Feedback: WAY too easy.

[Phydeaux]

I loved the writing, I loved the game universe, and I loved the concept. The sheer Isaac Asimov feel in this game is fantastic, and I've always adored the idea of robots running about aboard a starship while the humans are blissfully unaware, asleep.

But what's up with these puzzles? I'm no slouch in the brains department, but I'd never consider myself a puzzle maniac by any means. I dashed through the puzzles fairly quickly. The puzzles were generally rather intuitive and I was only stuck once or twice, but never for any longer than, say, ten minutes. I was hoping the difficulty would ramp up, or additional puzzle elements would show up to make life more interesting, but that never happened.

I liked the combat system, but it felt imbalanced to me. Zelda never really needs any healing spell except for the one she starts the game with. It ramps up in power so it's always enough to heal anyone up to full or close to it. There aren't enough equipment choices (chips included) to make that part of the game interesting, either.

Basically, I enjoyed the game, but the 'game' part felt sort of mindless. There was zero chance of failure during combat and the puzzles were too easy. I felt like the overall puzzle difficulty needed to increase, more puzzle elements were needed, and combat needed a lot of tweaking. That said, I'm playing through it on hard, and I'm not noticing a difference yet, except that I have one life.

The characters are so much fun, however, that I wanted more of them. I was sad when the game ended because it meant there was no more chatter coming. That the ending broke the fourth wall was cute, but I wanted more in-character stuff at the end for a reward.

[Fost]

I (personally) am with you on everything you are saying. However, current feedback, and feedback throughout beta, was that much of the game was hard and the player needed a lot of hand holding. The number of posts from people in the Mr. Robot forum are testimony to this.

Out of interest - did you ever play any of the old isometric games like Knight Lore and Head over Heels? I think people who played those games (like me) may expect more of a challenge (especially in the 'reality' puzzle sections).

Hard mode does currently give you only one life, but perhaps there are things we can do in the future to make that even harder. We are certainly thinking of adding more difficult offshoot rooms in the expansion pack. Possibly adding some optional medals to collect, but with much harder rooms to complete.

If it's ok with you, I'd like to invite you into the beta group when the little add-on adventure I'm working on is ready for testing. The puzzles in it are the kind of thing I enjoy, but (I think) would be definite sticking points for a lot of people.


As for ghost hacking - again, we are getting a lot of feedback that this is too hard, at least inititally.

[DaiShiva]

I to agree that it is pretty easy. But when I saw the game had a age rating of 7+ while starscape was 11 (iirc) so I figured the difficulty was intentional.

The 'limitations' on the hard mode are laughable. Having one life was not a deterrent at all to taking damage in isometric mode. Having three lives was a HUGE deterrent however, since if I blew up, I had to find that much more energon before I started making 'money'. In hard mode, I never lost more than 2. The lesser amounts of energon floating around was not noticeable.

Point> You gain more energon money credits in hard mode

Suggestions for a 'true' hard mode
- Chance for a robot head-hack to fail. Failing will zap you and knock you off their head. It should probably also temporarily freeze the robot in place so that it doesnt just follow and kill you (having those robots push me into the wall and blow me up because I couldnt get away was frustrating) Hacking every single robot in the game to completion nets you a ton of energon and items (which can be converted to more energon later) allowing you to buy anything and everything. If there wasnt a limit on the number of ability modifications I could buy, I would have every single one of my robots fully upgraded.

- Hacking a node disables it for future hack attempts. Limits re-farming

- Enemies in ghost mode have more hp. The 'harder' enemies toward the end of the game get one or two-shotted the same as the beginning enemies

- Re-tune minor stat boost. This is the only buff I ever needed to cast. With it I can one-shot most things, and two shot everything else with just an ICE attack. Enemy ICE attacks are blocked and programs are resisted a great deal of the time. This leads me to...

- Strength ability is too powerful. You dont need to upgrade any other ability, ever. Sure zelda and orgus may miss and get blocked 75% of the time in the beginning of the game, but max out their strength, and they'll hit the target most of the time, and with stat boost can hit just as hard as asimov or brutus without strength boost.

- Item drops are not balanced. I'm getting energy restore level3's while killing baby scramblers, and chip chields while going through the computer core.

- Armor is uninteresting. Your defence is higher if you wear a 'set' than if not. As a result. I will only upgrade a complete set and not pieces at a time. Breaking that 'basic' set bonus with one piece of medium armor has your defence go DOWN. This is not always the case, but it lessens the value of seeing a new armor item drop. ie: 'oh well, I'll just have to wait till I collect the rest of it'

I'm sure there are others, I'll be sure to make note of them when the bug-patch comes out =)

[Fost]

[DaiShiva]

[Fost]

[xadrian]

If you need further testing on expansions, sign me up. I played both normal and hard. Got it on Friday, finished on Sunday. Personally, i enjoyed it because it didn't make my brain melt, but I was expecting it to be a bit longer, not necessarily harder.

One thing I did notice is that there was ample opportunity to get sidetracked and if you went off saving one robot you may have forgot about another. Maybe a current mission objective section on the menu. Something, I don't know.

I'm not a gamer, I play casual games more than anything. So if this was easy for me...

My kids will love it in a couple years.

[Phydeaux]

Sure. Toss me an email when the levels are in a testable state.

One thing that strikes me as good for a hard mode would be to simply alter the existing rooms. Take out one piece here, or move one piece over there so the obvious solutions don't work anymore. I don't know how time intensive it would be, but it would let you make everyone happy. People who feel the difficulty is fine as is would stay on Normal. People who need some more punishment can go to Hard.

I did play a decent number of isometric games, but not so much isometric puzzle games. I'm in my late 20s, so I've been through most of the 3/4 view era. ;)

[Sergenth]

Just as a clarification... hard mode does what exactly to the game? I know about:

- one life
- randomized energon pick-up removal.


I found Mr. Robot's overall challenge structure (dexterity, puzzles) to be good enough to intitially appeal to people who haven't played an isometric platformer in a while - which is me. It can also court an experienced gamer like me just through charm, polish, and the extended potential that the editor will bring.

If the editor is used as much as people use the DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold editor, you are going to see some very high-quality modules within a couple months -- pure challenge modules, and some that deliver the whole package with appealling maps, story, and innovative puzzles stemming from LUA script usage.

I myself would like to see some modules that have a handfull of showcase-quality half-hour rooms with multiple solutions, multiple rewards, entrapment, false leads, advanced bot herding, NPC cooperation, resource generation and destruction and other surprises!

[Poo Bear]

That's it, as you said. Hard mode does need toughening up and making ghost hacks harder (as suggested earlier) is the first obvious thing to do. This should happen in the 1.1 update (see project status).

It's interesting to see people talking about the "normal" mode being too easy, I think this is the first time that has been said. Up until now we've had a huge number of comments about different things being too hard

Extra downloads should satisfy those looking for a challenge. Updates to the main game that refer to optional content that you don't strictly have to do (i.e. secret rooms or side missions) will have the difficulty ramped up I expect.

[Zharmad]

I agree on the easy point, and was also expecting some different room layouts for hard mode.

If I can get enough down-time in the next few weeks I can finish making a couple of rooms and put them up for ridicule. There are a few choice techniques that can make Aasimov work harder.

bte, what's up with the zoom camera? The game crashes when I enter a 7 by 12 by 15 room, so I had to make it a square 15^3. Is there an upper limit to each dimension? (I would like to make a real hangar. Preferably flooding uncontrollably. )

Improvements for hard mode:
- make it a percentage chance to obtain items, and make them scale. I have inventories filled with level 3 and level 4 healing items which I never need to buy. I have bought level 1 items only for the first door hack.
- Begin to improve stats and increase numbers for all ghost-hack enemies once you have 4+ members. Perhaps, when you finish the harder enemies make them appear sooner and make enemies that only appear in hard mode <-- in place of increasing stats.
- HEL's stats might as well be doubled for all I can see. He is also the only enemy at the moment to have all-party attacks. Weak one, too.

Although, I *am* stuck on 86% completion. I can't find those secret rooms. Hopefully they're not underwater or script-based.

[Phydeaux]

On my second run-through, I was struck by how many puzzles I solved in what may have been unintentional ways. There are a lot of puzzles in this game where you can get by without using half of the things you're given. Robots (and yourself) to stop rolling balls, carefuly timed jumps, and so on.

That said, wow... I'm impressed by how you guys respond. I have faith the game will end up just right. This is no 'drive-by-release'. I'm looking forward to these expansion levels. Somehow, the character interaction was my favorite part. I'm not sure why, but something about the game setting really floored me. If you're doing a second pass as well as creating an expansion, maybe more dialog would be nice, especially with the characters who never say anything (Orgus and Raistlin).

[Poo Bear]

[Phydeaux]

Oh, sure it's a good thing. It also means that if there were a hard mode that makes the puzzles more difficult, you only need to make it so the 'mainstream' solutions don't work anymore. :)

[Agrajag]

I also thought that the game was too easy. I expected the difficulty to ramp up a lot more than it actually did. The difficulty mainly only increased because of an increased number of enemy robots or more dangerous robots (like the big red ones) and not because of puzzle complexity. I figure however if I wait a couple months for the editor to be completely up and running that the community will take care of creating plenty of difficult puzzles, leaving you guys to concentrate on ironing out bugs, balancing ghost hacks, and then (hopefully) adding new features (I hope you're still planning on adding laser puzzles).