DLC Picnic Panic is not a picnic! Harder than original game!

[rambo_fox]

I'm now at the voodoo hearts race at the end (or almost?) end of Picnic Panic. Ouch--this is waaayyy harder than anything in the original game. Is it just me, or did the devs decide to torture fans with insanely difficult material this time around?

[Seth Abercromby]

Originally posted by Crystal:

reminder to take achievements stats with grain of salt, since tools like SAM exist, which just give you all the achievements

And those people make up a tiny fraction of baby cheaters who have nothing in life than cheat achievements in indie games nobody knows about.

Unless you can give me a good reason to assume this game has an unusually high amount of achievement cheaters, I'm assuming the margin of error is no less significant than rounding errors on the side of Steam.

[Hotel Security]

And those people make up a tiny fraction of baby cheaters who have nothing in life than cheat achievements in indie games nobody knows about.

True, but Achievement/Trophy stats are still unreliable, especially for a game an indie that was available for free are certain points. I mean someone can be on PSN+ and sees this game available for free. They grab it, play it for a half-hour, don't like it, and then put it away....but this trophy list gets registered with all the rest.

So every trophy list has to consider that there are tons of people who started the game and quit almost immediately. Not to mention that folks quit or move on from games all the time and usually just for impatient reasons like a better game getting released. Many never get back to finish it. So, I agree that you can't trust trophy data for this type of thing since it's already bad data from all the people who barely played the game. You can't judge difficulty from trophies when that's not the reason most people don't get a trophy.

In the case of Picnic Panic, DLC percentages are even lower since many of these are people who beat it and didn't care about the extras. So it's am smaller pool.

I'm assuming the margin of error is no less significant than rounding errors on the side of Steam.

The percentage is fine but it's based on many many many people who barely gave the game a fair shake and likely never even tried Picnic Panic. I mean, according to trophies only 80% beat the first boss...am I to believe it was too hard for the 20%? Of course not...those are the people who barely played it.

steam achievements dont work, when you play in offline mode

Didn't even know about that. That's pretty stupid.

[Seth Abercromby]

Originally posted by Hotel Security:

So every trophy list has to consider that there are tons of people who started the game and quit almost immediately.

If you ad actually bothered reading my original point, I went specifically by total percentage of people who finished the game vs percentage of people who managed a perfect race.

Now there are a unknown number of people who made it to the race and never finished the game, but even those I believe to be a statistical minority. As the facts are, slightly less than a quarter of the people who completed picnic panic finished a perfect race on that bossfight one way or another.

[L.3.N.Z.]

I noticed the Shadow Messenger doesn't start moving until you do in the Race. This should give you time to find how a way through the challenge.

Rope Dart is super useful. In one of the runs there are spiked pendulums and monsters, use your Rope Dart to grapple the monster and whirl though the pendulum. Rope Dart gives you invulnerability time due to the Messenger's spinning animation.

Now, if you are going for the achievement where you have to win every parkour against the Shadow and you're on the final race with the Rope Dart/ Gliding Combo, then all comes down to Timing and knowing how grapple speed works.

Don't grapple monsters, they will slow you down, only grapple rings.
You want to hit the monsters with the Glide Attack, (Messenger swings his sword down while gliding) causing you to bounce off them and keeping your speed.
You need to memorize the patterns of monsters and rings while going fast.

It was hard for me when I tried the first 11 times and it is still hard even after I got the achievement. I was surprised when I completed it, but yeah, response time is the key.

[Seth Abercromby]

Originally posted by Crystal:

[CITATION NEEDED]

Achievement data is publicly available. If you have nothing more to offer than 'but muh steam cheats', then those are the most accurate representation of the player performance regarding this particular achievement. I'm sorry you're staking so much of your feelings on being too bad to clear a challenge that is meant to be difficult.

[Seth Abercromby]

I'm sorry you are too insecure about an achievement to take an L buddy, stay mad.

[TheBeak]

I enjoyed the race and the DLC. Didn't think completing the race in general was impossible. Didn't go for perfection too, too overboard but I'm coming off Quantum Break on hard (that final battle is misery) and Shadow Warrior on insane with no new game +, so I was happy in just completing Picnic Panic as is. It's do-able though and lost out on a perfect run with one mistake on my part. It all felt very much like the mistake I made robbing me of a flawless run was all on me and not random chance. Messenger controls are tight and responsive in my book, so I slammed my fist for my own error. You can breeze those first 4 races, I had those down to a point after a few tries that I won them every single time.

As someone stated above, I thought the totem battle was tougher than anything that came after it (or before it in both the main game and DLC). And again, not cheap tough, just required a lot of old school, focused pattern watching and getting in every hit you can while maintaining endless momentum. I enjoyed the hell out of that fight. It legitimately felt like a true old school challenge to me and was happy when I got it down to a science for the victory.

All in all I loved the DLC, it felt like a solid challenge in the sense that you had to be on your game/moves and paying attention to what you're doing with every trick you pull.

[Miguelh1020]

I think the problem is that there's a huge shift on difficult from everything else in the game.
There are difficult games that requiere your complete devotion to master, but The Messenger is on the most part a fun relaxing experience not a battle for perfection.
This final challenge is a giant test of might that may not be what some people were expecting of the game

[TheBeak]

I can agree to that. Even the action-oriented first half of the game is nowhere near as tough as the DLC. I didn't think any boss throughout the entire game was a tough as the totem boss in Picnic Panic. But then again, I'm one that put the game down for awhile when it became less linear and more wandering. As much as I like the whole experience, there is an a pretty uneven side to the Messenger when you stack up the first half vs the second vs Picnic Panic.

As a whole, I have to say I had a blast but don't blame anyone for finding each part a bit jarring.

[Neocronic]

About dlc in two words - Dark souls.

[Hotel Security]

I can agree to that. Even the action-oriented first half of the game is nowhere near as tough as the DLC. I didn't think any boss throughout the entire game was a tough as the totem boss in Picnic Panic.

I had trouble both with Barthmazel, the Arcane Golem and felt they were just as tricky as the Totem boss. And I had far more trouble against the Race than any of them. I felt the last few levels in the main game were on par with the DLC levels. Not that much harder but still tough in sections.

[TechnØmatter]

Try doing that ♥♥♥♥ on keyboard... Star Messenger will have to wait for when I have a new controller.

[Hotel Security]

^I don't know how anyone does these side-scrollers with a keyboard. You folks are crazy.

[TheChrononaut1]

I adore this game and almost everything about it, but the Dark Messenger race is legitimately awful. Poorly designed, poorly implemented. It screams, "the people who designed it were good at it (because obviously) and thought everyone else would be too." It really, really isn't fun at all, at least for me. Nothing in the entirety of the rest of the base game or DLC feels this way. I wish it could just get modded out. I don't even care about the achievement.

[Seth Abercromby]

I feel like I'm being a broken record whenever this thread is revived, but the Star Messenger achievement is not meant to be for everyone. The games gives you much easier challenge rooms if you're falling behind, and the last room if you both are one point away is a very straightforward cloud jumping challenge that dark messenger even makes a mistake on, given you an additional chance to win.

Only about half the people who went out of their way to beat every optional challenge actually managed to claim Star Messenger (for which I'm using the meeting the mask achievement as a benchmark as I think it's reasonable enough to assume that the people who got every mask fragment would also have gotten all power seals), which should give you a decent insight into the 'intended difficulty' for that achievement. I myself have it, and I'm not gonna pretend it didn't take a lot of resets. It's hard and you have to get a good grasp on the particulars of the speed-gliding course to not miss your cloud jumps. It is possible, but it is absolutely not meant for everyone.