Gryzemuis on 18/6/2013 at 10:44

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Earlier, I wrote: "I approach all fights the same way: I just keep running".


I'm not so sure about that.
You can hit someone in the face. Kick them in the shins. You can disarm them. You can take their gun, and shoot back.

At first I wanted none of that. I just wanted to keep running. But at certain points, just running isn't an option anymore. E.g. in the boat-level, where you have to spend 5-8 seconds turning a wheel to open a door. You'll get shot in the back by 4 guys with guns. So you will need to find another strategy.

Possible strategies:
1) Hit them in the face. One by one. Until they fall down. It's a non-lethal approach. But not fun. Because it's still violent. Also constantly fighting guys with machineguns, just using your bare hands feels stale very quickly. It breaks immersion.
2) Hit one of them in the face. Take his gun. Shoot everyone dead.
3) Kite them. Kite all of them far away from the exit-point. Then run for it, open the door, and hope the guards are too slow.

I didn't kite them. It feels just as bad, exploiting the bad AI. And even then, the AI isn't that bad, because they often won't follow you. So no kiting.

In the end, I said "fuck it", and I just took a gun, and shot them all.

The game started good. I really enjoyed the first half. But then the fighting increased. And the fun slowly went away. I got to the point that I didn't even want to play anymore. I am now in the last level, so I will probably finish the game. But my enthusiasm went from 9 to 3. The game has a lot of potential. But it seems like the developers didn't understand themselves what made the game fun.

Gryzemuis on 18/6/2013 at 13:01

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It's the two halls right after you leave the truck in which you entered the boat. The first hall I could do without fighting. But I imagine that it'd be easier when you just pick up a gun. The next hall (on top of the first one) has 4 cops with machineguns. You leave that hall via a door with a revolting doorknob. Turning the doorknob takes so long that you'll be shot for sure.

I watched Fafhrd's run right after I did the boat level. Because I wanted to see how he did those 2 halls. It turns out he did it by dying a lot of times. :) In the end, his strategy was to just approach them one on one, in melee combat. He didn't kill the guards, but just knocked them out, one by one. I imagine you might be able to kite them, so you won't need to knock out. That would be a little less violent, and a little more appropriate for "a runner". But I haven't tried kiting. It might not work at all.

It's not that I thought that fighting the guards was hard. It's just that I didn't like the fact that fighting was silently implied, and makes those levels a lot easier. I prefer games like Thief and Dishonored, which give your serious options to avoid violence (doh!).

I just finished the last level. Overall the game was ok. There were times where I enjoyed myself. And times where I was pretty frustrated. ("I should need to be fighting these guards"). It could have been a classic, I think. But some how the developers botched it up, imho.

Pyrian on 18/6/2013 at 20:26

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In the discussed boat-room, there's a machine-gunner in the middle of the room close to the exit. MG guys, as opposed to the more common SMG guys, do not move and cannot be kited. Heck, they can't even be kicked backwards, they will stand their ground until they're unconscious or dead (at which point they won't be standing, but they're still not going anywhere). Interestingly, this makes them hard to beat up, but they're very easy to disarm (again, in contrast to the SMG guys, who're the hardest to disarm of any disarmable enemy, but pretty easy to just beat up).

newguypaul on 20/6/2013 at 21:25

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I think this could be really good... if done correctly. The only way to make this work though, is to have multiple ways to attack each situation, similar to what LittleFlower said. I like open world exploration like what Assassin's Creed offers and I think that could work quite well here as well. That said, you still need to appeal to those who liked the speedrun style of gameplay from the original. I personally would enjoy both. Being able to explore a city beforehand and then getting missions that send me from A to B like the original would be fantastic. I mean maybe you could get intel about where Blues are patrolling and it's different from mission to mission. That way you would have to use your previous knowledge about the city's layout to plan out your best route through the mayhem. Sorry if this seems like I'm rambling a bit, I hadn't put too much thought into this game yet, but this thread got me thinking.

Renault on 1/7/2013 at 05:30

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Couple things on this - I just read somewhere that ME sold 2.5 million copies, so calling it a flop sounds pretty harsh. They wanted to sell 3 million, and came up a bit short, but certainly not enough to call it a flop.

I've always heard great things about this game, and I'm finally in the process of playing through it (level 3 currently). The PC version I recently bought on Steam for super cheap performs really awful on my 4 year old PC, even without PhysX enabled, so I borrowed a 360 version from a friend and it's a massive improvement.

That aside, from what I've seen so far, this game is kind of meant to be a linear, speedrun game. Get from point A to point B fast, and there's a couple of options for doing so. So far, the exhilaration in playing is trying to get your shit done fast, before the cops close in, with very little room for error. But open world? Sounds like A) it would totally change the gameplay and B) it would be a logistical nightmare for level design. Aren't they completely shooting themselves in the foot by not sticking to type of game that made the original as popular/successful as it was?

Edit: Thought this was worth posting - real life ME.

[video=youtube;KSwBT6QRUjA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSwBT6QRUjA[/video]