Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty - Team Ninja's take on Romance of the Three Kingdoms

[Kromeo]

Just now, Stanley said:

Games are the opposite in that you have meet certain conditions or increase your skill to get further, and it’s beyond reach for some people no matter how hard they try or how much they might enjoy the game otherwise.

 

Correct! Not everything is for everyone. I Wanna Be The Guy wasn't for me, for instance; it was made for a very small group of masochistic gamers, and that's OK.

 

1 minute ago, Stanley said:

They are prevented from enjoying the media they’ve purchased due to stubborn decisions made by the designers. 

 

No! Incorrect! It's just not for them! Not everything has to be for everyone!

 

2 minutes ago, Stanley said:

I’m all for difficulty and accessibility options for that reason alone. It doesn’t harm the original vision for those who want it and can still access it that way, but it does open the game up to much wider audience of less skilled players.

Not wanting to open something up can be part of that original vision you say you don't want to harm.

[jonamok]

Anyway. That early valley area with all the bridges is quite the warren to navigate isn’t it? Feels much more expansive than the previous three levels. More areas like this please.

[Stanley]

So you’re basically saying to those people who’ve just spent £50 on the game, tough shit, it’s not for you - thanks for buying the game though! 

[jonny_rat]

2 minutes ago, Kromeo said:

 

Correct, it wasn't. It's exactly the kind of stuff a community manager would tweet on a daily basis. Trust me, I should know.

 

If the studio was in panic mode, they would've patched the boss by now, not send out a message on a social network with medium popularity. Also note that the tweet in question is a week old. 

No one's panicking. You're just coping. 

Medium popularity? I know the musk stuff has been shit, but, no.

 

I think they haven't patched it yet because the fix here, such as it is, needs a bit of thought. This still needs to be a teaching boss: the problem is that the goal looks too distant. Maybe the player should be told to focus on doing the actions that will fill up their beast bar. What are those actions? I still don't know, and I've done the boss.

 

What am I coping with again? I just want people to play a good game and the devs to be rewarded for their good good game.

[BadgerFarmer]

55 minutes ago, Kromeo said:

It might feel like a misstep, but people said the same thing about the nunchuck boss in Ninja Gaiden back in the day, despite just needing to learn how to block properly. They said the same thing about Demon's Souls (the red-eyed knight and the HP loss), etc. All things that are looked back on with nostalgia now.

Mark my words, the fight is going to stay the same. If anything changes, it'll merely be a bigger emphasis on the jade activating in the second phase.

From has been rebalancing its Souls etc. games all the time, or adding extra hints to help you through. Even Ninja Gaiden added an easy mode when it was updated for NG Black.

[Kromeo]

2 minutes ago, jonamok said:

Anyway. That early valley area with all the bridges is quite the warren to navigate isn’t it? Feels much more expansive than the previous three levels. More areas like this please.

 

Yes, Team Ninja really stepped it up with the level design in this game! And you're in luck: I'm at a later level right now and it's massive.

 

3 minutes ago, Stanley said:

So you’re basically saying to those people who’ve just spent £50 on the game, tough shit, it’s not for you - thanks for buying the game though! 

 

For fuck's sake.

You know what? Yes. Cry me a river, grow the fuck up, and get a refund.

 

Do your research before buying anything; it's 2023, and you're walking around with the biggest information depository in the history of mankind in your literal pockets.

 

4 minutes ago, jonny_rat said:

I think they haven't patched it yet because the fix here, such as it is, needs a bit of thought.

 

Or people can just quickly look up how to activate the jade, LOL. 

[Kromeo]

2 minutes ago, BadgerFarmer said:

Even Ninja Gaiden added an easy mode when it was updated for NG Black.

An easy mode that was forced upon Itagaki by the publisher, and that he added with so much reluctancy that the mode actively shamed the people who picked it.

[jonny_rat]

12 minutes ago, Stanley said:

It’s fundamentally different from other types of media such as music. If you buy a heavy metal album, death metal or whatever, then it’s likely you’re interested enough in the first place to warrant the purchase. The difference is that you can listen to it any way you like, tack by track, as whole, in reverse order. Games are the opposite in that you have meet certain conditions or increase your skill to get further, and it’s beyond reach for some no matter how hard they try or how much they might enjoy the game otherwise. They are prevented from enjoying the media they’ve purchased due to stubborn decisions made by the designers. 
 

I’m all for difficulty and accessibility options for that reason alone. It doesn’t harm the original vision for those who want it and can still access it that way, but it does open the game up to much wider audience of less skilled players. 
 

To use your comparison it’s like releasing a movie without subtitles and expecting viewers to learn a foreign language before they can enjoy it, and then if they complain pointing them towards to the internet to look for a translation. 

 

Whenever it gets down to a games/music/other media comparison there's always one example that I end up circling back to - like, the comparisons fall down most of the time, but I quite like this. There's basically only one genre where the barriers to the experience - the things that stop some people from enjoying it - make the music better, and that's lo-fi/cassettecore shit. You have to dig out your old hardware to hear this as it's supposed to be heard! It sort of works for vinyl as well, and the same happens with retro games.

 

So it is funny to hear people trying to compare other media and, like, multimillion dollar games. Which is ridiculous of course.

[Timmo]

I can see both sides of this argument. Whilst I do think i the first boss is a valid skill test and teaching tool (there’s no point playing on if you can’t kill him) and that I learnt more in that first boss fight than I would have in 10 more hours of gentle exploration, they definitely could have improved the training zone (selectable from any Battle Flag) to help people get there. Give the player infinite health and let them practice timing parrying red attacks from soldiers and tentacles and projectiles over and over, away from the pressure of a boss battle. 

[Flub]

I actually went to the training area to see if there was an easy way to practice my deflections but it seems just a very long and basic combat tutorial.

[Popo]

Surely that tweet is an admission that the game hasn’t successfully tutorialised itself. 
 

Say what you want about Dark Souls - the game tells you all the basics. Sure, it doesn’t tell you how magic works, or where to go, or what your encumbrance level is, but you don’t need to know that stuff to beat the first boss - or any boss really. 
 

I had similar issues with Immortality’s reticence to explain the alternate scrubbing mechanic - I didn’t know it was there and had to be told. That game made me feel stupid, and Wo Long made me feel incompetent. 

 

I’m at risk of overstating things now. There’s definitely a reason I kept throwing myself against that wall. It’s a fun game, I’m enjoying the setting and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. 

[HarryBizzle]

It’s totally bizarre that they don’t tell you how to summon the divine beast and there is no on screen prompt for what the button combination to access it is. If your martial attacks are RB+ X or Y, it would be logical for it to be RB+B. They tell you how to summon it in tutorial screen in the next level!

[Flub]

2 minutes ago, Popo said:

I’m at risk of overstating things now. There’s definitely a reason I kept throwing myself against that wall. It’s a fun game, I’m enjoying the setting and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. 

 

Totally this. I'm not the sort of gamer to have that many tries at a boss if there wasn't something about the game that was pulling me in.

 

Top marks to the character creator. I was able to make an adorable waifu easily. Love the extensive hair config options. More even than Black Desert Online

[jonny_rat]

7 minutes ago, Timmo said:

I can see both sides of this argument. Whilst I do think i the first boss is a valid skill test and teaching tool (there’s no point playing on if you can’t kill him) and that I learnt more in that first boss fight than I would have in 10 more hours of gentle exploration, they definitely could have improved the training zone (selectable from any Battle Flag) to help people get there. Give the player infinite health and let them practice timing parrying red attacks from soldiers and tentacles and projectiles over and over, away from the pressure of a boss battle. 

 

Yeah, this is good. I think the first boss is a fantastic skill gate boss, in the tradition of Gascoigne and Margit. The second could easily be as well: it's just doing a bad job of representing the level of challenge in that it's easier than it first appears.

 

Signposting towards the training zone and improving it would help too.

[Popo]

20 minutes ago, jonny_rat said:

Signposting towards the training zone and improving it would help too.

 

There's a training zone? 

[MardiganX]

Wasn’t the whole point of the recent demo to avoid all this? If at the end of the demo the game doesn’t feel like it’s for you then you don’t buy it. Or better yet on Gamepass you simply don’t play it. It’s more than almost every other developer / publisher does these days and a very welcome approach IMO.

 

All I wanted to know before buying it was if they had sorted the ridiculous context sensitive parry / block mechanic and they did so I bought it day one. There is no arguing how big a test the demo throws at you but if they hadn’t done that, instead saving the really tough stuff for the full game, then players would likely be kicking off even more.

 

Compared to other similar games the actual gameplay is a lot easier. It’s how poorly it teaches you about vital mechanics that makes everything feel overly punishing.

 

I’m a few areas / bosses in now and it’s sucked me in big time. I feel I’ve missed loads of stuff in areas I’ve went through so going to do some back tracking and exploring before I progress further. If it wasn’t for the absolutely horrendous inventory management this would almost be a perfect game for me.

[Flub]

I never even knew there was a demo. I just saw the announcement that the game was on Game Pass and decided to try it out.

[HarryBizzle]

2 hours ago, Stanley said:

So you’re basically saying to those people who’ve just spent £50 on the game, tough shit, it’s not for you - thanks for buying the game though! 

Not having Game Pass seems like the very definition of artificial difficulty. 

[carlospie]

I beat the hawg first time. And I'm shit at these games, actually really enjoying it now. That first boss was a shit decision.

[CarloOos]

Almost 20 years later and we’re still rehashing the Ninja Gaiden first boss/easy mode discourse! Unreal.

 

It’s been quite eye opening going back to NG and Metroid Prime recently, the bosses in both were much, much easier than I remembered. I think the Souls series has ingrained restraint during boss battles on many players. 

[jonny_rat]

Having it on Gamepass Day 1 changes the conversation a fair bit. Lots of people coming to it curious to try it out. 

 

3 hours ago, MardiganX said:

Wasn’t the whole point of the recent demo to avoid all this? If at the end of the demo the game doesn’t feel like it’s for you then you don’t buy it.

 

This isn't quite the problem. It's not just about the game being difficult. For one thing, for a lot of people it does feel like it's 'for them'. There's just a tremendous perceived difficulty spike that isn't actually a difficulty spike at all; it's a bit of poor communication about how long that boss fight is going to take. After that spike the ramp goes back to being fairly reasonable from what I've played.

[HarryBizzle]

What are people’s thoughts on the sub missions? I’ve only done one but wasn’t impressed. It was basically a remix of part of a level. I think I won some elixir or something, which I haven’t even tried using once. 
 

Also what does it do when you offer a dragon pot to a little purple flag? I think it increases your morale? Does it stay if you rest at a flag? Because there have been bits with loads of purple flags and I imagine I could gain like 7 morale ranks if so. 
 

 

Currently on the first bit of Part 4 and it seems like a great battlefield. 

[BadgerFarmer]

1 minute ago, HarryBizzle said:

What are people’s thoughts on the sub missions? I’ve only done one but wasn’t impressed. It was basically a remix of part of a level. I think I won some elixir or something, which I haven’t even tried using once. 
 

Also what does it do when you offer a dragon pot to a little purple flag? I think it increases your morale? Does it stay if you rest at a flag? Because there have been bits with loads of purple flags and I imagine I could gain like 7 morale ranks if so.

It's a temporary morale boost. Sometimes worthwhile if you're about to take on a tougher enemy, but it doesn't last very long.

[Timmo]

You can turn them off by using the item that looks like a grave. They’re incredibly useless in my opinion

[shirubagan]

And I’m now unable to parry even the most basic attacks.  

 

I give up. 

[Timmo]

9 minutes ago, shirubagan said:

And I’m now unable to parry even the most basic attacks.  

 

I give up. 

Just check you aren’t over 100% equip rate first, which means you can’t parry. 

[Bingox]

I found the Lu Bu fight very satisfying. Must have taken me over an hour of attempts, but finally defeated him. I think I hindered myself by summoning help too much on early attempts - the summons seemed to die a lot, and was hard to learn deflect timings as Boss didn't attack me as frequently. Not sure if the Boss gets more health with summons, but I felt I made better progress solo. The fight also taught me more about how the Spirit gauge works, and also a bit on the five elements interactions (so if I'm on fire casting a water buff spell will quench it).

 

Harder than the first boss in my opinion. 

 

Incidentally they Team Ninja always seem to use the same trick on their first bosses  - both Nioh 1 & 2 asked you to summon your spirit animal to finish off the Boss as a means of teaching the mechanic - but I remember it being much more explicit in those games. 

 

 

[shirubagan]

1 hour ago, Timmo said:

Just check you aren’t over 100% equip rate first, which means you can’t parry. 

Ohhh… that might be it

 

I will take a look. 
 

Edit: I was at 100.3% FFS. 

[Timmo]

1 level into Earth will get you below, although I think under 70% is the way to go for B agility. You can go under 30 I think for the easiest parries but you’ll probably be a bit squishy. 

[shirubagan]

I really appreciate the advice.  
 

Historically when I’ve been struggling on a Souls-like game, my mates just tend to message me “git gud” which makes me want to punch them.