Starcrawlers -its out now!

Games
86

Well, you do have different environments - offices, underground, ships, and it increases with complexity with security systems / door & mag safe locks / puzzles.

There is also main story quests which are typically far more involved and complicated to find a path or find what you
are looking for. There are also escort missions, assassin missions and explore / collect type of missions.

Another part of the game is around factions - there are 4 main factions with 5-6 “companies” or “entities” per faction that you either gain favor or piss off depending upon the mission. You can also do things during the missions to help / hurt your faction status.

So I would that there is a lot more variety - for me it’s almost overwhelming at times, but in a good way.

However, I do think the appeal of the game is more around the skill trees and other crawlers you hire. Because battle is what it really comes down to (random encounters + boss battles) and how you select which other crawlers & their skills trees will depend whether you succeed or fail.

87

@Tman - Thanks for that. I haven’t seen any puzzles other than “find the switch that unlocks the door”, so hearing that complexity ramps up makes me feel better about my purchase. Perhaps I should restart and pay closer attention to what main character/skill set I want to start off with.

88

I know nothing about this game except for the 10 or so screenshots I just looked at on the Steam store a few moments ago. I get a really heavy Journeyman vibe from this game. Anyone else?

89

The puzzles are exclusively in the Story missions. I dont think they did a procedural code for the random missions to generate puzzles.

90

I’ve really been enjoying this game, but if anything, that makes me even more disappointed with how half-assed skill design/balance was. While there are some things that are more powerful than the rest, i’m much more concerned with the MANY MANY MANY skill trees that are just plain not good. It is also a serious issue that the capstone abilities in MANY trees, even ones that are good, are themselves boring and or not good.

My secondary problem is that the hacker is basically required for environmental stuff. The middle hacker skill tree is still pretty good now, but with kill switch now being pretty meh, other classes become A TON more tempting. The problem is that i can’t give up my hacker to try someone else because of her environmental stuff.

I really feel like reworking the skills should be their number one priority to encourage interesting party variations that just aren’t possible right now due to balance problems and extremely few options that allow synergy (probably why a lot of people end up going crit builds).

This is almost to the level where i am starting to question whether the game should have come out of early access sadly.

91

My main problem with the game just starting out is the abilities are really confusing and I don’t understand how they work by reading the descriptions.

92

Reading the forum posts about the nerf to the Hacker made me realise that it’s not the first time the nerf bat was used.

The beta players remarked that there were fun classes with trees having nerfed into the current state.

I think that explains the lack-luster and very meh trees in many of the classes.

The nerf-bat used in a single player game at the insistence of some vocal minority resulting in bland skill trees that are frankly uninteresting and boring convinced me that the designers are actually clueless as to what made great games like Wizardry and RPG’s of old fun.

That is the fun of creating overpowered fun characters to play. I remember making solo characters to tackle Wiz 7, Faerie Bishop/Ninja with the CoC! Yes baby! Or the crazy multiclassed Samurai wielding the Muramasa Blade! Now that was fun.

Those great games had every class that were fun to play and level. Some classes had the potential to be exploited to crazy heights of power. And people did that. And people used them to solo the content in a 6-player party based game! In fact, just judging from the items in games like that, some items were meant to make certain classes god-like and “break” games.

What I dont understand is why would some player PURPOSELY whine about skills that others players are enjoying? What is the problem here?

If you dont like how certain skills “trivalizes” the game content. Then dont use them. Why prevent others from using them? Why stop people from building super characters that they can then use to solo the content in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME!

Meanwhile, I await how the nerf to the Void Psyker will turn out.

Edit: The rant is not directed at anyone here. In case Murbella is wondering. I just happened to latch onto Murbella’s thoughts about the lack luster trees and started my rant.

93

I do think balance matters in a single player game, even if it is just things being too powerful, but I think it matters much less than in a multiplayer game.

In a single player thing the most important thing (in my opinion) should be allowing as many (reasonably equal) viable options as possible. It isn’t enough that a stellar player can finish the game with a completely broken tree that is equivalent to not having any skills, it has to not make you feel like a complete idiot for taking it.

So yes, i would support toning kill switch down (although not as much as they did), but it should be way lower on the priority list than fixing other critical balance problems. I can kind of understand why they did kill switch now, because fixing skill trees or even whole classes will be a lot of work (if they even do it), but i think it was a poor decision.

On the note of hackers, i still use mine and think they are quite powerful, but some skills just are not worth getting. Kill switch, optimization above the 2nd row etc. With kill switch being mediocre now it has allowed for basically a perfect hybrid between Malware and Optimization where you can get all of the benefits of each tree. I haven’t used rootkit beyond overheat, but i kind of lean towards it not sounding like a good tree to specialize in heavily.

94

I finally got around to digging into this over the last week, and it’s been a lot of fun. So many neat skills and abilities to tinker with.

The de-emphasis of healing gives it a very different vibe than most other RPGs and forces you to pay attention to damage mitigation over the course of a mission.

Just caught up on the thread, and I have to agree that some of the skill trees are significantly better than others, especially the Void Psyker’s Invocation. But I experimented with every class other than Engineer at least a bit, and they all managed to contribute substantial value

I wouldn’t call any of them really required. Hacker is certainly nice for the environmental skills, but can generally disable or avoid most security stuff if you pay attention, and the locked doors usually have a keycard somewhere in the level, so all you miss out by doing without one is the occasional secret treasure room. Void Psyker is great for shields and big groups, but both of those can be dealt with by other classes.

The most consistent character, though not very flashy, was my Force Psyker main character, using the Sentinel tree. Mirror Prism prevented an absurd amount of damage over the course of the game, and the ability to clear enemy buffs and debuffs is situationally very helpful. I tried respeccing to the middle tree for a while, but felt that the barriers didn’t really keep up with damage nearly as well as Mirror Prism.

Somewhat less impressive was my Smuggler, who I had in the Gunslinger tree early on. But pistols just seem to fall behind other weapons. She could put out amazing single-target damage against targets with no armor or shields, but didn’t have much other utility, and was just a waste when encounters had a lot of shields. I later switched her to Traps, and that’s been extremely effective. Lots of blind, confuse, stun, and taunt to keep the rest of the party alive.

I recruited a Cyberninja for a while in the mid-game after finding an amazing epic hammer that had all enemies start with combo points. It was great while it lasted, but the damage fell behind after a couple of levels, and switching to higher-damage weapons without that ability meant she just took too long to ramp up.

My Hacker was somewhat similar – a few levels of awesomeness in the midgame after getting a weapon that automatically triggered viruses, but eventually falling behind. I had used him in Optimization for a while, but the buffs just never quite seemed to add up as well as they looked like they should. And without the virus-boosting weapon, he was lackluster compared to other characters.

I didn’t try the Soldier until pretty late, after finding a fantastic weapon for him, but he’s working out absurdly well. Basically immortal thanks to healing on crit, and once he gets ramped up, he can hit for over 1,000 damage every 5 TU, indefinitely.

Anyway, I’m on the home stretch now, at level 25 and just got a strong “point of no return” vibe from the next mission. I wish the game had a bit more teeth to it, though. I’m playing on Challenging, and only had one actual failed mission. There were a couple more close calls earlier on, but especially after hitting the mid-teens, it felt like my characters power level far outstripped the enemies. I’m a bit disappointed that I wasn’t able to do more with the factions and never managed to collect all four components for any of the class unique crafting items, but I figure it probably makes more sense to just try for NG+ if I feel like it later rather than hang around doing more missions and then have the actual story end be even easier.

95

Yeah, they nerfed the hell out of the Hacker. Hackers used to be awesome and very fun to play. Now, they’re not so fun anymore. I couldn’t swap him out after the nerf either because he was my main. Fortunately, I had just finished the main quest at that point. I was bitter about it though so I didn’t start NG+ and I put the game down and haven’t been back. One day I may.

96

What did they change? Mine was still pretty useful due to stun and charm abilities, but basically just applying a bunch of viruses wasn’t very interesting. The haste buff in optimization was really good, but I specced out of it because it had major negative synergy with Mirror Prism.

97

I didnt finish it. The constant nerfing involved in a single player game was so off putting that I gave up in disgust.

98

Huh, really? I was just glancing at the patch history because I was wondering how the Hacker used to be different, and it looks like there have only been two patches since launch and both seem pretty minor in terms of balance changes.

And as I was playing, I never felt like I was missing out on power or fun abilities (honestly, the Void Psyker and Soldier could probably stand to be nerfed a bit given how they are performing in my game on Challenging.)

Did you play a lot in EA? If so, that definitely reaffirms my general stance of waiting for full release.

99

I was not in EA.

But the patches happened while I was playing. Once shortly after I started so I just shrugged. But another happened after good progress past about 3/4 of the way into the plotline.

I started following the forums after the 1st patch. And there were a vocal minority of people asking for nerfs left and right. Just plain crazy. It got really tiresome after that.

So my “constantly” referred to the period where I played where the nerf bat come and affected how I play. I was enjoying myself before some random guys insisted how I used my characters was affecting them in a single player game.

And developers employing the nerfbat willy nilly just indicated serious issues with how they envision their game’s balance.

There are so many other games clamouring for time. I dont need nonsense like this.

But I started out enjoying the game. Just that i wasted my money buying this at full price to support the devs.

Edit: Turned out that I had supported developers who had no idea about game balance, or developers who have no idea about their design (e.g. the original class trees had multiple viable roles, but the impression i get is that a minority of people want to lock classes into roles; clearly contradicting that design. Having the developers agree with them is the last straw for me.)

100

Fair enough, thanks for the explanation. Out of curiosity, what was the change when you were 3/4 of the way through that affected how you played so drastically? I’ve never been to the forum, but both post release patch notes on steam seem pretty benign to me.

More generally, I do like there to be a reasonable attempt at balancing in single player games. It doesn’t need to be down to the last 0.5% modifier like in PvP, but I want there to be an interesting challenge in my deciding how to use my available resources to overcome the game’s challenges. If some of the options are drastically superior to all the others, the decisions are less interesting. And yes, it’s possible to ignore them, but it’s unsatisfying to feel like I have to balance the game on the fly or play with one hand behind my back.

101

I had my Hacker as the primary DPS, but it was DOT based.

The party did not feel overpowered in anyway. In fact, in this game weapon damage is a huge multiplier. The damage mechanics starts to scale when you land really good weapons, short turns couple with huge damage numbers absolutely owns.

So my whole team composition had to be reworked, I can’t swap out the hacker and so spec-ed him as a healer/damage mitigator. And brought in a Void Psyker as the DPS, turns out that the Void Psyker is much much more “OP” compared to the Hacker. (And yes, there are threads clamouring for a nerf as well.)

Between 1) the respec-ing, experimenting with the party composition, 2) reading the forums clamouring for even more nerfs and balance and 3) relooking at the old threads detailing the exact same approach in EA

The ‘sense of wonder’ I had for the game just evaporated. I was looking forward to the NG+ and NG++. But the 2 nerfs and balance I experienced made me relook at my assumptions that I’ll have a great time. I looked into the skill trees in detail and came to the conclusion that they are so ‘meh’ that NG+ and NG++ will just be numbers game; spamming the same limited set of “balanced” skills over and over again.

In the name of “balancing” the skills, they have removed the potential synergies and fun combinations that the design seem to lean towards initially (but every nerf moves them further away from that design).

That was a huge minus for me. It may appeal to others.

102

I know shortly after release they pretty heavily nerfed a few widely used hacker skills. The skills themselves were basically useless after that point, but the class overall was still pretty strong.

The game did have a lot of balance problems. Some trees are 100% useless. Don’t know if they ever fixed them.

103

Yeah, after reading a bit about the Hacker changes, I think that the complainers were right that it was too powerful to stay as it was, but that @cicobuff is right that they went too far the other direction. Instead of making those skills on par with other good damage skills in the game, they made them not worth bothering with (I experimented with both of them on my Hacker before I knew about the controversy, and dropped them to make room for others because they weren’t pulling their weight.)

104

they were indeed too powerful compared to other skills, even not counting skills that were obviously broken due to how bad they were.

Personally i would have preferred they fix some of the very obviously useless skill trees before working on that in a single player game.

105

Wrapped up the story on this, and as expected it didn’t put up much of a fight.

Curious about the other story paths and whether the difficulty will ever ramp up again for high-level parties, so going to try NG+ on Hardcore and stick to the story missions for a while.

I would agree with this if we were talking about an old-school game where your party is your party and if a skill tree turns out to be crap you’re stuck with it unless you want to restart. But here, respecs cost a pittance, and switching classes is pretty cheap too, so if something isn’t working out, you can easily try something else.