They’re patching out their unwitting solution to early difficulty level for less skilled players? I am so glad now that I decided not to buy this game at launch. It’s clearly intended for the “Souls” audience that relishes repeated attempts and high difficulty. I suppose the lack of mid-run checkpoint saves also indicates that.
I guess there may be some marketing strategy to this? Lure in the hardcore, skilled players with a reputation for difficulty and eliteness. Then, when those numbers taper off, release a patch with difficulty adjustments / more save points to appeal to the more casual. Isn’t that what Remedy did with Control? And it worked, from what I can tell. They had multiple bumps of interest from different audiences.
I’m still working my way through Biome 3 (fuck those drones) and I don’t think it’s anywhere near as hard as a Souls game. Yeah, it’s challenging but it’s not that bad.
Yeah the reason I stopped playing had nothing to do with the difficulty (challenging but never unfair) and everything to do with the lack of mid-run saves (in a game where a single run can take well over 3 hours).
I hate to keep harping on this but I’d really like to see what the developers reasoning is for not implementing a save system. This does nothing but punish the player.
Good news! I got the sword and fought the boss once. Made it most of the way through phase 2. The sword is going to be a huge help in that I can access more resources on runs.
I beat the final boss last night on my 20th life overall. It’s definitely not the hardest roguelike out there, but there are some brutal difficulty spikes out of nowhere - namely the introduction of those irritating drones and the mandatory gold challenge room in Biome 5.
@forgeforsaken Yeah, that seems to work the best…although there are times in Biome 5 where there’s a half dozen or so of them attacking you at once and I end up resorting to hiding behind a door.
@GregB Yeah, the rockets and the suicide bombings!
I beat biome 3 and got to the next branch of the game, I guess? I put it down for the night, came back the next day and rode my god-tier artifact setup all the way to the final level. I lost to this guy who could give me malfunctions if he hit me. One of the malfunctions caused him to shoot back when I shot him. That was the end of that run.
Since then I can’t clear past Biome 4 most of the time. So much of this game seems to be on finding a good gun. Maybe I’m missing something, but the high end guns suck. A Carbine with that High Caliber mod has to be the worst gun in the game. The sidearm does more damage with a higher ROF. The pylon shooter thing that makes the laser webs is ok. But it sucks in the water level because there’s no walls. The grenade launcher… not the green blob one that one rules, but the red one you get as the boss weapon reward later on… utter shit. Nothing like shooting some drone and counting to 3 before it dies, giving it a chance to shoot back at you.
The best gun is that machinegun with the poison bullets, especially if you get the portal beam mod with it, or the green goopy grenade launcher. That thing is always good. Once I got a rocket launcher with full auto and that thing just melted everything. But it was level 15 and I couldn’t keep it when I moved on to level 20+ weapons.
A lot of the later miniboss enemies fake you out. Like they wind up, I dodge, they’re like “psyche! I haven’t attacked yet!” and I’m all “ok you got me but I’m gonna dodge now” and they’re still like “ha nope, still here!” and then I dodge again but I can’t because they actually did attack and I’m dead.
The drones aren’t bad once you realize you need to run toward them to dodge the missiles. Game changer. But if there’s like 10 of them swarming around just accept the run is over.
I think 1-3 is harder on replay than 4-6, mostly due the much better guns you get at 15+. Yeah there’s clunkers in there but some of the perk combinations are crazy. I’m working on finding the one item per biome for the secret ending and just need 3 and 6 and working my way through 3 has been tougher than 6 generally. Need to take some of the clunker weapons and grind up the unlocks an they get decent, the flares are’nt bad when they spawn homing rockets when they blow up. The gun I find a nightmare is the Dreadbound which wont fire until the bullet returns so on open maps at distance it’s total butt, I STILL haven’t found the spinning blade launcher Coilspine Shredder or whatever it’s called.
Also here have a screenshot I finally took after disabling the HUD.
I beat it, got the last boss down in 1 try. I had a pretty godly weapon. Full auto rocket launcher with huge bonus damage, replicating rockets, and thermite DoTs. Just melted everything. I think you’re supposed to shoot those blue balls the boss makes but the replicating rockets took them all out if they ever were going to be a problem. I didn’t even get hit in the fight.
Anyway I’m shocked by something in the ending. Selene is NOT Gwendolyn Christie. This whole time I thought 100% that she was modeled and voiced by her. Nope!
I’ve played returnal for between three and four hours and feel like I haven’t unlocked anything except alt fire and have no progress in any story. I am ok with the punishing difficulty if things actually evolve over time but I’m pretty close to just moving on with my life. Maybe Hades has spoiled me for what games like this can do.
I don’t need my hand held but having zero information change or any strength improvements over 4 hours of play is just lazy design. Fuck you figure it out.
That’s strange. I wonder if this has something to do with the RNG gods. I feel like there’s been a steady stream of unlocked items and story content through found logs and, uh, places visited.
How are you doing in terms of navigating through the levels? Are you spending your obolites in the repository? That’s the thing that lets you exchange obolites for ether. When you use that, you start unlocking artifacts. The machine at the very beginning of the level does the same thing when you spend ether at it, although I can’t remember when that opens up. Maybe you have to at least reach the first boss?
I’m still plugging away on the third biome. I can get to the boss without too much trouble. Just need to get better at dodging the patterns.
I went 45 minutes last night without getting a single ether and all the yellow crystals need 5 to unlock. I don’t even know what they hell they do. Each run lasts 15-20 minutes and I go back to the start with nothing but alt fire and none of the stuff to get a buff from the machine.
And it doesn’t sound like it will get better for a player like me:
