Prologue difficulty...

[Lord Dickinson McCheddar]

I've seen a lot of discussion on this topic but I've not seen anyone properly work it out. I'm certain half the problems people are having with this is because of a bug with a combination of elements leading up to this that make the situation particularly catastrophic.

* It's obviously a tutorial so you don't expect it to be that punishing and to give you a chance to learn.
* The controls are not all that intuitive and it doesn't explain the hidden mechanics at all nor offer optimal circumstances to work it all out instead telling you something so obvious you have to wonder why even bother such as use the stick to move and then seemingly giving up shortly after not telling you much else other than to use the shoulder buttons to shoot.
* I played in normal and found it easy and quite forgiving albeit demanding of attention up to a point.
* The first time you fight a buzzsaw arm the sweeping attack where it's not immediately obvious what to do does limited damage and you use auto recovery with an obvious counter so you don't have to worry too much and it's easy to finish it off before working out the dodge mechanic.
* The dodge mechanic isn't obvious with it also being sprint otherwise and you don't need it in the tutorial except to evade that attack.
* For Xbox controller the layout is not ideal and the shoulder buttons should really have been mapped by default in that case the other way around.
* The next time you fight the buzzsaw but with two arms despite being the same boss it kills you in effectively one hit almost instantly even with full health and ample recovery items.
* This happens after 40 minutes without the opportunity to save despite to levels of progression, both through the level and in terms of collecting items doubling the sense of loss. It's not just a setback but back to zero.

I'm fairly certain this wasn't intended and is a bug. When it happens it looks like you've clipped inside it. If this happens to you it's not much to do with anything other than arbitrary decisions. It might as well come down to luck and is pretty harsh if it happens to you. It comes across almost as malicious and being deliberately messed with or set up.

It's this inconsistency that causes much of the problem. It results in the game signalling one thing and then doing something that's kind of like lying in a cruel way that just isn't fun. I suspect this is because it's not what was originally designed.

It has the effect of an one shot kill but the damage done is in rapid small increments because your character got knocked out of bounds and stuck in the hit box rather than knocked out of it which would normally stop the damage from repeating and then give another chance to work out what to do on what's supposed to be a training session that should give you at least a few chances.

Let me put it another way that makes it obvious it's a bug. Those little balls that hit you from the robots all do the same damage. Same enemy, same attack, same damage. It's what you expect. You get hit by a couple and they take just a little damage. Then a room later one hits you and kills you instantly on full health. You would instantly recognise that as a bug. That's effectively what happens here.

I think there should be a study on human communication. I've seen so many people talk about this but none appear to have realised that it's most likely a bug that's severely exacerbated by circumstances. Perhaps some might have done so but if so they're pretty rare or aren't saying much.

[meow]

gg

[robatw]

did it for the first time today. died on the boss but it was super easy 2nd time around cause you know what to do. took you longer to write that useless crap than for me to second try the boss. people are weak.

[Exarch_Alpha]

If even in normal you still are failing, the flawed thing is you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvS6zMThiZU

[Lord Dickinson McCheddar]

I've had three responses all of which I have permanently blocked as they are not productive. This is my point. If you report an actual issue with the game there is a communication barrier generated by a toxic community. This inhibits crucial feedback on the game and prevents it from reaching the developers.

There are some spurious claims out there of issues with the tutorial. Someone saying they spent six hours on it and others complaining because they were playing it in hard. This particular issue pertains to normal mode in which a glitch toward the end can instantly kill you despite the rest of the tutorial including the very same attack being extremely easy.

Between the noise there is a simple bug in the collision system with a particular attack where the hit box is just a perimeter. If you reverse engineer it then it becomes obvious that it's meant to knock you out of the perimeter but sometimes knocks you inside of it instead. It's not a complex mechanism and is quite common in gaming. It's a classic bug, pinned down inside the hitbox.

It's likely that you have this problem because action games with more or less real time dynamics isn't quite Square's area of expertise. They have been fumbling with and experimenting with action RPG for quite some time and their traditional model usually involves choreographed scenes without real or dynamic physics involved.

[Exarch_Alpha]

Yeah, run away from the truth by blocking it.

[Lichtgestalt]

Originally posted by Lord Dickinson McCheddar:

It's likely that you have this problem because action games with more or less real time dynamics isn't quite Square's area of expertise. They have been fumbling with and experimenting with action RPG for quite some time and their traditional model usually involves choreographed scenes without real or dynamic physics involved.

Game is developed by Platinum, not Square. "Action games with real time dynamics" is their whole deal. You still might me on to something. I always thought it's strange how many people are complaining about the tutorial on this forum. Could also simply be skill issue. Don't know.

[Exarch_Alpha]

I tried starting this game on Hard.

Took me 6 hours. Didn´t manage it.

Won the prologue on Normal on my first try. Eventually I managed to beat it on hard, start to finish.

OP might have some valid points but from my experience skill matters the most.

[Liby22]

I'm playing on hard mode, and I found the prologue to be a good challenge, but once you understand the mechanics you can get through it without too much difficulty. The EMP boss (who knows, knows) in hard mode is a completely different matter. Miquella's consort Radahn is a walk in the park in comparison. Not so much for the difficulty itself, (with 2 hits you die) but because it's too confusing.

[Lord Dickinson McCheddar]

Originally posted by Lichtgestalt:

Originally posted by Lord Dickinson McCheddar:

It's likely that you have this problem because action games with more or less real time dynamics isn't quite Square's area of expertise. They have been fumbling with and experimenting with action RPG for quite some time and their traditional model usually involves choreographed scenes without real or dynamic physics involved.

Game is developed by Platinum, not Square. "Action games with real time dynamics" is their whole deal. You still might me on to something. I always thought it's strange how many people are complaining about the tutorial on this forum. Could also simply be skill issue. Don't know.

I happen to be a developer and have done a little work in gaming including systems with some basic geometry and physics. If you did intermediate mathematics in high school then a lot of it is just that.

There is a difference between the physical model in games and the graphical models. Internally very simple methods are used to achieve the intended effect. You don't fully simulate a saw.

In this case you would simply establish a perimeter. The attack and movement is on a 2D plane. The mathematics is really quite simple. You can use hypotenuses for example to get the distance between the player and the central point of the saw.

On the main loop you might have something like if the time difference from the current timestamp and the timestamp of the last check is more different than the equivalent of 100ms then run the check if the player is within the distance or not.

Then if they are both inflict damage and initiate the animation along with the change of position that knocks them away. Just the distance check alone produces in effect a perimeter even if no circle is actually programmed in directly.

In this situation the bug is likely in part also a design issue. If it's trying to know you out of its way but it's implemented crudely then it can knock you inside instead especially when what do you do when it's moving toward you.

Have you ever noticed in some games where you get knocked a little unrealistically but obviously out of the way? This is because they had this in mind. In this case they have not thought about it properly or some of the mathematics is just off.

You can see when attacked you normally get knocked outside of the wheel. It is reasonable and logical to assume that's what's supposed to happen. In some cases if you simply get unlucky and caught in the spot where the mathematical mechanisms fail then it translates into getting pinned in the enemy hitbox which also hits really frequently causing too much damage because usually it's not a problem, usually one hit pushes you out of the hitbox due to centrifugal force. When the bug occurs centrifugal force is inverted. It may be as simple as the wrong sign (- instead of +), a single bit often a problem in mathematics but I don't really know it's not my job to disassemble the binary and look at the exact code.

There are many reasons as to why this issue might occur but it's clearly an issue. The 3D model used is as usual a hollow shell. It's not solid and you're not meant to clip through objects like that in games. It clearly breaks the illusion and if you do 3D programming it's one of those things you learn to address very early on as it breaks the scene otherwise. When this issue occurs you can clearly see that you have clipped inside the model and what should be a solid object.

The point being if someone got hit by this bug the first time around when playing which is merely a matter of getting unlucky enough to simply being at the wrong angle when it hits so that the numbers internally in the mathematical model break then it's a perfect storm.

If making games with a penalty for dying, lots of lost time and so on, the same with things like permadeath then the standard requires is much higher. If you have glitches like this but you had a check point a matter of minutes or so prior well you can get away with it but if you have some kind of arrangement in your game where if the player dies it's a big loss then you need to be far more strict in respect to your standards and the number of bugs you'll tolerate otherwise someone who finds they just lost loads of time and progress not because they screwed up, the power cut out but because a bug randomly killed them the immediate interpretation is a kind of malicious callous disregard for the player along with their experience and their time.

For players reporting issues with the tutorial not having a save for a long time if you just assume a binary split of 50% of the problem being them and 50% the game then when the latter this bug likely accounts for the majority of complaints which are serious complaints. Nothing is going to convince those people that they are in the wrong because they're not and any attempt to put the blame on them is a furtherance of the disrespect of the player already experienced in the game because someone doesn't quite get trigonometry or just didn't consider the interaction of all the elements in the scene or something like that.

[Lichtgestalt]

Very interesting. Thank you for the detailed explanation. I vaguely remember being caught in the buzzsaw and dying in a weird way on my first playthrough.

[Alt0153]

the only issue with the prologue is on a fresh save and not realising that dyingf resets you to the very start :D