A general rant about games asking me to do things and then making it impossible.

[yvannairie]

Irregardless of if there was grind to finish Forbidden West or not, there's still an unacceptable amount of jank in this game.

Like, okay -- I joke a lot about being bad at video games, but I truly don't mind if a game is genuinely just really hard. I don't mind mechanics that are too complicated for me to figure out (parrying timing) or outside of my skillset (strategy games as a whole). I don't mind if there is no other option for me other than patient, boring gameplay of sniping at enemies from fifty miles away and waiting for them to forget my existence between getting hits in.

What does drive me crazy is when there is no way for me to play the game even normally to get through a thing. So far, there have been two moments in this game where I've just entirely stopped having fun, had the game turn into a grindfest, and both of them have been big bossfights against enemies that do not give you enough space to manoeuver around them, or expect you to do something under extreme time constraints, meaning you can't wait for an opportunity.

The first was Drakka's fight against a surprise Thunderjaw -- I kept getting stuck in scenery, and then stunlocked to death because there was no way for me to dodge its projectiles. The other one is the Raintrance Tremortusk weapon trial, because the arena is so small you can't pick up the heavy weapons you need to beat the trial without the Tremortusk in question literally coming to stand over you, and, again, stunlock you to death.

Both of these are instances where my only realistic option for beating them is to just get lucky -- lucky enough to not get stuck on scenery, lucky enough that the Tremortusk damages the nearby machines to make them easy one-shot kills for me without actually killing them -- lucky, not capable in any way. And waiting for the game to let me beat a challenge is not fun. It's in fact literally the most annoying thing in the world.

And it drives me particularly crazy with this game (and the previous game, that had a single bastard mission like this where the only realistic way of beating it was grinding out the best weapons so you could outdamage the enemies involved) is that it's such a small part, it happens so rarely that it's not a thing I have any sort of extra skillset trained into me, and it also feels completely unintentional on the designers' part. It's simply mechanics in the game interacting in the worst ways that take away all my agency in how I would approach the challenge.

This is, what? 0.3% of the game, or something, it's a minuscule part, which only makes it worse because somehow the rest of the game knows not to put me in scenarios where I'm dying over and over from being kicked into walls by enemies I can't block or dodge. It's a single bit of bad design, of "how the fuck did they miss that?" lack of testing, of sheer insurmountable jank. And it pisses me off when the only reason I can't even learn to do something in a game is because the game won't let me.

Comments

[palominocorn]

I haven't had the convergence of time, energy, and desire to play yet, so I've just been watching my spouse.

The boss fights just generally seem longer and grindier in general to me. The slitherfang one took REALLY long, for example. I'm going to have to seriously fiddle with the accessibility options when I play.

There's definitely complexity creep. It always takes me at least half a playthrough to learn mechanics, but the sheer number of skills and new additions and weapons and loot and ahhhh my brain is swimming.

[yvannairie]

Yep! And the thing is, I've been enjoying the extra complexity. I like how much more you have to think about removing armour, now, I like the interplay of elemental damage, it's all honestly put together pretty well.

But being asked to kill a Tremortusk after shooting off its cannons and then killing three Clawstriders in under two minutes? When you can just about use one cannon's charge to kill one Clawstrider? In an area the size of a teacup where the angry Tremortusk wants to come physically stand on you as much as possible? In a game where you not only take damage from contact with machines when they're mid-animation, but where you have multiple stun/stumble animations that you can get locked into?

Being told to kill a Thunderjaw that cannot be deaggroed in a field where you have no way of telling where the changes in ground height are so you might be unwittingly running into a wall, trying to get away?