C1 is utterly hopeless

[Fuggin' Kyle]

It's meticulous dog ♥♥♥♥. Tons of sleepers, scouts, invisible enemies, cursed doors. It's absolutely ♥♥♥♥ing hell.

EDIT:

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the difficulty. It really is part of the charm of this game that it's so difficult. But obviously there's room for improvement to make the struggle worth enjoying.

I really enjoy the RNG. It keeps it from getting stale.The more random the better. But like Shrinkshooter said, it starts to feel like a "terrible slog" after a while.

But If anything, I wish it were more random. Part of me hates knowing that I have to get the same cell every time to power the same exact generator in the same exact room every single time. Knowing I have to do the same exact thing every time plays a part in dreading repeating the same mission a million times.

Besides the RNG not being random enough for me, I almost feel like I stop having fun because of the combat.

Pumping 3+ shots of combat shotgun into one enemy feels like I'm shooting a sponge and it kills the rhythm of the game for me. Fighting an uphill battle on top of a mountain starts to become a chore after a while.

[Rayalot72]

It's not that hard after you learn it, but C in general has been given a higher difficulty than in the past. If you were mediocre at stealth before, expect to seriously struggle down here.

Practice killing scouts and soloing rooms. C1 is the ideal playground since you have three zones with no alarms and many areas.

This is what was intended for higher difficulty in GTFO. This isn't R1 where anyone can go down all the way and win. You have to get much better at the game mechanics or stick to B tier. Most people appear to be stuck there anyway.

[Shade*]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥♥♥' Kyle:

It's meticulous dog ♥♥♥♥. Tons of sleepers, scouts, invisible enemies, cursed doors. It's absolutely ♥♥♥♥ing hell

I hear only mimimimi

[bad_metaphor]

Try it with 2 bio trackers and 2 sentries.

[Simon Viklund]

We might be tweaking the difficulty of C1, you can focus on other expeditions in the meantime and thanks for being patient!

[Fuggin' Kyle]

Originally posted by Simon Viklund:

We might be tweaking the difficulty of C1, you can focus on other expeditions in the meantime and thanks for being patient!

Thanks for the feedback!

I finally beat it. I had a good group that's played it as much as I have. We barely made it; we used a bio tracker, sea foam, mines, and shotgun sentry.

Part of me loves the difficulty of the game. It really ties into the lore and hopeless atmosphere. I love playing games that are really going to be a challenge and keep people from just breezing through after they've played it so many times.

I think where you could improve on balance is the damage of the weapons.

Yes, the challenge of the game is what drives me to beat it, but the combat is what should keep me coming back. The combat is underwhelming and feels weak when my shots connect.

For example: the combat shotgun gets picked 90% of the time because there's a somewhat decent balance of damage and ammo, yet it still feels sponge-y when my shots connect.

If the combat shotgun were to have the same damage as the regular shotgun, it would become way more gratifying when my shots connect and could possibly help balance levels like C1.

I agree with the scarcity of ammo, but for the sake of making the combat more gratifying: improve upon the damage output of the weapons.

[Shrinkshooter]

Even with high levels of skill and foreknowledge of the mission it's still a terrible slog. The RNG in the previous rundown was within well designed margins, but in this rundown it's all over the place. In C1, you can either have no scouts between your starting position and 204, or you can have 6 of them, with 1 in the spawn room and 2 or 3 together in another.

Even then, with the most ideal performance from experienced players, all it takes to kill the mission is the biotracker missing a single scan once you're at the exit waiting for extraction. RNG is severe and the margin for error is small, the balancing for the mission is a total shotgun spray.

[kazaric]

Originally posted by Shrinkshooter:

Even with high levels of skill and foreknowledge of the mission it's still a terrible slog. The RNG in the previous rundown was within well designed margins, but in this rundown it's all over the place. In C1, you can either have no scouts between your starting position and 204, or you can have 6 of them, with 1 in the spawn room and 2 or 3 together in another.

Even then, with the most ideal performance from experienced players, all it takes to kill the mission is the biotracker missing a single scan once you're at the exit waiting for extraction. RNG is severe and the margin for error is small, the balancing for the mission is a total shotgun spray.

C1 is worth taking dual biotrackers, at least for me. Only the guy that runs the computer needs to have the sentry and the last guy could bring either C-Foam Launcher or Mine Deployer.

Personally I think the difficulties are perfect as it is, but I do agree with you that the RNG could use some tweakings, sometimes there are so many scouts before the first terminal you might aswell just restart the game.

[Zé do Rifle]

After playing C1 a little more i think that the dificulty is indeed the map lenght.

Its fine to have invisible enemies or tough situations, the problem as others said is that the map feels like a slog. There's so many things to do, so many alarms and scouts that It makes you feel sad to even waste one bullet or loose 5 Hp.

It's demoralizing to waste 30 minutes just to get to the hard parte and then failing after 1+hour

[kazaric]

Originally posted by Zé do Rifle:

After playing C1 a little more i think that the dificulty is indeed the map lenght.

Its fine to have invisible enemies or tough situations, the problem as others said is that the map feels like a slog. There's so many things to do, so many alarms and scouts that It makes you feel sad to even waste one bullet or loose 5 Hp.

It's demoralizing to waste 30 minutes just to get to the hard parte and then failing after 1+hour

You think C1 is a slog fest? Wait until you reach D1, that map takes a MINIMUM of 3 hours and that's already with a very competent team, and failing the final defense (which has like a million of those new rapid fire giants) would mean all these hours wasted.

[DrunkBunny94]

Originally posted by Shrinkshooter:

Even with high levels of skill and foreknowledge of the mission it's still a terrible slog. The RNG in the previous rundown was within well designed margins, but in this rundown it's all over the place. In C1, you can either have no scouts between your starting position and 204, or you can have 6 of them, with 1 in the spawn room and 2 or 3 together in another.

Even then, with the most ideal performance from experienced players, all it takes to kill the mission is the biotracker missing a single scan once you're at the exit waiting for extraction. RNG is severe and the margin for error is small, the balancing for the mission is a total shotgun spray.

100% this.

One run we had 6 scouts before the first alarm door - then 2 in the first terminal room and i think 2 more (i think 1 in 205 and 1 in 207) for a total of 10!
So we had no ammo for the extract because we weren't able to take them all out silently.

Another run we had shadows back spawn in the empty room behind the 207 terminal after we sealed ourselves in - we lost all our HP and again died in the extract circle.

Spawns shouldn't be literally the other side of the wall that players are in they should be at least 1 full room away so that firstly you have time to catch them on the scanner, and secondly so they dont appear in an empty room behind you >_<

In our winning run we had 2 scouts prior to the first alarm door and then 1 more in 205 and 1 more in 207 for a total of 4...
Plus we knew about the spawn cheese so we had a player stand in the back of 207 to funnel the shadows to 1 direction. Theres no way to push them further back when holding 205 if you wanna seal the door they'll spawn about 5m away.


Then theres the bugs:

We had a wipe because of a bioscanner fail:
https://streamable.com/1s5p7m

We also found you can get shot through doors:
https://streamable.com/y8v3lf

Theres a bug where the first few people to hit the extract zone to lose audio...
https://streamable.com/lc1eck
(we prolly werent winning this one as our biotracker player got stuck and killed but still its lame to both die to 1 shadow because you cant even hear hes close or attacking you)

I still dont quite understand what happened here but i'll take it:
https://streamable.com/3yccjv
my friend thinks the first one insta agros because i moved and crouched (crouching down shouldnt alert them imo kinda makes it pointless)
then i got a lucky hit on the back of the head (dispite him facing me) the other ranger to instakill it
The scout must have been distracted by his phone or something

Heres our win for anyone struggling:
https://youtu.be/sCv-eey_J4c

[Fosil]

one small tip for players struggling: you don't have to do the terminals in a certain order. doing the terminal closest to the exit last, helps a lot to have a clean getaway. furthermore it is good practice to use the scanner not only to tag enemies, but to call out position and numbers of shadow enemies approaching in-between scans.

[livinghell]

Originally posted by TFB DrunkBunny94:

Originally posted by Shrinkshooter:

Even with high levels of skill and foreknowledge of the mission it's still a terrible slog. The RNG in the previous rundown was within well designed margins, but in this rundown it's all over the place. In C1, you can either have no scouts between your starting position and 204, or you can have 6 of them, with 1 in the spawn room and 2 or 3 together in another.

Even then, with the most ideal performance from experienced players, all it takes to kill the mission is the biotracker missing a single scan once you're at the exit waiting for extraction. RNG is severe and the margin for error is small, the balancing for the mission is a total shotgun spray.

100% this.

One run we had 6 scouts before the first alarm door - then 2 in the first terminal room and i think 2 more (i think 1 in 205 and 1 in 207) for a total of 10!
So we had no ammo for the extract because we weren't able to take them all out silently.

Another run we had shadows back spawn in the empty room behind the 207 terminal after we sealed ourselves in - we lost all our HP and again died in the extract circle.

Spawns shouldn't be literally the other side of the wall that players are in they should be at least 1 full room away so that firstly you have time to catch them on the scanner, and secondly so they dont appear in an empty room behind you >_<

In our winning run we had 2 scouts prior to the first alarm door and then 1 more in 205 and 1 more in 207 for a total of 4...
Plus we knew about the spawn cheese so we had a player stand in the back of 207 to funnel the shadows to 1 direction. Theres no way to push them further back when holding 205 if you wanna seal the door they'll spawn about 5m away.


Then theres the bugs:

We had a wipe because of a bioscanner fail:
https://streamable.com/1s5p7m

We also found you can get shot through doors:
https://streamable.com/y8v3lf

Theres a bug where the first few people to hit the extract zone to lose audio...
https://streamable.com/lc1eck
(we prolly werent winning this one as our biotracker player got stuck and killed but still its lame to both die to 1 shadow because you cant even hear hes close or attacking you)

I still dont quite understand what happened here but i'll take it:
https://streamable.com/3yccjv
my friend thinks the first one insta agros because i moved and crouched (crouching down shouldnt alert them imo kinda makes it pointless)
then i got a lucky hit on the back of the head (dispite him facing me) the other ranger to instakill it
The scout must have been distracted by his phone or something

Heres our win for anyone struggling:
https://youtu.be/sCv-eey_J4c

We just had a teamwipe because of this bioscanner fail in the same room. Everyone was shouting to me to scan and mark them.... and I was doing it all the time...

[Gustav]

Originally posted by Simon Viklund:

We might be tweaking the difficulty of C1, you can focus on other expeditions in the meantime and thanks for being patient!

Did the developers make it through these levels themselves?

[Blue]

Originally posted by Gustav:

Originally posted by Simon Viklund:

We might be tweaking the difficulty of C1, you can focus on other expeditions in the meantime and thanks for being patient!

Did the developers make it through these levels themselves?

From my experience trying it 15+ times. Eventually you get a run with less scouts and lots of good loot which makes it significantly easier. I've had that kind of run twice so far. Both times got messed up by first time players who completely screwed the team. (one accidentally activated the terminal objective in the room with a scout while the team was trying to take it down. Another one accidentally fired his weapon while the team was sneaking past some big guys to a scout, which downed the entire team). I've had some tries with multiple double scout rooms, and very bad loot RNG. Like the big middle area having like half the boxes, and all of them only have flashlights or disinfectant.

Edit: There is also a lot of RNG in the ai. Sometimes they are screwy and go out of their way to bust down doors far away, rather than take the shorter path through an open door (which later makes defending much harder). Sometimes they get stuck between 2 closed doors making defending easier, or they for whatever reason decide to go through a door they don't normally go through. Then there are the bugs, like I've had multiple times where a scout shot it's tentacles through a closed door and hit me, even though the tentacles were not visible on my screen (but a teammate said he could see them). The scout didn't make any noise, but it still triggered the event. I've also had a few times where enemies busted down open doors.

[Shrinkshooter]

Originally posted by Gustav:

Did the developers make it through these levels themselves?

My friends and I are convinced they don't play their own game often. There are quite a number of noticeable things that wouldn't make it past someone who played the game frequently; a great example is the total ear-blast sound effect of the gasp right before you drop. Super noticeable, super irritating, it's been there since the start, great conversation piece with other players you can bond over by laughing about how you all alt-tab out of the game so you can actually hear each other's voices. Super simple and easy to fix from a development standpoint. It hasn't changed.

There's like two dozen other little things like that which make us convinced that the playtesting is really limited on their end.