be sure. I was somewhat surprised when January told me to off it to prevent it from stopping me leaving (and really, given the reason for blowing it all up, I find the decision to escape a bit skeevy, but then, I had zero Typhon mods). I was also surprised that Alex didn’t do anything to stop me either. Might have been the gun I was holding on him, though.
So far, so good. We escape in the shuttle, and the last thing I hear is “I keep having this dream…” Suitably murky. Credits roll. Good thing I stayed around, too, because…coda! And here’s where I have some real quibbles. Turns out it was, if not “all a dream,” well, yeah, all a simulation. Or something. Four operators/AIs and Alex pass judgment on my actions, in a Fallout-esque recapping, and then I get the choice to kill 'em all or make nice, because, who knew? I’m the half-Tyhpon/half-human hope for humanity! Complete with Typhon-esque arm blotches.
What I can’t figure out is, did anything actually matter? What’s the timeline? Best I can figure is that somehow, the Typhon broke containment and made it to Earth long before the game actually starts (maybe those accounts of the evacuation and crisis you find laying around during the game?) and Alex cooked up this mad scheme to inject human stuff into some Typhon (where the sibling fits in is hard to figure) in a last ditch attempt to figure out a way to save humanity. Alex shows you an Earth covered in coral, with the implication that humans are hiding out away from the Typhon or something. It’s also implied that there had been people on Talos I (the operators in the room seem to be AIs based on/built on the consciousness of actual people), but you don’t get a sense of what actually happened.
Big questions for me remain, including did the decision I made about the shuttle (blow it up or not) reaching earth with maybe Typhon on board make any diffrence? For the record, in this play through I did not blow it up. Also, when I installed the nullwave (never activated it), I had one of those flashbacks where someone’s voice said “They’re lying to you.” WTF? Who is lying, about what? Is any of this real? Would I have received a different ending if I had either stayed on the station as it blew up, or activated the nullwave? I suspect I’d still end up in a dingy room with those four operators and Alex looking like he woke up after a three-day drunk.
Ah, read this, and now I think I have a better handle on it.
Your spoiler block isn’t working. I think the opening and closing tags need to be on their own lines. As for whether your choices matter:
Nothing you do will change the Typhon having reached the earth. But it will affect how Alex and the operators react. They can either throw you back in the simulation (if you did what December wanted and escaped early with the escape shuttle), kill you, or set you free. The decision between the last two isn’t just based on whether you blew up the station, it’s made based on the sum of your actions.
And yes, I wish the final scene had a callback to the decision about whether to blow up the shuttle heading for Earth.
This was probably one of my favorite game endings of all time. It marked the first time I did not have a very extreme dislike of the it’s all a dream trope. I thought it earned that ending with an amazing amount of consistency throughout the game. I would preorder a sequel in a heartbeat just to show my support.
I finished it finally. It seems like they have to remake System Shock every decade. Last decade it was Dead Space (not the sequels because they do their own things). Bioshock is too shooty IMO. This decade it is Prey. I enjoy exploring different modules (I explored everywhere before even touching the main quest, which throws up some bugs). After I’m done exploring, the magic is gone.
I wish I could explored the station BEFORE it all went to hell, then afterwards. And the decisions I made before it went to hell would affect what happens afterwards (e.g. which NPC gets to live, which area is destoryed.) THEN throw a big linear main quest on top of that.
All the SS clones are about the aftermath, it is time to shake things up.
I never understood the people who dislike the ending because “it was all a dream”. Do they understand it was a simulation, yes, but a simulation of the events that really occurred x years ago? In other words, what you played could be also considered the real event, by a real person, before they were converted into machines, but narratively it’s explained as a ‘second run’ done in a simulation in the future.
Initial impressions on the Steam page and Reddit are super negative. Unlike the base game which runs on Cry Engine, Typhon Hunter has a separate Steam entry because it’s using Unreal 4 and feels completely different to play. Bethesda also forgot to update the game’s system requirements to reflect that people will need a more powerful machine to play, and video customization options are limited to only presets. It doesn’t have push to talk, and is suffer from laggy performance. Seems like a rushed afterthought.
