This! Exactly what I was saying.
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I donāt know where to even start. Me and my buddy really enjoyed playing the game before these patches. Every day we played 10 hours straight and some times we even forgot to eat and sleep. So that tells you that we really loved the game.
Nowā¦
Today we started playing at Sout Coast Region and using binoculars over there was almost useless because of the bad visibility. But the things went worse when we entered a military base where the haze was on even we were inside the building. And for some reason there appeared a brand new bug that we couldnāt see anything because of the white blinks that blocked the view. It was kinda like having continuous flashbang orchestra in front of our eyes.
We moved on from there and went to the Farmlands Region and over there we noticed that rules has changed and not for good.
The military class Hunters are like gods. They are totally in some sort of god-mode.
They see me where ever we try to sneak and kill us by one shot. Their gas attacks come through walls. Thereās no logic on how to play anymore. Before it was reasonable to go inside a building to cover, but now these guys just kill us when we are behind the walls. Explosives kill us through walls as well as the gas.
Before this was a shooting game, but now it is just a dying game. I spawn somewhere about 100 meters away from my dying point and the Hunter learns in one second where I am and kills me right there.
Before it was fun to create strategies and the game was more than just brainless shooting, but not anymore.
We really enjoy games that offer a challenge, but there needs to be some sort of rules. Now the rules are gone and anything can happen and that is a total immersion killer.
We tolerated the bugs somehow because the game was so great. Enemies ignored the walls but that happened only some times. Now the rules have changed and the gas penetrates the walls all the time and also in open area we die in one second. Also, the gas mask was something that we didnāt care to use because of itās low protection (30% + perk 10%) and now the gas mask protects you even less (20%).
So for us, the game is now unplayable and it is really a shame. We really hope that you guys can save it from this disaster what it has become.
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Merged topics. For the record guys, agree to disagree with eachother every once in a while. This thread is about Feedback for the April 2020 Update. Arguing back and forth will only get this thread locked sooner.
//Mod
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Co-op is not easier as the difficulty adjusts up.
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You can toggle that. I forget the name. So you can bring multiple players into a solo game (effectively), but yeah, itās messy.
I think this thread is both civil and instructive.
Agreeing to disagree is only a viable option if there is nothing actually important at stake.
Obviously, this is about a game so itās not about something important.
But, objective fact is a hard thing to neglect and that is why people argue about even small things.
In this case, even though itās not about something important, the objective fact is that the game has been changed dramatically.
That canāt be denied.
Further, it canāt be denied that harvesters now shoot āinstant missilesā all the time or that hunters now teleport into battle or that some of them have sniper rail guns or that buildings/walls no longer offer protection. These are just some examples of said change.
I personally assume it is intentional though I canāt see why and as a paying customer I disagree with how my purchase has been modified.
So, my suggestion is simply to withdraw this update and let things get back to the way they were. I look forward to another island dlc coming and hope my game will have cooled off by then.
4 Likes
I have actually made extensive use of smoke grenades and EMP rockets, but the smoke feels much less effective after this past update. One thing Iām not sure about is what the role of the enemy optics component is. If I destroy it will they not be able to see me? Be less aware? Or does it disable their abilities to use things like IR vision and OPV? If they have IR or OPV can they just see through smoke? I would love to know the answer to some of these.
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I donāt think anyoneās denying the prevalent issues and bugs. But some like the challenge that came with the update, and the changes to Machine AI, so theyāll disagree when other say itās too difficult.
Itās easy for the discussion to heat up when people disagree with eachother.
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For us the challenge is good, but the laws of physics should be in order.
If the gas crenade is exploded on the roof, the gass should rise up instead of coming down inside the building.
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As a clarifying question: How many people supportive of the new update are using heavy sneak/hack builds, with the intent of avoiding all possible combat?
How many folks supportive of the new update are already high level with most/all gear, quest completions, etc?
One of the big problems with the human mind is we quite often subconsciously presume āour wayā is āthe right wayā, and forget there are other ways. Often enough, people do this without even being aware of it. When it comes to games, especially āfreeformā games like this one, itās incredibly easy to forget what it was like when you started, or to not even think of what taking other options in a skill tree might entail losing.
At current, combat with anything above prototypes is a hard lose proposition, and yet paradoxically if you DONāT dump points into one of the combat trees to get Vanguard, youāre screwed the first time a Concussion Rifle fires at you. This is simple mathematics - one of them leaving me at 12 health maths out at roughly 140 damage. Considering that Concussion Rifles can now appear on military Hunters, and are in fact quite frequent - Iāve seen them spawn on every single Hunter called by a Harvester - and Vanguard becomes required for not dying on first contact. In theory, someone COULD buy all 3 levels of +max health and dig far enough into the combat tree for armor 1 - that would leave them with 6 health after getting rifleād, and needing to eat 5 small/3 medium/2 large medkits to get back to full. Far, far more than theyāre getting back from a single Hunter.
Is there a flaw in my logic so far? If so, please point it out; I donāt mean that sarcastically, either. Iām fine with being wrong, because itās an opportunity to learn.
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I canāt speak for others. Personally Iāve currently got three characters with different builds and different weapon setups. The stealthy one is naturally not very good at combat with massive amounts of enemies so, that oneās difficult to play but very satisfying to sneak around with.
The other two are max levelled with endgame gear. Theyāre good at big battles, though I still play in Adventure Mode most of the time.
Fourth slot I leave free for hardcore characters. This way I can experience the game from level 1 with no items, and take on challenges like a new player would.
Thereās definitely some balance issues to even out, no flaws in the logic there.
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With respect, thereās also some legitimate frustrations being vented. It feels like thereās a consensus that something is wrong with the current balance update, regardless of whether people are enjoying it or not.
I would like to say, this kinda illustrates the value of a more modular difficulty, controlling things like enemy durability, frequency, aggression, and awareness separately.
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A final set of thoughts:
As it stands, combat against mil+ bots is a hard-lose scenario - unless you face-zerg, youāre gonna burn all your medical supplies with fair odds of not actually finishing the fight. Yet there are still multiple missions that require you to fight mil+ Hunters, and at least one that requires you to fight a mil Tank. Have not come across any that explicitly require you to square off with a Harvester, but Iāve not completely explored everywhere.
If ādetection=deathā is the intended gameplay paradigm, then these missions are as self-contradictory as putting the FEV in the purifier in Fallout 3 - at that point in that game, itās impossible to not know that your character will be killed by the contamination. The only redeeming point in Bethesdaās favor regarding that particular scenario is the player has the option of saying āare you frikkinā stupid? That will kill me!ā and giving the poison to someone for incineration. At current, Gen Zero, sadly, lacks the affirmative ability to refuse the suicide mission - I am in effect told āIf you pull this lever, you will have an anvil dropped on your head. To proceed in the game, you must pull this lever.ā
If they want this level of brutal in the combat, then they need to rework quests such that youāre not ordered to pick fights, and make the stealth tree non-optional - reduce the max level cap by the number of points and just auto-add them for your first X levels. Otherwise, theyāre setting players up for a frustrating, painful experience of the kind that has already got them pretty heavily review-bombed - I havenāt left a review, by the way, positive or negative, and do not intend to do so, as the game is not yet ācompleteā.
ā¦and I think that may be part of the problem - the devs really havenāt decided what they want the game to BE, in the end, have they? Thereās still a tug-of-war between the hard-stealth, detection=death style games in the Amnesia vein, and the more free-form, exploratory-ambient, hard-but-fair combat, questing/looting game they had before this update, isnāt there?
If so, thatās a problem, and not one any patch can solve.
5 Likes
Well, there was something good too.
We were wondering that when we are going to get better guns. We had roamed through almost all the regions but we were still having three crown weapons.
After the patch we finally got four and five crown weapons (magnum and semi automatic shotgun).
So if you were balancing the game that people already have higher level weapons that might be part of the problem. Was it a bug that there were no higher level weapons to get?
So, if some people have already master weapons, they might like the extra challenge.
Anyway, that is a problem for us who donāt.
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I remember one that required you to, at least, deal with an objective that was being guarded by a FNIX harvester. AFIAK, that Harvester is mission related, so it should be a guaranteed spawn.
Iām back with a fresh ax to grind with this mess of an update! First one on the chopping block, or grinding wheel (itās actually called a whet (that is spelled correctly) stone) if weāre sticking with the ax metaphor, the topic of much lamentation of late: hunters. Iāve been trying to pin down exactly what is the root cause of this insane spike in difficulty we have all witnessed, and this time I think Iāve hit the nail (or ax) on the head: itās the hypersensitivity of hunters that is the source of so much pain. Hunters themselves have not gotten meaningfully more difficult to fight or kill, but they have gotten a lot harder to avoid. Someone mustāve hit zero one to many times or misplaced a decimal point because Hunters are about an order of magnitude more alert than they were prior to the update. Both the range and detection speed are very high, and once players are detected hunters can track them for miles, even through walls and terrain. This has to be a bug, because right now hunters are about to put seekers out of a job. I donāt think that Avalanche would do something as stupid as making one of their own machines completely obsolete. Hunters are meant to be a solid foot soldier, more than an annoyance (runners), but less than a challenge unto themselves (tank). Right now they do not fill that role because they are detecting players from much too far away, and because so many are in range they end up converging on players in massive swarms that keep growing in size unless they are constantly being taken down by the players. The harvester situation only exacerbates the problem by increasing the number of hunters there are in the world to detect players.
7 Likes
my guy i only have 40+ hours of this game and i got amlost all 4 stars and one 5 star rocket launcher then i fought a tank a harvester and a pile of dogs and hunters and got 1 advanced a bit of ammo that doesnt even compensate what i used and a propane tankā¦ no it does not change the loot drop you got lucky thats allā¦
Itās not a run and gun anymore.
After 25 minutes in the forest, and 4052 XP later - head on does not work anymore.
Distraction is the only way to clear them out methodically, but I still had my ass handed to me having to pop 3 adrenaline sticks to the 2 tanks that were raining fire non stop.
Iād also highly recommend paramedic kits on stand-by just in case you spawn into a fustercluck like I seem to keep doing. Patience, kill smart, donāt expose yourself.
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Distraction is good. I hope they improve distraction capability. Like remote triggered arrays or remote detonations. Or interactive sirens in towns.
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Iāll chip in on the refund side of it. I work for the Xbox UK customer support side of Microsoft.
Youāll have to call them direct and explain that the title is not as expected because of all the known issues providing of course you got the game recenetly. I wouldnāt bother if your past a months gameplay.
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