Campaign mission's gameplay just bad.

[Aedwynn]

I'll get it clear - storytelling is okay, enemy placement, enemy types, tasks - they are mostly okay too, but everything else - is bad.
1) No cues when mission ends - player might want to explore a bit more and collect those orbs/money/loot, but no - he pulls a switch, gets too close to certain spot and mission just ends. Just mark that last action that it actually ends mission. Same for points of no return.
2) Actual difficulty depends way more on player bringing correct weapons than chosen perks or item lvl. Bringing short range/melee weapons to deal with zombies is okay, but will hurt you really bad when dealing with massed soldiers (unless you are dedicated melee class)
3) Most puzzles work well with gamepad but become clunky with KB+M.
4) Animations are super bad. Attack animations placing zombies inside player model resulting in weird displacements. Knocked down enemies still atacking character in melee while they didn't even start to get up. Weird hitboxes while enemies move make bullets pass without hitting target.
5) Most interactable environmental hazards are useless as they hit player only.
6) In many cases crucial mission information is missing. Like you need to protect that pump, instead of "waiting till it works", or kill ALL enemies, not just "advance forward".
All that just make you think of how to avoid those issues rather than staying focused on what you need to do.

[Ant Ra]

I am a new player with low experience atm. But even i can see that your points 2 and 4 are an annoying problem. Especially point 4.

The hitbox failure compared to this nooding dog behaviour of most zombie-clones gives a chance of 33% or something like that to hit the head properly. Shootguns or bursting fire in favour of assault rifles or other precise weapons. To play with sniper attitude fails pretty fast and long range shoots are not in sight right now.

All other points seems to be reasonable for alpha stage, i guess. But weapon balance and hitbox problems are a basic key and if ignored we will see that even after official release.

[Aedwynn]

Final mission is badly designed for solo play as well. It is doable, but it is more irritation than fun as bossfight is built around group fighting boss, not solo player. Killing boss without taking damage in solo is, waay too hard. And boss deals a lot of damage, that is for a regular player of level 10 -11(that's when he gets mission) is way too much and player basicaly has no way to regen health but to use medpacks. In the end it boils down to player bringing enough medkits and ammo boxes.

[The Raving Dragon]

point 2 ? what correct weapons i played all story mod with just a minigun called the vulcan never realy swaped much and hardly used powers

Originally posted by Aedwynn:

Final mission is badly designed for solo play as well. It is doable, but it is more irritation than fun as bossfight is built around group fighting boss, not solo player. Killing boss without taking damage in solo is, waay too hard. And boss deals a lot of damage, that is for a regular player of level 10 -11(that's when he gets mission) is way too much and player basicaly has no way to regen health but to use medpacks. In the end it boils down to player bringing enough medkits and ammo boxes.

are we playing the same game ? i soloed his ass on hard frist try no death used slow time skill to dodge and thats it also always have atlease 1 HP regen packs and a few med packs

[Aedwynn]

Originally posted by RaVeN:

point 2 ? what correct weapons i played all story mod with just a minigun called the vulcan never realy swaped much and hardly used powers

And that's why you claim weapons are properly balanced? Because you went through all game using only 1 and had no issues?

are we playing the same game ? i soloed his ass on hard frist try no death used slow time skill to dodge and thats it also always have atlease 1 HP regen packs and a few med packs

Same game. Did you try other weapons/builds? Like going with Xbow + katana, bubble shield and lightning ball for Gunner? Or do you again mistake single case for whole balance?

[The Raving Dragon]

i used a shotgun and slow down on the last boss dose that count ?

[Aedwynn]

Originally posted by RaVeN:

i used a shotgun and slow down on the last boss dose that count ?

Try using chimaera launcher. As I said it boils down to player having "correct" weapon and in case of boss "correct" perk. Then Boss is really trivial, but can you say it is fair to other perk combos or weapons that player put his effort in to be absolutely useless?

[hazzamanazz]

Originally posted by Aedwynn:

Originally posted by RaVeN:

i used a shotgun and slow down on the last boss dose that count ?

Try using chimaera launcher. As I said it boils down to player having "correct" weapon and in case of boss "correct" perk. Then Boss is really trivial, but can you say it is fair to other perk combos or weapons that player put his effort in to be absolutely useless?

I have to disagree with you, since you can complete the game with any weapon available, even the most common of them, like the shotgun Jane receives, the pistol/rifle Gunar has and the sword/bow Kay have.
I finally got my hands in the legendary version of the Epirus (that's the name of the bow) and WoW.

I'm amazed what you can do with it.
Hell, I completed the assault on Wagner's lab with only a sword.

The main point is every weapon has some pros and cons. The Chimaera is very powerfull, but is extremelly slow to start firing; the Epirus is restricted to one shot one kill, same as the Onyx (the disc launcher); the Equinox, a crossbow, is EXTREMLLY powerfull and capable of dispatching a large crowd in one shot, but don't even think firing at closer range, because you will also die in one single shot; the Fury combat machinegun is extremelly inaccurate, but has a very large magazine and is perfect for CQC combat.

Maybe if you refine your strategy depending of the wepon you can achieve better results.

I agree with you regarding the enviromental hazards, they should be abel to damage zombies, therefore we could use them to build traps for them.

[Aedwynn]

Originally posted by hazzamanazz:

Originally posted by Aedwynn:

Try using chimaera launcher. As I said it boils down to player having "correct" weapon and in case of boss "correct" perk. Then Boss is really trivial, but can you say it is fair to other perk combos or weapons that player put his effort in to be absolutely useless?

I have to disagree with you, since you can complete the game with any weapon available, even the most common of them, like the shotgun Jane receives, the pistol/rifle Gunar has and the sword/bow Kay have.
I finally got my hands in the legendary version of the Epirus (that's the name of the bow) and WoW.

I'm amazed what you can do with it.
Hell, I completed the assault on Wagner's lab with only a sword.

The main point is every weapon has some pros and cons. The Chimaera is very powerfull, but is extremelly slow to start firing; the Epirus is restricted to one shot one kill, same as the Onyx (the disc launcher); the Equinox, a crossbow, is EXTREMLLY powerfull and capable of dispatching a large crowd in one shot, but don't even think firing at closer range, because you will also die in one single shot; the Fury combat machinegun is extremelly inaccurate, but has a very large magazine and is perfect for CQC combat.

Maybe if you refine your strategy depending of the wepon you can achieve better results.

I agree with you regarding the enviromental hazards, they should be abel to damage zombies, therefore we could use them to build traps for them.

You are quite confused about weapons. Unlike you I actually tried a bunch of them on different enemies, not just watched stats and theorycrafted how I would play it without actually doing so.
Yes, you can beat any level with any gun combination but it will be heaven or hell depending on what you chose. Katana trivializes zombies because it's powerful attack has range surpassing zombie's attack and wipes them in one blow. Knuckles don't have range or power so you often take damage in return unlike Katana where you take damage only when animation bugs out. That's why I always have it on me vs zombies. Fury is very meh because it doesn't have "very large magzine", it has 40 rounds vs 30 with accuracy of 56% vs 80%. Vulcan has large magazine, Fury doesn't. So it rans out of ammo just a bit later than assault rifle, but with it's accuracy you go for body shots mostly, not for headshots, significantly increasing number of bullets you have to put in target. So it's equal to rifle, just you don't need to aim much but reload way slower.
And all that brings us back to boss. As I said, just try doing Eye Boss with Gunnar. With bubble and lightning perks, with Xbow and Katana. You will easily get to it using Katana to cut through all those zombies, BUT.
Bubble doesn't work against that boss well, as it stops bullets only, it does not stop explosions. So bosse's barage hits you even in the bubble, unless you put that bubble between you and boss and never actually stay in it. But with that you will have very little openings to fire at boss, battle drags out way too long, you take way more damage and eventually ran out of medkits. Switch Xbow to plasma assault rifle, bubble to bullettime. You will have to refill your primary ammo 2-4 times but your time shooting at boss drastically increases because in bullettime you can shoot and dodge, so you down him in 5 minutes using but a few medpacks (and a lot of ammo boxes).

[hazzamanazz]

Originally posted by Aedwynn:

You are quite confused about weapons. Unlike you I actually tried a bunch of them on different enemies, not just watched stats and theorycrafted how I would play it without actually doing so.

Yes, you can beat any level with any gun combination but it will be heaven or hell depending on what you chose. Katana trivializes zombies because it's powerful attack has range surpassing zombie's attack and wipes them in one blow. Knuckles don't have range or power so you often take damage in return unlike Katana where you take damage only when animation bugs out. That's why I always have it on me vs zombies. Fury is very meh because it doesn't have "very large magzine", it has 40 rounds vs 30 with accuracy of 56% vs 80%. Vulcan has large magazine, Fury doesn't. So it rans out of ammo just a bit later than assault rifle, but with it's accuracy you go for body shots mostly, not for headshots, significantly increasing number of bullets you have to put in target. So it's equal to rifle, just you don't need to aim much but reload way slower.

And all that brings us back to boss. As I said, just try doing Eye Boss with Gunnar. With bubble and lightning perks, with Xbow and Katana. You will easily get to it using Katana to cut through all those zombies, BUT.
Bubble doesn't work against that boss well, as it stops bullets only, it does not stop explosions. So bosse's barage hits you even in the bubble, unless you put that bubble between you and boss and never actually stay in it. But with that you will have very little openings to fire at boss, battle drags out way too long, you take way more damage and eventually ran out of medkits. Switch Xbow to plasma assault rifle, bubble to bullettime. You will have to refill your primary ammo 2-4 times but your time shooting at boss drastically increases because in bullettime you can shoot and dodge, so you down him in 5 minutes using but a few medpacks (and a lot of ammo boxes).

For what I understood you want ANY gun to do the same job, regardless if it's a anti-tank shell or a anti-air missile.
Of course you have to chose your weapon carefully, but this choice is related of how you play (agressive, passive, at range, CQC, etc).

Take the lowest shotgun in the game, the Velvet. Tthe range is not good, the accuracy is bad unless you aim down the sights and you need to be very close to the target to actually kill it in one shot.
But has the fastest reload of the three pump shotguns available in the game.
So what do you do? Try to shot at range with her? I don't think this would work.

I think the problem is not the guns, but the way the game flows. It doesen't matter if your weapon isn't the most powefull, like the Katana since you mentioned, or if the magazine of the weapon holds few rounds. What it matters is if the gun reloads fast, do decent damage and can kill zombies quickly (wich Fury does, BTW).
Juggernaut is one of the best shotguns in my opinion because of this.

Usually I upgrade some weapons stats, specially the reload speed and magazine size. If you go for the full upgrade Fury has 80 rounds and reloads quite fast.
40 rounds it's with no upgrades or the default white one, wich is given freely to the player.
And ANY white weapon is actually a POS, BTW, because they can't be upgraded and they only work for the level they are given.
Advance one level and your weapon becomes obsolete and won't do much damage unless you kill zombies with headshots.

I don't think people will gonna like to hear this but I will say it: Gunnar is bad, weak and the middle ground between the crowd control Jane has and the CQC specialization Kay has.
And because the lack of specialization Gunnar sucks. Hard.

Jane can do the same thing Gunnar do with her Leash ability, wich locks a single enemy in a gravitational field and at the same time you still can shot at him, unlike the bubble Gunnar has (but bosses aren't affected, only slowed).
Her Chooser of Slain is fantastic on the other hand, because you pull one enemy close and push the rest back, even bosses, so you can actually concentrate on him while the zombies are pushed far away.
Her Equinox ability makes fighting soldiers a breeze, since they can't hurt her, but she can shot back, unlike Gunnar barrier.

Kay is even better if you like CQC. His Devastation ability does more than 16.000 points of damage in level 14, only bosses don't die from this power in a single hit, all others zombies do. Depending how you play you have two choices with him: pull enemies close or push enemies back, with his thrown and push abilities.
Or you can go beserk and add 200% more damage to your melee attacks with his Zeal ability.

Regarding melee, it's funny actually. The first thing I do with Gunnar and Jane is get rid of their pistols and equip them with a katana or the machete variations.
The knuckles, razor pick and the axe (Fixcar Chopmaster) are simply not worthy the investement in my opinion.
The knuckles lack range, the razor pick is very meh and the axe wastes tons of stamina (but at later stages of the game, when you are swimming in money, armor, implants and weapons, if you decide to invest it's actually a devastating weapon, the most powerfull melee in terms of raw damage).

One question: do you equip your katana with the heal codex (Vampagrade)?
This is pretty much required, because is almost certainty receiving damage when using melee.
This codex saved me a lot of times, specially when the game starts to cheat and out of nowhere you receive a barrage of grenades.

Then you look and is a single grenadier on the other side of the map. LOL

[Aedwynn]

I certainly do use my Katana with Vampgrade as well as balance, but way different from knife or fists I very rarely take damage from zombies unless as I said animations bug out and:
1) grenadier simply drops on the floor and slides to me as if being on sled then explodes on me,
or
2) I run to knocked down zombie to finish him off but he strikes back despite still lying on the floor
On other points you said, I don't want all guns being the same. But I see too much of performance difference here like with all melee weapons (that do act the same - hit enemies up close with variations to range, speed and damage) beside ones with best range are way too useless regardless of your strategy. You akcnowledge yourself game has balance issues, but for some reason narrow it to characters while I simply state weapons have issues too. And problem here is: a guy a few posts above wrote that he went through whole story with Gunnar using Vulcan minigun, never feeling need to change it (and added that he specced bullet time). Me for example, never ever saw Minigun as a drop or on sale (saw it on sale today for first time in 12 levels) or some other guns. Never. And respeccing character costs increasing sum of money all the while game requires specific weapon set/ skill set to comforatbly (still challenging) beat certain fights. Because otherwise instead of intense fight for 5 minutes you got a 40 minute fight where you just crawl to the goal. Really lowers build variations.

[hazzamanazz]

Originally posted by Aedwynn:

I certainly do use my Katana with Vampgrade as well as balance, but way different from knife or fists I very rarely take damage from zombies unless as I said animations bug out and:
1) grenadier simply drops on the floor and slides to me as if being on sled then explodes on me,
or
2) I run to knocked down zombie to finish him off but he strikes back despite still lying on the floor
On other points you said, I don't want all guns being the same. But I see too much of performance difference here like with all melee weapons (that do act the same - hit enemies up close with variations to range, speed and damage) beside ones with best range are way too useless regardless of your strategy. You akcnowledge yourself game has balance issues, but for some reason narrow it to characters while I simply state weapons have issues too. And problem here is: a guy a few posts above wrote that he went through whole story with Gunnar using Vulcan minigun, never feeling need to change it (and added that he specced bullet time). Me for example, never ever saw Minigun as a drop or on sale (saw it on sale today for first time in 12 levels) or some other guns. Never. And respeccing character costs increasing sum of money all the while game requires specific weapon set/ skill set to comforatbly (still challenging) beat certain fights. Because otherwise instead of intense fight for 5 minutes you got a 40 minute fight where you just crawl to the goal. Really lowers build variations.

Of course the game has balance issues, it's a early access game.
Usually I don't buy these games because of that and other problems, but since I liked the first Dead Space a lot I thinked why not give it a shot.

If devs are reading this, one suggestion: I liked the zombies with yellow glowing eyes much more than with red ones.

As I was saying, yes, the game has balance issues regarding the weapons AND zombies.
Zombies dropped on the floor because we severed them both legs have a tendency to become ultra-fast, wich makes totally sense, isn't?
I also never saw a Vulcan drop since I started playing the game, but I'm doing some Biohazards collecting money and guns for the future, because it's my mpression the next update will raise the level to the (final?) 20th, so we will probably have to change all of our armors, guns and implants .
But guess what? After playing for the million time, a Vulcan dropped fall onto my lap.
A gun never dropping doesn't mean a bug, it means the dice roll wasn't in your favor.

Unfortunately it was a locked level 14 weapon and since I like to play the game on nightmare/hard setting, the weapon's performance would probably suffer, since enemies are level 16.

And I'm dying to put my hands in a Legendary type Vulcan.

I think what I'm trying to say since the beginning is this: regardless the weapon we have, they are level dependent. A weapon one level bellow the enemies we are fighting is still capable of working, but two levels and beyond it will suffer heavy performance issues.
So even if you have a Vulcan level 14, playing the game with enemies level 16 will make most other weapons level 16 performance better than a level 14 Vulcan.
Even if it's a pistol.

I know, doesn't make much sense, right? But that's how the game works.

But every weapon has his niche and by experience I learned that not all weapons work right on story playthrough and at the same time on biohazard misisons.
Some are good for one, some are good for the other.
I think the devs could change some weapons behaviour depending the game type, like the Quimerea and Oracle.
Really devs? A f*** ton of zombies are waiting for me and the Onyx, capable of killing almost everything with one shot, behaves like always do: one shot for a enemy and you have to wait the disc reload.
While the horde starts charging the player. :-|

What incentive I have to use this weapon in Biohazard mode?
Why not make the wepon performance like the usual for the story gameplay and in Biohazrd missions the disc been able to kill three or four zombies because the disc hits the zombies behind the first one, specially if it was a headshot?

But for fighting soldiers this weapon is great.

[INGAME STUDIOS]

Hi Aedwynn! Balancing the weapons is still a work in progress in Dead Effect 2, but to be honest - this game is all about weapons, and choosing the right weapon for the fight ahead is half the fun. At least the way we see it. Anyway, we really appreciate your feedback! We definitely agree that the animations needs some work, and the mission end cue is a good point as well. Let me forward your suggestions to the dev team. I hope you will continue playing in the meantime.

[Aedwynn]

Originally posted by BadFlyInteractive:

Hi Aedwynn! Balancing the weapons is still a work in progress in Dead Effect 2, but to be honest - this game is all about weapons, and choosing the right weapon for the fight ahead is half the fun. At least the way we see it. Anyway, we really appreciate your feedback! We definitely agree that the animations needs some work, and the mission end cue is a good point as well. Let me forward your suggestions to the dev team. I hope you will continue playing in the meantime.

I will continue, and I appreciate that my feedback will help in some way. On the weapons I understand what you say, but as I noted, in some cases I simply don't see how certain weapon may become viable at all. Short Knife / Fists - I don't see any situation where they will have advantage over Katana.

[Aedwynn]

Originally posted by hazzamanazz:

Zombies dropped on the floor because we severed them both legs have a tendency to become ultra-fast, wich makes totally sense, isn't?

I know that cutting/shooting off legs will make them crawl, but that wasn't the case. He wasn't even damaged. He walks, then stands for a second, then drops on ground and slides to me as if he is on a rocket sled. Without even moving hands.

[Aedwynn]

If I am to summarize my first 11 levels experience, it will be: too many random things. Which is the reason why my experience quite differs from another people in this thread.
Gear drops and sales: ~80% infiltrator stuff that I did not need at all for Gunnar. Resulted in gear being inadequate for most of time.
Implant drops and sales: ~40% movement speed, ~30% energy regen, ~10% strength ~10% accuracy, ~10% stability. Again, most of time it was implants not fit for Gunnar, resulting in implants being inadequate most of time.
Weapon drops and sales: ~70% melee, ~15% pistols, ~10% shotguns, ~5% everything else
Add here that all that stuff becomes obsolette in just a couple of levels, I effectively had no control over what weapons I can use. It was about what dropped and what's on the market. That's why I was stuck quite a few times unable to progress or progressing extremely slowly. After that first 10-11 levels, XP progression slowed down significantly, so now I have time to gear up.
TL;DR: For first 10 levels item drops are too random for player to consistently get adequate gear for the task at hand.