The failures of this otherwise good game...

[Naem]

Just had a look at this game again, reminiscing on the good moments when it was a fresh experience, but some design choices still bug me...

1. Overwhelming amount of items (upgrades):
Sometimes you'll spend more time sorting through them than actually playing the game. A skill based system rewarding the player at the end of a mission with a few good upgrades would probably give you a more accomplished feeling than the current amount of useless item drops off of enemies (and no, more item drops won't help!). You may choose to just ignore it and fuse those at some point which will still require a large amount of time (if you have the resources).
A small change like restricting item drops to elite enemies and/or bosses would help in reducing clutter, as long as those upgrades are more meaningful.

2. Luck based systems:
a) Miss chance on guns.
b) Crit chance instead of crit areas on every enemy type (-> skill based).

3. Generic weapons:
Well, this is not so much a "failure" but a valid design choice (.. at least in terms of development time). Still most guns and melee weapons just feel the same. Adding more will also not help in making it more interesting.

4. Useless parry mechanic?!
The recently added skill alleviate this issue somewhat, but you're probably always better off continuing to do damage than trying to parry an attack. Main problem is the responsiveness of executing a parry, you will have to stop attacking for longer than what feels ~natural~.

Other than that, the environments are beautiful, level design (yes, generated.. still good job!), the story engaging (i'm not that demanding) and the gameplay is... was fun.

[slo]

Well, I've got a couple to add.

5. Random resists and vulnerabilities.
You can't just get an acid gun to use it against all robots because robots aren't vulnerable to acid. They're actually are more likely to have a resist for acid than vulnerability.
Likely you can't have a gun against flesh or against ghosts etc etc.
Which makes all the guns basically the same, because who has time to READ all that stuff in text during combat? I don't, and I don't want to.
All of the enemies from a particular class of enemies should be vulnerable to a particular element. And in every encounter there should be a majority of enemies of a particular type. To a) make combat situations readable. b) for there to be combat situations at all. Because now it is mostly just white noise.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1137600953
What? FIVE items to read in combat? Is this a reading club or a shooting club?
I kind of like both, but not at the same time.

6. Teleporting monsters.
Not only you have to read a writing on a specific guy to shoot it with a specific gun, but it's likely to teleport all around the place, which makes it impossible to track. So why even bother.
I don't think enemies should teleport in a game with a strong crowd control.

7. Reloading based perks and upgrades.
Reloading SUCKS. ALWAYS. You should not ever-ever-ever make an upgrade that makes it worse, because it already sucks to begin with.
Instead, have a whole class of guns that don't need to reload at all or do it super quickly!

8. Ammo control.
I'm tired of clicking empty guns. Switch a gun. *click* Empty. Switch a gun. *click* Empty. Switch a gun. *click* Oh, FFS! What's the point of all this guns if half of them are either empty or not loaded all the time? I can't even consistently use the few guns I have that don't have reloading, because they're all are soon out of ammo.
Make them all reload automatically in the background and replenish ammo before each mission. Why? To make the game fun.

8. Make chests highly visible. Looting them is enough of a stop in the gameplay already. Looking for them is just a waste of time. Come on, it is an action game.

9. There's no fall damage! BUT...
There's a whole lot of bottomless pits, that we WILL punish you for falling into.
What's the point of the whole "no fall damage" then?

tl;dr:
It's not borderlands 2, therefore it sucks.

[Chaos Epoch]

"It's not borderlands 2" is exactly why it's good.

[slo]

Originally posted by Chaos Epoch:

"It's not borderlands 2" is exactly why it's good.

If by that you mean "Does not bring any money to the pitchford buttface", then I'm fully with you.

[Dyro_B]

@OP

1: I agree that the amount of items is overwhelming. But you can fairly easy sort them by type/effect, so you can easily compare the same type of items.

I never parry in this game btw :p

@slo

5: It's making the game fun that way, if you ask me. It ''forces'' you to use different weapons with different elements, and different tactics. Also, all elements have their own color, easy to reconize what to use. A tip; just pick a fav weapon, and use that one when crowded and kill the majority with it so you can focus on the ones who are resistent. If the majority doesn't die quickly just switch to another element weapon and try it again. Dashing away a bit from enemies for switching weapons and/or healing a bit is part of the game.

6: Not all monsters teleport, and those who do, is fine that they do. Adds more tactics, for me that's fun.

7: Theres either a skill or a gem that reloads auto when gun put away. But;

8: Learn to play as melee ninja ^^ Way more fun, and no ammo required!

8.2: Chest are highly visable on the map, orange boxes, with the map it's kinda peace of cake to find them. Fun part of these Shadow Warrior games is exploring. You can enlarge the map on the screen btw, via M, so they are even faster to spot.

9: So that means that those bottomless pits are indeed bottemless, and thus certain death, and that it's not a teleportal to port you back to the map.

Game is lots of fun.

[Abyssrocker]

As a big fan of the game, those are all extremely valid points that I wish they'd address.

Gunplay in particular takes too great of a hit because it is so much more forgiving to use melee weapons.

Tight hitboxes are no issue for melee's broad strokes, no reloads to slow you down, no penalties for speed, and some gold/orange gems even lose their negative effect automatically.


As for elements, while I agree that they add a sense of tactics, there are two huge problems:
1. Aura damage should be removed, period. If an enemy wants to kill you, they should lift their lazy arm to do so.

2. Despite an apparently lethal aura around enemies, they somehow don't kill one another when in close proximity. I only bring this up because it's one thing to face a small mob of one elemental type, but it gets frustrating to fight a mix of every element, possibly with some innate invulnerability thrown into the equation, which severely limits the combat. Combined with far too much "physical resistance," and you're spending too much time switching between weapons not because of their own tactical advantages, but because of an overly prevalent element system in place.

The idea of robots being weak to acid rather than resistant simply makes sense, and especially at the highest difficulty levels would it balance out the fun if you could always rely on certain enemies being weak to *something* instead of having to read a bunch of text in a fast paced game.

Finally, my proposal for the loot issue is to make gold and orange far more rare overall, with a much lower chance to include negative effects. This balances out the problem that affects guns the most, while also making gold and orange drops feel like actual rewards.

Next, even rarer are gold and orange drops *with* a negative effect, but that are also a notably higher level than the usual drops and might even have a rare or exotic effect.

On top of this, elite enemies all drop orbs to help remove negative effects from gems, and orbs are made a rare general drop in smaller quantities by difficulty scaling.

Why? Because it can take several *hundred* orbs to purify a single gem, which might not even last you that long. Maybe of a level 80 orange gem was only 30 orbs to purify, it would be fine, but the scaling is too high for the end result. I had a similar situation the other day on a new playthrough in which a gem would have cost over 300 orbs to puify, which at insanity 2 means 10 trials grinded out. This is no longer fun, but tedious, and all of it could be fixed by making orange and gold drops feel like actual rewards in the first place.

Shadow Warrior 2 doesn't have the weapon drop rates like Borderlands or Destiny, using gems instead, so by weighing them down with detrimental, negative effects, they are less "rare items" highly sought after, but the first step to either crafting RNG or grinding for orbs, after which they might not even be worth it anymore.

[Bankai9212]

^ Actually the gunplay in this game is handled better then then original. You didn't need to grind money to make guns marginally better, and even then they were still weak with all the upgrades. Plus with health on karma strikes you can just melee for the entire game and rarely use guns.

[Mister Torgue Flexington]

Originally posted by LivingDeadDraugr:

As a big fan of the game, those are all extremely valid points that I wish they'd address.

Gunplay in particular takes too great of a hit because it is so much more forgiving to use melee weapons.

Tight hitboxes are no issue for melee's broad strokes, no reloads to slow you down, no penalties for speed, and some gold/orange gems even lose their negative effect automatically.


As for elements, while I agree that they add a sense of tactics, there are two huge problems:
1. Aura damage should be removed, period. If an enemy wants to kill you, they should lift their lazy arm to do so.

2. Despite an apparently lethal aura around enemies, they somehow don't kill one another when in close proximity. I only bring this up because it's one thing to face a small mob of one elemental type, but it gets frustrating to fight a mix of every element, possibly with some innate invulnerability thrown into the equation, which severely limits the combat. Combined with far too much "physical resistance," and you're spending too much time switching between weapons not because of their own tactical advantages, but because of an overly prevalent element system in place.

The idea of robots being weak to acid rather than resistant simply makes sense, and especially at the highest difficulty levels would it balance out the fun if you could always rely on certain enemies being weak to *something* instead of having to read a bunch of text in a fast paced game.

Finally, my proposal for the loot issue is to make gold and orange far more rare overall, with a much lower chance to include negative effects. This balances out the problem that affects guns the most, while also making gold and orange drops feel like actual rewards.

Next, even rarer are gold and orange drops *with* a negative effect, but that are also a notably higher level than the usual drops and might even have a rare or exotic effect.

On top of this, elite enemies all drop orbs to help remove negative effects from gems, and orbs are made a rare general drop in smaller quantities by difficulty scaling.

Why? Because it can take several *hundred* orbs to purify a single gem, which might not even last you that long. Maybe of a level 80 orange gem was only 30 orbs to purify, it would be fine, but the scaling is too high for the end result. I had a similar situation the other day on a new playthrough in which a gem would have cost over 300 orbs to puify, which at insanity 2 means 10 trials grinded out. This is no longer fun, but tedious, and all of it could be fixed by making orange and gold drops feel like actual rewards in the first place.

Shadow Warrior 2 doesn't have the weapon drop rates like Borderlands or Destiny, using gems instead, so by weighing them down with detrimental, negative effects, they are less "rare items" highly sought after, but the first step to either crafting RNG or grinding for orbs, after which they might not even be worth it anymore.

actually dude, you're better off farming some of the mini-bosses (like Lord-of-War or TL-Devourer) who drops Orbs everytime they're killed

[Abyssrocker]

Gunplay is a major improvement over 2013, but strictly speaking on the hardest difficulty setting, the game abuses the hell out of physical resistance and elemental resistance such that guns have a tendency to be extremely weak.

Now, of course there is the fact that this is the hardest difficulty, but it seems a bit too heavy-handed to just make enemies resist everything instead of almost anything else.

I find that gun builds just end up suffering so much more because of the game's treatment of the various damage factors, when it has the potential to truly shine far brighter than it does now. It's already more satisfying than Doom 2016, but doing a new playthrough, I'm seeing how some people could get frustrated as you have to work through these slogs when you simply cannot put out enough damage because of the stats. Instead of hitting a skill ceiling, you can wind up with underpowered guns/gems for the job, and very little recourse.

One of the best ideas I've read is to just treat guns with their own leveling, so the more you use a gun (or sword) , the more proficient you can become with it. That would certainly promote more experimentation, and it fits in with the RPG side of the game.

But if I had to pick one weapon in the game that indisputably exemplifies this problem with guns, look no further than the Sidekick, a gun so weak that it can't even kill some of the most basic enemies in the tutorial mission.

The only two current solutions are 1. Damage boost, or 2. Critical bonuses. The latter actually feels like a bit of a cheat, since you turn critical hits (skill) into higher odds for any old shot, yet you end up sucking it up because the alternative is bullet sponge hell.

*As a side note, I also think you should be able to land a critical strike in an enemies weak point with a melee weapon, tooz rather than make that purely chance.

Originally posted by Mister Torgue Flexington:

actually dude, you're better off farming some of the mini-bosses (like Lord-of-War or TL-Devourer) who drops Orbs everytime they're killed

I would probably do that more if it weren't for the load times, but you're right. One enemy + minions generally is a lot easier and quicker than most trials.

If it was like Borderlands 2, though, then it would be a lot smoother sailing. I don't have much spare time to play, so the grinding does get old, which is why I really would have liked to see them add the orbs to the regular loot table. The trials and mini bosses aren't the most exciting parts of the game ; I've had far more insane battles in Calamity Town against hordes of giant monsters and minions swarming the place, and those types of situations warrant more reward than a few gems I'd have to purify anyway.

late edit: I'm currently looking through the unofficial mod tools to see if I can find a way to disable the enemy aura damage, so wish me luck on that front...