GTFO needs something more

[Raptros]

Originally posted by Raptros:

This isn't just some complaint I whipped up out of nowhere. I've thought about this for a while.

You've got people speedrunning some of the hardest levels with these tactics and getting amazing times. I think there's a speedrun of E1 that's around 30 minutes. .

Now sure, those guys clearly are good and have put a ton of time into the game, bit the fact that the hardest level yet can be blown through, despite it being designed as an hour and a half+ mission says something for the power these kinds of strategies have. Their gunplay wasn't really all that demanding either. A lot of the time they were just firing entire magazines to be fast. They weren't taking the time to be precise or anything.

Why is that significant? Well, why wouldn't it be? One of the things you have to do as a developer is break your game. If I can get through your hardest levels with your designed method of combat being secondary in my strategy then we've got a problem.

I don't need you to explain these things to me. I'm pretty knowledgeable about most of what this game has to offer. I understand how it works. I know it's supposed to be hard. That's not my gripe.

My gripe is that GTFO lacks depth in the ways you approach your objective. It's why I said it needs something more. If you break it down, there's three phases of the game. There's the downtime/planning, there's stealth and there's gunplay. The latter two are my focus here.

There's only so many ways you can approach these phases. In stealth, you sneak around and kill whatever you decide to kill, that's it. During gunplay, you shoot and move, maybe even use your tool here and there. That's it.

On its own, there's nothing wrong with that. The issue arises when you make harder and harder rundowns to the point where exploiting the game becomes more effective than the intended design. It's undeniable that playing the game in such a way is significantly more effective. It's why people can and have done the hardest missions in crazy amounts of time.

When you have only but a few mechanics to base your game off of, you can only design so much until you've exhausted said mechanics. It can only get so complex until the difficulty starts to become "hard for the sake of hard." The more complex you make something, the more you can do with it. Imagine if chess was comprised of only pawns. There's only so much you can do with that. The different pieces with different rules is what creates the complexity of the game. With more complex rules, you can create more interesting scenarios and push the difficulty further. It can be more and more interesting, instead of just being an endurance test.

Do you see what I mean? GTFO can only go so far with it's difficulty before it starts to get ridiculous. Your current combat system is so ineffective with the given difficulty that people just decide to push the boundaries of what can and can't be done. It's why people are running through entire hoards of enemies with a melee system built for stealth. Sure, there are always going to be people that push the limit, but don't give them a reason to.

I'm also not asking for them to just drop the difficulty in some blanket way. That's a surface level solution and I'm sure plenty of people wouldn't like that. Clearly you and I don't.

What I *am* asking for are more ways to approach combat. More complexity. Give us more toys to play with, more ways to approach combat. Give us different ways to interact with the monsters and environment.

When your current combat system is LESS EFFECTIVE than an unintended method people discovered, that's just not good.

Anyways, all I want to see are new ways to approach combat and maybe even stealth. I want to see the game evolve and change. I want the core combat to be the most effective way to play the game, not some weird strategy that clearly wasn't designed to be.

Do you understand where I'm coming from?

GTFO needs something more if it's going to demand so much from us.

What I mean by that is some kind of feature that assists the player with the ever increasing demands of each rundown, besides the exploits that are clearly not the intended design.

With rundown 5, I have been more frustrated with this game than any other rundown. Back to back rooms full of scouts, minimal pickups, entire levels with fog that last hours at a time. It's beginning to get excruciating and feels like it's designed around the bunnyhopping, whack-a-mole exploits, rather than the co-op tactical shooter it pretends to be.

Right now, the name of the game is horde control/clear. There's no other serious factor, other than stealth. If you're going to dump an unreal amount of difficult stuff on us, fine. Seriously, that's fine, but you have to give us SOMETHING to combat it all with!

A gun shove that could stagger one, maybe two enemies in front of you.
Ammo types for better damage, stagger, or count.
Different gadgets and tools that can assist in horde clearing.
Drones, distractions, barricades, hell, even grenade types.

The game, as I see it and a lot of others as well, boils down to one thing, hammer play and breaking the game open at a fundamental level. There's nothing that teaches you any of the nuances of the game. Hitboxes, attack ranges, aggro ranges, line of sight on enemies, horde spawn distances and rates. Without this knowledge, people will look for the cracks in the game and bust them open as far as they can.

You've got people who know that the striker attack is approximately a rectangle in front of them and that your hitbox is just a little box in your chest, so if you run through them and jump, they have a hard time hitting you. The devs even addressed that and made it harder to do!

What do you want from us? We can barely do the rundowns legitimately, and now they're trying to patch out the people exploiting the game. I don't understand what the design philosophy is here... Are we suppose to play whack-a-mole, jumping around or not? The game can barely be played normally, and now you're trying to tell us that the kiting and melee isn't the way to do it either?

I don't understand GTFO. I want to love this game, but I can't tell what it's supposed to be anymore.

If it wants to be as difficult as it is, it needs some kind of feature, some kind of tool or ability that assists with these new challenges, otherwise you'll get people trying to exploit each and every little thing out of your game. You've dumped so much difficult stuff onto use that we've hit a brick wall with our current toolset. We can only shoot so many bullets, stagger so many enemies, and melee so much until its over.

What is GTFO trying to do? I don't get it...

[Rayalot72]

What are you stuck on?

The optional objectives are supposed to be difficult, and they're still very doable. You don't need to employ any special strategies to make it doable, it can just make it easier or faster.

[[ACPL] Jon]

Originally posted by Raptros:

GTFO needs something more

Agreed.

We need killstreaks.

[advanced pallet user]

sounds like u need to git gud

[Fosil]

booster are horribly implemented, but they make this rundown much easier to complete. for example having 50% base health and 50% gain per pack charge, gives you much more margin of error without having to be able to kite perfectly.

that said, the game expects your team to be able to melee kill a descent amount of active enemies and it expects you to know the spawn rules to avoid some ugly room pulls from error alarms.

[Gunnerman007]

The boosters were a fun idea and added depth to the game but I agree, it does lack a little more in terms of completing the rundowns. I still enjoy the game and the challenges it gives me and my friends.

[Rayalot72]

For the record, people will still consistently beat everything once circle kiting, cross-map kiting, and b-hopping are nerfed. B-hopping already doesn't make stealth any easier, and nerfs to kiting would just require hammering be far more coordinated and ammo efficient weapons be used a bit more often. Considering you have too much ammo a lot of the time, not a whole lot would change.

[Raptros]

It's not about being stuck. It's about the lack of evolution in the actual gameplay.

When you dump so much stuff on the player to the point where they have to abuse the games intimate mechanics to do well, and then nerf those things without giving us some kind of tool to succeed, what are we supposed to do?!

I'm not saying the game cannot be completed, it clearly can, but it feels like it's being designed around the exploitative playstyles and not the actual shooting part of it, the part it was conceptualized around. Around a melee system thats built for stealth, not wave fighting. Hard for the sake of hard, if you will.

If you dump 5 minute scans on us, multiple bosses, huge waves, big guys back to back, and then nerf the exploit playstyle, we need SOMETHING to help us in those scenarios, otherwise your playerbase will hit a brick wall with what they can do.

You can only design so much around a few mechanics. If you want to increase the difficulty without forcing people to cheese the game, you have to give them new approaches to combat and stealth.

I'm not gonna even touch on the bugs and stuff, like rooms alerting for now reason, ect.

[Rayalot72]

When you dump so much stuff on the player to the point where they have to abuse the games intimate mechanics to do well, and then nerf those things without giving us some kind of tool to succeed, what are we supposed to do!?

Get better? A lot of the difficult content has ways of preventing you from hammer kiting already, and they can always throw you more ammo. If you think any of these strategies are necessary, rather than easier, you're just wrong. If anything, changing how hammer kiting works would just encourage players to learn different things that will allow them to manage. It's largely popular because most players are pretty mediocre at gunplay in this game, which starts to hurt them in the long run when they start to encounter mechanics that aren't weak to hammer kiting.

If you dump 5 minute scans on us, multiple bosses, huge waves, big guys back to back, and then nerf the exploit playstyle, we need SOMETHING to help us in those scenarios, otherwise your playerbase will hit a brick wall with what they can do.

Most of the things you're listing here are specifically harder to deal with kiting, you're better off just shooting or making good use of your tools.

Class IX alarm you can use 5 doors worth of foam and mines to stall and wave clear for most of it, after which you can just keep things off scans with guns (if you clear a wave, you have a brief break as well if it's in a nasty spot). If you're talking about the standard large S1 scan then you just shoot for that, you can't even kite away from the scan.

Bosses you just need to kill quickly, if you have the right weapons and everyone is good enough you can manage it easily. Give yourselves openings to deal damage, find ways to avoid it for periods where you need to fight other stuff, maybe split the team's attention based on who's best equipped for horde clear and who's best equipped for fighting the boss.

"Huge waves" you almost always have warning for, just have a sentry thin them out and shoot them as they come. For surges in particular, if you need to buy time you can foam the ground in a chokepoint they have to come through to ensure the first portion of the horde is delayed.

Big dudes, run HEL weapons for fighting them and learn to coordinate better in stealth for rooms that have lots of them sleeping. Their aggro mechanics are the same as other sleepers, so you can safely kill most of them if you sync correctly and you're all crouched the whole time you get the kill.

It's not about being stuck.

It clearly is, this entire thread reeks of "I'm hard-stuck on C tier," you should ask for some expeditions to be more accessible if you think it's getting too hard too early. This is definitely the hardest rundown so far, B tier has a lot of newbie killers during the main objectives and C tier requires a fair amount of coordination and skill compared to the fairly straightforward main objectives in R4.

[Raptros]

This isn't just some complaint I whipped up out of nowhere. I've thought about this for a while.

You've got people speedrunning some of the hardest levels with these tactics and getting amazing times. I think there's a speedrun of E1 that's around 30 minutes. .

Now sure, those guys clearly are good and have put a ton of time into the game, bit the fact that the hardest level yet can be blown through, despite it being designed as an hour and a half+ mission says something for the power these kinds of strategies have. Their gunplay wasn't really all that demanding either. A lot of the time they were just firing entire magazines to be fast. They weren't taking the time to be precise or anything.

Why is that significant? Well, why wouldn't it be? One of the things you have to do as a developer is break your game. If I can get through your hardest levels with your designed method of combat being secondary in my strategy then we've got a problem.

I don't need you to explain these things to me. I'm pretty knowledgeable about most of what this game has to offer. I understand how it works. I know it's supposed to be hard. That's not my gripe.

My gripe is that GTFO lacks depth in the ways you approach your objective. It's why I said it needs something more. If you break it down, there's three phases of the game. There's the downtime/planning, there's stealth and there's gunplay. The latter two are my focus here.

There's only so many ways you can approach these phases. In stealth, you sneak around and kill whatever you decide to kill, that's it. During gunplay, you shoot and move, maybe even use your tool here and there. That's it.

On its own, there's nothing wrong with that. The issue arises when you make harder and harder rundowns to the point where exploiting the game becomes more effective than the intended design. It's undeniable that playing the game in such a way is significantly more effective. It's why people can and have done the hardest missions in crazy amounts of time.

When you have only but a few mechanics to base your game off of, you can only design so much until you've exhausted said mechanics. It can only get so complex until the difficulty starts to become "hard for the sake of hard." The more complex you make something, the more you can do with it. Imagine if chess was comprised of only pawns. There's only so much you can do with that. The different pieces with different rules is what creates the complexity of the game. With more complex rules, you can create more interesting scenarios and push the difficulty further. It can be more and more interesting, instead of just being an endurance test.

Do you see what I mean? GTFO can only go so far with it's difficulty before it starts to get ridiculous. Your current combat system is so ineffective with the given difficulty that people just decide to push the boundaries of what can and can't be done. It's why people are running through entire hoards of enemies with a melee system built for stealth. Sure, there are always going to be people that push the limit, but don't give them a reason to.

I'm also not asking for them to just drop the difficulty in some blanket way. That's a surface level solution and I'm sure plenty of people wouldn't like that. Clearly you and I don't.

What I *am* asking for are more ways to approach combat. More complexity. Give us more toys to play with, more ways to approach combat. Give us different ways to interact with the monsters and environment.

When your current combat system is LESS EFFECTIVE than an unintended method people discovered, that's just not good.

Anyways, all I want to see are new ways to approach combat and maybe even stealth. I want to see the game evolve and change. I want the core combat to be the most effective way to play the game, not some weird strategy that clearly wasn't designed to be.

Do you understand where I'm coming from?

[Rayalot72]

You've got people speedrunning some of the hardest levels with these tactics and getting amazing times. I think there's a speedrun of E1 that's around 30 minutes.

This is a pretty ordinary run of E1, the strat is to bring a cell from the start of the level to the end of the level to skip something like 70% of the threats. They are shooting for a great deal of it, and I'm pretty sure it's the intention of error alarms w/ primarily strikers that you should hammer a great deal of them, that seems to have been the intention when error alarms apart from extraction were first introduced in R2C2. The only real change that would occur with anti-kiting changes would probably be a requirement for some amount of coordination in when you hammer strikers (multiple people going through a rhythm to avoid damage) or people will prefer a greater degree of shooting. I don't think any of this is going to radically change the difficulty of the game, just change how people engage with it.

This speedrun would still work given kiting nerfs, you would just need to coordinate hammers or expend some time you wouldn't otherwise to get more of the available ammo.

What I *am* asking for are more ways to approach combat. More complexity. Give us more toys to play with, more ways to approach combat. Give us different ways to interact with the monsters and environment.

Then suggest that separately, that's completely unrelated to how anti-kiting changes will affect the game and its difficulty.

Do you understand where I'm coming from?

I believe so, and I think that you've completely misdiagnosed the problems you want solved (which is clearly just stale gameplay), you've considerably overestimated how much nerfs to kiting will impact the game (removing bunnyhopping won't change anything at all, for the record, just slow stealth down slightly), and you're making suggestions that have no bearing on what changes are made to kiting.

[Jordan_Peterson]

GTFO needs to re-invent itself new.
Its taking way too long to finish a map, its more a semi-horror rogue-like game.
Guns doesnt feel fun and more like paintball guns.
respawning enemies in areas you have already been? yuk.
1-2 hours to fonish a map and you cant exit until finishing the task or alt+f4.
hmmm
this game looked promising but turned to be nothing new, just tossed together known elements from other games.

[Raptros]

Originally posted by Rayalot72:

You've got people speedrunning some of the hardest levels with these tactics and getting amazing times. I think there's a speedrun of E1 that's around 30 minutes.

This is a pretty ordinary run of E1, the strat is to bring a cell from the start of the level to the end of the level to skip something like 70% of the threats. They are shooting for a great deal of it, and I'm pretty sure it's the intention of error alarms w/ primarily strikers that you should hammer a great deal of them, that seems to have been the intention when error alarms apart from extraction were first introduced in R2C2. The only real change that would occur with anti-kiting changes would probably be a requirement for some amount of coordination in when you hammer strikers (multiple people going through a rhythm to avoid damage) or people will prefer a greater degree of shooting. I don't think any of this is going to radically change the difficulty of the game, just change how people engage with it.

This speedrun would still work given kiting nerfs, you would just need to coordinate hammers or expend some time you wouldn't otherwise to get more of the available ammo.

What I *am* asking for are more ways to approach combat. More complexity. Give us more toys to play with, more ways to approach combat. Give us different ways to interact with the monsters and environment.

Then suggest that separately, that's completely unrelated to how anti-kiting changes will affect the game and its difficulty.

Do you understand where I'm coming from?

I believe so, and I think that you've completely misdiagnosed the problems you want solved (which is clearly just stale gameplay), you've considerably overestimated how much nerfs to kiting will impact the game (removing bunnyhopping won't change anything at all, for the record, just slow stealth down slightly), and you're making suggestions that have no bearing on what changes are made to kiting.

At no point have I asked for these strategies to be removed, and if I have said so, I misspoke and retract that.

I'm not asking for the removal of these strategies, I'm asking for an alternative. I'm asking for the intended design of the game to be brought to par with them.

Kiting and the like are indeed a part of the game. There's no denying that. They are valid and have their uses.

I just don't think it's good design for kiting to be pushed to it's limits because your other approaches are vastly less effective.

Again, I'm not asking for the removal of these things. I'm asking for the expansion of the intended combat system to bring it up to speed with such methods.

[Rayalot72]

At no point have I asked for these strategies to be removed, and if I have said so, I misspoke and retract that.

I never suggested that.

Kiting nerfs and bhop nerfs are confirmed to be on the radar. There will almost certainly be changes, and I tend to think those changes will be positive.

[Raptros]

Originally posted by Rayalot72:

At no point have I asked for these strategies to be removed, and if I have said so, I misspoke and retract that.

I never suggested that.

Kiting nerfs and bhop nerfs are confirmed to be on the radar. There will almost certainly be changes, and I tend to think those changes will be positive.

I see. I'm curious how it will change the way people approach the game, as well as stuff like speedrunning.

[Sam D-B]

I love how you single handedly complain about speedrunners like they're a big problem in the community when all they're doing is having fun trying to get fast times. 1% of the community speedruns the levels, the others play it normally. Leave em be.