Restart button?

[Crackpunch]

Sometimes you take an unlucky hit that basically makes continuing pointless, so could we have a restart button so we don't have to waste our time waiting for the AI to kill us (or maybe a way to mitigate bad luck like being able to rest and heal half of the permanent damage). If possible a soft restart from the beginning of the current level would be preferred, with only a death sending you back to the last checkpoint.

[CatEatingMushrooms]

Originally posted by Luzilyo:

ah ok, yeah, that makes sense. still, i think you give a bit too much weight for luck. no amount of luck will be enough to get you through the first three levels if you're not at least somewhat decent at fighting. and since a restart button would put you back to the last checkpoint, it's pretty much the same as just finding an enemy and letting him kill you or looking for a hole to jump into. you'd still lose all progress since the last checkpoint, the only difference is that a restart button would be quicker.

regarding greaves, they don't really help much when getting hit in the thigh, since they only protect the lower legs (the thigh is the inner part of the upper leg? or am i understanding it wrong? english is not my main language). however, i think the best protection is always to not get hit in the first place, so it really helps to be good at dodging. even if it's just a basic maneuver of step forward + attack, immediately step back, repeat it can help a bit against getting hit.

I'm saying the opposite about luck, it's almost never luck but people won't learn that, and won't learn to get better if they aren't forced to face the risk of death. Not only may they never learn that their 'bad luck' was actually a mistake on their part, but they'll also never learn the challenge of properly managing their healing resources, which may just end up hurting them in future levels where healing items may or may not be more scarce. They'll also become reliant on that restart mechanic early on, even though later levels don't have checkpoints to restart from.

You're right about greaves; I was misusing the word "greaves" to refer to armor covering the thighs, but greaves cover your shins. Thigh armor is called a 'cuisse' or 'cuisses' which is a French word that literally translates to "thigh" in English.

[Luzilyo]

i just don't see how a restart button would be that much different from death. either press the button or get killed by some dude, it will still have the exact same result of making you restart from the last checkpoint.
they could even call it "suicide button" instead of "restart button" to make this more obvious.

[CatEatingMushrooms]

The point is that it's a crutch that you end up relying on rather than facing the challenge of being brought to near death, and overcoming it, and it will hurt you post-portal where you don't have those free checkpoints anymore; it serves no purpose after you go through the portal because, again, no more checkpoints; and it completely kills the game's immersion when the person struggling to survive and get out of the underworld just randomly commits suicide because they're mad they got hit once or twice.

Something like that just serves no purpose in a game like this, and would hurt the experience more than help it.

[Luzilyo]

i don't see how that will be such a great issue though. if people want to rely on that mechanic, they can already do so. just find any zombie, hit it once, go out of combat mode and let it hit you once or twice. boom, dead, restart from checkpoint. it's the exact same thing, just a bit more tedious, if you have already killed almost all zombies in a level before you decide that you want to restart.

only way to counter that would be to remove the checkpoints entirely. and like you said, after the portal there are no more checkpoints anyway, so it will never be possible to cheat yourself through the entire game, with or without restart button.

and if people don't want to use it because they see it as too immersion breaking, they don't have to. i think most people spend their time in a game without bringing up the escape menu unless they want to quit or change some settings for some reason, etc, so for most of the time it wouldn't even be visible.

[Crackpunch]

I wouldn't worry about immersion so much. It dies as soon as you do. Learning each level until you can get through with a satisfactory amount of health/resources is not immersive at all.

[DeathOnRedBull]

Originally posted by Crackpunch:

I just keep getting hit in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thigh. I only took two hits in a fight with one of the blue swordsmen, both in the thigh, dead. I dunno why I can't find any greaves this playthrough.

I had the same problem too. It's cuisses you want, not greaves. The red guys all carry them (and greaves, if you really need them, as well - there should have been loads before that level, though). First cuisses I'd found in the game were these ones, albeit rusty.

[Crackpunch]

Yeah I meant cuisses. I finally beat the last guy, kinda anticlimactic given how you can't face him properly without getting walloped. I resorted to bum rushing him with the special mace.