Firstly I just want to start off by saying that this isn’t me complaining about the JP being too hard and that I can’t do it etc. etc. I know that if I keep trying I will finish it eventually and I will feel good about it. This is more just my thoughts on what constitutes good JP design and why i feel like this one falls short in a few ways.
My biggest concern is something I’ve been seeing across the game. There seems to be this opinion that ‘difficult’ = challenging, fun and good. It really doesn’t. Difficulty is about mastery and requiring users to carefully calculate and time things. I feel as though this new JP relies too heavily on blind jumping and already knowing where to go.
If you look at JP’s like Hidden Garden (which is undoubtedly a user favourite) and Morgan’s Spiral, one of the first things you notice is that these puzzles have very specific paths and it is always obvious where you need to jump to next. The thing is being able to see where to go doesn’t automatically mean you can do it with ease, that is what makes these ‘difficult’ and fun. Hidden Garden’s jumping section up the tree for example isn’t always easy, making the jumps between mushrooms requires you to be careful with your jumps, yet it’s enjoyable.
If I look to the Mad Kings Tower and the Wintersday puzzles, once again the path was always clear. You had a good sense of where you needed to go. These puzzles brought difficulty in the form of a time limit, something that worked well and encouraged users to learn the path. But they weren’t unforgiving, if you fell it wasn’t a big deal.
The new JP seems to have dropped everything learnt in the others. If you fall there is a good chance you will die. The jumps aren’t always immediately obvious (unless you watch the steady stream of people in which case nevermind). There are jumps which require you to land in a specific place which you cannot see because it is above you and will kill you if you don’t (really bad design because anyone just starting the puzzle either needs to have ruined it and looked up the path or make it out of luck). There is the very easy possibility of being sabotaged, in most other JP’s if someone else speed buffs you it isn’t a big deal, in this one it spells death – most of the jumps have been created with the default jumping distance in mind and have a small landing area and death to either side, being speed buffed just as you jump (which happens frequently) pretty much kills you.
I wan’t to reiterate, I’m not saying ’It’s too hard make it easier!‘. I just want to express my opinions and maybe see what other people think. I’m going to keep trying and I know I will get it eventually. But it definitely doesn’t rank anywhere on my list of top JP’s. And I live for the JP’s