Gorepete Wrote:mrttao Wrote:1. Most boss fights are timer based. You have to dodge for a minute before getting that 3 second window of attack. Losing to an instakill attack 20 minute into the fight and having to restart it from the beginning is horrible.
Yeah, that is fair. I might have to tweak some of the boss' HP levels before a final release. I have been going back and forth on some of the "when you can attack them" windows. Right now though, the alternative is to either nerf the crap out of Eva's damage or buff the hell out of the boss' if I wanted to make them more "free for all" damagable (the mask is a good example of this, you can damage him at any time in any phase but his return damage is fairly brutal). Do you like fights like the mask more or fights like the stinger's more where you have to wait for opportunity?
Why do you HAVE to also buff them in response? A boss taking 5 minutes instead of 50 isn't too bad.
How about just making their invulnerability phases shorter? Or if they mostly played the same. But during the "invulnerability" phase they just had serious damage reduction instead of total invulnerability?
Its already pretty risky to get close to them during their active attack phase. So it would take a lot of skill to not take damage while attacking them before their guard is down.
The mask fight you DO have to wait for the opportunity... sure you can damage it, but it is a trap. You will die if you attack and damage it at the wrong time. The masks biggest problem is that of the flash engine itself. 90% of my losses against it were due to flash acting up. (I do admit I made a mistake that got me killed in those other 10%)
Gorepete Wrote:3. Every time you lose against the mask though you have to fight all the guys in the arena again before it. Its not HARD, in fact its trivial... its just time and wrist breaking. I spent 7 hours trying and failing to beat the mask (yes, really... and the vast majority of this was NOT spent actually fighting the mask). This is not "tough but fair" this is burning time.
I will probably cave on this one eventually. But right now, the 'philosophical' issue against it is that the purpose of the arena is to have mobs to grind on to level up before you fight Bridgette. If people auto fight the mask once the waves have been done, there is nothing to grind on and you are stuck between the Mask and Bridgette with no opportunity to level up. So I would need to come up with something to resolve that before I make a change.
How about after you beat the arena the first time (all except mask) you get a tiny cutscene showing that you sense something from the mask and then make it activateable (stand over mask and press a button) to start the mask battle. And you can redo the other sequence (without the mask) by activating the brazier.
And/or if killed by a bossfight (or just the mask), have a "retry" option which restarts that boss battle without having to wade through minions again.
4. I got mask to 0HP, yet it wouldn't die and ignored seduce... so i kept on hitting it doing about 2x the damage needed to kill it... nothing happened. Only later did I find out the cause is that HP is only checked when they are done doing their attack sequence. And the mask was still pretty early in the "5 masks dropping down to hit you" sequence.
This is one of those game limitations. Interrupting the animations and starting the regen sequence is actually a much bigger pain in the ass than you would think; that is why the current attack sequence has to complete before it will enter regen phase. If I can think of an elegant solution to this (instead of the mask just dissapearing or gap stepping into regen, I will change it. Right now though, I don't have that solution.
Alright then, but this is something that should be covered in the game instructions mini-tutorial you are given at the start.
5. When fighting the angel, supposedly my character decided on WHERE in the island the ambush points are. I am never TOLD where they are. Every step of the way that I beat her I have to guess. On the 3rd one I guessed wrong (I tried to go left instead of right) and hit an invisible wall... could get to the other side in time and got insta killed and had to restart this battle.
Eh? Was the shadow wall not up? There should be the black wall blocking the left side, which should make it pretty clear that you are supposed to go right where there is no wall. If the wall wasn't showing, that is a bug and I can fix it.
I didn't see any shadow-walls. I used trial and error to figure out the path I need to take.
6. Very fast HP Regen on bosses means you have to beat them again and again and again before they actually go down. Mask for example is a minimum of 2 beatdowns (based on how fast it regened HP while I was seducing it after the first beatdown)
Yeah, I actually try to balance the fights so there are at least two seduce sequences for the bosses. I think this is whats them feel more "boss like"; and when you think about it mechanic-wise, there would be no real purpose to channeling lust if everything seduced in the first round. Now I agree that if a boss requires like 4+ seduce rounds, that is way out of wack and should be fixed. But I really do think 2-3 is perfectly fair.
In general I agree, its just that this compounds with the above issues. Defeating the mask once is tough enough, beating it 3 times in a row? Very tough. Especially because most of the times I die against it due to flash issues (abilities not firing off properly; abilities needed to survive the instakills)
Yeah, I try to work these issues out as best as I can, but like you said, flash is flash. Sometimes it is just a really crappy platform for games. I do try to limit what I do for it to be within reason. I actually had a completely different fight for the Broodmother initially, but after testing, I knew the lag for some players would just be too much and redesigned it from scratch. I would love to have more spell effects and diverse fighting, but my hands are tied a lot by the limitations of the program.
Yea, and this is the core of most of the issues I raised. a lot of them are not unfair in of themselves, like the boss needing to be beat 3 times or requiring exceptional skill and timing or a 3 second window of attack per 1 minute of dodging. I have handled such games before.
The issue is that when a single flash mishap insta kills you 40 minutes into a 50 minute boss fight you want to snap the keyboard over your knee. The longer boss fights are the worst it gets.
I got the perfect win in cave story, the secret one with the insane difficulty. I am no stranger to tough skill challenges.
But you have to be able to execute new attempts fast enough. And you have to be using a platform that reliably takes key presses and doesn't lag.
The crux of my argument is, BECAUSE you are programming this game in flash, the difficulty and amount of skill a player should have needs to be dialed down to compensates for flash's shortcomings.
Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2012 10:18 am
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(Damn you Marduk for stealing my line...)