No additional news to post, I figured I'd just talk a little bit more about my experiences with the beta.
After beating the current build (took us about 10 hours over two separate nights due to how many times we died just trying to beat a single screen) my friend and I took a crack at leveling stats and farming to see how that works.
And the short answer is: it's pretty much exactly like RCR, only about 50x harder and more frustrating.
In RCR:U, when you level up the caps on your stats goes up by 1. Then you have to go find food and purchases which actually reward stat points. It took a while to identify which shops offered things that actually affected our stats. Once we'd done that we started hanging out by the Wanna Sauna, beating guys up for cash.
This part was nightmareish. For 6 hours we just farmed this one screen, making some money then inevitably dying so we'd lose most of our gains.
It'd be too much of a pain in the ass to do, period, were it not for a bug I found with the Wanna Sauna. Buying a sauna for yourself heals you to full, or the whole party if you buy the group sauna. The prices though are not easy to meet when you can struggle to have more than $2.00 in your pocket. However once we got lucky enough/got gud enough to afford the $5.55 sauna....we learned it doesn't deduct the money after you purchase it. Neither does the $11.00 group sauna. So after $5.55 you got a free heal and the Sauna, and at $11, a free group heal.
So that breathed new life into our efforts. The basic strategy was "fight until you hit half health, then run for the sauna and heal up before some prick one-shots you." This worked pretty well.....except for all the times you a) walk out the doors and immediately get nailed by a special attack and lose half your life or b) getting caught running to the doorway or zoning into Wanna Sauna and getting killed.
After 6 hours we'd made I'd say.....$30 worth of purchases each from the sushi place near by. This upped our stats, some of which we could tell were doing stuff, some we couldn't, and some that obviously didn't work.
Getting "Attack" up made our specials do more damage. Getting "Strength" made our basic punches and kicks and what not do more damage. "Throw" made our grapples and throws (including throwing prone bodies) do more damage. "Agility" we couldn't see any effect, and "Defense" seemingly does nothing either. (In some cases we actually saw ourselves taking more damage from some attacks than before. Another beta tester using cheat engine reported enemy stats going up in game at some point......oh boy, level-scaled content, my favorite.) "Stamina" (i.e. life) seems hard capped and wouldn't increase no matter what we ate, although to be fair just like RCR it's hard to tell what's a "heal" versus an "increase" because of the wording. Willpower went up but it's a currently underutilized mechanic. (It's a bar like health, that when you reach zero stamina converts itself into stamina. It represents your ability to keep fighting just based on sheer willpower. However there's currently no known way to replenish it and I'm not even sure it works. Or if it does work you only notice it for a death and then it never works again. Because again, no known way to replenish the pool since it does refill on respawn like health.) Max Special Power up definitely works....but at this time it is kind of pointless since your all character special abilities either cost "a fuck load" or "fuck all", so it's hard to notice its efficacy.
Strength and Attack then are clearly where it's at. If you can play through the whole beta with no upgrades, then just simply doing more damage should make it easier. It does in the sense than you only have to throw a few less punches or use a special one less time and guys are still dead. But it in no way addresses how much damage you take, or how easily the AI can exploit every mistake.
They're on their 4th beta patch now, which said it tuned down some AI behaviors like the desirability of picking up weapons. It seemed like they used them less than before, but generally the game isn't any easier. The Jocks gang is still, by far, the most bullshit enemy in the game, who have an insta-grab throw that does your half your life. And once the AI decides it's going to use it, it's pretty much guaranteed to hit you with it, since it's currently a master of spacing and prediction. (I literally did a running jump to avoid some enemies and watched a jock sprint to my landing location, block my air attack as I came down and then grabbed and threw me before I'd even touched the ground. I seriously haven't seen cheesy AI like this since I played games in arcades.) So that sucks ass. The entire forum is yelling at them to do something about that move and I hope they do before release.....because it's total horseshit in its current implementation. You'd think it's a stupid thing to get hung up on, but right now that move and one other from the Bomber's gang is the only reason either my friend or I die like bitches constantly in the beta. And I do mean constantly. Like probably once every 4 minutes or less in areas that spawn jocks (or bombers.)
Without those two abilities the beta would be tough as nails but beatable and enjoyably so. With those two abilities in play however the game goes to insta-gib-get-wrekt-MLG-2017 levels of frustrating. I'm sort of annoyed that we've told them about how much this move damages the playability of the beta and they've done nothing about it. I get it's a beta, you're not "supposed" to have fun with it. But between the AI (which I can accept on some level) and the move (which I cannot), it's like they wanted their testers/backers to be intentionally frustrated with the game. And I have a hard time fathoming why. Conversely, all the boss fights are a joke if you've ever played the original RCR. It's just like the original. Knock them down and attack them mid frame as they're standing so you can knock them down again. Special abilities in RCR:U just make this easier and faster. It's the definition of an anticlimax to spend an hour of white-knuckle zerg dying to packs of enemies with broken AI and moves to spawn a boss....only to kill them in 20 seconds of unmitigated cheese. Bosses may have cool flash abilities that will destroy players....but if they never get to use them, they're just glorified meat bags with lots of HP.
Considering the game is doing exactly zero pre-press or public betas or anything, I can kind of understand why there is so much of the game missing. If no one but backers see it, does it really matter if there are glaring omissions in the playable build? Not really. But the problem for me is this: you need those missing parts so people know what to expect on launch day. We're supposed to be hyping people up for the game as the only ones that have seen it, but I'm basically having to tell people "I hope it will be ok? /nervous grin" The things missing from this game that are hurting my ability to really sell it with enthusiasm are:
1. Tons of characters have missing moves. And based on the useability of the moves currently in game, it seems unwise to not at least test them externally before launch. Secondly, it's made a lot of the characters seem like shit when the handful of things they do have suck to use in the current beta.
2. Zero balance. There is no real balance to anything. Enemy attacks, your attacks, how much stuff costs to use in terms of Special Energy, how fast you can level up stats, how effective a stat is, how boss abilities are balanced.....None of this has ever been shown to us, except for some of the stats belatedly being hooked up sometime in beta. (With, I might add, no mention from the devs about any of it.) Raw gameplay, seeing is believing sure. But you can't just throw numbers up there and ask me to take it on faith that they work/make sense/are balanced. I'm too much of a gamer for that, and have seen too many devs swing and miss on those numbers.
3. A non-playable AI. If their testing principle is "let's make the AI as hard as we can and balance from there", then I think it's a mistake. The game really seems like it's angling toward "this is a hard game" mentality. If it's not, how would we know? The devs have given no visible sign as to what they think average difficulty SHOULD be. As far as testers can tell, they actually think this AI is playable and fun! Most people do not have the patience for the kind of difficulty shown in the beta, and if they think they can just dial it back a little for release....they are going to have hordes of people on their forums going "WTF is with this game!" And if they go the opposite direction and the normal AI is a pushover compared to beta...I'll still be asking why they subjected us to it in beta. So much of how this game plays and is viewed by the player stems from the AI, and in the current build you learn to fucking hate and fear the game. Fear where it will spawn you. Fear the split second decisions the AI makes when a screen loads and your only human brain is still processing that fact while the AI is going 'I'm going to throw you asshole!" Hate watching every spawned AI track your steps like a bloodhound and space the fuck out of you. It's like fighting one guy while 7 of his friends stand behind him flipping you off. In fact, sometimes the whole game comes across as a giant middle finger to the player. And that's the impression you want the people who prepaid for the game to take back to the masses?
So while the execution of the game and the art and everything is good, maybe even great.....At this point I'm taking release on faith and trust that they just know what they're doing. They haven't given me any reason not to believe so....but on the other hand, they simply won't clue us in to what they think is "right." If very little of my complaints seem addressed at release, I'll still play the shit out of this game....but my relationship with it will go from one of joy....to an adversarial one where I play and beat it just so I can say "FUCK YOU." And that's not how I'd like it to be. I don't want this to be a game I zerg rush because just slowly making your way through it is a death sentence. I want to stop and smell the roses without having some asshole flying goomba fist into me going "Enjoy the roses prick!" I want it to not feel like I'm playing the Deadliest Fucking Game where if you stop moving you're dead. Christ, we've cleared an entire screen of enemies before and spent about a minute collecting coins and stuff....only to have a fresh pack spawn and kill us from the doorway of the store where we heal as soon as we get near it. I don't want the game to be that frustrating, not in my or anyone's first playthrough. I want to fight through every screen for the fun of it, instead of sprinting through them because "I don't have time for this shit."
I hope Contaus ultimately understands the difference between challenging and frustrating. Because mistaking that difference could mean a lot for how this game is received by the general public. To be clear: I like a challenging game, I like failing so I can learn to do better. I like feeling like a win was earned rather than given to me. But there is a finite skill cap in RCR:U, and beyond that, there's little you can do when the game decides to fuck with you. And as example: when a guy pulls a bullshit throw on you that you couldn't avoid, and then 4 of his friends line up to ground stomp you while you're furiously mashing buttons to get up, and you die, that's frustrating, not challenging. That is the game fucking with you.
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Topic: River City Ransom Underground. New soundtrack is out (Read 13013 times)