Is there any way to get rid of Angie?

[Emily]

We really had to add a persistent stalker type that knows exactly where you are at all times, is there a way to get rid of it or atleast disable it?

I was super into exploring the environment and experiencing the story but now I'm rushing through everything trying to not let this stupid thing catch me and it's made the game dramatically less fun.

I don't get it, maybe it's just not my type of thing at this point but man is it irritating when I'm hard intrigued into the world and then there comes an enemy type that just does not leave you alone.

Puh-lease tell me there's a way to get rid of this thing or disable it. Maybe I missed some tutorial or something that tells you how to permanently get rid of it for a zone.

[Emily]

Originally posted by Bud Weiser & Terence Pils:

I don't think so, the female pedant to Mr. X from Resident Evil 2.

Wellp, there goes this game for me then lol.

Angie hasn't been spooky in the least, just extremely annoying. Cause my idea of a fun time isn't doing laps around an area every time I get stumped on where to go or what to do.

Angie hasn't been spooky in the least, just extremely annoying.

Thanks for the info.

[Mike_Brasstoken]

Originally posted by Emily:

We really had to add a persistent stalker type that knows exactly where you are at all times, is there a way to get rid of it or atleast disable it?

I was super into exploring the environment and experiencing the story but now I'm rushing through everything trying to not let this stupid thing catch me and it's made the game dramatically less fun.

I don't get it, maybe it's just not my type of thing at this point but man is it irritating when I'm hard intrigued into the world and then there comes an enemy type that just does not leave you alone.

Puh-lease tell me there's a way to get rid of this thing or disable it. Maybe I missed some tutorial or something that tells you how to permanently get rid of it for a zone.

Sorry Angie has prevented your ability to explore, as that isn't the intent. We consciously try to limit her from situations where there is lore and encouraged exploration, but we've clearly missed a few spots. She generally spawns after the exploration phase of an area ends, which can encourage you to revisit the area later. Could you let us know the areas that were the biggest issue? I can see if we can tune that or if there are bugs present.

A few bits of data on Angie:

• Angie won't follow the player near/past wards (the banner posted in the ground with the snake like symbol coiling around two dots)
  
• Melee attacks will disable her for 30 seconds (we are considering increasing this to let you explore more). Sage does the most damage to her.
  
• Angie doesn't move while you are paused (reading lore/using gates, etc..)
  
• A salt trap disables her for 5 seconds
  
  Hopefully there is some help above or a path to lead us to improve the experience.Thanks

[Mike_Brasstoken]

Originally posted by Bud Weiser & Terence Pils:

Reminds me of "It follows" - the movie, not these little game.

It Follows was an inspiration for Angie -- perhaps a little too much. We have some bugs and tuning to investigate to improve the experience.

[Emily]

I'm just following the game's normal path, I'm at the part where I'm following Sunny into the mines, I cleared an area of the gloom, was trying to explore some more (I generally am much slower with horror games), been taking the time to read through notes and listen to the tapes, had her stop by while I was listening to one, had to cut that short, grab the tape and bolt out of there on multiple occasions, I tried to damage her in my game and that didn't seem to do anything, the attack went straight through her and put me in panic attack mode.

I also tried to toss salt to her once and that didn't seem to do anything, so I had no choice but to run laps around the area and rush through the house till I got annoyed with having to run laps around the place. At least in my game, she's fast as sin, but the problem compounded into her just intruding whenever I was trying to move on. Have a friend who is a bit further ahead on PS5 and complained about the same thing, except she was able to damage her with the sage stick which is what prompted me to try and fail at it too.

She didn't chase me back to the main camp, but there was absolutely nothing else to do back at main camp and once I went back she was still present in the area.

[Emily]

And I apologize for coming across as an ass, I genuinely like the game, has a PS3 era Silent Hill vibe (in a good way I promise) - I'm just not a fan of stalker type enemies, I think I had enough Mr. X for one lifetime.

I had figured out a decent solution for the microstuttering on my rig so that wasn't a huge bother, but idk if any of those just straight up broke Angie for me.

I'm playing on Standard difficulty btw and being as thorough as I possibly can.

[Emily]

Originally posted by Bud Weiser & Terence Pils:

If it's allowed to slide into your kindly words, Madame Emily, i would like to ask you, what kind of solution you've figured out for these micro-stutter-stalkers. Thank you.

It still stutters during shader compilation, but I don't get any stuttering otherwise.

Nvidia CP - set Vsync to Fast
Frame Limiter via RTSS
Added the-chant-win64-shipping.exe as an exploit protection exception

These are the common usages for me whenever I play a game built in UE4 to mitigate microstutters

[Emily]

Originally posted by Bud Weiser & Terence Pils:

Thank you very much for these guide, i only have to figure out what these exploit protection thing is. But i guess i get i somehow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzsHYeIpFP4

Try that, not the original guide I used but same process. Hope it helps

[Mike_Brasstoken]

Originally posted by Emily:

And I apologize for coming across as an ass, I genuinely like the game, has a PS3 era Silent Hill vibe (in a good way I promise) - I'm just not a fan of stalker type enemies, I think I had enough Mr. X for one lifetime.

I had figured out a decent solution for the microstuttering on my rig so that wasn't a huge bother, but idk if any of those just straight up broke Angie for me.

I'm playing on Standard difficulty btw and being as thorough as I possibly can.

Thanks for the encouragement and it isn’t our desire to reduce exploration. She shouldn’t pester you for awhile after that point though. There are a lot of banner wards around to escape to before waiting for her to back off for a bit. A designer and I just discussed some possible solutions to give the player more agency when they want to explore the environment.

You should be able to momentarily stop her by hitting her with 4-5 swings of the sage stick. If she starts to attack (listen for a screen or watch her animation) you can dodge quite safely.

Dodge to the side for her torpedo or dodge back for the vortex attack.

Hope this helps and we’ll post any updates on her behaviour in the future.

[Mike_Brasstoken]

Originally posted by Emily:

Originally posted by Bud Weiser & Terence Pils:

Thank you very much for these guide, i only have to figure out what these exploit protection thing is. But i guess i get i somehow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzsHYeIpFP4

Try that, not the original guide I used but same process. Hope it helps

Thanks for the guide and we should be updating with the pre-compiled shader patch very shortly. Half our team are testing it as we speak to positive results.

[Emily]

Originally posted by Mike_Brasstoken:

Originally posted by Emily:

And I apologize for coming across as an ass, I genuinely like the game, has a PS3 era Silent Hill vibe (in a good way I promise) - I'm just not a fan of stalker type enemies, I think I had enough Mr. X for one lifetime.

I had figured out a decent solution for the microstuttering on my rig so that wasn't a huge bother, but idk if any of those just straight up broke Angie for me.

I'm playing on Standard difficulty btw and being as thorough as I possibly can.

Thanks for the encouragement and it isn’t our desire to reduce exploration. She shouldn’t pester you for awhile after that point though. There are a lot of banner wards around to escape to before waiting for her to back off for a bit. A designer and I just discussed some possible solutions to give the player more agency when they want to explore the environment.

You should be able to momentarily stop her by hitting her with 4-5 swings of the sage stick. If she starts to attack (listen for a screen or watch her animation) you can dodge quite safely.

Dodge to the side for her torpedo or dodge back for the vortex attack.

Hope this helps and we’ll post any updates on her behaviour in the future.

Of course, it was wrong of me to assume the intention was to cut off exploration, I like over analyzing environments, without spoiling anything, I was a huge fan of the environmental storytelling for that area done via notes and stuff lying around, it is absolutely phenomenal and your environmental artists did a beyond amazing job at it.

Exploration to me becomes essential in some titles due to this aspect and Angie was getting in the way of that a bit and is the primary reason I actively dislike stalker enemy types. I could gush about the overall design of the game for a while lol but that's not why I made the thread ha.

I only tried to hit her twice and my attacks didn't seem to have any form of registration to them and I thought merely coming into contact with her puts you into a Panic state, which feels like is what happened to me.

I guess I didn't really expect her to pop up from this particular instance cause you'd think clearing out a crossing from gloom would make it less spooky, but it just introduced a Mr. X counterpart, if there's ever a sequel to this game (I really hope there is) it would be cool to introduce the stalker type enemy if you have a sanity meter and let it run low.

Outside of that, I'm looking forward to that new patch, I'm gonna recommend the title on my socials as best I can. Thanks for your hard work Mike and the Team!

[Mike_Brasstoken]

Originally posted by Emily:

Originally posted by Mike_Brasstoken:

Thanks for the encouragement and it isn’t our desire to reduce exploration. She shouldn’t pester you for awhile after that point though. There are a lot of banner wards around to escape to before waiting for her to back off for a bit. A designer and I just discussed some possible solutions to give the player more agency when they want to explore the environment.

You should be able to momentarily stop her by hitting her with 4-5 swings of the sage stick. If she starts to attack (listen for a screen or watch her animation) you can dodge quite safely.

Dodge to the side for her torpedo or dodge back for the vortex attack.

Hope this helps and we’ll post any updates on her behaviour in the future.

Of course, it was wrong of me to assume the intention was to cut off exploration, I like over analyzing environments, without spoiling anything, I was a huge fan of the environmental storytelling for that area done via notes and stuff lying around, it is absolutely phenomenal and your environmental artists did a beyond amazing job at it.

Exploration to me becomes essential in some titles due to this aspect and Angie was getting in the way of that a bit and is the primary reason I actively dislike stalker enemy types. I could gush about the overall design of the game for a while lol but that's not why I made the thread ha.

I only tried to hit her twice and my attacks didn't seem to have any form of registration to them and I thought merely coming into contact with her puts you into a Panic state, which feels like is what happened to me.

I guess I didn't really expect her to pop up from this particular instance cause you'd think clearing out a crossing from gloom would make it less spooky, but it just introduced a Mr. X counterpart, if there's ever a sequel to this game (I really hope there is) it would be cool to introduce the stalker type enemy if you have a sanity meter and let it run low.

Outside of that, I'm looking forward to that new patch, I'm gonna recommend the title on my socials as best I can. Thanks for your hard work Mike and the Team!

Thanks for the encouragement. We really appreciate it and all the feedback. I think the reaction for Angie dying and doing her attacks are too close, so I will investigate a way to make that more obvious.

We actually experimented with having Angie spawn based on your mind level -- it was really hard to tune as players would miss her at key times, but we'd love to try to incorporate that in a future mode/sequel. One thing we would really like to do is diversify the difficulty levels some more, so this is a potential option. Angie could be relentless on a harder difficulty, and less on the lower one to give players a chance to explore and breathe in all the surroundings.

I'm going to create a pinned suggestions post for stuff like this. Thanks again.

Mike

[ChubbiChibbai]

I have to say that i find her terrifying. Some of the times she has popped up have really ratcheted up the tension.

She is also always in a location where there are lots of circle backs which means while you can't completely relax you can keep moving and avoid her for the most part even though she will be following.

So to be honest - as much as i hate her spawning because the sound litterally makes the hairs on my neck stand on end - i love it because this is exactly why i play games like this - to feel afraid and stressed out.

[Cthoolhoo]

Originally posted by dirtyCAT:

I have to say that i find her terrifying. Some of the times she has popped up have really ratcheted up the tension.

She is also always in a location where there are lots of circle backs which means while you can't completely relax you can keep moving and avoid her for the most part even though she will be following.

So to be honest - as much as i hate her spawning because the sound litterally makes the hairs on my neck stand on end - i love it because this is exactly why i play games like this - to feel afraid and stressed out.

i only felt her irritating

[Ouka]

I really don't like her and had I known there was a stalker type enemy in this game, I would most likely not have picked it up. I don't feel the fighting system in general is all that great, but as someone already mentioned: my attacks seem to go straight through her at times, which puts me into panic mode every time and made me quit the session in frustration multiple times already.

[Emily]

Originally posted by dirtyCAT:

I have to say that i find her terrifying. Some of the times she has popped up have really ratcheted up the tension.

She is also always in a location where there are lots of circle backs which means while you can't completely relax you can keep moving and avoid her for the most part even though she will be following.

So to be honest - as much as i hate her spawning because the sound litterally makes the hairs on my neck stand on end - i love it because this is exactly why i play games like this - to feel afraid and stressed out.

I would agree if this didn't force you to rush through the environment which is something I specifically mentioned above. I don't really like the idea of having to run around in circles every minute time I get a little stuck, I get the game isn't the most complex horror game out there in terms of puzzles, but it can get annoying after it happens more than once, it just slows the game's pace down to a screeching halt, even more so if she induces a panic attack and you have no choice but to run aimlessly until it wears off.

I guess the beauty of spooky games is how different people take to it, but I still don't think a stalker type belongs in a game that feels mostly linear like this, it just slows down the pace and makes you not want to explore.