Death Wish is perfect as it is.

[Vi]

Yes some missions are hard, but its called death wish for a reason. If you want to beat a contract so badly then enable Peace and Tranquility. Its called the no-judgement zone for a reason.

Just because you struggle with the difficulty doesnt mean you should cry for it to get lowered. Some find this kind of difficulty fun and challanging. GFB did a great job with the DLC.

[(Edgy) Asriel Dreemurr]

I don’t think any of the updates made the challenges easier. They only changed stuff like making P&T cost pons instead of yarn, and removing the five minute wait after 3 deaths.

[Vi]

Originally posted by (Edgy) Asriel Dreemurr:

I don’t think any of the updates made the challenges easier. They only changed stuff like making P&T cost pons instead of yarn, and removing the five minute wait after 3 deaths.

So far yeah, but I've seen some discussions with people yelling at GFB to make it easier

Originally posted by D YellowMadness:

No one thinks this unfairness & tedium is fun. You're tryharding & everyone knows it. No one's impressed.

I've been playing death wish with 8 other friends and we all love it. Sure its annoying at times, but the satisfaction of beating a hard mission has us all giddy. Again, if the missions are hard. Just do P&T.

[LaChouette]

I raged a lot on the very first Death Wish, but try after try, you find new ways to cut down your time. It's so satisfying when after being a bit slow to get to the first cool spot on your route you finally get there before the Snatcher even warns you.
Same with the Dead Bird Studio one, it's really cool when you bypass an area filled with penguins using a shortcut you found when playing the level normally.

Deah Wish is hard, I have only done two levels of it, and it's probably gonna make me rage more, but once you finally get it, once you manage to master some of the platforming, it feels satisfying and rewarding.

[killerkirby96]

frankly, i'd rather not beat every mission than beat every mission with peace and tranquility. yeah, i admit it. death wish is too hard for me. but i'd rather keep my honor and be defeated by a challenge that i can't beat. if i were to go easy mode, i would lose my honor by beating a toned down version of a mission i couldn't beat normally.

[Bouncer]

Just because it's hard doesn't make it automatically good. Your kind of thinking is exactly why a lot of devs just put barely any effort into a hard mode. Death Wish is unfair, unfun, and very poorly designed.

Mario Odyssey has some brutal bonus stages as well. Difference is, they don't suffer from poor controls, wonky physics, bad design or unfair nonsense.

Take the 10 seconds to destruction. You get stuck in the grates, in the ceiling, can fall through the floor, and at some point they just place explosive enemies everywhere 'cuz 'what is level design?', all while having a timer that does not allow for 'mistakes', even if they're caused by glitches.

Or the Mafia Boss who has an invisible wind attack/yell that makes you bounce around.

Or the mill where physics and momentum are more or less random.

Or boss rush where 1 boss takes longer than 3 others combined and health recovery is mostly based on RNG.

Every DW stage suffers from some sort of major design flaw like that.

[Skyblade799]

The mode has serious issues; it's far from "perfect". Go look at other games with high difficulties (Super meat boy, hollow knight, cuphead, dark souls, etc.) and see why those games are praised while deathwish in this is not so.

The character movements are at odds with the player's intentions often times (grabbing comes to mind), they aren't as precise, are tied to the characters direction and camera instead of just input for actions like dashes (games like dark souls only care about user input for attack/roll direction for instance), the camera fights the player, the challenges are often tedious, the levels require interacting with otherwise unintended items (like the wonky wall physics requires when doing jumpless challenges), and there are a lot of RNG elements at play in many levels.

I'd know; I 100% completed all of the challenges in those games (exclusing achievement only non-main ones like cotton alley no-death or hollow knight steel soul). This game has a lot of issues in comparison.

[Elzquiem]

Originally posted by Bouncer:

Just because it's hard doesn't make it automatically good. Your kind of thinking is exactly why a lot of devs just put barely any effort into a hard mode. Death Wish is unfair, unfun, and very poorly designed.

Mario Odyssey has some brutal bonus stages as well. Difference is, they don't suffer from poor controls, wonky physics, bad design or unfair nonsense.

Take the 10 seconds to destruction. You get stuck in the grates, in the ceiling, can fall through the floor, and at some point they just place explosive enemies everywhere 'cuz 'what is level design?', all while having a timer that does not allow for 'mistakes', even if they're caused by glitches.

Or the Mafia Boss who has an invisible wind attack/yell that makes you bounce around.

Or the mill where physics and momentum are more or less random.

Or boss rush where 1 boss takes longer than 3 others combined and health recovery is mostly based on RNG.

Every DW stage suffers from some sort of major design flaw like that.

Originally posted by CZSkyblade799:

The mode has serious issues; it's far from "perfect". Go look at other games with high difficulties (Super meat boy, hollow knight, cuphead, dark souls, etc.) and see why those games are praised while deathwish in this is not so

I'll just quote this because it's just too good and resumes it perfectly well.

I also don't need the game to mock me with useless screens when I decide to go P&T just because a speedrunner dev decided to make a point, and not a good challenge.

You have fun. This is good. I had also fun on the inflitration mission and also, the 10-sec train I've yet to succeed it (only tried in OHKO mode). Those are, in my opinion, without talking about bugs, RNG or physics, good example of "good challenges".

But this line...

Originally posted by VpIII:

Just because you struggle with the difficulty doesnt mean you should cry for it to get lowered. Some find this kind of difficulty fun and challanging. GFB did a great job with the DLC.

Just because you enjoy the unfair and masochist difficulty doesn't mean you should defend bad game design. I also like hard challenges, but right now, it's just better going into my usual competitive games where at least, I do not fight against the game, but helps me by giving me tools to have ultimately some fun. There is no middle ground to enjoy in DW right now.

Originally posted by VpIII:

Its called the no-judgement zone for a reason.

Oh, by the way, this is called "hypocrisy". If there really was no judgement, we would never have any philosophic screen, a different name for this difficulty or an annoying thing in-between, we would just have an option "Enable easy mode" and basta. Maybe it's not the devs intent that it can be read that way, but the game speaks for itself instead anyway.

[[Lizard Wizard]]

While you may think the difficulty is just fun it's quite unsuited for the audience this game has garnered.

Nigh on impossible/hectic requirments that are head bashingly hard do not suite this game at all and make these challenges true nightmares.

I do not play A Hat in Time to bang my head against a wall on challenges because they have artifical difficulty programed in. The challenges as stated are fine most just need fine tweaking to make them challenging but fair.

[Vi]

Originally posted by D YellowMadness:

Originally posted by VpIII:

So far yeah, but I've seen some discussions with people yelling at GFB to make it easier




I've been playing death wish with 8 other friends and we all love it. Sure its annoying at times, but the satisfaction of beating a hard mission has us all giddy. Again, if the missions are hard. Just do P&T.

The difficulty isn't the problem. The unfairness & tedium is. The mode is hard but it would still be hard even if it weren't unfair & tedious. Also, your scenario is false. You don't have 7 other people playing a semi obscure game on a mode that requires meta knowledge, luck, & trial-&-error & all being giddy about it. No such group of friends exists.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/489861042013470723/491308324344823829/unknown.

Im not friended with 2 but yes. I do have friends who enjoy this mode. One even died over 800 times doing train rush.Once he beat it he said it was one of the most fun times he had and he's glad he did it. As for the "unfairness and tedium" You need to adapt, learn, and tackle the missions from other angles. If you just dive in without plans sometimes, well of course you're going to fail.

[Elzquiem]

Originally posted by VpIII:

One even died over 800 times doing train rush.Once he beat it he said it was one of the most fun times he had and he's glad he did it.

You mentionned the train rush, and it's in my opinion one of the best ones (with the exception on the rng inside). So yeah, in that case of course, because it does not feel unfair.

Originally posted by VpIII:

As for the "unfairness and tedium" You need to adapt, learn, and tackle the missions from other angles. If you just dive in without plans sometimes, well of course you're going to fail.

I think we can all adapt, learn, and tackle things from other angles, Mr. Wright. But it's better when it's done with good game design, a reason why Nintendo is always on the top with Mario games.

So go on. Show your evidences. We're listening. Tell us how you tackle bosses bonus, the last boss rush and adapt against randomness and bugs. Also, if I want to plan something, I'd like to have access to full informations, like the invisible timers for speedrun bonuses.

[Vi]

Originally posted by Elzquiem:

Originally posted by VpIII:

One even died over 800 times doing train rush.Once he beat it he said it was one of the most fun times he had and he's glad he did it.

You mentionned the train rush, and it's in my opinion one of the best ones (with the exception on the rng inside). So yeah, in that case of course, because it does not feel unfair.

Originally posted by VpIII:

As for the "unfairness and tedium" You need to adapt, learn, and tackle the missions from other angles. If you just dive in without plans sometimes, well of course you're going to fail.

I think we can all adapt, learn, and tackle things from other angles, Mr. Wright. But it's better when it's done with good game design, an reason why Nintendo is always on the top with Mario games.

So go on. Show your evidences. We're listening. Tell us how you tackle bosses bonus, the last boss rush and adapt against randomness and bugs. Also, if I want to plan something, I'd like to have access to full informations, like the invisible timers for speedrun bonuses.

You cant really compare a triple A title with an indie game. However, im sure everyone would agree that AHIT has better bosses. As for the bugs, the devs are working at fixing them all, which is why we've been getting updates constantly. I faced bugs myself and all I can say is either work around it. or take the little steps to avoid the bugs. As for the invisible timer. Go to the game options and turn on the speedrun timer.

[Red]

The devs are only working on *Death Wish* related bugs, all the wonky physics and rather terrible controls at times are here to stay, they weren't changed in years, they aren't going to be changed now.

RNG is also way too prevalent not only throughout Death Wish but also in the main game, the difference being that in the main game it was a minor set back at best while in DW it can kill a half hour mission, forcing you to restart from 0.

You can only potentially play around a few issues here and there before the RNG completely obliterates your run. If you get to a point where a challenge's success is fully decided by RNG and by events you simply cannot predict then that challenge isn't really a challenge but a time sink because you were *never* going to beat that run to begin with. So even ignoring the horrible pacing and high difficulty in general DW will not be "Perfect" until they fix the randomness.

[Vi]

Originally posted by Red:

The devs are only working on *Death Wish* related bugs, all the wonky physics and rather terrible controls at times are here to stay, they weren't changed in years, they aren't going to be changed now.

RNG is also way too prevalent not only throughout Death Wish but also in the main game, the difference being that in the main game it was a minor set back at best while in DW it can kill a half hour mission, forcing you to restart from 0.

You can only potentially play around a few issues here and there before the RNG completely obliterates your run. If you get to a point where a challenge's success is fully decided by RNG and by events you simply cannot predict then that challenge isn't really a challenge but a time sink because you were *never* going to beat that run to begin with. So even ignoring the horrible pacing and high difficulty in general DW will not be "Perfect" until they fix the randomness.

The physics and controls are fine as is. I honestly don't know what complaints there would be, unless you're using MnK. As for RNG I also can't think of any times thats implimented besides certain boss patterns. Mind giving me some examples of the bad RNG?

[Red]

You just mentioned the worst RNG the mode has, and it's not just a small thing you can drop as a side note either because you eventually have to go through a literal boss rush and a lot of them require you to clear them without getting hit once, which when left to luck is just plainly unfair no matter the difficulty.

And I don't wanna discuss hitboxes and physics because people accustomed to bad ones will not see the glaring issues like the way the faucets work like in the very first DW mission. It's a waste of time.

[Detestable Geohound]

Originally posted by VpIII:

The physics and controls are fine as is.

The physics are fine for what they were originally designed for: the base game. Even for the new Chapter the physics is acceptable, although a little wonky.

A good majority of the Deathwish contracts do not remotely mesh well with the original physics and character movement. There are too many little things that add up very quickly that can destroy a timed run, sometimes before you've really even gotten started. Most of these things aren't usually the players fault because they are built in automatically, such as ledge grabbing or wall riding.

Death Wish by its nature is supposed to be hard, but difficulty is not purely the problem with Death Wish: the design is just very poorly done. You have missions that are very easy (Snatcher Coins, Community Rifts) mixed with missions that are essentially impossible without literally 50+ tries (or perfect execution while fighting the game itself). For starters, the easy missions should have been first, not at the very edges of the map.

Originally posted by VpIII:

Just because you struggle with the difficulty doesnt mean you should cry for it to get lowered. Some find this kind of difficulty fun and challanging.

There-in lies the true problem with this DLC. Some people like this difficulty, most do not (the core audience didn't go into this game with this kind of difficulty in mind).

And the really messed up part? People who do like that difficulty can literally self impose it on themselves; go ahead and do an entire mission without jumping no one will stop you. Hell, I used to do crazy Buster Only Runs in MegaMan X games (X2: No Armor, Buster only, Final Boss Level with Zero battle, taking no hits). But the reverse is simply not true by design; players who want a reasonable amount of difficulty cannot undo the game files without mods. The developers designed everything in reverse.

GFB really dropped the ball here, and as a kickstarter backer I'm actually now concerned about the game's future DLC, where before I was very optimistic.