Guild Wars 2

Here is a suggestion, please create third mode… like infantile, but with the principle of “help on demand” rather than having it shoved in my face. Being someone who had 0 need for infantile mode before the notorious water sprouts in W2 Z1 I would really appreciate the ability to get helping hand when I hit a brick wall not have to choose to either go through the level on rails, or keep slamming my head against that wall.

I agree on the bauble nerf. Should be once per day per character again since you need a lot for the hard mode and even for normal mode world 2 at the beginning until you are good enough to do it with less dying.

If they want: The chance on a rare non bound drop you can sell could still be once per account per day to not flood the market… but the bubble bauble and the stuff you can buy for it are account bound. So not a problem if this is farmed even if people delete chars and make new chars to farm more.

Or they could just make the coins non bound so you could sell them at TP(but then probably nobody would buy the unlimited coins for gems anymore).

The way it is at atm I’m not really in the mood to try farming all the stuff. Going for 1 normal playthrough and then skipping all the achieve cause I’m sure I’ll die a lot and I need coins then.

How many Baubles are even in w2z1, counting all of the secrets? It feels like it would be extremely difficult to make a profit if you use even one Continue Coin.

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.

Luthan.5236:

Or they could just make the coins non bound so you could sell them at TP(but then probably nobody would buy the unlimited coins for gems anymore).

Yet people bought the infinite picks and co even though it’d take 3 years of mining to save gold with them :p

I’m a bit disappointed with SAB World 2. I expected death traps in TM, and perhaps a bunch of them in normal mode. But normal mode is covered by those arrow traps (I’m stuck at the great castle with a gong since 2 hours ago, fun disappear some time ago, now I only want to finish it)

World 1 is well balanced, but in Word 2:

- Infantile mode is too easy
- Normal mode is too hard
- TM …

I tried Liadri until I beat her, but this time I think I’ll give up some of the achievements. World 2-2, killing every assassin and finding every bauble might be longer than Arah p4 for me.

Anyway, the main problem here is that SAB is not permanent. If SAB were permanent I could give a try sometimes. But since it will only last for several days, I’m forced to try it more times that I would do it

World 2 is too brutal. I spent 5 continue coins on Zone 1 alone, and they were all spent due to the rapids alone. Those geysers didn’t help too much either. -_-

RyuDragnier.9476:

World 2 is too brutal. I spent 5 continue coins on Zone 1 alone, and they were all spent due to the rapids alone. Those geysers didn’t help too much either. -_-

I visited Moto at least 10 times because of those geysers, with the infinite coin towards the end mind you, which is at least 100 tries. Then I gave up decided to try infantile only to find that it completely trivialize all of the content and won’t even let me try W2 Z2, in normal mode afterwards.

I guess I will give it yet another shot tomorrow, but right now I am completely burned out because of those rushing rapids.

Josh, may i suggest to lock Normal Mode until one complete Infantile Mode once? I started SAB World 2 with my friends and they wanted to start Normal Mode. Today I play Infantile Mode for Baby’s Second Super Adventure Achievement and was surprised how it is so friendly to players. Especially cloud with rainbow through waterfall in Rapids (we died there several times in Normal Mode not knowing where to jump) and clouds with different moods near first dart trap.

I just went into W1Z1 to get refreshed with SAB and noticed we just have 1 extra life before it’s game over (this is on a character I didn’t get all the previous unlocks on… annoyingly I did that on my Norn.. wtb account bount item unlocks plz! :P) Was this always like this?

OK, got a group of 5 jump fanatics together today and we did a full World 2 run. Zone 1 and 2 we knew where to go (except for after the gong in zone 2), Zone 3 was new. Had Infantile Mode knowledge of all zones though.

Zone 1:

Good area, except for the buggy rapids/geysers. Every area went smoothly with few combined deaths, including the waterfall logs. Generally one of us could make it through a tricky area if the others couldn’t, so grouping was beneficial (while it wasn’t very in World 1). Geysers part had us stuck for a long time because we kept getting hit when safe, on air, and so forth. We would’ve gotten through quicker without bugs and if the geysers weren’t so finicky with knocking you back. Took maybe 30-40 minutes overall.

Zone 2

We had issues with a few tricky jumps on trees where you’d bump your head and fall. Also had issues with flowers sending us flying when we weren’t stepping on them, which made some parts take longer than they should to complete. Owls in tree areas made this more frustrating since we were sitting ducks for them. Otherwise, the area went smoothly (largely because I knew where to go/what to do). Octopi were a bit annoying due to the amount of fish you had to feed them, but otherwise went fine. The part with the block puzzle just before the frog room and the gong, I did alone. By the time I finished everyone else was still scrambling trying not to die. Frog room was OK because we knew to bomb it. Gong itself actually went faster, mostly because we could split up and have some wait at the bottom for it. Died a few times trying to do it right, but managed. We were pretty surprised that instead of a checkpoint we were greeted by tricky jumps and assassins who could knock us off the walkways before actually reaching the checkpoint. Considering the dificulty level of the gong run when solo, this was off-putting. At the warp puzzle, some of us went for the pillars, which would’ve been better without the bouncing – with higher latency bouncing is very inconsistent and you can’t tell your exact position, making it more punishing than necessary. No further problems. Run was much longer, around 1h30, perhaps.

Zone 3

With everyone new to it, we got lost quite a bit. Paths were often not obvious. One of us had a lot of trouble figuring out what to do in the icy slopes. This was the level where we killed ourselves a lot whenever someone hit a checkpoint, just to get past things without trouble (at this point we were all pretty tired). Some of us didn’t have the torch, so that delayed things a bit whenever one of us died and was stuck behind the frozen waterfalls. The part with the long vertical jumping puzzle was an exercise in frustration – I found it first, and spent a good 30-40 minutes just trying to find the next platform to jump to with the camera constantly zoomed into me. Everyone else couldn’t even find the cave for that good 30-40 minutes. Once they did, one of us managed to climb and get to the checkpoint. I finally saw a platform where I was supposed to jump and also finished making my way up (platform was hard to see with my character’s eyeballs obscuring everything. It was also impossible to accurately gauge distance due to camera issues). Another of us fell on the last jump and gave up, and the other two didn’t even bother trying. Ledges were very tiny, lots of places where you could bump your head and fall. Overall a frustrating climb. After that things went fairly smoothly, problems with inconveniently-placed bananas and the falling icicles/goats aside (there’s a checkpoint where you just constantly get pelted by the icicles and another where you get pelted by goats while waiting for everyone else). Yeti was more frustrating than wizard. Wizard’s charge felt cheap, the rest of his mechanics were great. We had trouble telling when a platform would be eaten/reacting to it. Overall time about 2h+.

Full run time was nearly 4 hours. This with a group of people who really love jumping puzzles. Solo runs would be much more frustrating, and take much more time. We were glad to be done. Rewards were extremely underwhelming. Walked out with 150 more baubles and a couple bubbles for something that took longer than raids in some MMOs. Two of us had headaches by the time we were done. All of us had the infinite continue coin, and the rewards (or lack thereof) did not feel worth the purchase of the coin.

Overall impressions that I haven’t already repeated to exhaustion:

- It’s doable. Grouping is highly recommended. Soloing only for really hardcore players. Leagues above World 1 in difficulty. Feels more like World 3 at least.
- Potion upgrade is laughable. World 2 has death mechanics everywhere and only rarely do you die from low health. 300 baubles best spent on 6 continue coins.
- Baubles are way too few, way too far between. Not nearly enough to buy the upgrades, lives and continue coins you need. All of us had infinite coins, so coins were a non-issue to us, but we were constantly musing that we would not want to waste actual lives on this.
- Overall rewards are extremely underwhelming for the length and difficulty. Would not do this in normal mode again unless I was helping someone.
- Head bumping as a way of reducing jump precision needs to go. Accurately gauging distance is extremely difficult due to camera mechanics, so you end up bumping your head and falling a lot in spite of knowing where to go.
- Checkpoints need to be safe and easily available after difficult areas.
- Darts are used excessively and are overly sensitive and overly punishing.
- It’s unnecessarily difficult to climb up the icy slopes. If you slide down even the tiniest amount you can’t gain the momentum back and need to slide all the way down before you can start climbing again.

I think Zone 1 geysers NEED to be always up, this way the zone will be way more balanced, except for the needle-sized hit boxes

Crise.9401:

Here is a suggestion, please create third mode… like infantile, but with the principle of “help on demand” rather than having it shoved in my face. Being someone who had 0 need for infantile mode before the notorious water sprouts in W2 Z1 I would really appreciate the ability to get helping hand when I hit a brick wall not have to choose to either go through the level on rails, or keep slamming my head against that wall.

You CAN choose, hop off the rails.

neon.4863:

- It’s unnecessarily difficult to climb up the icy slopes. If you slide down even the tiniest amount you can’t gain the momentum back and need to slide all the way down before you can start climbing again.

all the sizable slopes had bits of land along them for you to use to regain momentum.

Player Character.9467:

You CAN choose, hop off the rails.

In some cases yes, but not always… besides I wouldn’t be so sure that all the puzzle’s remain completeable when a rainbow bridge is activated even if you can jump off. As in the rainbow would collide with your character.

And besides there is no reason to, what I was suggesting was a middle ground, going out of your way to make things more difficult for yourself for absolutely no gain is hardly the same thing.

I gave up too, maybe i got 3/1000 achievements, but this is not fun anymore.

The first waterfall thing with all the graphic bugs, and zoom in and out, is dooable.

But the next zone, its like x300% difficulty.. ninjas have 3 HP and you miss them 80% of the time..

When you walk on these flowers, 1 small step on them you shoot the wrong direction and you start all over.

You need to walk every step very slowly, i am sorry but 8/16 bit games in my time, were fun to do and had alot of action.. this is just achievement grind.

Player Character.9467:

all the sizable slopes had bits of land along them for you to use to regain momentum.

Yeti did not (and had things being thrown at you to knock you back, to boot). Also even reaching the bits of land can be tricky, I found myself losing momentum just by trying to steer my character left or right (although I suspect latency may have something to do with it).

Josh Foreman.8250:

le snip

Hey Josh, just finished playing some Super Adventure Box. I’ve probably spent a total of 10 hours in there so far between yesterday and today. I am enjoying it so much! I don’t believe the content is too difficult at all. It’s challenging, which is good!

After I saw the forums and the amount of complaints, I thought I might pop in and let you know what the other side of the coin is saying since most of them are still in the SAB and won’t touch the forums.

Baubles and Bauble Bubbles
Baubles are not too hard to come by. I don’t mind going back into old levels, digging in the secret spots to get baubles, and then popping back in the current zone to buy what I want. It’s like eating pie compared to what I had to do in many of the Zelda series. Bauble Bubbles are rewarded fairly when I kill a boss (normal mode) and there is always the conversion rate of 250 baubles for 1 bauble bubble.

Platforming Difficulty
As I said before, I don’t think the SAB is too difficult. I don’t have to deal with lag or bad ping, so I can’t account for those that are unfortunate in that regard, but all of the jumps are possible. Some jumps look possible, but then once you realize after you jump that you’re not going to make it, and then notice the somewhat obvious path you should have taken, that’s part of the learning experience. It comes with the territory. I have not run into any game-breaking, impossible jumps, so therefore I don’t believe the SAB is “too hard”.

Longevity
World 2 is considerably longer than world 1. I am perfectly ok with this. Not sure why this would even be a complaint.

Monsters
Monsters can be a bit tricky. The raft portion of zone 2 is a little tough because there is no room to dodge, so being able to calculate where the assassins will land is crucial. Again, it’s a nice challenge, and definitely not too difficult. One thing I noticed with assassins is that sometimes their skill will knock you flat on your back, and sometimes that same skill will knock you back 5 feet or so. Is this intended? Not sure if it’s a bug or if the knock back is a random chance to happen if you’re struck.

Some mobs are placed in tricky areas, but that’s ok! I have bombs, a slingshot, and many other things I can take them out with. I have found pre-planning to be very successful. If I know I can’t whip the 3rd turtle down the river, I will bomb it before I hop on the 1st turtle, so then when I do get to the 3rd turtle, he’s already flopped over.

So in short, I don’t think the monsters are “too hard”. Some require thought before you approach them, some are better to just leave alone, and some are better smacking at range.

New Elements
I haven’t had a problem with the water spouts. It’s all about timing and patterns.

The spinny flowers are fun. They haven’t glitched/bugged out in any way. They throw you in the direction your camera is facing (if you hold down right click like I do), not the direction your character may be facing. Not complaining about that, just pointing it out because it seemed like some people were unaware of this.

Possible Bugs
Some of the rocks in the various rivers seem to think they’re water and will launch you when you step on them, sending you to your doom. I think this might be a legitimate bug. This happens most frequently on the smaller rocks in World 2 Zone 1.

The waterfall with the logs that are falling down it in World 2 Zone 1 (the area immediately before the final boss) seems like it might have some hit detection problems. I know not to touch the vertical wall of water while I’m jumping from log to log, but sometimes when I am on a log, the vertical water next to me will decide it’s tired of seeing me and throws me off. (I’m not being hit by the piranhas swimming upstream).

Conclusion
Overall I am enjoying the new levels of SAB. I really do not think the difficulty spikes too much. However, I did play SAB in April, every day for the entire month, so I might be a little more practiced than the average player. Honestly though I really do not think it is too hard, I just think people need to bring their patience and persistence. If they can’t do that, then they need to bring rum.

Tribulation Mode
Just wanted to let you know I will beat all the tribulation modes. My guild and I went into World 1 Zone 1 last night. We laughed, we cried, we raged, and we had a ton of fun. Half of them couldn’t hang (had to go to bed, or ran out of coins) so they left. I, however, stayed and finished world 1 zone 1 on tribulation mode. You are a very cruel developer, but I know your tricks now Mr. lava-floor-pokey-sticks-of-death.

i feel like the real issues presented in this thread (other than bugs) can be boiled down to two:

1- levels are too kitten long. it would’ve been much better and casual-friendly if levels were the length of 3 or so checkpoints. that way players wouldn’t have to sit through a level for over an hour to get through with it. it’s not a difficulty challenge, it’s a time challenge. the length makes it feel boring and tiresome. it’s not the amount of content, but the amount of content that must be done in one sitting.

2- there’s a disconnect between the amount of baubles obtained and the amount of lives required to go through levels the first time. you said that you’re giving nods to the arcade days of requiring coins to continue, and of the grind experience required to progress in games like FF. however, the problem is that no one, ever in the history of gaming, enjoyed running out of coins at an arcade. the whole continue coin thing was specifically designed to nickel and dime players out of their money and that’s not something that any developer should willingly bring to their player. then there’s the grind. grinding is always a chore, but you put up with it in RPGs because at least you’re getting something out of it (you’re getting stronger). grinding baubles for continue coins serves only one purpose: gate people out of stuff they’d rather be doing until they spend X amount of time getting enough continues to go back to what they want to do. that’s bad design, old school nods or not, and it escalates when you consider how long the levels are.

Btw, a hint for the raft section of w1z1 : use the whip. Use only the whip. Mobs won’t respawn until you kill the previous “wave”.

BrunoBRS.5178:

i feel like the real issues presented in this thread (other than bugs) can be boiled down to two:

1- levels are too kitten long. it would’ve been much better and casual-friendly if levels were the length of 3 or so checkpoints. that way players wouldn’t have to sit through a level for over an hour to get through with it. it’s not a difficulty challenge, it’s a time challenge. the length makes it feel boring and tiresome. it’s not the amount of content, but the amount of content that must be done in one sitting.

2- there’s a disconnect between the amount of baubles obtained and the amount of lives required to go through levels the first time. you said that you’re giving nods to the arcade days of requiring coins to continue, and of the grind experience required to progress in games like FF. however, the problem is that no one, ever in the history of gaming, enjoyed running out of coins at an arcade. the whole continue coin thing was specifically designed to nickel and dime players out of their money and that’s not something that any developer should willingly bring to their player. then there’s the grind. grinding is always a chore, but you put up with it in RPGs because at least you’re getting something out of it (you’re getting stronger). grinding baubles for continue coins serves only one purpose: gate people out of stuff they’d rather be doing until they spend X amount of time getting enough continues to go back to what they want to do. that’s bad design, old school nods or not, and it escalates when you consider how long the levels are.

You are aware that you don’t even have to spend a single baubles to buy the continue coin. Simply if you do happen to die, leave the instance and come back again. what does this lead to?

1. You don’t spend your bauble.
2. You can enter as many time you’d like, as long you have someone inside the instance.
3. You don have to do the old grind as you say.

This was known since first time SAB was released. However the loading screen might be tiresome if you do happen to die a lot, but then there is infinity continue coin if you’re fed off the grinding for continue coin.

On the other side… somewhere in world three, you’d face this ice wall. Was it intended for the torch to cost 400 bauble? I find it stupid, that if you do not have this bauble amount of bauble, you’re simply forced to grind the 400 bauble to then be able to continue world 3. Also somewhere in world 3 there is this place where you jump inside a cave upwards. It’s very long, and some what dark in the corners. My group of five people spent several hours getting up there and once we got there it felt like a relief to let lose a 40KG bag (as what it felt). Some checkpoint in W3 are placed so close to each other it makes no sense while other are too far away. Please do something about the checkpoints.

Overall I loved the final boss match with the storm mage and would like to see similar bosses like him in the future.

RyuuAkari.6589:

You are aware that you don’t even have to spend a single baubles to buy the continue coin. Simply if you do happen to die, leave the instance and come back again. what does this lead to?

Leads me to believe this game is completely unbalanced in difficulty between solo and groups. I do that kind of content solo mostly but I guess it was a mistake.

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 love the difficulty and hope that world 3 and 4 will be even more difficult! keep up the good work!

Josh Foreman.8250:

I value all feedback. We do have several layers of testing that go on throughout the process. We have alphas all over the world who give us forum feedback, we have regular design reviews with Mike Z, Izzy, Colin, etc. There were several revision they requested to knock the difficulty back in several areas, which we did. But apparently we made them 5 easier when they should have been 20 easier.

I personally watched a lot of people play through their first time, but apparently those folks were better than average. Also, we did a fix to the waterspouts late in the process that ended up making a worst bug (getting KB when they go down) so I didn’t get to see people play through that till it was too late. But We’ll get a hot fix in to address the difficult sections soon.

I know you’ve said that the rewards aren’t your department, but I hope that risk v. reward is included in such discussions because that’s part of the reason I think people are a bit underwhelmed with World 2. This release not only made things more difficult, but also retroactively nerfed bauble and skin farming, and while it added new skins to Moto it also removed material reward options such as Obsidian Shards for people who don’t necessarily want skins.

In all, there seems to be much less of a reason to keep playing past the achievements (or in some cases even for the achievements) due to the high ratio of difficulty to reward, and slightly tweaking difficulty downward won’t do much to change this. In the last SAB I farmed enough that I kept a stack of BB in anticipation that rewards might be even better this time, however I find that there is now a lack of things to spend the BB on (other than self-serving Continue Coins) and I certainly won’t be making any additional effort to farm them since they are now so limited in quantity this time around. What incentive is left to replay SAB when open world farming is easier and more profitable than ever? SAB rewards by comparison are just a huge time and money sink. I think whoever did design the rewards for this release took the SAB’s popularity for granted, and thought the player base would jump (no pun intended) at the opportunity just to play and the rewards be kitten ed.

I think people would be more accepting of the current difficulty level if there were more meaningful rewards to show for it. But to make the content this difficult while nerfing rewards across the board seems to me the primary problem with this release. I don’t mind so much the difficulty itself, but if anything World 2 should have better rewards than the last release because of that difficulty. Somehow we ended up with both higher difficulty and fewer rewards, and that has thrown the entire proposition off-balance because the SAB wasn’t very profitable in the first place, lucky drops notwithstanding. Anyway, thanks for reading and I do hope the situation improves in whatever way possible.

Arty.3261:

I see this going the same way as Diablo 3’s Inferno mode.

" GAME TOO HARD! YOU SAID IT WOULD BE SUPER HARD BUT GAME TOO HARD! NERF PLZ"

Having finished a run through yesterday, I found it challenging but greatly rewarding for getting past some sections. Never had issues with bugs or hitting targets. Get better at the game and enjoy challenging content for once. If you are not good enough to do it, please don’t ruin it for the people who can by begging for it to be changed.

No. Tribulation Mode is supposed to be hard. Normal World 2 should be only slightly more difficult than World 1.

Everyone was PERFECTLY FINE with the Tribulation Mode introduction. No one in their right mind should be complaining about the hard mode being difficult (whether or not Tribulation Mode is difficult or just incredibly bad design is a completely different discussion that has nothing to do with this thread.)

Normal Mode needs dozens of fixes in each level. We’re not even complaining about “difficulty,” per se. We’re complaining primarily about horrible mob placement, bad collision detection, and complete inflexibility when it comes to latency.

I finished zone 1 with a rando in about 2 hours. I thought it was a blast. But It would have been impossible with out a infinity coin.

Worth reposting:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/when-difficult-is-fun

RvLeshrac.2673:

We’re complaining primarily about horrible mob placement, bad collision detection, and complete inflexibility when it comes to latency.

Yeah, this is really killing it for me.

Liadri was much harder, this is easy mode compared to Liadri.

Finished W2S2 today and also managed to grab all the secrets.

I’ll list what i personally felt annoying/need more work.

-The first instant kill trap made me feel like i was playing rick dangerous/IWBTG. Almost impossible to avoid it, cheap as can be. Unless you played infantile at least (and even if you played it you’ll try going through and get one shotted for the lol).
-Well i’ll be honest, i got killed by easily half the trap of the level, they are kinda hard to see imo but whatever.
-There’s an instant kill trap with a weird angle when you jump above another using a cube you moved. Again, this felt like Rick Dangerous.
-The gong… Ok i’ll be honest, to go through it, i killed myself when activating it, then rushed back and waited it to go down to the last floor. The mechanic wasn’t that bad, imo it was even interesting but the fact that a fail resulted in going all the way back up, then all the way down hoping you make it while trying to see where the one shot trap are all that in a hurry is frustrating as hell. It was probably the only part of the stage i hated with all my might.
-A bit after the eagle secret regular path, there’s a frog waiting after a jump behind a cliff, honestly the first time there’s a high chance it will instant kill you. Again that feels like playing Rick dangerous.
-Sometime i felt there wasn’t enough checkpoints in that stage.
-As expected from infantile fast run the stage is massive, this is not really a negative in my point of view but i can see it being an issue for others.

On a positive note I really liked the diversity in mechanics of the stage, pushing blocks, feeding the octopuses, the teleport maze (solution being given by a ninja in a secret location), even the gong if i didn’t took that much time to have another attempt at it were all pretty decent. Also the game crashed near the end so i had to do the whole thing again, it felt great to go through it with ease once i knew what to do, were all the traps were, etc… The secrets were also well hidden and the secret ninja one was interesting.
I dunno if doing well in the secret eagle stage brings you further, but if it’s the case it was a good idea.

Overall, i think this stage needs more clarity with the trap being far more visible, more checkpoints, the removal of that hidden frog and maybe a nerf to the red sword ninjas.

Edit: i said W2S2 was alot more harder than W1 in it’s globality, i felt W2S2 did the same with W2S1.

The freaking waterfall in World 2 Zone 1 on river part keeps hitting me despite me not even being close to it. (the part where you jump through 3 geysers with waterfall near #2. I thought I was doing it wrong until I google’d.

Puru.4217:

Finished W2S2 today and also managed to grab all the secrets.

I’ll list what i personally felt annoying/need more work.

-The first instant kill trap made me feel like i was playing rick dangerous/IWBTG. Almost impossible to avoid it, cheap as can be. Unless you played infantile at least (and even if you played it you’ll try going through and get one shotted for the lol).
-Well i’ll be honest, i got killed by easily half the trap of the level, they are kinda hard to see imo but whatever.
-There’s an instant kill trap with a weird angle when you jump above another using a cube you moved. Again, this felt like Rick Dangerous.
-The gong… Ok i’ll be honest, to go through it, i killed myself when activating it, then rushed back and waited it to go down to the last floor. The mechanic wasn’t that bad, imo it was even interesting but the fact that a fail resulted in going all the way back up, then all the way down hoping you make it while trying to see where the one shot trap are all that in a hurry is frustrating as hell. It was probably the only part of the stage i hated with all my might.
-A bit after the eagle secret regular path, there’s a frog waiting after a jump behind a cliff, honestly the first time there’s a high chance it will instant kill you. Again that feels like playing Rick dangerous.
-Sometime i felt there wasn’t enough checkpoints in that stage.
-As expected from infantile fast run the stage is massive, this is not really a negative in my point of view but i can see it being an issue for others.

On a positive note I really liked the diversity in mechanics of the stage, pushing blocks, feeding the octopuses, the teleport maze (solution being given by a ninja in a secret location), even the gong if i didn’t took that much time to have another attempt at it were all pretty decent. Also the game crashed near the end so i had to do the whole thing again, it felt great to go through it with ease once i knew what to do, were all the traps were, etc… The secrets were also well hidden and the secret ninja one was interesting.
I dunno if doing well in the secret eagle stage brings you further, but if it’s the case it was a good idea.

Overall, i think this stage needs more clarity with the trap being far more visible, more checkpoints, the removal of that hidden frog and maybe a nerf to the red sword ninjas.

Edit: i said W2S2 was alot more harder than W1 in it’s globality, i felt W2S2 did the same with W2S1.

Just have to say I youtubed Rick Dangerous and.. wow. The grandfather of IWTBTG found at last.

Personally I’ve really enjoyed the new zones. I like that they are longer and that they actually require you to think and observe your surroundings. I don’t think the difficulty is anywhere near to high, although it is clearly much harder than world 1. The only major issue I encountered was needing 400 baubles for the torch to break the ice wall.

I found tribulation mode amazing. It’s so hard that it’s fun. I think I died a total of 500 times over the 12 hours I’ve spent doing it and I will never trust flowers again.

Puru.4217:

Overall, i think this stage needs more clarity with the trap being far more visible, more checkpoints, the removal of that hidden frog and maybe a nerf to the red sword ninjas.

What about the traps is not visible? Besides, the whole zone is about being aware of your surroundings. You can clearly see where a trap is by the red vent attached to the walls, it also tells you the direction the darts will shoot in. Look at where you’re going from different camera angles, see if there are any other ways you could do – if you’re just mindlessly running about then of course you’re just going to keep getting killed by them.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Monkey Fritz.9052:

W1 was a fun, colorful lighthearted and challenging homage. W2 could be but isn’t.
W2 suffers from the “Lets make it as hard as we remember those games being when we were five and sucked at playing video games.”

I’ve said it several times in this thread so far but I’ll keep repeating it since I don’t expect anyone to read the whole thing. The design intent was NOT to make Normal Mode as hard as it is. There are a combination of factors that are making it so, and we’re currently working on a fix. We want W2 Normal Mode to be slightly more challenging than W1. There are several obvious difficulty spikes that we are addressing by adding check points, removing the buggy waterspouts, making dart traps easier to spot, removing some of them, etc.

All the complaints about the randomness of the rapids, floaty platforming, camera issues, etc. are things I would literally pay a thousand dollars to fix. Maybe even two. I’d cut my salary if we had a way to fix them. We hate them as much as you do. We simply accept the pain of these engine limitations because we feel like the overall content is worth it. I totally understand if other’s find them too annoying to be able to enjoy the content.
I said earlier, we have a great engine for GW2. But making it do platforming stuff is like getting a powerful heavy elephant to win a horse race. It’s not always pretty. Finding the sweet spot between pushing the boundaries of the engine to create new old-school mechanics and keeping the gameplay perfectly smooth is a constant game of compromise. I’m not claiming we’re perfect at it. But we’re trying. Check back after we get the changes in and see if we addressed most of the difficulty spikes.
I’m really appreciative to have this interchange with you guys. Some of your ideas are going directly into our fix. Though most of the warranted complaints are just a limitation of what we can and can’t do with our engine. (Like making the dart traps knock back instead of kill. That was our initial intent, but there’s no way to make it work.)

Sounds promising! A question related to my greed and avarice will SAB be extended to 30 days after the fixes go live? I’ll understand if its a no can do due to schedules and such (personally I would love to see SAB be a permanent addition) but as you may or may not have seen from other threads the reward structure compared to other content is grossly imbalanced, and as SAB skins are personally my favorite (over and above most Legendaries) I’d like to have an opportunity to kit out my alt characters as well.

Mirta.5029:

This is where I normally land, the land on the right is where I think I should land. Landing on the flower itself here or getting bugged right here is very easy. I was never able to over shoot the flower and land in that nice patch of free land.

I feel your pain. It cost me a whole continue coin just to make it to the boss platform thanks to those spinning flowers. -_-

Josh Foreman.8250:

Fhaeris.9237:

@everyone: they made it this hard just to sell more infinite coins off the gem store. Don’t fall for this trap.

We made it so that it’s fun to play. It’s quite possible that we are just THAT much better at jumping than the average player, but I doubt it. I want it to be fun. If MOST people think it’s too hard to be fun then I’ll reduce the difficulty. But like I said above, we don’t have good numbers on that yet.

NO! Don’t touch the difficulty! You know how many people died to that first goomba in mario? This brings back the days when super simple games felt far harder then then super complex games today!

Josh Foreman.8250:

Assassin X.8573:

sofar these devs have been nothing but rude kittenbags to the playerbase. Great customer service you have going on here

Howso? I apologize if I’ve come off as rude. I was using the ‘protip’ line a couple times, but I apologized for that and explained that I forgot it’s used to insult people. I was actually trying to be funny and reference the era of gaming SAB is referencing. I really do appreciate the feedback I’m getting here and want to encourage people to share their opinions. That’s how I grow as a designer.

The feedback I like the least is the accusations that I’m basically trying to sell stuff. Since it’s not true it’s not helpful to me. But stuff about difficulty spikes, specific mechanics problems, etc. Those are very helpful.

I kittening love you josh. Don’t listen to the vocal minority, 95% of the game is designed for poor players to be able to cope, let us have our 5%. The first world wasn’t even complex platforming, and now that some good stuff that reminds me of platformers of olde gets in we get endless complaints about it on the forums.

News flash: You are under zero obligation to complete SAB. If it’s too hard, just don’t do it. Move on. Please for the love of god, move on.

Based scrybe.

Meriem.3504:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Fhaeris.9237:

@everyone: they made it this hard just to sell more infinite coins off the gem store. Don’t fall for this trap.

We made it so that it’s fun to play. It’s quite possible that we are just THAT much better at jumping than the average player, but I doubt it. I want it to be fun. If MOST people think it’s too hard to be fun then I’ll reduce the difficulty. But like I said above, we don’t have good numbers on that yet.

NO! Don’t touch the difficulty! You know how many people died to that first goomba in mario? This brings back the days when super simple games felt far harder then then super complex games today!

Um…

Have you read this thread because there’s a huge difference between “This is my first time playing, how do I jump? Oh no goomba! DEAD.” and “I know the controls, I’m a skilled player… but WTF camera angles?? Lag?? Instant death before I can react?? F THIS GAME!!!”

Josh Foreman.8250:

Monkey Fritz.9052:

W1 was a fun, colorful lighthearted and challenging homage. W2 could be but isn’t.
W2 suffers from the “Lets make it as hard as we remember those games being when we were five and sucked at playing video games.”

I’ve said it several times in this thread so far but I’ll keep repeating it since I don’t expect anyone to read the whole thing. The design intent was NOT to make Normal Mode as hard as it is. There are a combination of factors that are making it so, and we’re currently working on a fix. We want W2 Normal Mode to be slightly more challenging than W1. There are several obvious difficulty spikes that we are addressing by adding check points, removing the buggy waterspouts, making dart traps easier to spot, removing some of them, etc.

All the complaints about the randomness of the rapids, floaty platforming, camera issues, etc. are things I would literally pay a thousand dollars to fix. Maybe even two. I’d cut my salary if we had a way to fix them. We hate them as much as you do. We simply accept the pain of these engine limitations because we feel like the overall content is worth it. I totally understand if other’s find them too annoying to be able to enjoy the content.
I said earlier, we have a great engine for GW2. But making it do platforming stuff is like getting a powerful heavy elephant to win a horse race. It’s not always pretty. Finding the sweet spot between pushing the boundaries of the engine to create new old-school mechanics and keeping the gameplay perfectly smooth is a constant game of compromise. I’m not claiming we’re perfect at it. But we’re trying. Check back after we get the changes in and see if we addressed most of the difficulty spikes.
I’m really appreciative to have this interchange with you guys. Some of your ideas are going directly into our fix. Though most of the warranted complaints are just a limitation of what we can and can’t do with our engine. (Like making the dart traps knock back instead of kill. That was our initial intent, but there’s no way to make it work.)

I am glad you guys are working on the feedback, and do understand a lot of it is the engine. Mostly I was chiming in against the people claiming it “should be hard because oldschool games are hard.” And I, personally, don’t think oldschool games are nearly as hard as they are hyped, and think this current difficulty is more frustrating and limiting than ‘hard.’

And the length is just a bit much, that “Trapped because I can’t even pause the game” feeling is never fun, even if an instance is just 10 minutes too long.

The main thing I am upset about is the account blocking, diminished rewards, and only 1 starter life (any one of those would have ruined even w1 the first time in april, when i absolutely loved it and thought it was the best birthday present ever.)

SAB kept me playing the game after wasting 350 gold trying to get even one fused skin (when I wanted half the set). Having been able to get all the super skins while having fun during the same month kept me from leaving gambler wars 2.

But now as the gamble boxes are being lightened up, I can only assume the NCsoft execs are the reasoning behind the infinite coin.

Writetyper.1985:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Assassin X.8573:

sofar these devs have been nothing but rude kittenbags to the playerbase. Great customer service you have going on here

Howso? I apologize if I’ve come off as rude. I was using the ‘protip’ line a couple times, but I apologized for that and explained that I forgot it’s used to insult people. I was actually trying to be funny and reference the era of gaming SAB is referencing. I really do appreciate the feedback I’m getting here and want to encourage people to share their opinions. That’s how I grow as a designer.

The feedback I like the least is the accusations that I’m basically trying to sell stuff. Since it’s not true it’s not helpful to me. But stuff about difficulty spikes, specific mechanics problems, etc. Those are very helpful.

I kittening love you josh. Don’t listen to the vocal minority, 95% of the game is designed for poor players to be able to cope, let us have our 5%. The first world wasn’t even complex platforming, and now that some good stuff that reminds me of platformers of olde gets in we get endless complaints about it on the forums.

News flash: You are under zero obligation to complete SAB. If it’s too hard, just don’t do it. Move on. Please for the love of god, move on.

Based scrybe.

You HAVE yours, it’s called “Tribulation Mode”.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Though most of the warranted complaints are just a limitation of what we can and can’t do with our engine. (Like making the dart traps knock back instead of kill. That was our initial intent, but there’s no way to make it work.)

First off, I’d like to really thank you for being so engaged and helpful since this update’s release. It’s clear to me that you’re passionate about what you do and want to see it well received even if it means changing the plan somewhat. I think that’s awesome.

I just want to take a moment to draw attention to this one little bit here.

I’m a big fan of fighting games. Way back when I first started getting into them, I used to get into what I called “the special move trap”. I’d have just learned some new move, and I’d want to get it into a match. The problem of course being that the moves were all just tools that were effective for particular situations. But kittenmit, I’d just learned how to do Dragon Punch, and I wanted to use it, so without even really consciously thinking about that impulse I’d try over and over and keep getting knocked down for it.

I still do this sometimes if I’ve just learned some new combo or trick. It all happens in fractions of seconds, but then I sit back and review a match and go “Wow, I was really determined to fit that thing in and it cost me the win.”

Where I’m going with this is that the spike traps seem like a bit of a “special move trap”. They’re a cool idea, but when you run into this limitation of the system, it prevents them from being a win. Instead of entering into a situation where the character literally, and the design figuratively, get smacked in the face, it might be time to shelve that idea instead. If for example trap knockbacks aren’t possible in the system, maybe it isn’t the time for that idea at all. (In Normal Mode, certainly.) Using your cool idea in a situation where it becomes less than cool (instant death) might sacrifice the win in the effort to squeeze it in.

At any rate, just to keep on a high note: Thanks for all the work you’ve done, thank you for continuing to heap love and sweat on the project, and thank you for something in SAB that taught me not to hate and avoid all jumping puzzles in GW2 the way I did when I first started playing the game. I look forward to the incoming changes to Normal, and also to stuff yall have planned in the future.

Puru.4217:

-Sometime i felt there wasn’t enough checkpoints in that stage.
-As expected from infantile fast run the stage is massive, this is not really a negative in my point of view but i can see it being an issue for others.

These are a couple of points that have been brought up a number of times though I didn’t raise them in my own post. I think they’re very important to keep in mind going forward, especially since Josh did seem to initially think the complaint (particularly about the size of the levels) was a complaint about the amount of content.

I had a day off yesterday, and it took me a pretty good part of the day after the patch went live to make it through the entirety of world 2 (no infantile mode test run, and running purely blind but with a decent amount of experience in both GW2 and many other games). I have no issues at all with the amount of content in this SAB update. In fact, I feel that, pure play time wise, it’s quite possibly the beefiest content patch GW2 has seen to this point if you don’t consider repeated hour long invasion events or waiting for stuff to spawn as actual proper play time. Assuming SAB sticks around for the whole month, this is a great patch and I don’t think anyone is complaining about how much content it has.

The issue really is how the content is presented. Each level is very long, especially on first run, with no real way to hop out and come back later mid level. I realize that, sure, in old school games there often wasn’t a save mechanism at all but that’s one aspect of design that has certainly improved over the decades. At the same time, however, I wouldn’t want to lose the vastness of how the stages actually feel so I can’t really advocate something like breaking the existing stages up into 2-1 through 2-6 instead of 2-3 through 2-3 (or just opting for smaller/shorter levels next time around).

My personal recommendation would be a revision of the checkpoint system to include hard checkpoints like we have now and soft checkpoints sort of like what is in the Tribultion Mode. Have soft checkpoints in places right before or after notably tough sections, maybe even with a bauble cost to activate to make them more optional. Have hard checkpoints exactly where they are now. Then, when the player leaves the game, save the progress to the last reached hard checkpoint as opposed to just the start of the zone. Even if the entire zone otherwise reset, there aren’t enough Baubles around in World 2 to make this easily exploitable. Doing it this way would not only retain the ability to make each zone as large and epic as possible while still providing players a respite if they wanted to or had to drop out at some point.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Assassin X.8573:

sofar these devs have been nothing but rude kittenbags to the playerbase. Great customer service you have going on here

Howso? I apologize if I’ve come off as rude. I was using the ‘protip’ line a couple times, but I apologized for that and explained that I forgot it’s used to insult people. I was actually trying to be funny and reference the era of gaming SAB is referencing. I really do appreciate the feedback I’m getting here and want to encourage people to share their opinions. That’s how I grow as a designer.

The feedback I like the least is the accusations that I’m basically trying to sell stuff. Since it’s not true it’s not helpful to me. But stuff about difficulty spikes, specific mechanics problems, etc. Those are very helpful.

Aren’t you the peep who made the giant chainsaw for halloween?! If so, necros need chainsaws too! Trying to make minions out of a butcher knife just doesn’t cut it, no pun intended!

Josh Foreman.8250:

Well I would challenge anyone who thinks SAB W2 is harder than Zelda 1 to beat the last couple of dungeons! Zelda is WAY harder. Even so, I certainly don’t want to punish anyone for playing anything I make. Quite the opposite. I really, truly, honestly only want to make people have fun when they play my content. Some people have fun with brutal instant kill stuff like Tribulation Mode. But Normal Mode should not feel like that.

Then you should probably put more forgiveness mechanics in event to tribulation mode. It seems like you’re designing with your nostalgia goggles on here because
you keep citing games that were fun 20 years ago. I still enjoy ninja gaiden but I’m lucky enough to have played it when being that punishing wasn’t considered horrible design. Heck it holds up way better than other games from that era but early console games were designed to be super punishing because they were based on arcade design which was, ‘how can we make a game technically winnable but make players spend as many coins as possible.’ Now look at a modern difficult game, let’s say super meat boy. Super Meat Boy would be totally unfair and far too punishing if you weren’t allowed to pick up basically right where you died. What if super meat boy had a life system that would just be cruel. And that’s about where I am on SAB right now, world 2 normal needs way more checkpoints and tribulation mode, honestly could probably use some tweaks though I’d argue that the real problem with tribulation mode is that living story content is temporary so we don’t really get the trial and error time we should for such a game.

can we maybe get some feedback about the elonian wine thread instead of this one for a few….kkthnx.

Does the music at the start of zone 2 remind anyone of snake rattle and roll lol?