Guild Wars 2

This has been stated before, I just wanted to put in my +1 i suppose – the big levels are great, but the lack of a proper checkpoint system (such that you can resume midway through a level) is problematic.

I just spent about 20 lives in the gong pagoda, most of my deaths were standing off a platform slightly (the way you have to do in the rapids level to hit some of the crocs) and dying to dart traps that are situated horizontally. Then, literally as i am standing next to the gong, I get DC’d. Hours of work, and I have to start again at ground zero. If you can’t save checkpoints on the character, then I think you’ve got to design the levels with that limitation in mind. This is probably not something that can be fixed for this SAB, but going forward I think there needs to be a better way to split up the levels, with more resume points.

Okay. I feel a little bad about making Josh depressed now!

Positive Feedback Time!

Aesthetics of World 2 are pretty great. Stepping into Zone 2 is pretty cool, seeing the large temples and vast mountains and clouds.

New monster types. The bear is pretty great, and fun to see for the first time. He’s also relatively easy to deal with once you learn his pattern of attack.

Hillbillies were really amusing as well, complete with explosive barrels and distillery.

I actually liked seeing some of the more “old school” mechanics, like traversing floating logs across the rapids, or ones falling down the waterfall. Being able to push blocks is pretty neat as well in use for puzzle solving and as sort of a shield ability (though I do wish it could be held down to last for a long duration). The physics puzzle with the squid is pretty neat to see in SAB too.

Evans.6347:

Josh Foreman.8250:

CommodoreSkippy.2657:

As far the owls that litter the World, do they need to be infinitely spawning? They aren’t difficult, just annoying. The owls add no additional challenge, they only serve to make the game less rewarding.

The owls are not what they seem.

I hate it when people are mysterious, trying to intrigue me.
And succeed.

Without chemicals, he points.

Vince Ste Marie.2081:

I’ve been trying to communicate this on the forums as much as possible.

Yes, I think it was a couple of your posts that I remembered reading. But when I finally beat the zone after more than 2 hours, I wasn’t thinking of much else other than “yippee!” My own fault xD

I guess it just seems weird that we can even complete it w/o getting the achievement. It’s not like someone can join at the end in trib mode, and you need everyone at each checkpoint. I’m guessing it’s a measure left over from normal mode, but I don’t really know.

I’m just gonna take it as a punishment for not waiting to do the zone with my buddies so we could laugh at each other’s failures!

Josh Foreman.8250:

CommodoreSkippy.2657:

As far the owls that litter the World, do they need to be infinitely spawning? They aren’t difficult, just annoying. The owls add no additional challenge, they only serve to make the game less rewarding.

The owls are not what they seem.

I’m fine with the owls, but the noises they make? Oh god why. Same thing with the giggling baby bananas. Did they eat the voiceboxes of actual children? Are those the now frozen hearts of children being thrown at you?

I kid but jeez. Might be just me.

Also, eyebrow raised at that remark.

I played World 2 Zone 2 for the first time just now and, even though I couldn’t beat it yet, I loved it. Zone 1 felt almost nothing like the SAB I loved in April while Zone 2 felt much MUCH more like the game I adored.

The arrow traps did get me, a lot, but only 2 in particular felt unfair.
1. The first one. You have no idea it’s coming and while it does serve to teach you about the trap’s existence, that comes at the cost of a life. I also decided to test if I could dodge through traps, for the future.
NOPE. Haha, but that’s my own decision, not a design issue.
2. The one in the image below, on the right and between the blocks. Instantly killing you from so far away while also being very difficult to see is pretty unfair. I actually do understand WHY it’s there, but adding a pole to host a closer and more visible arrow trap would be nice.

Two suggestions, for what they’re worth. The first is to introduce the arrow traps more demonstratively rather than by surprise. I think it’d be awesome if you could script an Assassin attempting to run towards the player, only to have forgotten about the arrow trap in the way and consequently bite it. It would give the player a reason to take the time to figure out what happened and learn “oh, crap, arrow traps up ahead.” without costing them a life.
Also, I think it’d be pretty hilarious. :P
The second is to take a page from our good friend Mario. On occasion, there will be a somewhat hidden or difficult to get 1up shroom near particularly hellacious platforming sections. It would respawn every time you died, so it served the purpose of allowing you to throw yourself at the problem repeatedly without having to bother with all the already-conquered junk between it and the nearest checkpoint.
Someone mentioned the idea of a “soft” checkpoint for really difficult sections of the game and I think this is a way to do it. You still have to notice the 1up for yourself in the first place AND collect it each time. It’s usually not a free gift, and you can screw up getting to it if you get careless… but that’s YOUR mistake, not the game’s.

And hey, if you’re so good that you can reliably get past that section without losing a life, free man!

The forums are always going to be a cesspool of negativity. No one is going to come and say, “This content is adequate; I have no complaints” and those that enjoy it are too busy having fun.

My friends and I are all very happy with the release, and are thankful for the hard work put into this content. I mean, there are three modes: Infantile, Normal, and Tribulation. What other release has offered even a second difficulty to as much content as this? Everything seems very well polished as well.

The moving platforms are a lot of fun! I imagine they will be utilized in other content, like dungeons. The ice is awesome; I hope to see it used more in the open world especially!

My feedback with below in mind:

I have not tried tribulation mode yet, just started the new content…for reference I was playing with 3 other people and we got to the start of the new ice zone before quitting (not out of frustration, just time).

With that said…when i joined the party initially, after going through a bunch of the new zone with insta-death cliff jumps and assassins…i innocently asked, “did you guys put this on tribulation mode?”

All of the dart traps, insta dying from missing 1 jump, etc…the current difficulty of the normal mode World 2 is waaaaaaaaaay too high. I come from playing Starcraft 2, and I started gaming from all of the Sonic the Hedgehog games and Mario games…and those old school platformer games are no where near the difficulty that you’ve made SAB World 2. I also entirely completed all of the achievements in SAB World 1 and Liadri, it just seems there is a huge difficulty jump from World 1 to World 2.

Especially compared to SAB World 1. It seems you guys want people to spend money to buy the Infinite Continue Coin, or you entirely misjudged and made what is supposed to be the “normal” content about 100x more difficult than it should be… -_-

Oh, and another thing that I think you really overlooked when making World 2…you made it 100% necessary to have certain weapons to even progress further into the game. While this is akin to old platformers and games like Zelda where you had to get certain items to progress (hookshot, master sword, moon mirror, etc) …it’s not good that this aspect of the game changed from World 1 where you could complete the entire thing without any “required” items.

I was really confused that I couldn’t progress past the initial trees you had to burn when I started SAB World 2 on a character i had not done World 1 with. Just a thought.

Just my thoughts, I personally am a hardcore gamer though and enjoy the challenge, but i can see every casual game rightfully being entirely annoyed and irritated and frustrated right now.

These content updates are awesome though SAB ftw

Josh Foreman.8250:

The owls are not what they seem.

Oh god, now I’m scared.

It makes me sad somehow, that dedicated, creative developers like Josh and his team that created a great game like the SAB get told all over and over again in this thread that all their work was for nothing, SAB is an epic fail, long levels are an epic fail, they are slapping in gamer’s faces (sorry I had to bring that up, but this is the most overused phrase in the whole English forum), they just want to make money with the infinite coin, etc.

That’s the main message I get from this thread, and it’s a pity because there are indeed lots of good posts in here, containing hints to actual issues/bugs that can be addressed by the devs. Unfortunately some of the not so constructive but more aggressive posts seem to overshine the constructive feedback sometimes… And that must be very saddening to read for someone who worked his … off to make this content work.

Long levels, lots of mechanics, puzzles, obstacles in those levels (that are great btw. and fun to overcome) are meant to be in a game like that. You feel all the effort put into the SAB and World 2 while jumping through and I for my part caught myself very often saying things to my guildies like “Look over there, did you see that? Thats a reference to the game xy! And these over there… Ohh look, an Octorok ahm Octopus…” etc.

I think Josh and his team did a great job when it comes to the level design and the mechanics. The problems causing a much higher difficulty level as intended are the limitations of the engine they had to overcome and the related bugs… That’s something Josh already mentioned in some of his posts and I guess that’s something to be taken into consideration when giving feedback on the SAB.

Josh already stated that they are working on fixes, so just wait a bit giving the World 2 in its fixed state a chance and try it again…

Imagine the rapids without strange knock backs happening. Still too difficult? I don’t think so… Most of the justified complaints about difficulty I found were about bugs regarding knock back in the rapids, hit boxes of crocodiles, flower mechanics, missing check points inbetween etc. Those bothered me too when playing the SAB and those will be fixed as far as I read it in this thread.

Regarding the length of the levels, I actually don’t see a problem. When entering a dungeon, you enter it expecting to be in there quite some time, in some cases also well over an hour. Why should that be different in case of the SAB?

Josh Foreman.8250:

This is as designed. Dungeons are designed for up to 5 people. If you choose to solo a dungeon you should expect this sort of thing. At leas that’s how I look at it. Maybe because SAB doesn’t look like a dungeon there are different expectations? We did clearly communicate when you enter a world that 5 are recommended.

Except…this isn’t true for other parts of the game. Especially content that’s been described as part of the Living Story. The “dungeon” Scarlet’s Playhouse scales up and down based on the number of players that enter. I would think SAB would do the same. Less enemies while solo, more enemies while with a full group.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Smaller team, actually. And the length was my own desire to get as many ideas as I could in there. I spent several months pulling 16 hour days and a couple weeks where I did a couple 36 hour stretches, went home, slept and came back and did it again. No one else wanted me to do that. In fact those sort of crazy hours are discouraged at ArenaNet. I did that because I freeking love what I do and wanted this release to be the best thing ever. Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!

Your work was not wasted. It really sucks to work hard and get overwhelmingly negative feedback, I can’t say “don’t let it get you down” because it will, but honestly, this was not a waste.

A waste would be the entire update being rolled back and World 2 completely scrapped.

What you’re doing is changing/scrapping some parts, that you may or may not be very attached to, and that may or may not be mistakes (sometimes you do everything right, it just doesn’t work). That doesn’t make the work you put into this update was a waste. That’s like saying editing an already edited book further is wasting the work put into the original draft and the first edited release. If a chapter gets removed, the rest of the book is still there.

As a JP fanatic: I would have enjoyed this more if I didn’t have high latency, if there weren’t bugs, if the levels were split OR you could start at your last checkpoint, if the bauble farming in world 1 hadn’t been nerfed into oblivion, if the rewards were better, if the infinite continue coin was not a gem store item and if there weren’t various issues with the camera, and moving in general. Most of which, if not all of which, are not, in fact, part of your design.

The erratic difficulty curve compared to world 1 (and from one zone to the next) is the only thing I think was truly a design fault (but not one that stopped me from being able to do it, given time – it was just very, very jarring). Any other complaints I have regarding difficulty (e.g. too many ohko mechanics) end up stemming from that.

Finished all zones twice in the same day, first time around for myself and second time to help a friend.. it’s not hard…

Rayti.6531:

It makes me sad somehow, that dedicated, creative developers like Josh and his team that created a great game like the SAB get told all over and over again in this thread that all their work was for nothing, SAB is an epic fail, long levels are an epic fail, they are slapping in gamer’s faces (sorry I had to bring that up, but this is the most overused phrase in the whole English forum), they just want to make money with the infinite coint, etc.

That’s the main message I get from this thread, and it’s a pity because there are indeed lots of good posts in here, containing hints to actual issues/bugs that can be addressed by the devs. Unfortunately some of the not so constructive but more aggressive posts seem to overshine the constructive feedback sometimes… And that must be very saddening to read for someone who worked his … off to make this content work.

I think that most of the “RARRRGH THIS IS TOO HARD AND YOU SUCK!!” users have either said their piece or given up and moved on by now. The posts I’ve been reading lately have generally been legitimate bug complaints and honest critiques mixed with appreciation of the work and difficulty.

Oh, but while I’m at it: It would be nice if, in the case you die by falling off a cliff, you would respawn holding a key if you had one when you died. I’m not sure if it’s difficult to do coding wise, but it would mean I’d have more than one chance to jump the key over to a chest. Probably wouldn’t be able to keep a key while respawning from a Continue, but that’s fine.

Because I think that “cut” or “re-design” world 2 or TM mode for you(JF) seems not a good idea, or you can’t do it, So here has some ideas for you.

1. Decrease the number of ninja and assassin.
2. Make some jump plate bigger or add more plate for jump up easier.
3. Remove or decrease the wash stun effect in river environment.
4. Add more shortcut for complete the zone faster but still can get achievement
5. Add some hint in Tri-mode, instead of more and more one hit death boring.
6. Remove some trap in Tri-mode.

(7. “Or” remove Tri-mode’s achievement?)

I have to say that “Mario Cat” is just a KUSO game
When you use the idea from these KUSO game, this mode is destined to infuriate many people but not make them fun, although I know you already made much time to try and design it.

Have a good choice, and you will have more blessing from these angry player. Good luck.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Smaller team, actually. And the length was my own desire to get as many ideas as I could in there. I spent several months pulling 16 hour days and a couple weeks where I did a couple 36 hour stretches, went home, slept and came back and did it again. No one else wanted me to do that. In fact those sort of crazy hours are discouraged at ArenaNet. I did that because I freeking love what I do and wanted this release to be the best thing ever. Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!

The hours of dedication and passion you put into the game and playerbase are very, very much appreciated I wouldn’t count the hours as wasted at all, and I actually very much enjoyed many of the new mechanics.

I absolutely love large, substantial content updates and I think they’re one of GW2’s strongest selling points. Like you said though, it’s not so much the LENGTH of the content or even the AMOUNT, really. A lot of the complaints had to do with camera-angles and wonky glitchy jumps that WEREN’T part of the design but rather limitations of the engine.

As a designer myself, I entirely get the desire to make something so feature-rich and undeniably awesome that I sacrifice family, friends, sleep, food…. I think just being able to be passionate about what we do is amazing So no, you’re not making anyone miserable, but yes — go home already!

I personally really appreciated the amount of content provided, but didn’t quite enjoy the amount I had to do in a SINGLE sitting. It’d be nice to have, yknow, Start —> Save Game Progress so I could actually enjoy it at a pace better suited for me instead of planting myself in the same environment for four hours straight

I’d suggest a tiny bit of work on the Party side of things. The nature of the jumps and the deaths means that the team gets separated across the map (with some starting over, some bouncing way ahead) with no real indicator (minimap) as to where they are. It doesn’t encourage much teamwork or communication, except when everyone maybe meets at the end of the level. (The near-the-chest mechanic also means I often miss the bounty I spent many gruelling hours getting to if I get knocked off the cliff at the last minute or am still catching up due to a jump I struggled with. And that’s just a little disappointing).

That said, thanks for the work you guys do I continue to be an ardent GW2 evangelist (even despite my rather crummy and unsupported Mac Perma-BETA Client) and content like this is what keeps me returning!

CommodoreSkippy.2657:

I think that most of the “RARRRGH THIS IS TOO HARD AND YOU SUCK!!” users have either said their piece or given up and moved on by now. The posts I’ve been reading lately have generally been legitimate bug complaints and honest critiques mixed with appreciation of the work and difficulty.

I so hope you are right about this. I also noticed more constructive feedback coming up. The motivation for my post was this:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Lafiel.9372:

The biggest fail of this SAB is that it’s too long.

Lesson learned. I get it.

Lafiel.9372:

I guess the first one was successful because it was new, innovative and they wanted to get it right. Now when they made the second one, they’re just throw in a bigger team, a bigger budget and demand lengthier contents and say yup, that’s what players want. Like the say, the sequels are always crap until the next fresh reboot.

Smaller team, actually. And the length was my own desire to get as many ideas as I could in there. I spent several months pulling 16 hour days and a couple weeks where I did a couple 36 hour stretches, went home, slept and came back and did it again. No one else wanted me to do that. In fact those sort of crazy hours are discouraged at ArenaNet. I did that because I freeking love what I do and wanted this release to be the best thing ever. Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!

Unfortunately I’m very slow with my posts, so they are always a bit out of context, especially when it comes to keeping up with Josh Foreman’s posting speed

Lafiel.9372:

Oh, but while I’m at it: It would be nice if, in the case you die by falling off a cliff, you would respawn holding a key if you were had one when you died. I’m not sure if it’s difficult to do coding wise, but it would mean I’d have more than one chance to jump the key over to a chest. Probably wouldn’t be able to keep a key while respawning from a Continue, but that’s fine.

Yeah that would be great…

What I also noticed is the timer at boss chests preventing players, who have been knocked down a cliff by a bosses final laser beam, from looting the chest because they can’t reach it again in time… It would be nice if this one could be increased a little… At least in W2Z2 where there is ice slowly sliding you to death…

Hawkeye.4698:

Finished all zones twice in the same day, first time around for myself and second time to help a friend.. it’s not hard…

You know what else isn’t hard?

Speaking a second language fluently. Having a generally better grasp of grammar and vocabulary than most native speakers. Being able to infer the meaning of words from context. Thinking in a second language. All this without ever leaving your country.

I can do that, so it isn’t hard. Oh wait.

Once you do something enough, it becomes second nature. You can process new information much more easily than the average person. That doesn’t make it easy. It just makes you good/experienced at it.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Draygo.9473:

My problems all stem from attempting it solo. Fighting assassins solo is a grinding experience. When I’m grouped up with guildies we can often kill them quickly, but when your fighting 2-3 of them alone its really hard to avoid taking damage.

It ends up being frustrating and tedious. With a group its much easier to deal with the assassin mobs.

This is as designed. Dungeons are designed for up to 5 people. If you choose to solo a dungeon you should expect this sort of thing. At leas that’s how I look at it. Maybe because SAB doesn’t look like a dungeon there are different expectations? We did clearly communicate when you enter a world that 5 are recommended.

That’s the problem, this shouldn’t be ‘dungeon’ content!

The game style you’ve chosen to base this is never was ‘group content’, so why make it so here? Why does everything Anet add to the game now fall into the ‘forced group’ category, where trying to low-man/solo is usually doomed to fail?

Yes, it’s an MMO but the entire leveling experience is SOLO and fun content shouldn’t be ‘group only’. It’s bad enough core content like the Personal Story is forced-group at the end, stop making anything fun be like that.

So, I haven’t really played GW2 in a long time…(give or take six months or so…work two jobs and just recently started school again, software engineering…go figure…)

Anyway. I logged in to check out this SAB thing that is so awesome. I do the jumping puzzle, took me a few tries, pretty cool…no achievement, no reward, nada. Ok…but there’s another currency…on top of a wallet just to split up my currencies…which at this point I’m not even really sure where they come from or what they do. No big, I can check it out later. Seasonal content! Fun times! Casual friendly! (I work literally 50+ hours a week in addition to school, sometimes I count on a fun game where feel like I go somewhere without it taking hours…)

World one, spent some time in there. Fun. Retro. Nice learning curve, a bit quick to pick up, not feeling super inspired about this currency, but playing for the fun of playing. Then at the end my new buddy in my party glitches out on a log and he can’t claim the chest and I’m soloing the cage with the rock monster thingie. Meh, no big, moving forward. Wait, poison water? The floor is lava? I know this game…more fun.

Then world two. wut. Group of five, none of us could make it through the rapids…the first part was challenging, the candle part was tricksy and clever…but the bridge falling out after team mates jump on it? I thought that was a sweet addition, but then realized the rapids take you all the way back to the start of the level…(intentional? I can’t control my character barely…nope oh yup he hit a turtle….and a croc….and I’m dead. Whelp, at least I’ll catch up with my party now that I’m dead and back at a checkpoint one of them reached.) Bad design. Suicide option should not be best option. Easy fix with some sort of blockage closer to the mouth at the beginning of that particular segment, replaying through a part you haven’t figured yet is gratifying, replaying through the same challenge over and over again to get to the part you haven’t figured out yet is tedious and dull. I think that’s where the complaints about length come from. To be frank, I think the levels are fairly perfect in length. Climbing the same rock wall five times because I didn’t make contact with a ledge (again) is bad mechanics forcing me to repeat myself. (I don’t have a lot of time.)

I get that this is an RPG. I love this game as an RPG. I also love the jumping puzzles…seriously. It’s first thing I look for in every area I’m in. But if you’re going to make a hardcore tasting platformer then the mechanics and engine should be up to it…free camera controlling the pin-point jumps with a foggy hit box isn’t fun, it’s frustrating. Not in a Castlevania/Metroid kind of way. This isn’t something I need to figure out, or think about, and the risk/reward doesn’t work because I’m unaware of the risk being available and the pay-off isn’t solid or predictable. So either tighten up the jumping, make everyone the same size (doable with the heavy transition of style, at least in a design sense,) or make hit boxes match the models. Closer to matching them, anyway.

Remembering the water spout sequence (what order they come, how long they’re available) is engaging and old-school style fun. Creature around the corner I didn’t know about? Fun. Missing a step because invisible crocodile tail isn’t long enough and your character decided to pull out his gear at the precise moment you jumped and miss and now you’ve seizured in and out of the water until you die (and spend some, what are they now…bobbles?) to start over….further ahead from where you’ve died…missing the point (which, I’m gathering, defeats the purpose of remember the invisible hitboxes, which were not a problem in world one) just frankly isn’t good design.

I think the level and (intended) mechanics design is fresh, punishing, engaging and fun. The execution? No one in my group could get to the next checkpoint. Second party? Couldn’t either. Had to give up so I can write this post and go to bed. Love you guys, love the game, this game is sincerely an inspiration from a mechanic/design perspective…but seriously. It’s hard, not because it’s challenging, but because it’s flawed. Death should mean something, sure, that’s different and interesting. Cheap shots coming from bad mechanics (risk and reward, movement, controls, the rules of the game world) shouldn’t be the things that hinders the player. The level and the challenge should hinder the player.

Just my experience.

TL; DR: Yes it’s too hard…I’m ok with too hard…but it’s not too hard for the “right” reasons.

I cursed you, Josh, many many times yesterday. I lost 55 lives in W2Z2 (solo) and got so close to the end before I ran out of continue coins. Then I remembered when I received my NES 20 years ago with TMNT as my only game, that I beat some months later after months of practice … and I was only 9.

This remembered me that I’m getting old and pathetic, but more importantly lazy. It was a shock to me how video games lost that “gamer vs developer” aspect.

I will now proceed to crush your little piece of art with a renewed sense of perseverance and courage.

Thank you for everything.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Lafiel.9372:

The biggest fail of this SAB is that it’s too long.

Lesson learned. I get it.

Lafiel.9372:

I guess the first one was successful because it was new, innovative and they wanted to get it right. Now when they made the second one, they’re just throw in a bigger team, a bigger budget and demand lengthier contents and say yup, that’s what players want. Like the say, the sequels are always crap until the next fresh reboot.

Smaller team, actually. And the length was my own desire to get as many ideas as I could in there. I spent several months pulling 16 hour days and a couple weeks where I did a couple 36 hour stretches, went home, slept and came back and did it again. No one else wanted me to do that. In fact those sort of crazy hours are discouraged at ArenaNet. I did that because I freeking love what I do and wanted this release to be the best thing ever. Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!

For the record there are a lot of people who really appreciate the extra time you put in. Though perhaps not your family!

Re: the subject line, yes, it absolutely is. Part of the reason everyone loved the SAB the first time around was that it was light, charming, and fun. It was also casual-friendly. You could play solo or with a team and in no case would it take you more than a couple hours to get through start to finish.

World 2 is anything exactly the opposite of this. Even “infantile” mode will suck your lives away like a black hole. It’s far too time-consuming, and it feels capricious and malicious, tricking and punishing the player at every turn. It’s no longer fun, it’s simply frustrating. Frankly, if there weren’t a boatload of achievements tied to this thing, I would ignore it without a second thought.

Lower the difficulty to match World 1 and save the frustration for Tribulation mode and the masochists who enjoy that kind of thing.

Just got through W2Z2 my god was that the longest, most tedious grind i’ve ever done

Basicly I just suicide bombed the map, letting my team see where all the hostile crap was… But my god, the length of it… I almost don’t want the achievements.

The only feedback I have is that I personally love world 2, and I ask that you don’t jeopardise or undermine your vision for it when you make any changes to it.

Fix bugs, by all means. Address things like the waterspout knockback, weird random deaths with no reason, etc.

Even address difficulty spikes that were unintentional.

But all I can ask is that you don’t remove or butcher the good parts. The waterfall parts with the moving planks and logs were fun and moderately challenging but still not ragequit worthy. The puzzle with the dart traps was awesome. Storm Top was great, just had way too few checkpoints.

What I’m saying is that people are getting angry because of bugs and a few difficulty spike oversights. Not because of your design. Please don’t take this feedback and take a hatchet to world 2.

I also think the amount of content in this relesae is awesome. You outdid yourself, and I can’t thank you enough for being passionate enough to work those extra hours to create this. Please don’t let this feedback discourage you when creating future worlds, as I would love them to remain this length. I think a nice middleground for future content would be to work on some tech to create hard checkpoints – for example, being able to start from the part where the raft leaves you in the Rapids (the start of the new part that wasn’t in the previous release) instead of having to begin right from the very start.

Any fixes you make have to be done surgically. Not with a sledgehammer. Please keep that in mind.

(Also, by the way, Josh, how does it feel to have made a jumping puzzle with moving platforms in it? I saw the reddit post you made where you called the lack of moving platforms the bane of your professional life. :P)

While I’m having fun with this, there are still a lot of jumps that are just barely possible. It really aggravates me when I run into these jumps where my character is either constantly bumping her head against a ceiling, or is barely scraping the side of a platform.

A good example of this is in World 1, right after the maze. There’s a rock right before the queen beedog, that you must jump on, and then on to a tree, to escape the area. And while it’s such a simple jump, I could be wasting many minutes just trying to get that simple jump. And it isn’t for my lack of skill, it just seems the collision is so dodgy. And those kinds of jumps are all over the later worlds. It’s not so much the length of the jump, but the height of it. It seems my character can often barely made it on top of the platform.

I also noticed a couple of serious collision issues in Tribulation Mode. The large spiked floors do some really weird things, where they sometimes do not kill you (and you can run through them), and sometimes kill you when you’re not even touching them. It is as if something activates, and then repeatedly keeps killing you, no matter if you are touching the spikes or not. I was on a platform high above the spikes, and they still killed me, and continued killing me as I spawned. That’s clearly a bug.

There’s also a few stores in TM that spawn you into the lava as you exit. Is that intended?

Difficulty wise, the only trouble I’ve really had is with the logs across the waterfall. That thing is extremely unforgiving, and it slows everything down. And of course the dojo, with that blasted gong (But I guess Anything Goes…. right Josh?). Thanks for putting that in.The bit where you cover the arrowslits from four angles was clever, but I was often infuriated how the traps would shoot right through a block that was clearly obstructing the firing mechanism.

By comparison, the ice world is a lot easier than the dojo or the rapids. So the difficulty is definitely a bit skewed here and there.

BTW, All of this feels so much like Snake Rattle and Roll, it’s glorious.

Josh Foreman.8250:

rekim.5296:

The difficulty leap, in the curve was totally crazy. It doesn’t feel like a World 2, at all, to me, it feels like another game entirely, or a final world.

You are right. I agree. It was unintentional. We’re working on a fix.

rekim.5296:

Firstly, I’d like to talk about Area 1. The lack of music was disturbing, but not really had any impact on gameplay.

This is a bug we are trying to track down. Do you happen to know what your audio settings are at?

rekim.5296:

My next concern is about the croc’s and turtle’kittenboxes. Back then, the river area didn’t caused much problems to me. Nowaday, I just can’t seem to reach most of theirs.

It’s interesting, because I added about 50 new rocks to make hitting these guys easier. We made their hit-boxes almost 4 times bigger. If you look at the Crocodiles hit-box you could fit three of them inside it. Refer to to my post above about how we have to compromise how we would LIKE to make things, with what our engine is being tricked into doing. I’ll add even more rocks.

rekim.5296:

The only way I can think of getting the achievement, now, would be to be a five man party and praying not to be the focus of the assassins’ wrath… This is not a very staisfying way to get an achievement, to me.

Try whipping the first assassin and keeping him stun-locked the whole ride. No more will spawn.

Thanks for your feedback.

Thank you for your answers, and for taking the time to read my humongous wall of text !

I really want to enjoy SAB, for it is one of the game’s feature my platformers genes want to love the most. I’m going to wait a bit, do a few other things in the game, and watch for the hotfixes/updates to it, I promise to give it another go as soon as it’s live.

Thanks for your patience and dedication Josh !

Josh Foreman.8250:

Smaller team, actually. And the length was my own desire to get as many ideas as I could in there. I spent several months pulling 16 hour days and a couple weeks where I did a couple 36 hour stretches, went home, slept and came back and did it again. No one else wanted me to do that. In fact those sort of crazy hours are discouraged at ArenaNet. I did that because I freeking love what I do and wanted this release to be the best thing ever. Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!

Aw man, I just had to reply to this. Please don’t think that the attitudes of those complaining on the forum apply to everyone. I spent the entire evening yesterday playing SAB and I really enjoyed it. There were people in my guild still trying tribulation mode at midnight, and guild chat has been full of talk about how it’s the most awesome update so far. Also, I think the size of the levels is awesome. It’s almost like a stand-alone game.

I will be spending as much of the weekend as I can playing more SAB!

The last 17 hours were spent completing non-trib World Two (solo, +35AP).

I appreciate all the time and effort put into SAB W2.

It was an emotional day.

I consider myself a hardcore player: lots of AP, Liadri, rank __ in pvp.

If you have dissuaded someone like me from farming non-trib achievement points then you have probably alienated <b>quite</b> a few players.

—The nostalgia of hard, time-consuming games from older systems was well established for me.

I totally agree with Lasur’s post above. Playing zone 2, I’m getting nostalgia for spyro. I remember there was this one jump you had to glide around a wall totally blind, and if you didn’t start the glide at the very top of your jump you fall in lava. I died over and over, but when I finally got it the feeling was amazing. I can’t count the number of times I got knocked off a cliff by all sorts of enemies. The trolling aspect was actually one of the most memorable and fun parts of the game – the egg thieves constantly taunting you, the wizards who would bait you into a charge and then raise the ground up from under them and then laugh their butts off. It was funny, you had to think to deal with enemies, and often you’d have to come back later when you actually had the tools to deal with them – but that made killing them so much more rewarding.

What I want to point out is this – these levels are bringing back some of the best memories I have of gaming – spyro, Zelda, etc. I get that vibe from it and its a ton of fun, such a breath of fresh air from the Zerg fest of the scarlet invasions. The only problems I have are related to the limitations of the game engine, and by and large those are small. With a few bug fixes, and hopefully a look at putting in more frequent resume points in the future, this is absolutely a great step forward for SAB. I hope that message is getting across

Hi,

I come here to confirm that world2 is much too hard.
I had a huge lot of fun in world1 and I was highly expecting this update, thinking I would have that much fun again in world2. I’m now very disappointed.

SAB1 was very fun because it was mostly a huge 8bit/like jumping puzzle, you could jump aroudn everywhere searching for baubles, trying to find your way, to find secrets … and there was no difficulty issue.
Of course you could fail a jump, and have to restart a long path to get back up, but you didn’t die (I even remember reading somewhere on these forums, that falling damage was removed from SAB for it to be more fun so we could jump everywhere, not worry about falling, not die too much for stupid reasons … so this means that some months ago, Josh Foreman was aware that for most players, dieing a lot != fun)

Now comes world2. And tribulation mode.
What did I expect from these ?
(a) as much fun as before in SAB normal mode. Which means a world2 with a difficulty level similar to world1 even if there could be some new mechanics to learn.
(b) a tribulation mode for players who like unforgiving games, including the harder ennemies, maybe falling deaths, instant kills, …

_What did come with this release ? _
(a) a world2 that is much harder than world1, including all the things that I would have expected in tribulation mode only, removing all the fun from SAB
(b) I didn’t try tribulation yet. But players told me that tribulation world 1 is easier than normal world 2. Which proves my point : world2 is too hard in normal mode.

Why is it too hard ?
• The no falling damage thing is gone. Most of the place is designed to that falling will kill you.
• Much harder ennemies. It’s mostly impossible to kill them without being hit. Assassins can knock you back to the void (see the above point) ; bears will kill you is you fail using the whip before they first hit you (and the whip seems to bug …) ; bananas … which I just met and still didn’t find how to avoid being simply killed (may have to use that pay-to-play thing : slingshot).
There are probably ways I didn’t find yet to fight them in a better way, but in any case the fights now take a much too big part of this game.

infinite continue coin
Somewhere in this thread, someone said that world2 has been designed to be a trap to have us all buy infinite continue coins.
Josh came in and strongly denied this.
But let’s be honest : world2 has been made much harder than world1, it is something in which you will die a lot, and on the other hand normal coins are harder to get (no more loot from outside jumping puzzle chests, and world2 implies using a lot of baubles for potions, new stuff and slingshot while the digging spot “farms” have been nerfed, so we will not buy a lot of coins with baubles)

So, either you didn’t want world2 to be a trap to have us buying the infinite coin, and in this case world2 is a fail (and a big fail compared the the flawless world1) ; or world2 is a trap.

Eowyn

Josh, you da man. I’ve read all your posts in this thread through the Dev Tracker. If it makes you feel any better I’m on the brink of some 36 days playing your project to match what you put into it. Not a single second you spent on this was wasted, because it all led to this awesome little mini game. Not really so mini anymore, maybe it should just be a permanent fixture at this point, wink wink nudge. Some minor tweaks may be needed, but I don’t believe anything you’ve done up to this point has been wasted. I mean seriously, how many of us can say we’ve never let something we’re passionate about get a little carried away? I’ve gone through all the new stuff Infantile Mode just to make sure I could see it all ASAP, and I just love it. The feel of the three zones are very unique, while still fitting in the same world. Zone 2 feels a bit out of place, but near the end it does sort of blend into zone 3 and I get that.

I think Zone 2 specifically is a bit over tuned, but I still love it. I agree with a previous poster that said it’s much closer on the spectrum to Tribulation Mode than Infantile Mode. If your goal was to put it in the middle, then yeah it needs some tuning down I will agree there. After doing a bit of TM in World 1, World 2 felt almost like an extension of that, you know without the insta death spike traps and lava floors.

I’ve spent the past two days straight just exploring, trying to get through every little corner. I find that at the end of the day I actually haven’t progressed because I’ve spent so much time just looking around. I laugh to myself constantly, I jump into piranha water just to make sure it’s not safe, and try to jump over/dodge through arrows. Two or three times, you know double checking. Yeah, I’m that type of player. 600 gems well spent

The length of w2-z2 is pretty intense. It’s not really feasible to hop on and play through if you don’t have a significant amount of gaming time I don’t think. That’s a bit of a bummer, but it’s such a beautiful world I wouldn’t want to shorten it. I do think World 2 could have been split into 4 zones rather than 3 while still keeping a lot of the feel intact. Heck the Shortcut Worm dumps you right at the boss in World 1, I feel if the Shortcut Eagle did the same that could be a natural stopping point for Zone 2, then the last half could be Zone 3. Ice Land obviously Zone 4. Just thinking out loud here.

Speaking of Ice Land (my own name for it lol) I love it! I’ve always loved the slippery surface in platformers. Frustrating at times, but really fun! I feel like I’m drifting. I also played ice hockey for many years so it gives me fond memories of that as well.

Not much structure to this feedback, and I don’t have anything to add that you aren’t already aware of. Mostly just the glitchy water spouts. I really love timed platforms, but those made me sad because of how glitchy they seemed. I get that you’re working on that, so nothing else really needs to be said there. Quick note to anyone struggling with Assassins (the leaping kind of course), strafe is your friend! This is how I survived on the raft, actually killing every Assassin before I saw Josh’s tip. No need to even dodge really, just short strafing circles gets them every time.

Frankly I think you’re a genius for translating all this old school stuff to an MMO, engine limitations and all, and making it fun. The Genie and all involved in that I just saw tonight (omg) and it was fantastic, the pistol skin is hilarious and amazing (I’m an Asura Engi, so THANK YOU to whoever is responsible for that), and pretty much everything else SAB related just makes me smile. My guildies know when SAB comes out they don’t get me for guild missions, or much else for that matter. Thanks for pouring yourself into this, it really shows and I can’t get enough!

Personally, I love the length and difficulty of world 2 (those dodgy flower mechanics aside…), and found there wasn’t anything that wasn’t easily doable with enough practice (deaths), BUT, I can certainly understand why a lot of people simply can’t accept these mechanics as fair, or fun.

The problem is not that SAB is too hard, it is that it is too hard for today’s mainstream market. This is not a rant against said mainstream players, but it’s an undeniable fact that they aren’t used to dying 100 times just to master a single jump, or putting in a couple of hours at a time and still possibly not finishing the level. They want semi-challenging fun, not a grueling test of reflexes and patience.

If SAB were an indie game in it’s own right, I’m sure it would be getting rave reviews and being very thoroughly enjoyed by the people who knew what they were getting in to. For the people who are only used to the very casual style of GW2’s PVE, it’s like a punch in the face.

This all said, please, please, PLEASE remember that the typical make up of forum posters is never a good representation of the game population as a whole. As other people have said, the people with problems are here, the people enjoying the content are too busy playing the game to post their support. Consider something like an ingame, or email survey, before you change your vision based on one thread of negative posts.

As I said, I’m really enjoying SAB, and would happily pay real money to play it apart from GW2. That it’s a mini game is mind boggling.

A few solutions (all for normal mode only) :
→ Decrease all the enemies hp to 50
→ when falling to the void , teleport the player to the last checkpoint, not decrementing a life (= back to the “no falling damage” concept, without having to redesign the entire maps)
→ remove the digging nerf : if players want to get out and enter SAB repeatedly to get baubles from digging, I don’t see why you would stop them (unless you want to sell infinite coins^^) : no impact on game economy, no impact on other’s players game ….
→ Remove the instant kill things in zone2 (replace them with a wall if needed)

raahk.2786:

WatchTheShow.7203:

Josh Foreman.8250:

le snip

snip

you basically completely ignored all of the valid complaints about the new SAB and stated “Well, I think it’s alright, so there’s absolutely no problems whatsoever”, when in fact there is an incredible amount of problems with the latest update to the super adventure box.

I’m not going to name all of them. Others have already. I doubt the developers will actually fix them, however. At least not before SAB leaves us for another few months.

I don’t have to read any of the complaints to give my own opinion on why I like the SAB as is. Do I have to agree with the majority before I can post? Just because I disagree with you doesn’t make you right and me wrong. That’s why it is called an opinion and not a fact. I did not say there were no problems either. I had a bugs section in my post. Reading comprehension my dear Watson.

but it’s an undeniable fact that they aren’t used to dying 100 times just to master a single jump, or putting in a couple of hours at a time and still possibly not finishing the level. They want semi-challenging fun, not a grueling test of reflexes and patience.

Exactly. And being a nice&fun platform game without those “issues” was the strengh of SAB.
There is no problem with players like you who like dieing 100 times to master a single jump, but we would expect normal mode to satisfy those who don’t, and tribulation mode to satisfy you.

Btw, I would probably have tried tribulation and accepted to die 1000 times in there, but only after having fun jumping everywhere in normal mode. Facing this difficulty in normal mode really fells bad.

Eowin Of Rohan.2619:

Why is it too hard ?
• The no falling damage thing is gone. Most of the place is designed to that falling will kill you.
• Much harder ennemies. It’s mostly impossible to kill them without being hit. Assassins can knock you back to the void (see the above point) ; bears will kill you is you fail using the whip before they first hit you (and the whip seems to bug …) ; bananas … which I just met and still didn’t find how to avoid being simply killed (may have to use that pay-to-play thing : slingshot).
There are probably ways I didn’t find yet to fight them in a better way, but in any case the fights now take a much too big part of this game.

infinite continue coin
Somewhere in this thread, someone said that world2 has been designed to be a trap to have us all buy infinite continue coins.
Josh came in and strongly denied this.
But let’s be honest : world2 has been made much harder than world1, it is something in which you will die a lot, and on the other hand normal coins are harder to get (no more loot from outside jumping puzzle chests, and world2 implies using a lot of baubles for potions, new stuff and slingshot while the digging spot “farms” have been nerfed, so we will not buy a lot of coins with baubles)

So, either you didn’t want world2 to be a trap to have us buying the infinite coin, and in this case world2 is a fail (and a big fail compared the the flawless world1) ; or world2 is a trap.

Eowyn

I’m sorry, while I’m here I have to comment on this. There are lots of good reasons that World 2 has some balance issues, I don’t believe these are any of them.

Falling never kills you unless you fall off the map. In which case, well yeah. Duh. In some cases you actually must fall distances that would normally kill you. If you’re having a specific problem, could you tell us where that is? It might be something we can help you with or a bug you can report.

I can assure you it is not impossible (or really all that difficult once you figure it out) to kill the new monster types without being hit. When you have 5 hearts (do World 2 Infantile Mode first), getting hit once or twice isn’t that big of a deal anyways, not when most things drop heals for you.

It’s also telling you’re trying to get through World 2 without even using everything World 1 offers to help you. When you’re trying to fight hard monsters without some of the basic tools that improve your experience, well yeah you’re going to have a bad time. Those weapons and upgrades are there for a reason. Use them. Do you do dungeons without slotting any utilities?

Continue Coins absolutely drop out of JPs in the normal game world. I don’t know where you got this information besides maybe trying 1 and it didn’t drop? It’s not guaranteed (it never was) but they definitely still drop if you want to go that route to get them. Your little “kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t” choice of what World 2 is is cute, but your agenda is pretty clear if you don’t even have any outcome that the developers were anything less than malicious when creating this content. Get real.

It’s obvious from my above post I love SAB. I’ll make no apologies for that. I also believe there are legitimate problems and struggles people are having. There are some things that need adjustment, and some places where Josh was a little over zealous. I just don’t think you listed any of them.

Valmarius.4150:

Personally, I love the length and difficulty of world 2 (those dodgy flower mechanics aside…), and found there wasn’t anything that wasn’t easily doable with enough practice (deaths), BUT, I can certainly understand why a lot of people simply can’t accept these mechanics as fair, or fun.

The problem is not that SAB is too hard, it is that it is too hard for today’s mainstream market. This is not a rant against said mainstream players, but it’s an undeniable fact that they aren’t used to dying 100 times just to master a single jump, or putting in a couple of hours at a time and still possibly not finishing the level. They want semi-challenging fun, not a grueling test of reflexes and patience.

If SAB were an indie game in it’s own right, I’m sure it would be getting rave reviews and being very thoroughly enjoyed by the people who knew what they were getting in to. For the people who are only used to the very casual style of GW2’s PVE, it’s like a punch in the face.

This all said, please, please, PLEASE remember that the typical make up of forum posters is never a good representation of the game population as a whole. As other people have said, the people with problems are here, the people enjoying the content are too busy playing the game to post their support. Consider something like an ingame, or email survey, before you change your vision based on one thread of negative posts.

As I said, I’m really enjoying SAB, and would happily pay real money to play it apart from GW2. That it’s a mini game is mind boggling.

I’m just going to say I completely agree with this guy.

Eowin Of Rohan.2619:

Exactly. And being a nice&fun platform game without those “issues” was the strengh of SAB.
There is no problem with players like you who like dieing 100 times to master a single jump, but we would expect normal mode to satisfy those who don’t, and tribulation mode to satisfy you.

Btw, I would probably have tried tribulation and accepted to die 1000 times in there, but only after having fun jumping everywhere in normal mode. Facing this difficulty in normal mode really fells bad.

I’d counter that we could expect juvenile mode to satisfy those who don’t. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know if it helps significantly, but I do think that people shouldn’t complain about difficulty if there is an easier difficulty option available to them.

People wanting normal mode to be easier, but not doing the easy mode, is crazy. If juvenile mode is not making it easy enough, then perhaps that is the mode that should be changed.

But the main point of my post was, or was supposed to be, that I can see both points of view. Neither is incorrect. But I’d like Josh to gather points of view from places other than the forum before he decides to start hacking away at his work of art.

I’m currently dieing in infantile mode. Didn’t go normal yet.
Infantile doesn’t help avoiding those enemies that I’m saying are too hard for normal mode.

I have come back to this thread to clarify one thing, well, I can really only speak for myself and maybe my boyfriend, but I do believe that many feel this way:

We criticize because we’re huge SAB fans and we want more SAB. We want to enjoy the frakk out of the SAB for as many blissful hours as we can afford in September. If we can keep the “challenging” up with the “rage quit inducing frustration” going down, then we can maximize this quality SAB time.

We yell at you because we love you!

Josh Foreman.8250:

The owls are not what they seem.

Ohhh, stoppit, you <3 Gnee hee hee.

Valmarius.4150:

Eowin Of Rohan.2619:

Exactly. And being a nice&fun platform game without those “issues” was the strengh of SAB.
There is no problem with players like you who like dieing 100 times to master a single jump, but we would expect normal mode to satisfy those who don’t, and tribulation mode to satisfy you.

Btw, I would probably have tried tribulation and accepted to die 1000 times in there, but only after having fun jumping everywhere in normal mode. Facing this difficulty in normal mode really fells bad.

I’d counter that we could expect juvenile mode to satisfy those who don’t. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know if it helps significantly, but I do think that people shouldn’t complain about difficulty if there is an easier difficulty option available to them.

People wanting normal mode to be easier, but not doing the easy mode, is crazy. If juvenile mode is not making it easy enough, then perhaps that is the mode that should be changed.

But the main point of my post was, or was supposed to be, that I can see both points of view. Neither is incorrect. But I’d like Josh to gather points of view from places other than the forum before he decides to start hacking away at his work of art.

The trouble is even World 2 infantile mode is way, waaaay harder than World 1. If you check the posts made by Josh he admits it needs adjustment.

Maybe the enemies could be nerfed for infantile somehow, or even removed altogether, so that infantile mode could really be just about happy jumping like (most) of World 1 was.

I’m not satisfied with the overall difficulty of World 2, but I am happy that the devs (or dev in this case) are actually participating in a open discussion about it and willing to make changes instead of going “it’s great, go play World 1 if you don’t like it”.

Another change I approve is that you guys should restore the dig spots as they were and raise the prices of stuff to compensate.

Pixelpumpkin : +1
Loved SAB a lot in april, and I would love to have that much fun in September with wold2.

Eowin Of Rohan.2619:

I’m currently dieing in infantile mode. Didn’t go normal yet.
Infantile doesn’t help avoiding those enemies that I’m saying are too hard for normal mode.

Everything the assassin does can be avoided just by strafing. The bears fire so slowly, that you shouldn’t really have a problem with them unless you’re just standing in their aoe. You have ranged weapons if you need them. I don’t know what to say other than that. Some of SAB is certainly tough, but the enemies are very manageable.

Traveller.7496:

The trouble is even World 2 infantile mode is way, waaaay harder than World 1. If you check the posts made by Josh he admits it needs adjustment.

Maybe the enemies could be nerfed for infantile somehow, or even removed altogether, so that infantile mode could really be just about happy jumping like (most) of World 1 was.

I’m not satisfied with the overall difficulty of World 2, but I am happy that the devs (or dev in this case) are actually participating in a open discussion about it and willing to make changes instead of going “it’s great, go play World 1 if you don’t like it”.

That’s a great idea that I think most everyone could agree to. Making the enemies on infantile a bit easier, either do half damage, or have half health, whatever, or just take them away. I think no one could have any problems with making the easy mode as easy as people want it.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Epicrandom.5817:

Hey Josh, I’ve been following this thread for quite a while and I thought you might like some feedback.

Thanks for the quality feedback. I agree with most of what you say. One problem I’m realizing now is that when I first built 2-2 it was not a long level. I never changed the layout, but as we had more and more ideas for new mechanics they kept getting packed into that space. (and subsequently meant a bunch of 36 hour days for me and Lisa!) I’ve now come up with the ultimate idea: The Anti-Idea Helmet. (Please don’t steal this idea, I want to patent it.) It’s a helmet that the each member of the SAB team is given. Like a construction helmet, but it’s got brain reading electrodes or what-have-you that can sense when you start to get creative. At that point a spring loaded mallet pivots down from its mount on the top/front of the helmet, smacking you in the forehead, discouraging new ideas. With this invention I can guarantee that the next release for SAB will be shorter, less dense, and have fewer new mechanics. (and the subsequent bugs that accompany them)

:(

Well I enjoyed your levels and the rest of my guild did too. I hope this thread doesn’t discourage you from being creative. I understand things like hit detection gone wonky and lag that people might be upset about, but half of this is beyond silly. People talking about going into World 2 without bothering to buy upgrades from World 1. /facepalm
Imagine Link trying to kill Ganon with his starter sword.

P.S. players, if it’s too hard for you on normal mode, here is a secret:
-infantile mode is there for a reason

Currently have 2 green weapons and have been in World 2 zone 1 for the past 3 hours on Tribulation mode. I must say that once you do stuff and then you go back in you can fly through tribulation mode. It is all about finding the patterns in things. The water spouts are easy when you spot what needs to be done. Going to love getting all the weapons as green and yellow skins!!!! Also just finished world 2 zone 1 tribulation mode!!!

This is as designed. Dungeons are designed for up to 5 people. If you choose to solo a dungeon you should expect this sort of thing. At leas that’s how I look at it. Maybe because SAB doesn’t look like a dungeon there are different expectations? We did clearly communicate when you enter a world that 5 are recommended.

With this dungeon, I would really prefer it be scaled appropriately to the number of players playing. On normal model, playing it solo should be no more difficult than playing with a team of five. Enemies should come in quantities and HP amounts equivalent to that.

Normal dungeons, sure, soloing should be hard, but this dungeon is particularly well suited to personal exploration, and in a lot of cases the combat can be more annoying than it is fun. Part of this is because of the fairly limited lifebar management, part of it is due to the very linear attack shapes combined with touchy hitboxes, and part of it is due to the placement of moves on the keyboard making it mechanically tricky to shift between multiple attack options while moving around to fight. It’s no gamepad, and trying to shift between the stick and the whip and the glove while dodging attacks is a bit cumbersome.

It’s funny, I’d never played Infantile mode last time around, but I figured I’d get the achievement this time (I’d gotten all of them except that one and the “all the baubles in one run” one last time). So I cleared World in Infantile mode, and then decided to try World 2. It sure made things easier, but even in Infantile mode 2-2 was hard! I didn’t manage to finish 2-3 since I couldn’t afford the torch, but I did at least manage to get through 2-2.

Congrats on designing one of the most blatantly obvious (but still devious) money grabs I’ve ever seen implemented in an MMO cash shop.

Cranking the difficulty all the way up to “insane” for world 2 NORMAL mode, implementing an hard mode based on trial and error, reducing lives from 5 to 1, brutally reducing the amount of baubles with which you used to be able to buy continue coins, AND introducing the infinite continue coin which can only be purchased from the shop.

I’m assuming you already have the “real” world 2 normal mode ready to go live as soon as the bean counters think they’ve gotten enough money off all of this.

You’re brilliant, Josh. In a different way from what most of the people here are meaning it, but still brilliant

Heya Josh, I read most of this topic and decided to toss in my 2 cents.

First of all, I wanted to say that I find the second instalment of the SAB really awesome! I only completed world 2 once so far, and just for the sake of completing it so I’ll have to return to get all the secrets and upgrades and other things I missed the first time. I played the SAB with 2 guildies in 2 sessions, both lasting several hours. The first session ended with being stuck at the gong room, the second time we found the shortcut eagle (an awesome mini-game on itself!) and dropped off… right after the gong room, by pure coincidence!

So, is it all great? No, certainly not. Most has been said about it already (nuff said about the buggy geysers and flowers and the visibility of some of the clouds). I’m looking forward to these frustrating parts getting a fix of some kind, I highly doubt I’ll ever make it across the geysers without party members getting the next waypoint for me. I completely disagree with people complaining about the dart traps though, as they are almost all quite obvious and avoidable.

What else could be better imho?

1. I completely miss why world 1 should get such a harsh nerf (previously rewarding dig spots yielding nothing or or really low reward). World 2 drops so few baubles that you’re sure to run out of ammo if you use ranged weapons and healing pots a lot. Also… Back in April, I did zone 1 enough times to get 4 weapon skins… by collecting bauble bubbles from the end chests with a couple of characters. In so many runs, I never got a skin drop off a chest. Getting additional skins now is gonna be extremely hard when these chests are once per day per account and the drop rate is still low. Why was this nerfed so much? Can’t be an economy-reason, skins bought with bauble bubbles are account bound in the first place. Heck, even the shortcut worm got nerfed (green blocks killing people who aren’t even that close, probably another hitbox problem). Basically I wonder why normal mode of world 1 was touched at all. The changes made to world 1 make playing world 2 more tedious and time consuming.

2. Yes world 2 is huge. I don’t mind it being huge, but I’d love to have a way of breaking the zones in smaller pieces (someone suggested password checkpoints, which is very old-skool and cool).

Other than that, I think the SAB is pretty much perfect as-is atm (for me at least, although I’m quite the bad jumping puzzle jumper) and a lot of fun. Thanks a lot!