Honest endless mode criticisms

[yuu]

Very interesting game, I have followed it for a very long time and now that it has reached such an elaborate state with this renovation, and with the promise of further content updates, I want to simply put my thoughts here hoping that they resonate with somebody else.
※My playtime is not reflective of my actual time spent in this game or the original.

As much as the game is interesting, I think it is substantially lacking in the gameplay aspect beyond the scope of a first play through impression. With this being said, we can look past the story being boring to replay and too easy after the first completion, and we can excuse some achievements being arbitrary and completely backwards (like dying to everything in story mode once, ironically the rarest achievement to give an example).

I primarily care about endless mode, which houses this game's only real "engaging gameplay sequences" with nothing else in-between. When you think about what makes this game even remotely interesting, the answer is never the segments where you just walk through empty rooms. The people who played it once and never again, came and went for the story (including the DLC). But both those players and the ones who stuck around for endless mode, all got hooked because of the avoidance of the various creatures. So because this game is defined by the player fighting against the monsters, I want to discuss about only this aspect, because it is the only time where the player has any notable skill input and can potentially "play well" or "play poorly".

For these reasons, what I say is only targeted towards endless !

Preliminary round - room design

This is a fundamental flaw of this game, that it is built on a paper foundation that is extremely frail; it is a walking simulator when there is not an active threat or objective* (*in story or DLC).

As such, endless mode should reduce tedium in a few significant ways that serve 0 purpose other than to slow down and frustrate the player. Specifically:

・The looping room with the jump scare needs to be disabled in this mode. Artificially extending the length of a floor by forcing the player to waste an arbitrary amount of time looping the same room makes no sense. It is a safe room, but compared to all other safe rooms (bar one exception), it takes significantly longer by forcing the player to loop it by a considerable amount. It accomplishes the exact same thing as any other safe room, disallowing chase spawn rolls. So why is it included in endless mode? To slow down the boring segment of traversing empty rooms?

・The other safe room exception I mentioned is the puzzle room that has the player going through a series of 4 connector areas, and relying on sound/visual cues to guess a randomly assigned pattern to progress. At first, this seems like a clever way to give the player something to do while progressing. But the problem is that instead of a skill based activity, this room has the player throw the dice by having to guess completely randomly generated sequences to progress. This is not entertaining, this is unsurprisingly extremely tedious after the fifth time it is encountered.

Note:

Both of these aforementioned time wasting rooms follow a pattern that appears to come up often in this analysis, that being that they are stolen from story mode and thus designed and intended to be interesting for a first-time player. However, they are not adjusted to fit the confines and gameplay-loop of endless mode, which is the issue. These things become not novelties, but frustrating trivialities on repeat playthroughs that serve no purpose other than to waste time that could be spent speeding through an uneventful room quickly.

・The long abyss rooms that require substantial time to run through should not be able to spawn back to back. Not only for the convenience of the player who once again is forced to endure holding W and shift with 0 thought so they can get to the part where the game qualifies as an interactive experience, but also for balance reasons that I will detail in a separate segment.

・The 50/50 rooms should be completely reworked. In a game of this nature, adding an extra layer of luck in a literal sense that can potentially decide the player's fate in an instant with very little counterplay is a very expressive "I give up" sign from the developer(s) in my perspective. I understand that the goal of the two（～）true 50/50 coin flip choice rooms is to add a layer of uncertainty and force the player in an uncomfortable and risky situation. But the mark is severely missed in the current implementation where under not all that specific circumstances the player has no choice but to die if they lose the coin flip. Why? Why not make it reactionary, so the player has to make a quick judgment on a small visual cue on which way is the right way? The abyss room with the possible table dead end is a great example of a reaction-based 50/50 that rewards experience and quick execution. The game really does not need true 50/50 situations in certain rooms, it does nothing but detract from the experience at higher levels where the punishment for bad luck is already severe enough.

・Generally, room design has to account for the threats currently chasing the player. This is apparent immediately as a necessary change when we consider the layers of RNG that go behind the "difficulty" of endless mode. Let us suppose that all specimen are available in the chase pool. So what determines the player's fate?
Layer 1 - The creatures that are chosen to chase the player simultaneously
Layer 2 - The rooms that are in that floor seed and can appear on that floor
Layer 3 - The frequency of these rooms appearing sequentially

There are effectively 3 layers of luck multiplying each other that determine the outcome of a run. Certain room layouts make it near (if not fully) impossible to evade a laughably large selection of combinations of enemies, forcing the player to take guaranteed damage or die trying. And if these rooms happen to appear back to back frequently during a dangerous time, then the player is helpless as they are forced to play at their best and get rewarded by a tasteful game over because their luck was bad. There needs to be a core rework for how often room layouts can appear sequentially, what room layouts can appear based on the combination of active enemies, and so on.

Goal

The goal of this proposed rework is simple. Reduce the amount of pointless and exaggerated downtime, and make the room design such that it creates situations that the player can always react to, adapt to and overcome consistently without luck being such a make-it-or-break-it factor.

Having said this, the most mind boggling aspect of this mode is the fundamental concept of combining any monster with any monster to actively chase the player, up to 5 active enemies (with copies of each other possible) at once.

The problem with the core gameplay

...is that it simply is not play-tested and suited for this mode. All the specimen/monsters/creatures are (for the most part) lazily ripped from their source game modes with the most bare-bones changes (if any) to come across as polished for endless.
※I realise that my tone here sounds extremely disrespectful, and for that I apologize deeply, however this disappointment comes from a place of love.

The problem I see is that a substantial portion of the concepts for these enemies are defeating the purpose of their inclusion in the mode.

For the story mode specimen, the ones that work perfectly fine to spice up the gameplay for first-time players (in their respective game mode), become extremely imbalanced when paired with other specimen more often than not. For example, specimen 10 is a neat moment in the story where the player is forced to keep them close to be able to avoid their transformation. But in endless mode, you can get matched against this concept that requires the player to arbitrarily go slow (which is really boring and not engaging), in tandem with enemies that potentially force the player to run at full speed to barely escape them.
So the result is an enemy that by itself becomes nothing more than a time waster -as is honestly every enemy when faced alone provided you are aware of their mechanics-, who stupidly synergizes with a large percentage of other enemies with no clever catch involved. There is no "counter play" or "decision making" when you get a combination of this nature, it is simply a situation where at best you can manage to lose less compared to losing fully. And this applies to so many combinations, which results in the player feeling cheated when they lose.

Specifically the biggest problems I see laid out:

Specimen 8

If combined with any fast moving enemy and you get a series of winding rooms, there is 0 input from the player in that loss interaction. You may not have room to evade his warp, and due to the fast enemy chasing you, you cannot afford to go slow to prevent the warp from happening in winding hallways or zig-zag corridors and the like. So there is no counterplay, it is a stupid case of "my weaknesses are completely nullified".

Specimen 10

If combined with just about most high-threat enemies, this becomes yet another case of the player having no input in the interaction. You cannot stay close, or the faster enemy will catch up to you and kill you. But by running and activating the transformation, you are effectively just rolling the dice and hoping to get either incredibly short rooms, or rooms with many turns in which you can outpace the worm. So effectively, it is a witless gamble that can lead to an unfair game over with certain room layouts (like one of the many sequences of long straight hallways that exist in the pool of rooms).
ー＞Furthermore, this entire specimen needs a rework for this mode because who finds this mechanic engaging anyway ? At best, you are at no risk of losing and must arbitrarily go slower in certain rooms, wasting time. At worst, you are in the aforementioned state with no counterplay in a combination and must lose unfairly.

Specimen 11

Unsurprisingly, adding yet another layer of luck by having him teleport to a random location after being struck leads to some pretty stupid losses. You might have just survived an unlucky coin flip and struck him to get away while escaping other grounded enemies, but due to no fault of your own, this time he appeared right next to the exit door and killed you without you being able to react or suspect such a thing. This game really does not need even the monsters to start adding more RNG, on top of their very presence or absence as a factor.

Specimen 12

The sprint feature means that if this enemy is paired with any enemy that forces you to take time or slow down, you can find yourself stuck in an inescapable high damage situation, once again for no fault of your own. It is a good example of dumb synergy that has no clever combination of mechanics, but rather a straight wombo combo situation where one mechanic flawlessly covers another with no weakness.

Specimen 13

Another fundamentally flawed concept, because on its own it is pitifully easy, but if you factor the possible spawns for this encounter in terms of combinations (2, 5 and 12) you get another hilarious set of layers of luck. Any room of specimen 13 with specimen 2 is an absolute joke! But the dreaded generator rooms that have you press a button and wait for the water to lower right at the start combined with specimen 5 or 12 is a recipe for either guaranteed damage if 12 or both 12 and 5 are present, or even an untimely death in the latter scenario if you happen to miss the button press or don't react with near pre-emptive precision. Once again, why ? This is not a great challenge for the player, and at worst it becomes a time-wasting nuisance when it does not feel like being a run ender, beyond your control (to a frustratingly large degree).

Karamari Hospital Monster 6 (Bekka)

Honestly, I think the developer(s) gave up on this one completely. An EM exclusive enemy that is the epitome of fundamentally flawed design. As mentioned previously, so many enemies are fast such that you cannot afford to bait this monster, and the fast enemy chasing you at the same time, and proceed without damage. So you are forced to pick, will you get damaged by the thing chasing you? Or by monster 6? Whereas sometimes, she will not even spawn at all. Or other times, you get a room with many entrances and can avoid her like a joke. Complete nonsense design, based intrinsically on nothing but luck beyond the player's control. It highlights all the flaws with this game's design, that being that at a higher level it relies highly on bad luck to kill an attempt.

I will not touch on the endless mode exclusive "unknown specimens", as my criticisms are largely recycled or too similar as these aforementioned flaws.

As for balancing suggestions, I could offer countless for each and every problematic enemy in this game, but the fact that there are so many where the dynamic between the player and the enemy is either 0 (nuisance) or 100 (run ending combination) summarises what I am talking about. Of course, balance discussion is required to even attempt to make a change, so the opinion of just one person or a handful of people is not very substantial.

Closing thoughts & summary

Endless mode could really use some touching up and reworking. As it stands, there are far too many trivial and arbitrary time wasters that do not engage the player whatsoever, and the balancing is lacking to say the least.
Should this game want to severely improve in this aspect, a large detachment from multiple upon multiple layers of randomness needs to happen so that the game has a healthier input-output cycle with the player. Currently, it is far too easy to simply get unlucky and lose an attempt unfairly with no way to improve or learn from the experience.

Realistically, this mode is an afterthought without the vision of highly skill-based gameplay creating a competitive environment accounted for. I understand this fully , and such I do not expect changes to be made even with a theoretical content update, as they would be core changes that would take an incredible amount of resources and time spent, for a part of the game that is unappreciated to say the least.

This is also a reason why I did not bother to point out every detail, and suggest a fix in a comprehensive manner, because that would be the purest form of "wasting time" mentioned in this already long post.

But perhaps these ideas can resonate with someone reading this thread, and, maybe, become shower thoughts to consider for future games and game related concepts.

Please do not take this post too seriously !

That is all.

[Okami Amaterasu]

I used to hate Lisa the most just for wasting time, but the reworked Amnesia water monster wannabe is garbage and just an instant fun killer anytime it shows up. When it was just a one and done it was cool, and it would've been nice if it either went back to being a one and done or took less time to go through currently. But as it stands now it's an absolute slog, even worse when it decides to show up multiple times in short succession.

At that point I just quit lol.

[yuu]

Originally posted by Okami Amaterasu:

At that point I just quit lol.

Right ? Exactly my point! It is just not fun with the current way it works without failsafes to prevent constant tedium.

[Kataerpillar02]

Originally posted by Okami Amaterasu:

I used to hate Lisa the most just for wasting time, but the reworked Amnesia water monster wannabe is garbage and just an instant fun killer anytime it shows up. When it was just a one and done it was cool, and it would've been nice if it either went back to being a one and done or took less time to go through currently. But as it stands now it's an absolute slog, even worse when it decides to show up multiple times in short succession.

At that point I just quit lol.

The devs have stated on Twitter that Specimen 13 will be getting some gameplay changes in the next update, though to my knowledge they haven't gone into detail about what those changes will actually be. I do hope they make her chase less tedious though. I used to like it a decent bit, but ever since her previous rework I've started to dread encountering her solely because of how long it takes to get away lol

[typervader]

Im sorry but alot of this post comes off as a skill issue on your point. Its meant to be a bit of luck based and its meant to be hard with mutiple speicmens chasing you at once.

Spec 8 and 11 arent even that strong. And complaining about speicmen 12 of all people who is one of the weakest and most simple enemies in the game.

The room part i can kinda agree, Howards room is quite annyoing sometimes.

You claim its 'fudmentally flawed' but you gave 0 fixes for said problems that dont exist.

The mode is both skilled based with RNG, thats how its desgined. The entire game is built that way, so saying they need to remove RNG seems werid, and takes away from a core gameplay desgin element of the game.

[yuu]

Originally posted by typervader:

Im sorry but alot of this post comes off as a skill issue on your point. Its meant to be a bit of luck based and its meant to be hard with mutiple speicmens chasing you at once.

Something being hard is not an excuse for it being intrinsically flawed. I go into detail why the difficulty is not so much difficulty as a dice roll, and where that applies.

Originally posted by typervader:

Spec 8 and 11 arent even that strong. And complaining about speicmen 12 of all people who is one of the weakest and most simple enemies in the game.

It is circumstantial that you say this, on their own nobody is a threat, but with an unlucky combination you simply cannot do anything about certain specimen appearing in certain rooms.

But I will upgrade your opinion to make it more specific. You might argue that sure, you can get unlucky but you will just have to take some damage and survive.
So then, what happens if you get too unlucky? It is not actually very improbable to die due to bad luck, if you get a series of rooms that have layouts that lead you into these forced damage scenarios. And due to the way endless mode works where only specific rooms make up the room pool for every floor, these situations are more common than you think.

Originally posted by typervader:

The room part i can kinda agree, Howards room is quite annyoing sometimes.

It is understandable! I really do not think tedious rooms that you have seen once in the story should be constantly available to appear in endless mode, especially since nothing happens in them (as that is their intention for whatever reason- to just take up time even if encountered before).

Originally posted by typervader:

You claim its 'fudmentally flawed' but you gave 0 fixes for said problems that dont exist.

No, the issues exist and you even agreed with one of them earlier. I do not mean to say that what I say is gospel, but there is no way someone who has spent long amounts of time playing this mode can defend the amount of luck integrated into it, compared to the original version pre-HD port.

If you are still unsure, I have spoken to some people far more passionate than me and you combined, as they have gotten incredible scores in this game's (HD) endless mode. And I also reviewed a few others on youtube who post their attempts, and they all share the sentiment that due to the combination chase mechanic HD revolves heavily around RNG which is a problem that the original version did not have, for it does not have that (you can see Ryan J share this stance, to my knowledge the #1 original endless mode player who is very involved in the game).

I did not recommend any fixes for two reasons. I state clearly in my post that I have little faith that such core changes would be implemented at this point in the game's life, and there is no problem with this. The other reason is because if I had deeply thought-out fixes, I would be making my own game and not sitting here on a forum

Originally posted by typervader:

The mode is both skilled based with RNG, thats how its desgined. The entire game is built that way, so saying they need to remove RNG seems werid, and takes away from a core gameplay desgin element of the game.

That is very interesting to me how you say that the mode is both skill and RNG based by design. You are correct, but do you not think that precisely that is a discrepancy? How can something be both one way and the complete opposite?

Skill would imply that under any circumstance, the player has a correct option that if talented enough they can consistently make based on experience and other factors. Tetris is a skill based game because no amount of speeding up the blocks, or the variety of the blocks being random, is substantial enough to where a truly talented player cannot reach what is considered the "human limit" (or in some cases, go beyond that as seen in world records!).

Luck, is exactly that. No matter how good you are at poker, you will still lose a bunch. No matter how bad you are at poker, you will also win a few games. Luck is unfair because it knows no bounds and is completely blind. Punish the hardworking, reward the less so. Luck based games are not bad, but we have seen time and time again this dichotomy of games being 90% skill based, and the 10% luck involved is always disliked and filtered out because it causes problems in competitive (or otherwise) environments.


My entire topic, appears to be about making the game more competitive and less luck based in the essence that luck plays a role but is not able to determine the player's fate outright (resulting in an easy time or a loss respectively) on its own. If you lose, it should be your fault 100% of the time, and that is regrettably not the case currently for every single run that you can have, which I think is not very fun.

[Veryfungi3221]

Dude I just got this game and have bee-lined for all the achievements. I even got game over and over, Pacifism AND speedrun strats (so my skill aint that bad imo)
I was going for the achievement for 1001 rooms in endless and JESUS CHRIST was getting Rebecca first the WORST omen for my run I then had multiple chases where the game REALLY LIKED making me avoid both her AND the Body Bag which was VERY tense in a not-so-fun way
then around room 520-ish who would appear but Bandage-face
other than "look at him" I dont know how Bandage-face works
I dont WANT to know how he works
I WANT him OUT OF MY GAME
no matter what i do he just decides to teleport to me and chip off my health very quickly but, more importantly, negate health regen from having to Tank F***ING REBECCA deciding to come at me in the most CRAMPED HALLWAYS with a near-literal SPEEDING BULLET behind me
fast-forward to Room 605
as Rebecca and Bandage-face chip me away, I reach the end of a hallway and wonder why there's no door before I quickly peek behind me and recoil in Terror
it
was
S p o o p e r
I died at room 621
and I never EVER want to go back

[Secret Flag]

Originally posted by yuu:

Very interesting game, I have followed it for a very long time and now that it has reached such an elaborate state with this renovation, and with the promise of further content updates, I want to simply put my thoughts here hoping that they resonate with somebody else.
※My playtime is not reflective of my actual time spent in this game or the original.

As much as the game is interesting, I think it is substantially lacking in the gameplay aspect beyond the scope of a first play through impression. With this being said, we can look past the story being boring to replay and too easy after the first completion, and we can excuse some achievements being arbitrary and completely backwards (like dying to everything in story mode once, ironically the rarest achievement to give an example).

I primarily care about endless mode, which houses this game's only real "engaging gameplay sequences" with nothing else in-between. When you think about what makes this game even remotely interesting, the answer is never the segments where you just walk through empty rooms. The people who played it once and never again, came and went for the story (including the DLC). But both those players and the ones who stuck around for endless mode, all got hooked because of the avoidance of the various creatures. So because this game is defined by the player fighting against the monsters, I want to discuss about only this aspect, because it is the only time where the player has any notable skill input and can potentially "play well" or "play poorly".

For these reasons, what I say is only targeted towards endless !

Preliminary round - room design

This is a fundamental flaw of this game, that it is built on a paper foundation that is extremely frail; it is a walking simulator when there is not an active threat or objective* (*in story or DLC).

As such, endless mode should reduce tedium in a few significant ways that serve 0 purpose other than to slow down and frustrate the player. Specifically:

・The looping room with the jump scare needs to be disabled in this mode. Artificially extending the length of a floor by forcing the player to waste an arbitrary amount of time looping the same room makes no sense. It is a safe room, but compared to all other safe rooms (bar one exception), it takes significantly longer by forcing the player to loop it by a considerable amount. It accomplishes the exact same thing as any other safe room, disallowing chase spawn rolls. So why is it included in endless mode? To slow down the boring segment of traversing empty rooms?

・The other safe room exception I mentioned is the puzzle room that has the player going through a series of 4 connector areas, and relying on sound/visual cues to guess a randomly assigned pattern to progress. At first, this seems like a clever way to give the player something to do while progressing. But the problem is that instead of a skill based activity, this room has the player throw the dice by having to guess completely randomly generated sequences to progress. This is not entertaining, this is unsurprisingly extremely tedious after the fifth time it is encountered.

Note:

Both of these aforementioned time wasting rooms follow a pattern that appears to come up often in this analysis, that being that they are stolen from story mode and thus designed and intended to be interesting for a first-time player. However, they are not adjusted to fit the confines and gameplay-loop of endless mode, which is the issue. These things become not novelties, but frustrating trivialities on repeat playthroughs that serve no purpose other than to waste time that could be spent speeding through an uneventful room quickly.

・The long abyss rooms that require substantial time to run through should not be able to spawn back to back. Not only for the convenience of the player who once again is forced to endure holding W and shift with 0 thought so they can get to the part where the game qualifies as an interactive experience, but also for balance reasons that I will detail in a separate segment.

・The 50/50 rooms should be completely reworked. In a game of this nature, adding an extra layer of luck in a literal sense that can potentially decide the player's fate in an instant with very little counterplay is a very expressive "I give up" sign from the developer(s) in my perspective. I understand that the goal of the two（～）true 50/50 coin flip choice rooms is to add a layer of uncertainty and force the player in an uncomfortable and risky situation. But the mark is severely missed in the current implementation where under not all that specific circumstances the player has no choice but to die if they lose the coin flip. Why? Why not make it reactionary, so the player has to make a quick judgment on a small visual cue on which way is the right way? The abyss room with the possible table dead end is a great example of a reaction-based 50/50 that rewards experience and quick execution. The game really does not need true 50/50 situations in certain rooms, it does nothing but detract from the experience at higher levels where the punishment for bad luck is already severe enough.

・Generally, room design has to account for the threats currently chasing the player. This is apparent immediately as a necessary change when we consider the layers of RNG that go behind the "difficulty" of endless mode. Let us suppose that all specimen are available in the chase pool. So what determines the player's fate?
Layer 1 - The creatures that are chosen to chase the player simultaneously
Layer 2 - The rooms that are in that floor seed and can appear on that floor
Layer 3 - The frequency of these rooms appearing sequentially

There are effectively 3 layers of luck multiplying each other that determine the outcome of a run. Certain room layouts make it near (if not fully) impossible to evade a laughably large selection of combinations of enemies, forcing the player to take guaranteed damage or die trying. And if these rooms happen to appear back to back frequently during a dangerous time, then the player is helpless as they are forced to play at their best and get rewarded by a tasteful game over because their luck was bad. There needs to be a core rework for how often room layouts can appear sequentially, what room layouts can appear based on the combination of active enemies, and so on.

Goal

The goal of this proposed rework is simple. Reduce the amount of pointless and exaggerated downtime, and make the room design such that it creates situations that the player can always react to, adapt to and overcome consistently without luck being such a make-it-or-break-it factor.

Having said this, the most mind boggling aspect of this mode is the fundamental concept of combining any monster with any monster to actively chase the player, up to 5 active enemies (with copies of each other possible) at once.

The problem with the core gameplay

...is that it simply is not play-tested and suited for this mode. All the specimen/monsters/creatures are (for the most part) lazily ripped from their source game modes with the most bare-bones changes (if any) to come across as polished for endless.
※I realise that my tone here sounds extremely disrespectful, and for that I apologize deeply, however this disappointment comes from a place of love.

The problem I see is that a substantial portion of the concepts for these enemies are defeating the purpose of their inclusion in the mode.

For the story mode specimen, the ones that work perfectly fine to spice up the gameplay for first-time players (in their respective game mode), become extremely imbalanced when paired with other specimen more often than not. For example, specimen 10 is a neat moment in the story where the player is forced to keep them close to be able to avoid their transformation. But in endless mode, you can get matched against this concept that requires the player to arbitrarily go slow (which is really boring and not engaging), in tandem with enemies that potentially force the player to run at full speed to barely escape them.
So the result is an enemy that by itself becomes nothing more than a time waster -as is honestly every enemy when faced alone provided you are aware of their mechanics-, who stupidly synergizes with a large percentage of other enemies with no clever catch involved. There is no "counter play" or "decision making" when you get a combination of this nature, it is simply a situation where at best you can manage to lose less compared to losing fully. And this applies to so many combinations, which results in the player feeling cheated when they lose.

Specifically the biggest problems I see laid out:

Specimen 8

If combined with any fast moving enemy and you get a series of winding rooms, there is 0 input from the player in that loss interaction. You may not have room to evade his warp, and due to the fast enemy chasing you, you cannot afford to go slow to prevent the warp from happening in winding hallways or zig-zag corridors and the like. So there is no counterplay, it is a stupid case of "my weaknesses are completely nullified".

Specimen 10

If combined with just about most high-threat enemies, this becomes yet another case of the player having no input in the interaction. You cannot stay close, or the faster enemy will catch up to you and kill you. But by running and activating the transformation, you are effectively just rolling the dice and hoping to get either incredibly short rooms, or rooms with many turns in which you can outpace the worm. So effectively, it is a witless gamble that can lead to an unfair game over with certain room layouts (like one of the many sequences of long straight hallways that exist in the pool of rooms).
ー＞Furthermore, this entire specimen needs a rework for this mode because who finds this mechanic engaging anyway ? At best, you are at no risk of losing and must arbitrarily go slower in certain rooms, wasting time. At worst, you are in the aforementioned state with no counterplay in a combination and must lose unfairly.

Specimen 11

Unsurprisingly, adding yet another layer of luck by having him teleport to a random location after being struck leads to some pretty stupid losses. You might have just survived an unlucky coin flip and struck him to get away while escaping other grounded enemies, but due to no fault of your own, this time he appeared right next to the exit door and killed you without you being able to react or suspect such a thing. This game really does not need even the monsters to start adding more RNG, on top of their very presence or absence as a factor.

Specimen 12

The sprint feature means that if this enemy is paired with any enemy that forces you to take time or slow down, you can find yourself stuck in an inescapable high damage situation, once again for no fault of your own. It is a good example of dumb synergy that has no clever combination of mechanics, but rather a straight wombo combo situation where one mechanic flawlessly covers another with no weakness.

Specimen 13

Another fundamentally flawed concept, because on its own it is pitifully easy, but if you factor the possible spawns for this encounter in terms of combinations (2, 5 and 12) you get another hilarious set of layers of luck. Any room of specimen 13 with specimen 2 is an absolute joke! But the dreaded generator rooms that have you press a button and wait for the water to lower right at the start combined with specimen 5 or 12 is a recipe for either guaranteed damage if 12 or both 12 and 5 are present, or even an untimely death in the latter scenario if you happen to miss the button press or don't react with near pre-emptive precision. Once again, why ? This is not a great challenge for the player, and at worst it becomes a time-wasting nuisance when it does not feel like being a run ender, beyond your control (to a frustratingly large degree).

Karamari Hospital Monster 6 (Bekka)

Honestly, I think the developer(s) gave up on this one completely. An EM exclusive enemy that is the epitome of fundamentally flawed design. As mentioned previously, so many enemies are fast such that you cannot afford to bait this monster, and the fast enemy chasing you at the same time, and proceed without damage. So you are forced to pick, will you get damaged by the thing chasing you? Or by monster 6? Whereas sometimes, she will not even spawn at all. Or other times, you get a room with many entrances and can avoid her like a joke. Complete nonsense design, based intrinsically on nothing but luck beyond the player's control. It highlights all the flaws with this game's design, that being that at a higher level it relies highly on bad luck to kill an attempt.

I will not touch on the endless mode exclusive "unknown specimens", as my criticisms are largely recycled or too similar as these aforementioned flaws.

As for balancing suggestions, I could offer countless for each and every problematic enemy in this game, but the fact that there are so many where the dynamic between the player and the enemy is either 0 (nuisance) or 100 (run ending combination) summarises what I am talking about. Of course, balance discussion is required to even attempt to make a change, so the opinion of just one person or a handful of people is not very substantial.

Closing thoughts & summary

Endless mode could really use some touching up and reworking. As it stands, there are far too many trivial and arbitrary time wasters that do not engage the player whatsoever, and the balancing is lacking to say the least.
Should this game want to severely improve in this aspect, a large detachment from multiple upon multiple layers of randomness needs to happen so that the game has a healthier input-output cycle with the player. Currently, it is far too easy to simply get unlucky and lose an attempt unfairly with no way to improve or learn from the experience.

Realistically, this mode is an afterthought without the vision of highly skill-based gameplay creating a competitive environment accounted for. I understand this fully , and such I do not expect changes to be made even with a theoretical content update, as they would be core changes that would take an incredible amount of resources and time spent, for a part of the game that is unappreciated to say the least.

This is also a reason why I did not bother to point out every detail, and suggest a fix in a comprehensive manner, because that would be the purest form of "wasting time" mentioned in this already long post.

But perhaps these ideas can resonate with someone reading this thread, and, maybe, become shower thoughts to consider for future games and game related concepts.

Please do not take this post too seriously !

That is all. :aos2kyoko:

I actually really like this thread, and it gives very valid and good criticism. When Build Your Own Mansion comes out (somepoint after the next major update), I wouldn't mind hearing more about your thoughts and how I could maybe make an improved endless mode experience.

[Okami Amaterasu]

Originally posted by Veryfungi3221 #FixTF2:

Dude I just got this game and have bee-lined for all the achievements. I even got game over and over, Pacifism AND speedrun strats (so my skill aint that bad imo)
I was going for the achievement for 1001 rooms in endless and JESUS CHRIST was getting Rebecca first the WORST omen for my run I then had multiple chases where the game REALLY LIKED making me avoid both her AND the Body Bag which was VERY tense in a not-so-fun way
then around room 520-ish who would appear but Bandage-face
other than "look at him" I dont know how Bandage-face works
I dont WANT to know how he works
I WANT him OUT OF MY GAME
no matter what i do he just decides to teleport to me and chip off my health very quickly but, more importantly, negate health regen from having to Tank F***ING REBECCA deciding to come at me in the most CRAMPED HALLWAYS with a near-literal SPEEDING BULLET behind me
fast-forward to Room 605
as Rebecca and Bandage-face chip me away, I reach the end of a hallway and wonder why there's no door before I quickly peek behind me and recoil in Terror
it
was
S p o o p e r
I died at room 621
and I never EVER want to go back

Lisa is absolute agony, that I agree. Although Bandage is easy. He's the same as other weeping angel wannabe monsters but you can just hit him with the axe to get rid of him for the room.

[Veryfungi3221]

Originally posted by Okami Amaterasu:

Originally posted by Veryfungi3221 #FixTF2:

Dude I just got this game and have bee-lined for all the achievements. I even got game over and over, Pacifism AND speedrun strats (so my skill aint that bad imo)
I was going for the achievement for 1001 rooms in endless and JESUS CHRIST was getting Rebecca first the WORST omen for my run I then had multiple chases where the game REALLY LIKED making me avoid both her AND the Body Bag which was VERY tense in a not-so-fun way
then around room 520-ish who would appear but Bandage-face
other than "look at him" I dont know how Bandage-face works
I dont WANT to know how he works
I WANT him OUT OF MY GAME
no matter what i do he just decides to teleport to me and chip off my health very quickly but, more importantly, negate health regen from having to Tank F***ING REBECCA deciding to come at me in the most CRAMPED HALLWAYS with a near-literal SPEEDING BULLET behind me
fast-forward to Room 605
as Rebecca and Bandage-face chip me away, I reach the end of a hallway and wonder why there's no door before I quickly peek behind me and recoil in Terror
it
was
S p o o p e r
I died at room 621
and I never EVER want to go back

Lisa is absolute agony, that I agree. Although Bandage is easy. He's the same as other weeping angel wannabe monsters but you can just hit him with the axe to get rid of him for the room.

really??? I must have missed a lot but I swear he barely cares if ur looking and moves incredibly erratically until he just says "F*** it" and teleports on you from the other side of the room

[Veryfungi3221]

I also want to note that I never had much trouble from the amnesia siren because I was usually able to ignore the siren with good pathing and stamina management

[yuu]

Originally posted by Secret Flag:

I actually really like this thread, and it gives very valid and good criticism. When Build Your Own Mansion comes out (somepoint after the next major update), I wouldn't mind hearing more about your thoughts and how I could maybe make an improved endless mode experience.

I really appreciate it. Reading it back with hindsight and having since heard more opinions from other players, I would perhaps have gone into more detail and maybe suggested some of my best ideas, but at the same time I believe that this game is in good hands as it stands.


One of my biggest thoughts when I played endless mode for a while is how fascinating the attack interactions are with the player and the monsters. That is to say, whenever the player can use their weapon to take a specimen out of commission or severely influence their survival ability with well-timed attacks that stun or otherwise delay the pursuer, it makes for some of the most fun situations. The changes to make weapons slower makes it much more methodical to use, and managing your stamina and its quirks with attacking correctly creates great strategy. Keeping that in mind, if I was to rework the gamemode I would most likely make changes that sound somewhat like this:

-Highly increase the rarity (or limit to once per floor if chosen in the room pool) of the tedious safe rooms.
-Have some sort of system in which every room has a "danger" value, that is taken into account when calculating what the next room will be during a chase of multiple monsters:

Rooms that highlight the strengths of the monsters chasing you should be prioritised (pits for flying enemies to go over, winding rooms for monsters that are incorporeal) with the catch that if there are high-danger rooms available in the current floor pool and the player is being chased by more than 1 monster, the game should not be able to roll another "high danger value" room sequentially, using some sort of calculation of the current room's value and maybe taking into account a "threat level" variable for each monster.

In effect, a system of this nature tries to address the probabilities of a floor having really difficult rooms back to back that can lead to forced damage or unfair game over scenarios. If you get unlucky and have to endure a really difficult room with dangerous monsters chasing you, you are then ensured that the next 1-2 rooms will be short or generally easy to survive to some capacity, so that you can (if played correctly) heal back all your lost HP just in time until another high danger value room appears in the rotation.

-Add more interactions with the axe/ sword weapons that the player can take advantage of. The moment I saw that specimen 12 can "parry" your strike, I thought it would be really interesting if that had gameplay functionality and prevented or reset his sprint timer, so you can keep him close to you and prevent him from sprinting by forcing him to use up his energy to block your attack. All the specimen that can be stunned or disabled by means of striking add a lot of depth to the gameplay with their inclusions!

I still think it is reasonable for high threat value enemies to be invulnerable and have no effect when being struck (specimen 4 comes to mind), but as it stands since the issue is that some combinations are incredibly strong, adding new interactions that reward trading valuable stamina to instead attack to save your health temporarily or long term is a clever way to encourage taking risks (such as by being able to repeatedly disorient specimen 3 in a long corridor- I believe this interaction would work well with specimen 10 in his worm form too, to prevent it from being so oppressive when paired).

Truthfully, there are not many issues as it stands. I try to make it clear in my thread that the problems are not so much the lack of features, as the need to make certain features more intricate to encompass the harder and more strategic (hopefully) nature of this game's endless mode, compared to the original! It is not unexpected that the original game's endless mode is a breeze, where only 1 monster can chase the player at once, compared to this game where the core system of combining and mixing monsters creates exponential difficulty.
P.S I am not sure if it would be ideal to change both the room system and the overall difficulty of specimen combinations, as if I feel like either of those alone accomplish the same task of limiting over-arching RNG and rewarding player experience and skill. If I had to pick only one, I think being able to carefully perfect any encounter in any room is better than accepting that some rooms are unfair and just preventing them from appearing too often.

[typervader]

Originally posted by yuu:

Originally posted by typervader:

Im sorry but alot of this post comes off as a skill issue on your point. Its meant to be a bit of luck based and its meant to be hard with mutiple speicmens chasing you at once.

Something being hard is not an excuse for it being intrinsically flawed. I go into detail why the difficulty is not so much difficulty as a dice roll, and where that applies.

Originally posted by typervader:

Spec 8 and 11 arent even that strong. And complaining about speicmen 12 of all people who is one of the weakest and most simple enemies in the game.

It is circumstantial that you say this, on their own nobody is a threat, but with an unlucky combination you simply cannot do anything about certain specimen appearing in certain rooms.

But I will upgrade your opinion to make it more specific. You might argue that sure, you can get unlucky but you will just have to take some damage and survive.
So then, what happens if you get too unlucky? It is not actually very improbable to die due to bad luck, if you get a series of rooms that have layouts that lead you into these forced damage scenarios. And due to the way endless mode works where only specific rooms make up the room pool for every floor, these situations are more common than you think.

Originally posted by typervader:

The room part i can kinda agree, Howards room is quite annyoing sometimes.

It is understandable! I really do not think tedious rooms that you have seen once in the story should be constantly available to appear in endless mode, especially since nothing happens in them (as that is their intention for whatever reason- to just take up time even if encountered before).

Originally posted by typervader:

You claim its 'fudmentally flawed' but you gave 0 fixes for said problems that dont exist.

No, the issues exist and you even agreed with one of them earlier. I do not mean to say that what I say is gospel, but there is no way someone who has spent long amounts of time playing this mode can defend the amount of luck integrated into it, compared to the original version pre-HD port.

If you are still unsure, I have spoken to some people far more passionate than me and you combined, as they have gotten incredible scores in this game's (HD) endless mode. And I also reviewed a few others on youtube who post their attempts, and they all share the sentiment that due to the combination chase mechanic HD revolves heavily around RNG which is a problem that the original version did not have, for it does not have that (you can see Ryan J share this stance, to my knowledge the #1 original endless mode player who is very involved in the game).

I did not recommend any fixes for two reasons. I state clearly in my post that I have little faith that such core changes would be implemented at this point in the game's life, and there is no problem with this. The other reason is because if I had deeply thought-out fixes, I would be making my own game and not sitting here on a forum :aos2kae:

Originally posted by typervader:

The mode is both skilled based with RNG, thats how its desgined. The entire game is built that way, so saying they need to remove RNG seems werid, and takes away from a core gameplay desgin element of the game.

That is very interesting to me how you say that the mode is both skill and RNG based by design. You are correct, but do you not think that precisely that is a discrepancy? How can something be both one way and the complete opposite?

Skill would imply that under any circumstance, the player has a correct option that if talented enough they can consistently make based on experience and other factors. Tetris is a skill based game because no amount of speeding up the blocks, or the variety of the blocks being random, is substantial enough to where a truly talented player cannot reach what is considered the "human limit" (or in some cases, go beyond that as seen in world records!).

Luck, is exactly that. No matter how good you are at poker, you will still lose a bunch. No matter how bad you are at poker, you will also win a few games. Luck is unfair because it knows no bounds and is completely blind. Punish the hardworking, reward the less so. Luck based games are not bad, but we have seen time and time again this dichotomy of games being 90% skill based, and the 10% luck involved is always disliked and filtered out because it causes problems in competitive (or otherwise) environments.


My entire topic, appears to be about making the game more competitive and less luck based in the essence that luck plays a role but is not able to determine the player's fate outright (resulting in an easy time or a loss respectively) on its own. If you lose, it should be your fault 100% of the time, and that is regrettably not the case currently for every single run that you can have, which I think is not very fun.

The issue is that most of the time it is a skill issue if you die. There are very few situations that are complety rng that kill you. You can survive most if not all, combos by understanding map room layout, taking your time, or juking the specimens. Using the weaknesses of every one correctly.

Let's take 10 as an example. In some room types you can easily run in a circle to avoid the worm form due to its inability to turn well.

Or how about 8 who you claim has no counterplay. You can simply be far enough away from the wall to avoid him or just tank a hit because he has lower then normal damage.

Specimen 12 is one of the easier to avoid specimens so I'm unsure why your complaining about him. You can juke him out during his sprint like every other fast specimen.


Notice how every counterplay has 0 luck or rng involved, and just requires good timing, understanding ai, and room layout. The only luck factor is room types, speicemrn spawns, and who you get.


Also, please dont use Ryan J as an example. Dude hates HD enterily and the devs, so of course he would agree. Also OG endless mode has 0 challenge involed so getting a high score in it doesn't matter

[yuu]

Originally posted by typervader:

Notice how every counterplay has 0 luck or rng involved, and just requires good timing, understanding ai, and room layout. The only luck factor is room types, speicemrn spawns, and who you get.

Indeed, there is counter play in specific rooms for everyone, even troublesome combinations. But the keyword is "specific". I agree with you fully that there are situations where you can pull through, but these situations are not as cut and dry and common as you may have been lead to believe. There are unfortunately, far too many cases where those (to you) "improbable" unlucky situations can occur. And even if the player does not intrinsically lose outright, the fact that the possibility of them leading to a loss (seen most often with specific room types such as corridors and combinations of specimen that capitalise off of each other in these specific rooms) exists is the issue.

I agree only partly that as it stands, there is "technically" a loose sense of skill and counter-play under various scenarios, but the scenarios where there isn't do not disappear as a result !
That is to say, just as you can make an example where you can outplay specimen 10 with a fast specimen, I can reasonably make two more where you cannot, and this back and forth of which situation is fair and which isn't should not inherently be the subject of a balance discussion, these are only faucets of a larger issue.


As for the aforementioned player, I do not really know anyone's reasoning for having problems with endless mode that line up with what I have detailed in this discussion. All I know is that many people attribute the game to luck (good and bad players alike, which are both important metrics for a game) more so than the player's capabilities in a good handful of scenarios, which takes away from the competitive nature of it all. I am sorry if he was a bad example, I have not done much research on this aspect...

[Veryfungi3221]

Originally posted by typervader:

Originally posted by yuu:

Something being hard is not an excuse for it being intrinsically flawed. I go into detail why the difficulty is not so much difficulty as a dice roll, and where that applies.



It is circumstantial that you say this, on their own nobody is a threat, but with an unlucky combination you simply cannot do anything about certain specimen appearing in certain rooms.

But I will upgrade your opinion to make it more specific. You might argue that sure, you can get unlucky but you will just have to take some damage and survive.
So then, what happens if you get too unlucky? It is not actually very improbable to die due to bad luck, if you get a series of rooms that have layouts that lead you into these forced damage scenarios. And due to the way endless mode works where only specific rooms make up the room pool for every floor, these situations are more common than you think.



It is understandable! I really do not think tedious rooms that you have seen once in the story should be constantly available to appear in endless mode, especially since nothing happens in them (as that is their intention for whatever reason- to just take up time even if encountered before).




No, the issues exist and you even agreed with one of them earlier. I do not mean to say that what I say is gospel, but there is no way someone who has spent long amounts of time playing this mode can defend the amount of luck integrated into it, compared to the original version pre-HD port.

If you are still unsure, I have spoken to some people far more passionate than me and you combined, as they have gotten incredible scores in this game's (HD) endless mode. And I also reviewed a few others on youtube who post their attempts, and they all share the sentiment that due to the combination chase mechanic HD revolves heavily around RNG which is a problem that the original version did not have, for it does not have that (you can see Ryan J share this stance, to my knowledge the #1 original endless mode player who is very involved in the game).

I did not recommend any fixes for two reasons. I state clearly in my post that I have little faith that such core changes would be implemented at this point in the game's life, and there is no problem with this. The other reason is because if I had deeply thought-out fixes, I would be making my own game and not sitting here on a forum :aos2kae:



That is very interesting to me how you say that the mode is both skill and RNG based by design. You are correct, but do you not think that precisely that is a discrepancy? How can something be both one way and the complete opposite?

Skill would imply that under any circumstance, the player has a correct option that if talented enough they can consistently make based on experience and other factors. Tetris is a skill based game because no amount of speeding up the blocks, or the variety of the blocks being random, is substantial enough to where a truly talented player cannot reach what is considered the "human limit" (or in some cases, go beyond that as seen in world records!).

Luck, is exactly that. No matter how good you are at poker, you will still lose a bunch. No matter how bad you are at poker, you will also win a few games. Luck is unfair because it knows no bounds and is completely blind. Punish the hardworking, reward the less so. Luck based games are not bad, but we have seen time and time again this dichotomy of games being 90% skill based, and the 10% luck involved is always disliked and filtered out because it causes problems in competitive (or otherwise) environments.


My entire topic, appears to be about making the game more competitive and less luck based in the essence that luck plays a role but is not able to determine the player's fate outright (resulting in an easy time or a loss respectively) on its own. If you lose, it should be your fault 100% of the time, and that is regrettably not the case currently for every single run that you can have, which I think is not very fun.

The issue is that most of the time it is a skill issue if you die. There are very few situations that are complety rng that kill you. You can survive most if not all, combos by understanding map room layout, taking your time, or juking the specimens. Using the weaknesses of every one correctly.

Let's take 10 as an example. In some room types you can easily run in a circle to avoid the worm form due to its inability to turn well.

Or how about 8 who you claim has no counterplay. You can simply be far enough away from the wall to avoid him or just tank a hit because he has lower then normal damage.

Specimen 12 is one of the easier to avoid specimens so I'm unsure why your complaining about him. You can juke him out during his sprint like every other fast specimen.


Notice how every counterplay has 0 luck or rng involved, and just requires good timing, understanding ai, and room layout. The only luck factor is room types, speicemrn spawns, and who you get.


Also, please dont use Ryan J as an example. Dude hates HD enterily and the devs, so of course he would agree. Also OG endless mode has 0 challenge involed so getting a high score in it doesn't matter

like i, on my first endless mode run had to just use skill as i stared down bandage-face (who still teleported on to me from anywhere) as Bekka stabbed me in the back and spooper deleted health regeneration from my copy of the game while draining it?

[yuu]

I could make a separate discussion about spooper honestly he is such a big offender when it comes to bad luck, because half of the situations where we can excuse RNG it is because the player gets to heal after the unlucky situation. Spooper does not create any new problems, he just amplifies the existing ones from bad matchups.