Thinking about picking this up now that it is on the cheap. Not that I wouldn't have paid full price, mind you, it just got slightly edged out (no pun intended) last year by games I was super excited for. Anyhow, I have some questions:
1) How long is the single player campaign?
2) Is it better to turn off the red indicators for parkour-able objects? Does it make it too difficult to navigate?
1- Six to ten hours or so.
2- No. Yes.
More specifically, the first time through you might want to have them turned on. Even the inclusion of a 'point me in the direction I need to go' button doesn't always make it clear where exactly you can go to get there. Why make things more aggravating?
But as you get used to the game and what does and doesn't work, turning it off would be less of a difficulty. And the Hard difficulty itself has it turned off and locked by default.
Don't listen to him, turning on the red turns the game into a "seek the shiny red thing." You follow one path through the entire game and never even realize there are other options.
Read the insulting description ("show more" on craptube).
That's more along the lines of "I'm a huge dick." A tad defensive of this game, are we?
I don't think the combat is hard; I think it's done poorly. Look at your video and look at how combat just wrecks the pace of freerunning. Combat just flat-out isn't needed. You run into guards, you die. Run faster next time.
Thinking about picking this up now that it is on the cheap. Not that I wouldn't have paid full price, mind you, it just got slightly edged out (no pun intended) last year by games I was super excited for. Anyhow, I have some questions:
1) How long is the single player campaign?
2) Is it better to turn off the red indicators for parkour-able objects? Does it make it too difficult to navigate?
1- Six to ten hours or so.
2- No. Yes.
More specifically, the first time through you might want to have them turned on. Even the inclusion of a 'point me in the direction I need to go' button doesn't always make it clear where exactly you can go to get there. Why make things more aggravating?
But as you get used to the game and what does and doesn't work, turning it off would be less of a difficulty. And the Hard difficulty itself has it turned off and locked by default.
Don't listen to him, turning on the red turns the game into a "seek the shiny red thing." You follow one path through the entire game and never even realize there are other options.
And clearly being chased by heavily armed cops is the perfect time for exploration... It's called Runner Vision for a reason and it's not to prove the size of one's e-peen.
Love the game, looking forward to a sequel. But I agree with what's been said about little irritating faults in the running and platforming. Hopefully, Dice will tighten it up and allow the player to keep up momentum in the story mode, even on the first play through.
I don't agree with the people who want zero gunplay in the sequel. I went for the Test of Faith achievement right from the start because it felt right. But I still always had the option of grabbing a dropped weapon and using it, and that felt right, too. Because it was a choice. One with real gameplay implications, not some lame morality check used to determine if an NPC talks to you with a scornful tone.
Also, on my second playthrough on Hard, disarming a blue and wasting two icarus runners at the end of a long chase was cathartic. Took my time strolling to the next area, just because I could.
Zoku Gojira on
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
Mirror's Edge Review Fanfiksion by Kyle, Age 11
Faith stood at the top of the building and looked down the building. It was very pretty and bright and sort of hurt her eyes a little. A little TOO bright! LoL!
She talked into her ear,"Merc what am I doing?" and Merc said "Faith you are a Runner and you Run around and jump and you can also do other parkour(sp?) things."
And so Faith smiled a little and then she started Running! She leaped got into a good, decent run and then jumped. It was pretty easy to do, and with a little practice she was running so good. Sumtimes though she would try to jump up but could not and sometimes she was trying to grab onto a pipe but the GAME WORLD would not let her and she kept falling down! She said,"What is UP with that PIPE?" and Merc replied dryly,"Pipe down Faith your are making my ears ring ha ha!" "˜At least this doesn't happen that often" Faith thought at herself.
Just then when Faith was running her best friend Cel ran up to her and said,"Faith your sister is in trouble you have to go rescue her!"
And so Faith climbed up to a building and then started running again. She jumped over a box and then she jumped over a crate and then she saw that there was a ledge with a difficult jump. "˜I had better use my runner vision!" and so she used her runners vision and time went real slow so that she could make her jump better. Good thing she had run a lot to charge her vision up!
Finally she made it to her sister Kate Connor who had been FRAMED for doing something really bad! It was up to Faith to set everything right! She hugged her sister and said I love you Kate Connor and then she had to run because the police were there, or the blues as she liked to call them! But Faith wasn"t afraid to run OR fight! She stood before the cop and got close and he went to butt her with his rifle, but if she reacted at the right time she could grab it and disarm him! "˜Too bad it is his gun and not his arm that I am disarming" Faith chuckled to herself. Once she had a gun, she could shoot the other people, but she could not run as good and it was hard to aim some of them. She could also jump and kick and slide and kick at them, and follow it up with a punch "˜martial art" combo. She was really the Feminine Fatal! But if she faced lots of guards she would have to try again and again because she could not take many bullets! Thankfully she always woke up near where she fell asleep so that she could try again! Try, try again Faith!
Finally Faith caught up with the badguy! The baddie used to know Faith but she didn"t like him now. "˜Something about him really grinds my gears" Faith said, rolling her eyes at him.
"˜Ha ha Faith, it has truly been five hours of real time, hasn"t it."
Wait, you cannot break the forth wall!
"˜Who are you??"
I am Kyle and I am writing this story ha ha!
"˜But you are breaking the forth wall to Kyle!"
HA HA YOUR RIGHT OKAY I will be quiet ^_^
and then Faith kicked the bad guy and he fell really far away from the building. "˜Kate I have rescued you and saved you from the bade guy." And Kate said "˜okay" and they hugged like sisters because they were sisters.
But Faith new that it wasn"t over yet. Not until she had run to the biggest bad guy there was, the city itself. And so she went to the tall building and started to run. She would always run and she was STILL ALIVE.
R&R! I am currently working on Mirror"s Edge Part II and hope to release it soon! I liked writing this one a lot and I am sorry if my story was short and didn"t make a lot of since, I am still pretty new at this writing thing! Okay I have to go now, bye!
Well, it is possible to get through the server room only getting one guy. In fact, I've nearly managed it without attacking anyone, before being shot in the back at the top of the stairs.
But anyway, I believe that the point is that while you may be able to escape without fighting most times (and when you do it's pretty awesome), they set up quite a few scenarios where it is nearly fucking impossible. There may be some way, but it normally relies on a hell of a lot of luck. More than should be necessary. And so people are pushed into a combat system which leaves a bit to be desired. I didn't find it too annoying, but then I use slomo like there is no tomorrow. And guns. I've managed to perfect slowmotion dives, and now I want someone to make a level where a group of anti-runners pursues you off the end of a crane, so I can turn and blast them all out of mid-air. It's quite fun doing that, even when you end up dying.
I bought the DLC at the same time as I got the game (both from the EA store), but I've only gotten stars on two of the DLC maps. I've gotten a star on most of the non-DLC maps, though and two stars on a single one.
It took a lot of tries for me to get past the server room because I thought you had to destroy all the servers. Turns out that you only have to destroy one in each cluster. In fact, you can't destroy more than one in each cluster, which is confusing.
BlackDove is also playing on PC. This can affect the quality of the controls. At least the inputs.
The biggest problem with the combat is the early talk about the game apparently (according to the devs) took one tiny aspect of the game (the Leap of Faith achievement) and turned it suddenly into 'the game is all about avoiding combat'.
DICE then began insisting that combat was always a focus of the game. (Though how or why they were talking about an 'optional' achievement like that years ahead of release might be subject to more intense scrutiny.)
Combat in ME does play better if you're more willing to shoot and kill the enemies in your way. Speedrun videos all but prove it. I do think that if the game had been more about avoiding combat and doing awesome free running moves, it might have been better overall.
I maintain that the hand-to-hand combat's biggest problem is that the game doesn't introduce it well, or at all, really. The way it's set up, it makes it seem like your best options are 1) standing still and punching the guy, or 2) disarming from the front. Once I spent some time dicking around with fighting (New Eden mall :x), I got used to some of the disarm combos and figured out how to use them well, and I really liked the hand-to-hand a lot. (And I'm playing on 360.) Though I have a tendency to like things most other people hate, so there's no accounting for taste. :rotate:
Though yeah, when you're speedrunning, it's really best to just get the hell out of Dodge, and when you can't, cap some of the guards and then get the hell out of Dodge.
Read the insulting description ("show more" on craptube).
That's more along the lines of "I'm a huge dick." A tad defensive of this game, are we?
Oh I'm not denying that. I think that's self evident.
There is a method to the madness though, it's like that intentionally, and there's a good reason I don't want to change it. Whether people think I'm a dick or not (or whether I am one or not on a personal level) doesn't much matter to me. I could show why, but that would insult a whole bunch of people here, and I don't want to do that since this isn't the place for it.
But yeah, I'm very defensive of this game because by fantastic comparison, the anti-christ being the latest Prince of Persia, people will swallow that kind of a turd more or less SOLELY because it wasn't challenging for them and they didn't have to deal with the super intense frustration of dying, while a game like Mirror's Edge gets the shaft because the AI and the mechanics raped them and they feel all violated inside.
I fully believe one should place the blame inwards instead of outwards for those reasons.
Other than that, the game has a plethora of nice quirks to it, like the story sucking some major ass both from a story-telling perspective (which we talked a bit in the old thread, storytelling in games) and from a content perspective, yet for some reason it all seems to work out more or less as a whole when the "game" part is taken into account.
BlackDove is also playing on PC. This can affect the quality of the controls. At least the inputs.
The biggest problem with the combat is the early talk about the game apparently (according to the devs) took one tiny aspect of the game (the Leap of Faith achievement) and turned it suddenly into 'the game is all about avoiding combat'.
DICE then began insisting that combat was always a focus of the game. (Though how or why they were talking about an 'optional' achievement like that years ahead of release might be subject to more intense scrutiny.)
Combat in ME does play better if you're more willing to shoot and kill the enemies in your way. Speedrun videos all but prove it. I do think that if the game had been more about avoiding combat and doing awesome free running moves, it might have been better overall.
I maintain that the hand-to-hand combat's biggest problem is that the game doesn't introduce it well, or at all, really. The way it's set up, it makes it seem like your best options are 1) standing still and punching the guy, or 2) disarming from the front. Once I spent some time dicking around with fighting (New Eden mall :x), I got used to some of the disarm combos and figured out how to use them well, and I really liked the hand-to-hand a lot. (And I'm playing on 360.) Though I have a tendency to like things most other people hate, so there's no accounting for taste. :rotate:
Though yeah, when you're speedrunning, it's really best to just get the hell out of Dodge, and when you can't, cap some of the guards and then get the hell out of Dodge.
It doesn't help when that 'introduction' is also wrapped in a way where they essentially tell you that you don't have what it takes to take on armed enemies and that you should just run away. And then, in the Prologue level, you drop down out of the vent and about the first thing you hear is Mercury telling you to 'run away!' rather than stay and fight. From that point, you're practically encouraged to find the quickest way out of Dodge rather than fight. Even against the Icarus runners...
And then, depending upon just how good you are, you may or may not run into a few fights early or late. Like on the way to the mall and the three guys drop out of a helicopter. If you're 'on time' you can reach the pipe to climb up just as they start shooting at you. You'll likely not die (though your 'vision' becomes a bit cloudy) and you can just continue on. If you're late? Well, have fun.
Or the four shotgun assholes coming up out of the sewer... I didn't include them in my list because I suppose there might be a way to not have to fight/disarm any of them, but the game sure encourages you to go in a 'proper' direction. And that means a fight.
And let's not forget that the hand-to-hand combat is really bad. And not because of the trigger use. HtH only really works against the actual police. When you start going up against the armoured troopers, they can interrupt your attacks and that makes disarming all the more powerful. And then the tutorial goes and makes you feel like disarming will be that easy for the rest of the game...
Much of the early press on the game certainly seemed to express the game wasn't about combat. Then the game was about to come out and suddenly they intended it all along. The player is just 'encouraged' to avoid it where possible... I get the feeling that at some point this game hit a focus group and this group asked where the gunplay was. So it was 'tweaked' to add more gun usage by Faith. And in order to balance out how easy that might make things, more cops were added. The end of the mall sequence is really weird in that the end difficulty is really based upon whether or not the player trys to take out the enemy or just run through it.
They only "interrupt" your attacks if you keep using the same one. If you vary them one after another, they can't interrupt shit.
Note in my video, nobody interrupts anything. That's because my combo is "jump kick-punch-punch-punch-slide kick and then punch or jump kick"
They are different one after another. If you just punch punch, then punch punch, you're gonna get owned. Serves you right for spamming the same move over and over.
I'll say it again and again until you LIKE IT - combat was PERFECT. There was nothing wrong with it, except maybe we could have used a higher variation of moves.
Though you're right, the introduction does nothing to prepare you for all the facets of combat and how it works. That could have been done better.
[edit]Oh right, I'm totally not saying anything about combat in your gamepad environment. As a game sold in a format with such a shitty way to control it, if you say the combat sucks due to controls, I've got no counter on that one - haven't tried playing it with a gamepad. Though I do have full knowledge how shitty FPS' are on gamepads, and can totally see why you'd consider the game's combat to be trash from that perspective. That one is also their own fault for not adjusting it accordingly.
I guess I can't say skill plays much of a role on the console, when it's akin to tying your hands behind your back then setting them on fire.
Console people get a reprieve, I'd probably kill myself if I had to use a gamepad for this game.
Mreh, I never really felt frustrated by the controls. But then again I never tried using the guns. If I had, I probably would have gotten upset rather fast.
That screenshot reminds just how weird I thought it looked with the white plants. I guess it's the art style and to not draw attention to the plants, but it looks like they forgot to texture them.
That screenshot reminds just how weird I thought it looked with the white plants. I guess it's the art style and to not draw attention to the plants, but it looks like they forgot to texture them.
Yeah I never really got the white plants. I always just figured they were synthetic or something. I also really liked how they look, but still, you'd think someone would at least have ONE real plant somewhere.
I maintain that the hand-to-hand combat's biggest problem is that the game doesn't introduce it well, or at all, really. The way it's set up, it makes it seem like your best options are 1) standing still and punching the guy, or 2) disarming from the front.
Bullshit. If anybody doesn't know how to handle blues after playing the prologue, they weren't paying attention. Besides, as someone mentioned, the checkpoints are generous, so a bit of trial and error will quickly correct any misconceptions about the combat system.
Besides, disarming from the front is immensely helpful. I used it a lot on Hard mode. The timing can be tricky, but that's the way it should be.
Zoku Gojira on
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
Yeah, though I kind of put it there because it was a digicam screenshot, as ass as that screenshot looks like, you can see the stuff in there is awesome.
But yeah. Yours is better. I'll replace, you're right.
My problem with the combat is that it seems like the enemies, generally, are far too robust.
Fighting one slows you down to a stand still most of the time. You run up to them and then you hit them and now you're at a dead stop. It kills the flow of the game.
Lower health enemies and a variety of instant takedowns, I think, would go a long way to making the game play better. It would, perhaps, be a lot easier, but there are probably ways to make up for that and the game can be challenging in more fun ways, which the combat really isn't and the platforming really is.
at the Pursuit Cop training ground at the end of PK Headquarters, I've been able to take out every single one of them in order. Surprisingly easy once you've faced Cel at the end of the Boat and know that a disarm from behind uses their taser against them.
Or the four shotgun assholes coming up out of the sewer... I didn't include them in my list because I suppose there might be a way to not have to fight/disarm any of them, but the game sure encourages you to go in a 'proper' direction. And that means a fight.
Go directly onto the crates once you come out, you can jump from crate to crate and will probably only get shot once.
It's not that hard to figure it out, and once you do it's pretty easy. And awesome because when you get over the fence they basically just stop shooting. They have resigned themselves to the fact that you just ran past them at very high speeds and there's nothing they can do to stop you.
Also, multiplayer could be kinda good.
You have a large map with quite a few routes to get from place to place. Both teams are runners, and you can participate in ctf style games. As the matches progress, more and more cops get called in, and they will shoot either team. They can be deadly, but if you're good, they are easy power-ups (guns).
I've said this a dozen times, already, and I'll say it again.
THERE IS ONLY ONE FIGHT IN MIRRORS EDGE THAT YOU CAN NOT RUN FROM
Which one is that? The 'fight' with Ropeburn? At the beginning of the ship with the valve wheel? the Assassin fight? Or in the server room?
And this declarative statement changes that some people still find the combat/disarm mechanic awkward, how? Even for 'only one fight'?
For the fights people are complaining about. You know (and you do) the ones involving guys firing at you? That you can not run past at all? I've managed to run through the server room on normal, no kills, several times. Unless they really surprise me, the best change I could see would be to add a more obvious tell of when you should hit the disarm button.
That being said, the assassin fight was (ha ha) asinine and they better not include that shit in the future.
Doobh on
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My problem with the combat is that it seems like the enemies, generally, are far too robust.
Fighting one slows you down to a stand still most of the time. You run up to them and then you hit them and now you're at a dead stop. It kills the flow of the game.
Lower health enemies and a variety of instant takedowns, I think, would go a long way to making the game play better. It would, perhaps, be a lot easier, but there are probably ways to make up for that and the game can be challenging in more fun ways, which the combat really isn't and the platforming really is.
Indeed, just because a specific paradigm can't be improved(if that is even the case) doesn't mean the convention itself is perfect.
Tarranon on
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
edited June 2009
A shoulder barge movie where you say just knock them over but disorrientate them for a few seconds but still keep some of your speed would be a very welcome addition, Jump kick kind of has that but you still really slow down.
This was easily my favorite game of 2008. It's also one of the few games I salivated over and followed after the first teaser. I remember putting the teaser on my Zune and forcing people to watch it.
I had a lot of trouble getting my EA account to sync with my Xbox Gamertag, so I actually haven't done any of the time trials or speedruns, but I'm going to this summer. Is the general consensus that I should watch ghosts of runners who are doing slightly better than me to find the best routes through the maps?
A shoulder barge movie where you say just knock them over but disorrientate them for a few seconds but still keep some of your speed would be a very welcome addition, Jump kick kind of has that but you still really slow down.
It'd be cool to vault over somebody's head, too.
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Hrm, it may be an option I never looked at. I just know hard mode turns off runner vision.
On the black screen
Don't listen to him, turning on the red turns the game into a "seek the shiny red thing." You follow one path through the entire game and never even realize there are other options.
I don't think the combat is hard; I think it's done poorly. Look at your video and look at how combat just wrecks the pace of freerunning. Combat just flat-out isn't needed. You run into guards, you die. Run faster next time.
And clearly being chased by heavily armed cops is the perfect time for exploration... It's called Runner Vision for a reason and it's not to prove the size of one's e-peen.
I don't agree with the people who want zero gunplay in the sequel. I went for the Test of Faith achievement right from the start because it felt right. But I still always had the option of grabbing a dropped weapon and using it, and that felt right, too. Because it was a choice. One with real gameplay implications, not some lame morality check used to determine if an NPC talks to you with a scornful tone.
>_>
Faith stood at the top of the building and looked down the building. It was very pretty and bright and sort of hurt her eyes a little. A little TOO bright! LoL!
She talked into her ear,"Merc what am I doing?" and Merc said "Faith you are a Runner and you Run around and jump and you can also do other parkour(sp?) things."
And so Faith smiled a little and then she started Running! She leaped got into a good, decent run and then jumped. It was pretty easy to do, and with a little practice she was running so good. Sumtimes though she would try to jump up but could not and sometimes she was trying to grab onto a pipe but the GAME WORLD would not let her and she kept falling down! She said,"What is UP with that PIPE?" and Merc replied dryly,"Pipe down Faith your are making my ears ring ha ha!" "˜At least this doesn't happen that often" Faith thought at herself.
Just then when Faith was running her best friend Cel ran up to her and said,"Faith your sister is in trouble you have to go rescue her!"
And so Faith climbed up to a building and then started running again. She jumped over a box and then she jumped over a crate and then she saw that there was a ledge with a difficult jump. "˜I had better use my runner vision!" and so she used her runners vision and time went real slow so that she could make her jump better. Good thing she had run a lot to charge her vision up!
Finally she made it to her sister Kate Connor who had been FRAMED for doing something really bad! It was up to Faith to set everything right! She hugged her sister and said I love you Kate Connor and then she had to run because the police were there, or the blues as she liked to call them! But Faith wasn"t afraid to run OR fight! She stood before the cop and got close and he went to butt her with his rifle, but if she reacted at the right time she could grab it and disarm him! "˜Too bad it is his gun and not his arm that I am disarming" Faith chuckled to herself. Once she had a gun, she could shoot the other people, but she could not run as good and it was hard to aim some of them. She could also jump and kick and slide and kick at them, and follow it up with a punch "˜martial art" combo. She was really the Feminine Fatal! But if she faced lots of guards she would have to try again and again because she could not take many bullets! Thankfully she always woke up near where she fell asleep so that she could try again! Try, try again Faith!
Finally Faith caught up with the badguy! The baddie used to know Faith but she didn"t like him now. "˜Something about him really grinds my gears" Faith said, rolling her eyes at him.
"˜Ha ha Faith, it has truly been five hours of real time, hasn"t it."
Wait, you cannot break the forth wall!
"˜Who are you??"
I am Kyle and I am writing this story ha ha!
"˜But you are breaking the forth wall to Kyle!"
HA HA YOUR RIGHT OKAY I will be quiet ^_^
and then Faith kicked the bad guy and he fell really far away from the building. "˜Kate I have rescued you and saved you from the bade guy." And Kate said "˜okay" and they hugged like sisters because they were sisters.
But Faith new that it wasn"t over yet. Not until she had run to the biggest bad guy there was, the city itself. And so she went to the tall building and started to run. She would always run and she was STILL ALIVE.
R&R! I am currently working on Mirror"s Edge Part II and hope to release it soon! I liked writing this one a lot and I am sorry if my story was short and didn"t make a lot of since, I am still pretty new at this writing thing! Okay I have to go now, bye!
On the black screen
THERE IS ONLY ONE FIGHT IN MIRRORS EDGE THAT YOU CAN NOT RUN FROM
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Which one is that? The 'fight' with Ropeburn? At the beginning of the ship with the valve wheel? the Assassin fight? Or in the server room?
And this declarative statement changes that some people still find the combat/disarm mechanic awkward, how? Even for 'only one fight'?
But anyway, I believe that the point is that while you may be able to escape without fighting most times (and when you do it's pretty awesome), they set up quite a few scenarios where it is nearly fucking impossible. There may be some way, but it normally relies on a hell of a lot of luck. More than should be necessary. And so people are pushed into a combat system which leaves a bit to be desired. I didn't find it too annoying, but then I use slomo like there is no tomorrow. And guns. I've managed to perfect slowmotion dives, and now I want someone to make a level where a group of anti-runners pursues you off the end of a crane, so I can turn and blast them all out of mid-air. It's quite fun doing that, even when you end up dying.
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It took a lot of tries for me to get past the server room because I thought you had to destroy all the servers. Turns out that you only have to destroy one in each cluster. In fact, you can't destroy more than one in each cluster, which is confusing.
I maintain that the hand-to-hand combat's biggest problem is that the game doesn't introduce it well, or at all, really. The way it's set up, it makes it seem like your best options are 1) standing still and punching the guy, or 2) disarming from the front. Once I spent some time dicking around with fighting (New Eden mall :x), I got used to some of the disarm combos and figured out how to use them well, and I really liked the hand-to-hand a lot. (And I'm playing on 360.) Though I have a tendency to like things most other people hate, so there's no accounting for taste. :rotate:
Though yeah, when you're speedrunning, it's really best to just get the hell out of Dodge, and when you can't, cap some of the guards and then get the hell out of Dodge.
Oh I'm not denying that. I think that's self evident.
There is a method to the madness though, it's like that intentionally, and there's a good reason I don't want to change it. Whether people think I'm a dick or not (or whether I am one or not on a personal level) doesn't much matter to me. I could show why, but that would insult a whole bunch of people here, and I don't want to do that since this isn't the place for it.
But yeah, I'm very defensive of this game because by fantastic comparison, the anti-christ being the latest Prince of Persia, people will swallow that kind of a turd more or less SOLELY because it wasn't challenging for them and they didn't have to deal with the super intense frustration of dying, while a game like Mirror's Edge gets the shaft because the AI and the mechanics raped them and they feel all violated inside.
I fully believe one should place the blame inwards instead of outwards for those reasons.
Other than that, the game has a plethora of nice quirks to it, like the story sucking some major ass both from a story-telling perspective (which we talked a bit in the old thread, storytelling in games) and from a content perspective, yet for some reason it all seems to work out more or less as a whole when the "game" part is taken into account.
And so on.
It doesn't help when that 'introduction' is also wrapped in a way where they essentially tell you that you don't have what it takes to take on armed enemies and that you should just run away. And then, in the Prologue level, you drop down out of the vent and about the first thing you hear is Mercury telling you to 'run away!' rather than stay and fight. From that point, you're practically encouraged to find the quickest way out of Dodge rather than fight. Even against the Icarus runners...
And then, depending upon just how good you are, you may or may not run into a few fights early or late. Like on the way to the mall and the three guys drop out of a helicopter. If you're 'on time' you can reach the pipe to climb up just as they start shooting at you. You'll likely not die (though your 'vision' becomes a bit cloudy) and you can just continue on. If you're late? Well, have fun.
Or the four shotgun assholes coming up out of the sewer... I didn't include them in my list because I suppose there might be a way to not have to fight/disarm any of them, but the game sure encourages you to go in a 'proper' direction. And that means a fight.
And let's not forget that the hand-to-hand combat is really bad. And not because of the trigger use. HtH only really works against the actual police. When you start going up against the armoured troopers, they can interrupt your attacks and that makes disarming all the more powerful. And then the tutorial goes and makes you feel like disarming will be that easy for the rest of the game...
Much of the early press on the game certainly seemed to express the game wasn't about combat. Then the game was about to come out and suddenly they intended it all along. The player is just 'encouraged' to avoid it where possible... I get the feeling that at some point this game hit a focus group and this group asked where the gunplay was. So it was 'tweaked' to add more gun usage by Faith. And in order to balance out how easy that might make things, more cops were added. The end of the mall sequence is really weird in that the end difficulty is really based upon whether or not the player trys to take out the enemy or just run through it.
They only "interrupt" your attacks if you keep using the same one. If you vary them one after another, they can't interrupt shit.
Note in my video, nobody interrupts anything. That's because my combo is "jump kick-punch-punch-punch-slide kick and then punch or jump kick"
They are different one after another. If you just punch punch, then punch punch, you're gonna get owned. Serves you right for spamming the same move over and over.
I'll say it again and again until you LIKE IT - combat was PERFECT. There was nothing wrong with it, except maybe we could have used a higher variation of moves.
Though you're right, the introduction does nothing to prepare you for all the facets of combat and how it works. That could have been done better.
[edit]Oh right, I'm totally not saying anything about combat in your gamepad environment. As a game sold in a format with such a shitty way to control it, if you say the combat sucks due to controls, I've got no counter on that one - haven't tried playing it with a gamepad. Though I do have full knowledge how shitty FPS' are on gamepads, and can totally see why you'd consider the game's combat to be trash from that perspective. That one is also their own fault for not adjusting it accordingly.
I guess I can't say skill plays much of a role on the console, when it's akin to tying your hands behind your back then setting them on fire.
Console people get a reprieve, I'd probably kill myself if I had to use a gamepad for this game.
On the black screen
And The_Scarab's off the TV shot:
It's all to enhance the Runner Vision.
Their soul is dead. The city's soul is dead. There's nothing but void white colorless synthetic plants around. Nature is dead.
YOU ARE DOOMED!
Bullshit. If anybody doesn't know how to handle blues after playing the prologue, they weren't paying attention. Besides, as someone mentioned, the checkpoints are generous, so a bit of trial and error will quickly correct any misconceptions about the combat system.
Besides, disarming from the front is immensely helpful. I used it a lot on Hard mode. The timing can be tricky, but that's the way it should be.
But yeah. Yours is better. I'll replace, you're right.
Either way, white plants are neato.
Keep postin' I'll keep addin'
Changed to links so that they don't break Firefox, which unlike Opera apparently can't handle AWESOME.
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And that's not so much as a complaint as it is an improvement.
Satans..... hints.....
Fighting one slows you down to a stand still most of the time. You run up to them and then you hit them and now you're at a dead stop. It kills the flow of the game.
Lower health enemies and a variety of instant takedowns, I think, would go a long way to making the game play better. It would, perhaps, be a lot easier, but there are probably ways to make up for that and the game can be challenging in more fun ways, which the combat really isn't and the platforming really is.
On normal,
Go directly onto the crates once you come out, you can jump from crate to crate and will probably only get shot once.
It's not that hard to figure it out, and once you do it's pretty easy. And awesome because when you get over the fence they basically just stop shooting. They have resigned themselves to the fact that you just ran past them at very high speeds and there's nothing they can do to stop you.
Also, multiplayer could be kinda good.
You have a large map with quite a few routes to get from place to place. Both teams are runners, and you can participate in ctf style games. As the matches progress, more and more cops get called in, and they will shoot either team. They can be deadly, but if you're good, they are easy power-ups (guns).
It could be quite good.
Steam // Secret Satan
For the fights people are complaining about. You know (and you do) the ones involving guys firing at you? That you can not run past at all? I've managed to run through the server room on normal, no kills, several times. Unless they really surprise me, the best change I could see would be to add a more obvious tell of when you should hit the disarm button.
That being said, the assassin fight was (ha ha) asinine and they better not include that shit in the future.
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Indeed, just because a specific paradigm can't be improved(if that is even the case) doesn't mean the convention itself is perfect.
On the black screen
Satans..... hints.....
I had a lot of trouble getting my EA account to sync with my Xbox Gamertag, so I actually haven't done any of the time trials or speedruns, but I'm going to this summer. Is the general consensus that I should watch ghosts of runners who are doing slightly better than me to find the best routes through the maps?
On the black screen
It'd be cool to vault over somebody's head, too.
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)