Comment on Control - the first game to get me to turn on cheats in decades
Aurix@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Nah, Control was gameplay wise jank. I see in fact more and more modern games with terrible takes on encounter design. I grew up with frame tight games. They were at times brutally hard and speed runs do end there with deaths to normal mechanics. However you could systematically learn the timings, patterns in a pleasant way until you got it right. You might fail at them crushingly, but you know quickly a no-hit run would be possible and truly unfair situations are quite rare even on the highest difficulties.
Not so the past few years it seems. The gamer press lets many games get away with actually terrible game design. Off camera attacks, bad tells, awfully tight frame windows, multiple enemies which can on a dice roll attack unfairly together into undodgeable situations and so on. And while I do think the extremely tightened game design I prefer limits creativity, I do expect from those games who make it a bit wonky at times that they know their place about it and loosen the demand on the player.
Quickly the criticism on this gets drown out by the hardcore “git gud” crowd which probably never went past half the game. And then there is another fraction of players, who learn to cheese the systems as in exploiting high DPS outputs to reduce the interaction with the encounter design.
Back to Control, yes, I was similarly very frustrated by some gameplay sections and the story doesn’t pass a basic writing course test. It sets up this wonderful intrigue in the beginning and then forgets that a story needs something like stakes and tension. And towards the end it just drips along until it ends.
Cylusthevirus@kbin.social 9 months ago
What specifically did you find janky? Except for the one CTD bug I encountered (and spent hours fixing) everything seemed pretty fair. I completed all ten main story missions with no major issues with difficulty. I died some, but was always able to figure out a way to approach each encounter that made sense and didn't require exploits.
I'm not some elite gamer either; I'm a 41 year old dad.
Aurix@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There were bosses with camera problems (off camera tells).
As Whitelight explains enemies with bad tells doing 90% damage. Enemy design is overall bad, because it is the same approach youtu.be/hUGi07a0Mi0?si=37k8ldzolqPvt08_
Quote from Darkhack on the negative Steam review:
" Sadly, there are too many minor faults that manage to interrupt the fun. The launch ability that lets you throw objects can be unpredictable. Most of the time, Jesse will grab a nearby object or even pull rubble from the floor if nothing is available to throw at enemies. However, it’s not uncommon for the ability to glitch. At random moments, Jesse will inexplicably grab an object all the way across the room and wait for it to be pulled in and arrive at her side before throwing it. These objects can even get stuck on random geometry. I died more than once because Jesse decided that the desk located a mile away was the only suitable object to throw and she would wait for it to arrive while under heavy fire. That’s assuming it arrives at all and doesn’t get stuck along its path."
I think high damage mechanics are always a terrible idea in a physics based combat rule set instead of a restricted, openly telling system like in Mega Man or Final Fantasy XIV.