This beeping game

[Michael]

I've enjoyed parts of this so far, but I've got to provide feedback that I'm not a huge fan of putting 70% of the game after you've finished the story. Especially given some of the poor game mechanics in this and that have (unfortunately) persisted from the earlier game.

1. The beeping. God it's annoying. Not just for the person playing and it's next to useless for finding chests. Nothing more frustrating than following the increased beeping only to hit a brick wall.

2. The map. It's useless. The indicator for the player covers far too much area for any real indication of where you are. Maybe this is by design? It's not often you feel cheated spending in game currency but jeez, did I ever feel cheated buying the map early on during the story instead of some of the other potential upgrades.

3. Knowing what to do or where to go next once the story is done. That's what the story is for. I get it - you didn't expect this to be a full game, but after 27 months you decided it had to be a full game, but this new team had done the puzzles for a new game but not the story to connect it all up. Rather than spend more time you decided you could sell the "70% after you've finished" as a feature. This is like Carmack trying to convince Doom 3 players that the dark lighting was a design decision rather than a big technical limitation of the engine he developed.

Fair enough, I suppose, for the chests - I didn't complete them in the first game - it just sucked, but how much of that 70% is chest finding? What puzzles remain? Who can tell. The game certainly doesn't.

The big problem here is, reading what puzzles might exist etc here just gets spoilers.

Either way the game is ruined. It's either ruined by frustration of hours of beeping, a crap map and searching areas for what puzzles might exist or other things. It looks like there might be bones somewhere - but where? I seem to recall buying a detector but I don't see where it is in the hud. If it's shared by the chest beeping - jesus christ in a hand basket - so I have to search every location over and over constantly annoyed by incessant beeping for chests in the vain hope it'll beeps for bones if I happen across the right corner of the map? That's 70% of the game? The reason for throwing the money was the fun, story driven puzzles.

Worst part is it looks like the bones gives you upgrades that would help the searching. After you've finished searching, here's what you could have used.

And it has other consequences. During the story bit if you couldn't solve a puzzle a helpful radio told you. Great. You didn't waste hours trying to solve a puzzle that needed something you didn't have. Now the credits have rolled - zilch. I find puzzles, no indication you need an upgrade and then you read here out of frustration and see others saying "Wait until you get ...." - that's ruined it twice. It was ruined wasting time on the puzzle - and now the puzzle itself is ruined by the spoiler.

I think the story driven parts were superb and I'm looking forward to real supraland 2.0. But please, finish that game - or, if you want the bulk of that game to be a beeping search and explore - put a decent map in the game, come up with a better mechanic than the beeping (when people are walking up to you asking why your computer is doing that annoying beeping you know its flawed) and / or put some other mechanism for completion - a list of puzzles, chests by area rather than just a big total. That kind of thing.

Thanks.

[Wang Tang]

I have to disagree hard on most parts.

1. The beeping: it helps A LOT. I don't want to know where to find a chest, but where to look. Figuring out if the chest might be on this side of the wall or the other is part of that.

2. The map helped me for general knowledge of my place in the world, and that was all I needed as an improvement from Supraland and Crash. Anything more would be TMI and would actually detract from the gameing fun.

3. "Knowing what to do or where to go" - just explore! This is what the game is. If you don't like that kind of game that'S fine, but I feel that Supraland inherently is exactly that kind of game.

4. "Worst part is it looks like the bones gives you upgrades that would help the searching. After you've finished searching, here's what you could have used." - Yes, but you knwo that beforehand? As soon as you find the 3rd floor shop with the upgrades, you know you want to go for the skulls first. Exactly because it helps you exploring. The upgrade clearly states what it will do, and it's pretty clear that "more teleport range" = easier exploring.

[Michael]

Originally posted by Wang Tang:

3. "Knowing what to do or where to go" - just explore! This is what the game is. If you don't like that kind of game that'S fine, but I feel that Supraland inherently is exactly that kind of game.

Well, not really. The other games were primarily story-drive puzzle solving. That's why I've continued to buy them. If it were just exploring and finding the chests etc at the end of this game I'd agree. I mostly didn't bother with these in the previous games for the reasons stated and I'd just stop playing.

The downside with this title is, it's not just "finding chests" - it's more than 50% of the game.

After you've finished searching, here's what you could have used." - Yes, but you knwo that beforehand? As soon as you find the 3rd floor shop with the upgrades, you know you want to go for the skulls first.

But there are a handful of skulls - somewhere - and over 100 chests. The beeping thing is continually beeping for chests as you walk around not skulls.

That's exactly the point I'm making. Where to start searching for skulls? Why I have to have a continual beep beep beep like a lorry reversing knowing - as you accept - the upgrade for the skulls is more or less going to be pointless if you side track and go for the chests.

Of maybe not - maybe there's a puzzle somewhere that uses it. The game certainly doesn't say if this is the case and, as I've said, the discussions here are basically a set of game ruining spoilers. After all many of the puzzles are just thinking "Oh yeah I can use that..." thus if a post says "You need x" it's more or less ruined at that point.

This is why the game was clever enough to say "You have everything" rather than "You need the..."

To me that's not good game design. If I have to start looking here to see what puzzles are in the game then the design is poor. Ok there's a %age completion but I know more about how many times I've pressed crouch than I do about stuff in the game that is probably fun to do - rather than a tedious chore.

And that's the point really - there's no objective of "completing the game", there's no reason to actually play it, it's playing the game itself that has to be fun. Puzzles = fun, wandering around beep beep beep bumping into walls = not fun, just a tedious chore.

It's just a pity they didn't separate the 2 as well in this title as they did in the previous.

The same issue - to a lesser degree - affects the red pipes handles you turn - although since these are all in one area it's less bad that chest beeping continually happens while you're searching for something else.

It's like most of the chests having upgrades that are completely unnecessary because the combat doesn't require them. Which is a pity, it's like they thought "No one wants to get stuck on a puzzle or fighting a boss so you can get to the 'end' trivially but everyone loves a tedious and pointless search for upgrades they don't need using the worst map and annoying beeping game mechanic ever devised, so we'll stick that at the end" - and well, maybe they are partly right - maybe all the feedback they read here is people who can't figure trivial puzzles out asking for help, but I think they got the balance wrong here.

[potterr]

Originally posted by Michael:

But there are a handful of skulls - somewhere - and over 100 chests. The beeping thing is continually beeping for chests as you walk around not skulls.

From what I remember, there's an upgrade for that, in the after game village. Although ideally you get rid of the chests first so that the skulls are prominent on the detector. The only thing the detector doesn't find is the secrets, but you find most of them as they have chests in them, there's just a hand full that don't and require and bit more searching/ experimenting.

Originally posted by Michael:

It's like most of the chests having upgrades that are completely unnecessary because the combat doesn't require them.

I do agree with this, as you spend more time at the end of the game hunting for chests than when you may need them so the heart upgrades post game don't have a huge benefit, especially when it's the last chest you're looking for. However like previous games the dev team have made tweaks after feedback like this to improve the bonus's and so on (like first few days of this coming out people were saying they had tons of coins left, so the trophy detector upgrade was added to spend the coins on). Some later on chests do give things that help with further exploration [further throw on the pickaxe as an example to get those hard to reach blocks).
However at that point it's not so much what the chest contains anymore, it's actually finding the chest that becomes important, it could contain a dead squirrel for all I care, but at least I've found all the chests.

[Michael]

Originally posted by potterr:

Originally posted by Michael:

But there are a handful of skulls - somewhere - and over 100 chests. The beeping thing is continually beeping for chests as you walk around not skulls.

From what I remember, there's an upgrade for that, in the after game village. Although ideally you get rid of the chests first so that the skulls are prominent on the detector.

Which is the exact polar opposite of what the last poster said to do i.e to get the skulls first so the upgrades they give you are at least worthwhile. You're saying do the chests to get rid of the annoying beeping - which yes, you end up doing, but then the upgrades the skulls give might not be worth having to use in the game (maybe they are - it's difficult to tell that without spoilers which I don't want)

QED I think that shows.

[potterr]

The upgrade the skulls give you is definitely worth it, it opens up those hard to reach areas massively.