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Oh, did you find a semi-useful path? Here, let me put a giant wreck right in the middle of it. Oh, you thought you could take a shortcut through here? Nah, giant boulder field and also fragile ice. Did you just trek through a mile of the deepest snow in the game? Hope you brought Chain Tires because there's a 10-meter section of really steep ice road that you can't get around.
There's challenge and then there's "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ design." The map's design rigidly limits where you can and can't (shouldn't) go, but then uses this to funnel you into deliberate, non-obvious traps or just dead ends. It's using standard video game "language" to lie to you, to the point that a player basically has to fall into every trap, tip or burrow trucks over and over again until said player just learns all the ways in which the map lies.
The cherry on top for me is the Imandra garage. There's NO indication that a garage even exists on that map. Other campaigns usually either have garages which unlock when discovered or unlock garages through Contracts that the player can preview before even travelling to the map in question. In Imandra, the Garage is locked behind a mission that's itself locked by another mission which is itself located diametrically opposite the entrance and where players are likely to visit last. There's also no indication that that mission unlocks another mission which unlocks a garage.
I'll take Wisconsin and Yukon every day over this. Not only does the crafting/inventory management system in those regions add additional complexity without adding artificial difficulty, the maps are far more open with substantially more viable routes than the map shows. It's the exact opposite of Kola, where the map tells you there's a road but you die if you actually attempt it. There's reason to explore, there are routes to find and it's overall a far more fun driving experience.
same, same, aaand, same! well put indeed.
ps; i'm in wisconsin now (amur's next) and thoroughly enjoying it actually. i haven't even pulled my "♥♥♥♥ you, game!" mod, the immaculate azov iceberg yet. sure, the cargo requirements do get a tad stupid but with a little road train mindset, knowing what and knowing where it's good fun and a fair challenge.
Yeah, Yukon and especially Wisconsin have staggeringly huge cargo delivery missions (basically, every one is a Cargopocalypse), but their design makes this substantially less of an issue as good roads do actually exist. You're not driving 5 Km through deep mud and icy slopes. You end up driving 90% of it on the road, with only a few difficulty sections. If anything, the logistics of what to pick up where are far more of an issue than just getting to places.
That, and these missions encourage the use of large vehicles with large cargo capacity. The player has the option of making a few hard runs or many easier runs. Kola doesn't have that option, because large vehicles are almost always a non-starter due to the terrain. They CAN get around, but it's painful and not fun. The plane mission is by far that zone's largest move and it serves as a capstone.
I sincerely hope Amur hews closer to Wisconsin than to Kola.
Been doing this since Yukon
It feels like cheating, but its an option when needed, just the bridge layer that is a mod that should be a part of the game really, that mod is a keeper for me
As to Kola, I never finished the main objective, it was too frustrating and that is not what I am looking for in games, have enough of that IRL
I think maybe the key to those maps is about experimenting with different routes to find the one that is best (which often does not involve the designated paths they provide). Driving on the ice is often a great way to bypass a lot of the slow sections, both on the Kola region and the Amur region.
You never deliberately smash your thumbs with a hammer? Resisting pain is a great skill to have, and not just for carpentry. Surely that's a good use of our collective leisure time, no? I'm being facetious, obviously, but you're equally just making excuses for malicious design.
Snowrunner is a frustrating game at the best of times, but ideally this should stem from a natural-feeling difficulty of terrain. What Kola offers is entirely unnatural, and transparently artificial. To me, it's a game design faux pas, especially in a semi-open-world exploration games. Kola very heavily restricts players' pathing and deliberately funnels players into "setpieces" designed to be both deliberately frustrating and cheap.
Compare this to something like Taymir. Sure, terrain there is awful, the bud is deep, the ground is heavily slanted, etc. However, that's a fairly open map with multiple routes going to various places and very few bottlenecks (outside the damn quarry). Yes, it's often frustrating and it often feels unfair, but it never feels like the game deliberately tied my hands behind my back. Roads still exist, good routes still exist.
Kola feels needlessly constraint. It has the appearance of an open map, but it has actually very few viable routes, and what few viable routes exist are peppered with sucker traps the first time you drive them. That's not teaching me "self-control." It's teaching me self-interest. Don't play Kola, don't recommend Kola to friends. Ain't nobody got time for that.
But that IS the problem. Despite its appearance, Kola offers only a handful of viable routes. We don't have the freedom to explore and find our own unintended but surprisingly practical paths because the map designers deliberately walled all of them off and allowed us to travel only on the paths they wanted us to travel on. Sure, sometimes it LOOKS like we're going off-road and driving through the forest, but look at surrounding terrain and you'll notice that yes - this IS an intended path. Just a hidden one.
The above heavily regimented routing is what allows them to drop cheapshot traps on all the paths that we CANNOT avoid, because they've limited us to just those paths and thus forced us to navigate through stucker traps rather than going around them. No other map in the game feels as heavily scripted and restrictive as Kola, with the possible exception of Amur. Haven't played that yet.
Part of the fun of Snowrunner (and Spintires/Mudrunner before it) was experimenting to find workable routes around a fairly open map. Kola makes the same mistake a lot of Mudrunner mod maps made, of locking players to just a few "tunnels" through the map, which makes the experience less compelling for exploration and less sustainable long-term as we drive the same road up-and-down dozens of times.
Who am I competing against in Snowrunner? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but League of Legends isn't designed to limit a player's chances of success to the point of making it seem like the developer is punishing you for buying the game. The Amur and Kola maps are *clearly* designed that way.
Out of curiosity, what IS the issue with Amur? I've heard a lot of people trash-talk it, but I've yet to go there, myself. Neutral question here - just curious what people have problems with.
I haven't gotten far, for reasons that will become obvious. The area you can get to is limited by ice you will fall through if you cross it at anything but a rapid pace, and bridges that need to be built. The problem is that there appears to be no resources with which to build the bridges, and I've yet to find a reasonable way to get to any resources. There is a road, which won't get you terribly far, but anything wider than a particularly skinny bicycle will roll off the side. There's this big semi-open (as in, just small trees) swath that looks promising, but nothing I've tried, even the Tatarin and my extra-cheaty Kolob mod, can get across without a painfully slow winch drag, and I don't want to spend a half hour or more *just* doing that. I'm planning to try skirting along the land side of the ice and see if I can actually find something to get resources from, but it doesn't look promising. Frankly, it looks like it was designed either just to spitefully lash out at people for buying the DLC, or with some un-implemented game mechanic where one could bring resources in from other regions (like, picking up logs in Taymyr and bringing them to Amur, for example). Presumably, there is a way to get everything built up, but it's looking like Kola all over again.
I do agree, somehow, they planted big rocks here and there which will lodge themselves right under. Some of those rocks seems to appear out of nowhere.