Love this game, but some things are extremely irritating...

[Antroid]

I'll just go ahead and list things that make my blood boil in this game. Good thing that when these things aren't a factor everything else is so fun that I keep coming back. It's very addictive, really. The music is great too.

Okay, these are all in order of decreasing offense, so from the worst to the least annoying things.

1) "Kick and grab only" missions. I succeeded a couple of these early on, but now they are my bane and a guaranteed fail most of the time. First of all, how the hell do I reliably defeat anyone with grabs? I managed to slam some bikers into some environment objects like twice, but most of the time there isn't anything. The grabs don't even last at all so I have to line up and grab someone right before an obstacle. Besides, why the hell can't I just hold grab and have my biker hold his arm out to automatically grab someone? The same with sticky bombs, by the way. And, while I'm at it, I saw this suggestion somewhere, but it should totally be possible to ready a melee attack so that you don't have to tactically time swings - it's a fun challenge but sometimes it's really annoying - perhaps have it so that you can't hold them for too long, only several seconds? The bombs and grabs too - I get that timing it all is a challenge in and of itself, but more often than not it's not a fun challenge for me, and I would love to have a way to prep those things, maybe with a penalty on their power. Like less time for a grab and before a bomb explosion, and a weaker melee swing.

But anyway, very often there even isn't almost any incoming traffic either so even kicks don't help, and for some reason kicking people down an abyss doesn't tend to even give me the kill. And more often than not these missions give me way less time than reasonable to complete them. Now I'm all for a challenge and all but when in campaign+ I encounter this mission, it gives me like one minute, no incoming traffic, an empty wide track and a horde of armored bikers all in one crowd, what am I to do? There should never be unwinnable situations like that.

2) Speaking of missions I just don't want to deal with and prefer to quit just to save my nerves, those frikkin car rains. Now I saw it somewhere that you guys were planning to fix them so that they don't just fall directly in front of you without any chance to avoid. But why would you include them when they're so stupid and need fixing? Especially when such a mission occurs at night, there's no way in hell it's anything but an excercise in pointless frustration.

3) Bikers that crap timed bombs. Those huge red numbers obstruct the view, it isn't even fun to dodge them or anything (because sometimes you pass right by and they don't do anything, and sometimes they magically blow you up like a second after you passed one by), they keep blowing up people I could have killed and earned something for it, they just overall cause uncontrollable chaos. Now, again, a good amount of chaos in a game like this is obviously fun and pretty much required, but I feel that sometimes it just reaches extremely stupid levels when in front of me the whole road is covered in smoke and explosions and I can't even see anything I should be actively avoiding before it's too late. And the screen shakes and blurs too, as if it wasn't hard enough to see anything!

4) Crashes and how long it takes to get respawned. I get that crashes are supposed to be penalized, but first of all, about 90% of the time it doesn't feel like a crash was my fault, and secondly, when it shows me my flailing ragdoll and everything else speeds away, it's the most frustrating thing ever and I usually just genuinely scream something like "I get it, move on!" - and I'm not even a screaming-at-videogames type of person. I play stuff like dark souls and volgarr in complete calmness. That should say something.

5) Small thing, but when I tab out during loading my mouse cursor is locked to the middle of the screen. Not gameplay related but it has been extremely annoying.

6) another small thing, quitting the game is too slow. Why can't I just quit out of a race without having to go through several additional loading screens showing me my measly rewards that I usually don't care about since I, you know, quit manually? This is especially bad when I want to quit after assigning my experience without starting another round of the campaign. I have to wait for it to load mission objectives, then the mission, then quit and see my zero esperience, and only after all that I can mercifully quit the game for real.

7) the grapple will often latch onto something unexplicably behind me when I shoot it even at something pretty distant. It just has these periods during which no matter where I shoot it, it attaches to something beyond the camera boundaries instead. And if I die while it is attached to something, it stays so when I respawn when it obviously should detach in that case.

8) as a level designer by trade and on the side as well, it almost physically hurts me to see things like the buildings in the rooftop races being blatantly suspended above a flat colored plane, which is sometimes perfectly visible - there should always be some sort of cloud/fog layer down there, IMO - or when I finish a track and the location just ends with it, even though I still have time before the fade-out to look at all the glorious emptiness in front of me.



And please don't get me wrong, I find this game to be amazingly fun and have been coming back for days since I bought it - but when I quit, it's usually a ragequit at something completely ridiculous and unfair that made me lose. By the way, I absolutely love the rooftop missions and I think those are my favorites by far, especially the jump jet challenges with all the grapple hook action. They are the most controllable and have the most fair challenge about them, even if they aren't actually a challenge. I wish I could just have an endless rooftop jump jet + grapple race mode, or maybe like some sort of endurance version of it that lasts until the first time I fall (and the put me back on track button is disabled or fails me too).
Oh well.

[KingmakersDev_IanFisch]

Thank you for your feedback. We're going to look into all of these issues.

The grab and kick missions definitely need improvement. I think that if we're going to keep them at all, we're going to have to make sure there's a bunch of stuff on the sides of the roads in which to kick people into.

Car rain also needs balancing so it's a lot easier to avoid cars that come out of nowhere. We'll also probably make it a far more rare occurrence.

Whenever you die or crash, it should always feel like it was your fault. So that's just bad design on our part. Unavoidable hits are never fun. So we're going to work on improving that aspect too.

The respawn time after you crash might be shortened a little, but it's already pretty short compared to a lot of racing games. A lot of people want you to have to run back to your bike, which would make the respawn times far LONGER.

Anyway, we hear you loud and clear and will work on fixing these issues.

-Ian Fisch

[(-TN-) Sakaki]

Fully agree with 2, 3, and 7. Those are the main things that I hope are given a hard look, along with overly aggresive enemy car AI (which has been slightly improved recently, so the devs get credit for that). In my opinion, all of the other points listed are nitpicky -- 4, 6, and 8 especially so. An easy fix for 5: be patient for a couple of seconds and don't tab out during loading screens. I personally don't experience many problems with grab & kick only races, as there's almost always either a convenient car or rock to crash the enemy into when I grab them (as I almost never use kicks in those races, too unreliable for getting kills). I'm also never afraid of dying along with the enemy I'm crashing, as I'll still get credit for the kill and I can easily catch up with the nitro gained through the environmental kill (or with grapple shenanigans).

But yea, the game is a bit buggy, and the devs are hard at work. Just give it a bit of time.

Edit after seeing the dev post: If your bike crashes when traveling at high speeds (nitro or grappling), the rider tends to fly REALLY far. I would personally not want to have to run back to the bike after that. If that feature ends up being implemented, please reduce the flying distance.

[TwistedSamurai1]

Nice and well developed arguments, I have found a few of these issues mysef.

[Antroid]

Originally posted by RoadRedemptionTeam:

Whenever you die or crash, it should always feel like it was your fault. So that's just bad design on our part. Unavoidable hits are never fun. So we're going to work on improving that aspect too.

The respawn time after you crash might be shortened a little, but it's already pretty short compared to a lot of racing games. A lot of people want you to have to run back to your bike, which would make the respawn times far LONGER.

The crashing part, I've felt that quite often I just can't see something coming. That might just be my fault, but maybe doing something about the general visibility could help. Maybe letting us zoom the camera in or out (quite often the issue seems to be the road's shape and I just can't see over a bend or hill or something), toning down the shaking and blurring, maybe even quickening the dissipation of dust and other stuff could help. Is there a key to look backwards like in some open world games? If not, it probably should exist as well.

I'll be paying more attention to this while playing now and see if I can determine if there's any actual unfair reason behind many crashes or if it just me being slow. I'll get back to you on that, because I don't want you guys feeling like you designed stuff badly and make it too easy when it might be just my sucky reaction times and my own need to improve.

However, I think I have a pretty good solution to remove irritation from the respawn time but keep a healthy penalty. The worst thing about it is being forced to actually watch the ragdoll flying for an arbitrarily long amount of time, while seeing everything drive away. So what if the respawn was near instantaneous, maybe an ability to press a button to skip looking at the ragdoll, BUT you either respawned further behind or the other drivers were put further automatically (teleported), fully keeping the resulting penalty of crashing. That does not diminish the consequences of crashing, heck, you could even tweak it to have stronger consequences, but the player doesn't have to painfully sit through it all happening, feeling helpless. But maybe it's only me who feels that way during crashes so who knows.

Also even though nobody has said anything about it, I would still like to apologize for the harshed tone of my OP but that's what happens when you decide to vent after a ragequit :D

[Mr Deanster]

What confused me about kick and grab missions is you can kinda slam the bikers head into his own bike but it does not count as a grab. A tip for these missions is to lure bikers when you are grabbing them into oncomming traffic it makes them much easier.

[Antroid]

Sometimes someone will get killed by something in these missions and it will scream at me about how weapons do not count even though I didn't attack anyone. But to compensate for that, there's often those wonderful log trucks somewhere way ahead of me getting damaged, the logs kill several people and for some reason I always get credit for that even if it wasn't me damaging the truck. Maybe if those trucks were set to spawn more in these missions, even if the unfair credit for trucks I didn't touch gets fixed, it could be a bit funner to beat them, because you could choose to use the logs against the enemies.

Also, I'm wondering, is there any sort of system to determine if I have lightly nudged or pushed a biker to his death without actual kicks and grabs? Because sometimes I just touch someone, they steer to the side, get hit by a car and I get credit. Sometimes I don't, though. So I'm not sure if it is even intended to be happening.

[The Cooper's Corner]

WOW! Since I bought the game I've been thinkin about creating a document quoting all the problems and things I think need review. And one of them is definitely the KICK AND GRAB. Hate the mode with all my guts. :( I second the OP by changing this all together or just removed them, IMHO no one is going to miss those.

[Antroid]

Originally posted by Señor Abrazos:

I second the OP by changing this all together or just removed them, IMHO no one is going to miss those.

For some reason my first several times with these I got very lucky or something, so I consistently and easily grabbed and dragged people into cars and stuff, and kicked them into traffic, and I thought they were a great reason to have to use the less-used moves you have. However, since then my luck just ran out and I rarely ever succeed this mission anymore. In my opinion, they should stay, but get tweaked in some way that makes those moves more useful in them. For example, no wide roads, more incoming traffic, log trucks, more objects on the sides that you can kick people into, more time for the missions as well.

[The Cooper's Corner]

You know what could be nice? Those SPECIFIC missions should have specific levels. Like a PIT a-la-Mortal-Kombat. So when you GET the actual kill you throw them off to some spikes. THERE YOU GO! You can even include a KILL CAM option. :P

[pre-eminence]

I don't want quicker respawn, I want to run to my bike :) I find the crashes for the most part are fair, I rarely get hit without seeing it coming and messing up, and when it does come from no where, well that just reminds me of road rash that little bit more, which imo is not a bad thing at all.

The big things for me, are no bike shop and online play, I know you are working on online play and im delighted with the game so far, but I really would love a bike shop lol

[Antroid]

Running to your bike sounds tedious as all hell, not to mention probably almost impossible to implement properly, what with the maps not being a completely flat plane and all. I don't know if I would keep playing if every crash resulted in having to run to my bike, or even having to watch the biker do it by himself. No thanks.

[pre-eminence]

Originally posted by therealantroid:

Running to your bike sounds tedious as all hell, not to mention probably almost impossible to implement properly, what with the maps not being a completely flat plane and all. I don't know if I would keep playing if every crash resulted in having to run to my bike, or even having to watch the biker do it by himself. No thanks.

In 2 player running to the end of the level because you knew your bike was going to blow was funny as anything to me and my friends in road rash. I respect that you do not enjoy it, thats fine.

To each his own.

[Antroid]

This game is not road rash, it is not trying to be road rash and making it closer to road rash will not always improve it. I wish people got that...

[pre-eminence]

Originally posted by therealantroid:

This game is not road rash, it is not trying to be road rash and making it closer to road rash will not always improve it. I wish people got that...

Never said it should be road rash, just pointed out why I liked running to my bike in the game that this is most similar to from my past.

I guess my comment of to each his own went over your head

[JMTAotP]

About the kick and grab missions:

1. If you have a hard time lining up your kicks, that is what the grab is for. You can grab someone, move them to the edge of the road, and kick them off the map. You can even kick them into a car if you time it right.

2. If you bump someone, and they crash, or hit a car, you get credit for taking them down.

3. For "stronger" kicks, swing your bike at your enemy before you kick them, this tends to send them flying for me. I do not really know if this actually makes them "stronger" kicks. It feels that way for me though.

I beat these missions really fast using the third option but my timing is pretty good. If you guys are able to grab someone though, and it seems like you guys are able to, then you will be able to do this mission no problem using option 1.