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Suggestion Thread: Things to improve ...
June 11, 2016 11:35PM
edited July 2016
Suggestions Thread: Things to improve ...
Before I get started, I just wanted to say how much I've fallen in love with this game already, after the first few hours of gameplay. I feel like it doesn't only live up to, but exceeds the first game in nearly every aspect. So great work, and this is what I think so far.
The best suggestions in the forum (I'll choose the ones I think are the most realistic and most interesting, but if you vote on one that's not on the list, I'll put it on) will make it onto the list in the main topic, so post your ideas and who knows? The devs are always watching ...
Also, if you guys think you want me to put your names as credit to the ideas, just say the word.
Also, this is a thread for suggestions for future updates, and not for criticizing core features of the game that can't be changed (e.g. Story). If you feel the need to criticize the game, this isn't the place to do it, or constructive criticism only.
Movement
*Speed Vaulting: As far as I've seen so far, this isn't present in Catalyst. You still need to get the timing right to vault over something without losing any speed, and for some reason the animation for this is still extremely satisfying, but why not bring back the slight boost in speed for it? Maybe it shouldn't accelerate you as much as in the first game, but a little more speed would feel good, especially seeing as it takes like 20 frames to get back to her speed after the vault anyway, meaning that it's often better to coil jump over it, which I find is a shame. Maybe it's just me and I know it's more realistic without, but it was a very satisfying feature in Mirror's Edge so why not bring it back?
*Animations for standing near railings: This is a small thing that's probably not worth the effort, but I think it's cool that Faith touches the wall in front of her, mainly just because you get to see a little more of her. The idea is that the same thing works if you stand right in front of a railing, so she grabs it lightly or something while you admire the view. Just an idea.
*Shift: Shift is a great feature, but let's be honest, it's WAY overused. If you're not constantly spamming that shift key, then you're gonna lose those all so valuable milliseconds you need so bad to win that race (or make it high up on a dash or whatever). You want to concentrate on your route! This isn't a 'who can press X the fastest' game! It's useful in many cases, but it shouldn't be something you can spam. You shouldn't be able to use in more than once in 2 seconds, or on the same surface anyway, and it should be completely blocked at full, or near to full speeds. Also, it should be based on timing too, so that it becomes something more technical to use, and becomes a risk. For instance, if you're using it after a roll and mistime it, it might slow you down a little, or you'll just miss the window.
*Easier to stand on thin surfaces: There are many occasions when the player decides that he's going to go somewhere the game doesn't want him to, and he ends up scaling some scaffolding just for the sake of it, but when you're standing on the bars of it, it acts like a surface, and not like a balancing beam that would make things a little more interesting.
Combat
*More Attack Distinction: This may just be the way I perceive it, but with every upgraded, it appears that there's very little difference between heavy and light attack damage. The only difference seems to be that light allows you to preserve your flow, whereas heavy costs some focus. It would seem more logical (and more of a challenge) if light attacks did less damage, and heavy attacks did more, but reduced your focus even further. This just seems like it would balance things out a little, therefore making combat more technical and more of a challenge.
*Low Attacks: I'm completely going against my no core feature rule, but it's not entirely impossible that this be added in further updates in the future. In the first game there was the ability to perform low attacks. It wasn't very advanced, but I think in Catalyst it has potential. For instance, if you could time a crouch dodge right, you could perform devastating counter attacks. It just seems like it could spice up static combat a little.
*Magrope Attacks: Another big one, but wouldn't it be cool to utilize this new gadget in combat too? You could use it to pull enemies towards you, and have a cool finisher animation for when it's used when they're low health. You feel me guys?
*More Bullet Damage: Now I'm not talking about when your focus meter is full, because that works fine, HOWEVER I think when your meter is full, you shouldn't see or feel any damage effects (vibrations and visuals), as you're supposed to be dodging those bullets anyway, right? Not to mention the fact that it would A: Distract you less and B: Make it more obvious when you're taking real damage. But the point here was that when you're static, especially when you're close to the shooter, that you shouldn't be able to take 10 seconds worth of bullets before going down. The game should encourage you to move more, and the upgrades should only be for when you mess up, so you have just enough time to recover. The way it is, it allows you get through combat without having to use your wits and your speed, especially when you have fully upgraded health.
*Smarter Enemies: Although this is sounds like something big, I think the software is already there, it just needs tweaking. Enemies will try and cut you off, but they're always WAY too late, and way too few aswell. If you want things to be a challenge, they should be coming out of everything other door, and forcing you to reconsider your route. Maybe this should only be for hard mode users, but come on! Punish us for taking a moment to look at the view!
*Enemy FOV: The way it is now, enemies will annoylingly detect you on a radius basis, whether you're travelling behind a wall, under, or over them. I'm not saying that this should be a stealth game, but you should be able to get around them without them seeing without having to take a major detour.
*Sentinels: These enemies are awesome because they're enemies who can properly fight back. You get to experiment on them and create your own combos, not to mention I get to see more of those awesome third person takedown (I love them, but I never get to see them!). Combat in Mirror's Edge is awesome, but sometimes I'll die just to do it again, because it's often over so quickly! If I want to fight a Sentinel, I have to play through a whole mission just so I can fight them for a few minutes.
The solution is obvious: have them in the open world. They don't have to hang around the city like all the rest. Maybe they'd only appear after your notoriety (?) is at max and you've defeated that drone. Whatever the case, you designed these guys, and all this awesome combat, and we love them, so let's see more!
*Faster and Sharper Actions: This is relevant mainly for more advanced moves like Place Switch, which are useful, but honestly just feel a bit slow and out of character somehow (on account of it being slow). Heavy and light attacks work fine and feel fast, sharp and powerful, whereas the place swap move is slow and the sounds are somewhat muffled. In fact, on the matter of sound, some of the third person takedowns sound the same way (not all). The takedowns will be fast and powerful, but I'll only get that feeling from the visuals.
Time Trials, Dashes and Deliveries
*Big Red Arrow: In dashes and other jobs, following the red is not often the best solution, so you'll often find yourself wishing the location of the objective be more obvious so you can forge your own route from the start. The addition of a red arrow or something indicating the direction of your objective might make things a lot easier, and allow you to see obvious routes you might not have even glimpsed while chasing that red. This with a massive beacon will encourage people who want more of a challenge and are getting to know the city a little better to ditch the red without feeling too lost!
*Option to Restart after a Fall: When you fall off a building on a run, the last thing you want to do is wait for it to reload the world since you're going to have to restart the race anyways, especially since it coutns the loading time, which means that's like a 10 second penalty (I mean **** Dice?). So instead of it cutting to the load screen, you should be given the option to restart. In a race where every second counts, there's not time for mess ups like that. It takes so little time to restart compared to dying where you have to wait for it to load for 15 seconds and then restart it from there. This needs to be fixed!
*Combat Trials: They've majorly revamped the combat, and say what you will about it, not to mention it definitely takes a lot of practice, but getting it just feels awesome! But apart from sitting in front of a cam to **** off KrugerSec or replaying the full missions, there's no way to play the combat on it's own after you finish the story. So not only would Combat Trials allow for practice and therefore mastery of th combat. I'll often deliberately die to replay a combat sequence in the story because I got past it easily but didn't do it in the best way possible (and I honestly find it very fun). So if I could practice more, I'd be able to get better at it, and it would be awesome to compete with others too (it could be purely time based, or a mix in between time and performance (variety and stuff). Whatever the case, all it would take would be isolating some sequences of the story, and would pay off massively ...
*Live Dashes: Ok, this is a misleading title. Maybe these wouldn't be on actual Dashes. The idea is to compete with a live Echo though. Maybe on a Time trial, but what would really be interesting is if you could connect to a friend or someone random (maybe this could be another function for Beat LEs, as meet up points), and then just set a waypoint and go. Fastest one there wins. It's quite a big idea, but who knows. We can always dream.
World
*Deal with invisible walls: Invisible walls in a game like this are just a no-no. Although you need to inevitably limit off the map somehow, there are surely better ways to do it. In the end, however bad it sounds, players want to get to places they're not supposed to get, letting them get there is more of a good thing than bad, so we don't mind standing on a slightly unfinished building on the edge for instance.
*Sleeping: Add beds to Safehouses so you can sleep until a certain time of day. Glass looks awesome in all lights, so why should you have to wait?
*Better Citizens AI: I'm again going against my rule of not asking for too much, though if it's possible to make them look you way, wouldn't it also be possible to make them to say simple things like: 'Omg a runner!' or 'Please don't hurt me!' or 'I'm supposed to report you, aren't I?'. And it would go great with surprised reactions, or just turning round to go inside or something. It would be too far to ask them to completely populate the city (though it's not entirely impossible and implausible), but it would also be great if there were some more people hanging around too. It is a problem that there are only about two character models for citizens, but that can also be fixed. In the end, they don't have to have extremely complicated AI, and they don't have to be interactable, as in the end, you're going to be running past most the time anyway, right? They're just part of the environment, and they needn't be anything else, so if they could make this possible, Glass would feel three times more alive, even with minimal amounts of people. They don't need to be everywhere anyway ...
*More Secrets: So far, Beat LEs aren't so interesting, mainly because there aren't so many hard places to get to. So by making more areas accessible, not only would it make Beat LEs a better feature, they'd also allow for easter eggs and all sorts of other goodies! Why not scatter some character bobbleheads around the map like Doom, and make the found ones appear at the ZephyrTransit Hub? And easter egg wise, you've made other games, so you've got plenty of material. What about Isaac from Dead Space's mask just lying around in a safe house, or have a runner playing Battlefield or something ... that would be awesome.
*More Routes Between Districts: Am I the only one who likes getting to places on foot rather than using the fast travel system? And am I also the only one to believe that the fact that there's only one route in between the differents districts is no fun and gets boring after a while? Well, I might be, but let's say I'm not. I'm not talking about there being fifty different ways to Anchor from Downtown early on in the game, but I'm saying it would be great as you unlock more gadgets that you get access to more, and hopefully shorter and more efficient, ways of travelling between the districts of Glass. Not only would it add more variety and encourage people to get places on foot (who likes taking the hyperloop anyway?), but it would be a lot more fun!
Menu, HUD and Customization
*Ability to Customize your Tag In-Game: There's no reason why this shouldn't be possible, and it will allow you to instantly check out new stuff you get from runner kits instead of waiting to turn off the game and forgetting. There will also come a day when the website is going to retire, so it would really be great (not to mention more practical) to be able to deal with your Runner Tag in the game.
*In Ear Jukebox: Wouldn't it be awesome to listen to your favorite Mirror's Edge tune on the run, or have a say over what's playing? This should be optional, but since the Jukebox breaks in the game anyway, it would just be cool to listen to these awesome tracks in full why playing.
*Backround Chatter: This would take some effort, and should be a toggle, but it would be great to hear some of the runners chat about runner things, as well as the NPCs, who we want to know more about anyway ...
*Photo Mode: While this wouldn't be easy, but would definitely pay off. Glass is such a beautiful city, that all you want to do is immortalize it's pristine glory.
*Speedometer: This should be optional, so you can toggle it on or off. It was quite a cool little feature in the cool game, the it would work better as a meter in Catalyst, where everything's so much smoother and polished. In fact, I think there should be more features like that to customize your HUD, possibly even as unlockables ..
*Reviewable Cutscenes: The ability to rewatch cutscenes was cool in the first game, but would make even more sense in Catalyst, where the story's more prominent. Not to mention there are some great pan outs that make the disctricts look amazing ...
*Customizable Map: A rather **** idea I admit, but there's so much to customize your runner tag that you'd think you could bring some to a more practical feature, like the map (which is awesome by the way, and I'd probably leave as default anyway). Just throwing it out there.
*Better Cheat Controls: I don't want to have to say this, but less than a week in and we're already facing some serious hackers. I mean how they can even create a trainer that fast is beyond me, but I believe that there is an easy solution to this without even having to use some fancy computer calculations. You take a pro player or the current (legitimate) record on a Time Trial, subtract a second or two, and if somebody has a time under that, scan them. ****, if someone has a time more than 5 seconds better than the record holder, scan him, just in case. It doesn't ruin the game, but it is annoying to come second after trying so hard to somebody who just fast traveled to the finish or however the **** those ******** do it. I mean their records aren't even plausible, it's very clear they are cheating, and can easily be dealt with. Cheating's fine as long as you stay out of public activities ...
Technical and Graphics
*Toggleable Hints: Glass is a pristine city which is virtually spotless. The one though are those black shoeprints and scoffmarks. Sure, they're useful for beginners, and are a creative way to show people what's climbable, wallrunable, and ... slideunderable (???), but after you've gained some experience in the game, they lose their function, and just interrupt the sleek aesthetic of Glass, which is a shame, since the city is so awesome!
*More Compatability: A bigger one here, but plenty of people are asking I put this down, and more platforms is never a bad thing, right?
-MacOSX: Compatibility for Apple Macs. Just because they're not the traditional gaming PC, don't mean they don't have the power.
-Dualshock 4 Support (for PC): I mean there's Xbox 360 and One controller support (though for some reason PS4 users think a keyboard is more similar to the Dualshock), so why no PS4 Controllers?
-Linux: There are 12 of us now! We deserve consideration!
*Credits: Not sure this is the right category, but those end credits are awful long, and unskippable. Now this would be fine if you could skip after seeing the core team, but ... you can't. In fact, I wouldn't even mind taking the time to analyze the game after the first time, but it does it when you replay the last mission too, and it's also unskippable. It makes me not want to replay it again!
Anyway, those are just some **** ideas to get started off with. Hopefully people will post their own ideas too. Whatever the case, amazing game so far, and keep up the good work guys!
Before I get started, I just wanted to say how much I've fallen in love with this game already, after the first few hours of gameplay. I feel like it doesn't only live up to, but exceeds the first game in nearly every aspect. So great work, and this is what I think so far.
The best suggestions in the forum (I'll choose the ones I think are the most realistic and most interesting, but if you vote on one that's not on the list, I'll put it on) will make it onto the list in the main topic, so post your ideas and who knows? The devs are always watching ...
Also, if you guys think you want me to put your names as credit to the ideas, just say the word.
Also, this is a thread for suggestions for future updates, and not for criticizing core features of the game that can't be changed (e.g. Story). If you feel the need to criticize the game, this isn't the place to do it, or constructive criticism only.
Movement
*Speed Vaulting: As far as I've seen so far, this isn't present in Catalyst. You still need to get the timing right to vault over something without losing any speed, and for some reason the animation for this is still extremely satisfying, but why not bring back the slight boost in speed for it? Maybe it shouldn't accelerate you as much as in the first game, but a little more speed would feel good, especially seeing as it takes like 20 frames to get back to her speed after the vault anyway, meaning that it's often better to coil jump over it, which I find is a shame. Maybe it's just me and I know it's more realistic without, but it was a very satisfying feature in Mirror's Edge so why not bring it back?
*Animations for standing near railings: This is a small thing that's probably not worth the effort, but I think it's cool that Faith touches the wall in front of her, mainly just because you get to see a little more of her. The idea is that the same thing works if you stand right in front of a railing, so she grabs it lightly or something while you admire the view. Just an idea.
*Shift: Shift is a great feature, but let's be honest, it's WAY overused. If you're not constantly spamming that shift key, then you're gonna lose those all so valuable milliseconds you need so bad to win that race (or make it high up on a dash or whatever). You want to concentrate on your route! This isn't a 'who can press X the fastest' game! It's useful in many cases, but it shouldn't be something you can spam. You shouldn't be able to use in more than once in 2 seconds, or on the same surface anyway, and it should be completely blocked at full, or near to full speeds. Also, it should be based on timing too, so that it becomes something more technical to use, and becomes a risk. For instance, if you're using it after a roll and mistime it, it might slow you down a little, or you'll just miss the window.
*Easier to stand on thin surfaces: There are many occasions when the player decides that he's going to go somewhere the game doesn't want him to, and he ends up scaling some scaffolding just for the sake of it, but when you're standing on the bars of it, it acts like a surface, and not like a balancing beam that would make things a little more interesting.
Combat
*More Attack Distinction: This may just be the way I perceive it, but with every upgraded, it appears that there's very little difference between heavy and light attack damage. The only difference seems to be that light allows you to preserve your flow, whereas heavy costs some focus. It would seem more logical (and more of a challenge) if light attacks did less damage, and heavy attacks did more, but reduced your focus even further. This just seems like it would balance things out a little, therefore making combat more technical and more of a challenge.
*Low Attacks: I'm completely going against my no core feature rule, but it's not entirely impossible that this be added in further updates in the future. In the first game there was the ability to perform low attacks. It wasn't very advanced, but I think in Catalyst it has potential. For instance, if you could time a crouch dodge right, you could perform devastating counter attacks. It just seems like it could spice up static combat a little.
*Magrope Attacks: Another big one, but wouldn't it be cool to utilize this new gadget in combat too? You could use it to pull enemies towards you, and have a cool finisher animation for when it's used when they're low health. You feel me guys?
*More Bullet Damage: Now I'm not talking about when your focus meter is full, because that works fine, HOWEVER I think when your meter is full, you shouldn't see or feel any damage effects (vibrations and visuals), as you're supposed to be dodging those bullets anyway, right? Not to mention the fact that it would A: Distract you less and B: Make it more obvious when you're taking real damage. But the point here was that when you're static, especially when you're close to the shooter, that you shouldn't be able to take 10 seconds worth of bullets before going down. The game should encourage you to move more, and the upgrades should only be for when you mess up, so you have just enough time to recover. The way it is, it allows you get through combat without having to use your wits and your speed, especially when you have fully upgraded health.
*Smarter Enemies: Although this is sounds like something big, I think the software is already there, it just needs tweaking. Enemies will try and cut you off, but they're always WAY too late, and way too few aswell. If you want things to be a challenge, they should be coming out of everything other door, and forcing you to reconsider your route. Maybe this should only be for hard mode users, but come on! Punish us for taking a moment to look at the view!
*Enemy FOV: The way it is now, enemies will annoylingly detect you on a radius basis, whether you're travelling behind a wall, under, or over them. I'm not saying that this should be a stealth game, but you should be able to get around them without them seeing without having to take a major detour.
*Sentinels: These enemies are awesome because they're enemies who can properly fight back. You get to experiment on them and create your own combos, not to mention I get to see more of those awesome third person takedown (I love them, but I never get to see them!). Combat in Mirror's Edge is awesome, but sometimes I'll die just to do it again, because it's often over so quickly! If I want to fight a Sentinel, I have to play through a whole mission just so I can fight them for a few minutes.
The solution is obvious: have them in the open world. They don't have to hang around the city like all the rest. Maybe they'd only appear after your notoriety (?) is at max and you've defeated that drone. Whatever the case, you designed these guys, and all this awesome combat, and we love them, so let's see more!
*Faster and Sharper Actions: This is relevant mainly for more advanced moves like Place Switch, which are useful, but honestly just feel a bit slow and out of character somehow (on account of it being slow). Heavy and light attacks work fine and feel fast, sharp and powerful, whereas the place swap move is slow and the sounds are somewhat muffled. In fact, on the matter of sound, some of the third person takedowns sound the same way (not all). The takedowns will be fast and powerful, but I'll only get that feeling from the visuals.
Time Trials, Dashes and Deliveries
*Big Red Arrow: In dashes and other jobs, following the red is not often the best solution, so you'll often find yourself wishing the location of the objective be more obvious so you can forge your own route from the start. The addition of a red arrow or something indicating the direction of your objective might make things a lot easier, and allow you to see obvious routes you might not have even glimpsed while chasing that red. This with a massive beacon will encourage people who want more of a challenge and are getting to know the city a little better to ditch the red without feeling too lost!
*Option to Restart after a Fall: When you fall off a building on a run, the last thing you want to do is wait for it to reload the world since you're going to have to restart the race anyways, especially since it coutns the loading time, which means that's like a 10 second penalty (I mean **** Dice?). So instead of it cutting to the load screen, you should be given the option to restart. In a race where every second counts, there's not time for mess ups like that. It takes so little time to restart compared to dying where you have to wait for it to load for 15 seconds and then restart it from there. This needs to be fixed!
*Combat Trials: They've majorly revamped the combat, and say what you will about it, not to mention it definitely takes a lot of practice, but getting it just feels awesome! But apart from sitting in front of a cam to **** off KrugerSec or replaying the full missions, there's no way to play the combat on it's own after you finish the story. So not only would Combat Trials allow for practice and therefore mastery of th combat. I'll often deliberately die to replay a combat sequence in the story because I got past it easily but didn't do it in the best way possible (and I honestly find it very fun). So if I could practice more, I'd be able to get better at it, and it would be awesome to compete with others too (it could be purely time based, or a mix in between time and performance (variety and stuff). Whatever the case, all it would take would be isolating some sequences of the story, and would pay off massively ...
*Live Dashes: Ok, this is a misleading title. Maybe these wouldn't be on actual Dashes. The idea is to compete with a live Echo though. Maybe on a Time trial, but what would really be interesting is if you could connect to a friend or someone random (maybe this could be another function for Beat LEs, as meet up points), and then just set a waypoint and go. Fastest one there wins. It's quite a big idea, but who knows. We can always dream.
World
*Deal with invisible walls: Invisible walls in a game like this are just a no-no. Although you need to inevitably limit off the map somehow, there are surely better ways to do it. In the end, however bad it sounds, players want to get to places they're not supposed to get, letting them get there is more of a good thing than bad, so we don't mind standing on a slightly unfinished building on the edge for instance.
*Sleeping: Add beds to Safehouses so you can sleep until a certain time of day. Glass looks awesome in all lights, so why should you have to wait?
*Better Citizens AI: I'm again going against my rule of not asking for too much, though if it's possible to make them look you way, wouldn't it also be possible to make them to say simple things like: 'Omg a runner!' or 'Please don't hurt me!' or 'I'm supposed to report you, aren't I?'. And it would go great with surprised reactions, or just turning round to go inside or something. It would be too far to ask them to completely populate the city (though it's not entirely impossible and implausible), but it would also be great if there were some more people hanging around too. It is a problem that there are only about two character models for citizens, but that can also be fixed. In the end, they don't have to have extremely complicated AI, and they don't have to be interactable, as in the end, you're going to be running past most the time anyway, right? They're just part of the environment, and they needn't be anything else, so if they could make this possible, Glass would feel three times more alive, even with minimal amounts of people. They don't need to be everywhere anyway ...
*More Secrets: So far, Beat LEs aren't so interesting, mainly because there aren't so many hard places to get to. So by making more areas accessible, not only would it make Beat LEs a better feature, they'd also allow for easter eggs and all sorts of other goodies! Why not scatter some character bobbleheads around the map like Doom, and make the found ones appear at the ZephyrTransit Hub? And easter egg wise, you've made other games, so you've got plenty of material. What about Isaac from Dead Space's mask just lying around in a safe house, or have a runner playing Battlefield or something ... that would be awesome.
*More Routes Between Districts: Am I the only one who likes getting to places on foot rather than using the fast travel system? And am I also the only one to believe that the fact that there's only one route in between the differents districts is no fun and gets boring after a while? Well, I might be, but let's say I'm not. I'm not talking about there being fifty different ways to Anchor from Downtown early on in the game, but I'm saying it would be great as you unlock more gadgets that you get access to more, and hopefully shorter and more efficient, ways of travelling between the districts of Glass. Not only would it add more variety and encourage people to get places on foot (who likes taking the hyperloop anyway?), but it would be a lot more fun!
Menu, HUD and Customization
*Ability to Customize your Tag In-Game: There's no reason why this shouldn't be possible, and it will allow you to instantly check out new stuff you get from runner kits instead of waiting to turn off the game and forgetting. There will also come a day when the website is going to retire, so it would really be great (not to mention more practical) to be able to deal with your Runner Tag in the game.
*In Ear Jukebox: Wouldn't it be awesome to listen to your favorite Mirror's Edge tune on the run, or have a say over what's playing? This should be optional, but since the Jukebox breaks in the game anyway, it would just be cool to listen to these awesome tracks in full why playing.
*Backround Chatter: This would take some effort, and should be a toggle, but it would be great to hear some of the runners chat about runner things, as well as the NPCs, who we want to know more about anyway ...
*Photo Mode: While this wouldn't be easy, but would definitely pay off. Glass is such a beautiful city, that all you want to do is immortalize it's pristine glory.
*Speedometer: This should be optional, so you can toggle it on or off. It was quite a cool little feature in the cool game, the it would work better as a meter in Catalyst, where everything's so much smoother and polished. In fact, I think there should be more features like that to customize your HUD, possibly even as unlockables ..
*Reviewable Cutscenes: The ability to rewatch cutscenes was cool in the first game, but would make even more sense in Catalyst, where the story's more prominent. Not to mention there are some great pan outs that make the disctricts look amazing ...
*Customizable Map: A rather **** idea I admit, but there's so much to customize your runner tag that you'd think you could bring some to a more practical feature, like the map (which is awesome by the way, and I'd probably leave as default anyway). Just throwing it out there.
*Better Cheat Controls: I don't want to have to say this, but less than a week in and we're already facing some serious hackers. I mean how they can even create a trainer that fast is beyond me, but I believe that there is an easy solution to this without even having to use some fancy computer calculations. You take a pro player or the current (legitimate) record on a Time Trial, subtract a second or two, and if somebody has a time under that, scan them. ****, if someone has a time more than 5 seconds better than the record holder, scan him, just in case. It doesn't ruin the game, but it is annoying to come second after trying so hard to somebody who just fast traveled to the finish or however the **** those ******** do it. I mean their records aren't even plausible, it's very clear they are cheating, and can easily be dealt with. Cheating's fine as long as you stay out of public activities ...
Technical and Graphics
*Toggleable Hints: Glass is a pristine city which is virtually spotless. The one though are those black shoeprints and scoffmarks. Sure, they're useful for beginners, and are a creative way to show people what's climbable, wallrunable, and ... slideunderable (???), but after you've gained some experience in the game, they lose their function, and just interrupt the sleek aesthetic of Glass, which is a shame, since the city is so awesome!
*More Compatability: A bigger one here, but plenty of people are asking I put this down, and more platforms is never a bad thing, right?
-MacOSX: Compatibility for Apple Macs. Just because they're not the traditional gaming PC, don't mean they don't have the power.
-Dualshock 4 Support (for PC): I mean there's Xbox 360 and One controller support (though for some reason PS4 users think a keyboard is more similar to the Dualshock), so why no PS4 Controllers?
-Linux: There are 12 of us now! We deserve consideration!
*Credits: Not sure this is the right category, but those end credits are awful long, and unskippable. Now this would be fine if you could skip after seeing the core team, but ... you can't. In fact, I wouldn't even mind taking the time to analyze the game after the first time, but it does it when you replay the last mission too, and it's also unskippable. It makes me not want to replay it again!
Anyway, those are just some **** ideas to get started off with. Hopefully people will post their own ideas too. Whatever the case, amazing game so far, and keep up the good work guys!
Post edited by Zorkaz on
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Comments
- Opening cutscene included in the replay of mission 1.
- More obvious audio cues for Intervention missions, (radio chatter?)
- 'Sleep until...' option in Safe Houses, so you can select time of day.
- Ability to change tag in-game, for when the website and app are inevitably retired.
- In-ear juke box, rather than limited to the Lair.
Expensive, requiring VA.
- Background Runner chatter over the BeatLink.
- Background NPC chatter over the BeatLink, (Icarus, Plastic, whoever.)
- More passive lines from existing NPCs, and less hostile idle expressions.
- 'Still Alive.' (Make it happen, Dice, please mother of god make it happen.)
- Stop reminding the player they can turn runner vision on - if they went out of their way to turn it off in the first place they dont bloody want it!
- Balance the game correctly to support it. All of the time trial based missions are absurdly difficult without runner vision on. People who play without RV want/need a bit of extra time to find the correct path .. its simply unfair to have them subjected to the same difficulty of RV players, especially when a lot of the TT missions dont even give you much wiggle room at all, the best I've done is finish one with 5 seconds remaining and thats with RV On. Without RV it would have been impossible. At the very least you could have had difficulty settings set at the start of the game which might have loosened the times a bit.. otherwise, make it so it can detect when someone isnt using RV and give them like 10 more seconds. Not using RV should be rewarded anyway.
Clean up the collision detection on walls/floors around the map, flesh out some areas more to allow the player to explore and find cool areas to put Beat LE's and such.
As someone who mostly is playing for exploration its shocking how much the devs are trying to "contain" the player and not let them get to certain areas. Invisible walls everywhere, walls that are blatantly lacking "wall run or ledge grab" detection in order to keep the player locked in. We want to get to secret areas! We can see all those locations that look like it would be cool to reach .. why cant we get there?! The thing is, some of them are able to be reached, and those ones are awesome! ..why cant we have more? .. there are so many areas that look like it was meant to be reached but is intentionally blocked off for no reason.
- Add more secret areas to the game .. they dont have to have any purpose other than being a cool place to put a Beat LE/Time Trial.
- Add proper hit detection for wall running/ledge grabbing to place that are reachable by the player .. I should not be able to find an invisible wall in the middle of an open world map, and ALL walls should be able to wall run/climb/grab ledges on.
I absolutely agree with the balancing of any kind of time trial mission. They're overwhelmingly difficulty to the point I refuse to even do most of them and the ones I do attempt I'll only do a few times before permanently abandoning the mission. They're simply not fun.
This isn't a 'press X to win' game. Although a lot of us have, you're not supposed to 3-star trials straight off the bat. Particularly if you're a newcomer. In the original, some of them took me weeks of practice to nail.
Then I would politely venture that this probably isn't the game, (or genre) for you, then.
I agree with you that Time Trials (public ones) shouldn't be 'easy'. I mean I'd be lying if I said that sometimes I didn't get frustrated with them because every millisecond counts, but that's the spirit of the game: it's all about timing. And it's a helluva better than the first game on that front anyway, as you'd often end up accidentally side jumping off a building, or getting caught on a bucket or more ridiculous things like that.
Also, I'm going to add the best suggestions I've seen so far to the main topic, so don't stop suggesting, and who knows? The devs are Watching You! Sorry I haven't been more responsive too, but it didn't register any of the new posts so far until today (might be a forum bug). Anyway, many of these are brilliant, so keep up the good work!
Thanks for collating.
The dashes or whatever, have a 3 star system so all levels of players can feel some accomplishment... The delivery and distraction missions can be extremely difficult. It took me over 50 tries to complete one. If there were a star system of those, everyone would be happy I think.
There were only two that gave me grief - Aurorian Cusine, and The Lie. Both used the same shortcut, which turned out to be mind-numbingly obvious when I stopped to look at my options.
If you're struggling, my suggestion would be to slow down, take a good look at your surroundings, retrace the path in open world mode if you need to. There's a good 5-10 seconds spare on every named delivery once you've learned an optimal route and can pull it off cleanly.
Maybe they get tougher later on, but they haven't seemed too bad so far. I usually don't get them on the 1st or second try, and that's fine. You need those runs to learn/map out a good route. What I would like to see is a minimap, or maybe just a giant arrow overhead pointing to the destination and a giant beacon at the destination. It does get frustrating that I often can't even find the goal without runner sight.
Thanks for the thanks! This is the nicest community!
I agree about it being hard without runner vision, and the beacon and arrow idea's a good one, especially for dashes, I'll add it. I haven't encountered too many problems difficulty wise with missions or jobs, but I haven't done some of the harder ones yet, so I might in the future.
I know right? They should definitely do this! It's on the list!
I agree, but this could be solved with that red arrow idea, and like that it would be more general too, so it would work for TT and Dashes too. But it's a good point!
That sounds like pretty dumb advice. On 35 second deliveries I literally do not have the time to take a good look at my surroundings or figure out a different path.
As said in another thread, I would either expect to be able to finish deliveries while using runner vision and doing a near perfect (or even perfect) run, or use the 3 star rating for all side missions.
I don't care about being the fastest at all, I just want to finish the missions. Now it's almost as if I am trying to qualify for a race in a racing game, and the bare minimum for qualifying is driving a perfect lap under the fastest time ever driven on that track.
I don't always drive / run the perfect line, and sometimes mess up, but that shouldn't prevent me from even finishing my run / lap / whatever.
I now sometimes seem to have even more fun trying to get to the hackable billboards, because those are about parkour, but without the ridiculous time restrictions; I can figure out how to get to the top of a building at my own pace.
You nail it. That's about the same thing I wrote some days ago, just a little bit more explicit. So I'll post my combat suggestions again in here:
Not smarter - faster! And tougher!
The way these melee KSecs waited before even turning towards Faith and how slowly they attack makes them pretty harmless.
Also, they aren't though enough. It was a mistake to damage a KSec by simply pushing another guy into him. He should be staggered, yes, but taking damage? How often did I kick just one guard into a group of guards, and because of the chain reaction, they all collapsed like some seniors with simultaneous heart attacks. Or like a cardhouse. Too easy.
Also, light attacks and heavy attacks are too powerful one way or another:
Light attacks deal almost the same damage to enemies like heavies (after all upgrades), but the point of light attacks was actually just getting past guards, wasn't it?
And heavy attacks keep your focus shield up just like light attacks. As Faith shortly stops after having executed a heavy attack, shouldn't the focus shield go zero?
One more thing about combat to improve: I wish for more variety.
Means: A bit more of different takedowns, every enemy type seems to have just one way how he is taken out in 1.) first person 2.) and third person view.
As for the difficulty of time trials, I stand with ninemill and Zorkaz: They should be difficult. Or you won't remember them the day after. And only this way they teach you mastery of the game. Trial difficulty is fine!
As for the rest of my suggestions, I fear that there's no chance to change that in Catalyst. Because the core concept of the game itself is not quite right imo: Not enough campaign, cutscenes and narrative, while on the other hand there are to many redundant collectibles, repetitive activities and lifeless NPCs. Read more about that in my own Catalyst review here:
https://forums.mirrorsedge.com/discussion/2236/never-go-full-ubisoft-not-quite-a-review-of-catalyst#latest
This can be only done better in the next ME game, not here.
I don't have a PS4 but I have heard people complaining about lack of graphics customizability. I'll add this to the list when I have more ideas to do with graphics so I can create a category, ok?
I agree with basically everything here! There isn't enough distinction in between light and heavy attacks. For instance maybe heavy attacks should do a little more damage but cost more focus, whereas light attacks should do less. I mean there's so little damage difference that it's barely worth using heavy attacks as it just breaks your flow. Maybe this is just my perception of things though ...
I think pushing enemies against each other should do some damage, mainly because it's fun, and secondly because it allows for you to take out enemies more efficiently when you're on a roll. HOWEVER, I agree with you that heavy kicking an enemy against another from a near static position shouldn't do any damage. It should only apply when you're at medium or full speed.
Also, I agree with you that lots of these suggestions are quite drastic, and VERY unlikely, but they're not completely core. But you're right that many flaws in the game (story and repetitiveness) can't be fixed ...
LOL! Quite right, but don't be mean haha!
Also, am I the only one who thinks there should be combat Trials? I mean you can reply missions, so for them all it would take is isolating some of the combat sections and make defeating the enemies a race against time. And should they bring back Speed Runs like in the first game? I'll put them in the list for now, but will take 'em down if you guys disagree!
Will do, though I honestly thought it was a radius until very recently. I'd often take leaps of faith too, but that was just me being a bit of an **** (mind you it worked though lol). Also, making it a radius would be more interesting for Dashes too so that it might make some shortcuts more efficient (so you don't have to return to the main path for instance).
Also, I know there's a fast travel system, but for those who love getting places on foot (like me), don't you wish there were a little more routes in between districts? There's litterally only one for most, and it's a little boring. I think as your gadgets improve, it should add some additional (and possibly shorter) routes in between the different areas to spice things up a little!
If I can't even see the end point, and have no idea how to get there, then it is still pretty dumb advice. Various deliveries where I've tried the runner vision route and alternate routes, and still not making it to the end, because I don't know where it is. Can't even see it. So yeah, pretty **** advice.
I think the end point shows up on the map so you can mark it and search for it without the map, and you can probably estimate around where it is. In fact, the runner's vision route is always possible if you do it flawlessly. In fact unless you come really far from the objective time, you'll probably be able to see the finishing point, or if you don't, then you can search in the proximity for the messenger box, or the person, or whatever the delivery objective is. He didn't have the right to be mean, I agree with you on that front. However, as many people have raised this as an issue, even though many others have said that they haven't experienced a problem, I will consider putting it on the list. I mean in the end, it won't be making the objective easier, it will just be giving you a chance to figure out your route beforehand. So, how do you suggest this can done?
If one or two more people comment about this, and somebody's come up with a solution, then I'll put it on the list, ok?
First off, let me take this from your quote;
Unfortunately, this is not true. I have come across several dead drops for which this is not the case. I wish I were true, and your quote there is exactly the way I would expect it the least. Possibly with 1 or so seconds extra for people who might faceplant in the area where you start. I would expect that every single side mission could be completed by following the suggested (a lot of the time not so efficient) route.
My ideal scenario would be that all of these times would just be turned into 3-star ratings like the dashes, but that won't happen. So, the easiest acceptable solution to me is an increase in time for deliveries, etc. where the current minimum seems to be based on an alternate route.
Also, diversions could use the same. The times for those seem to be even tighter. I would also like to see that as soon as k-sec sees me, the timer resets. I have ran past (and nor through) several groups that clearly saw me, but did not cause my timer not to reset.
Funnily enough, your ideal scenario is the ideal one for all of us, and most of all, the one that wouldn't make other people's experience less enjoyable (there are already people complaining that the story's too easy, so they won't be happy if they make the side activities easier too). However, now I think about it, the idea of the diversions and deliveries is for it to be a one time thing, so it would require quite a lot of consideration for them to change this, because it would either mean turning them into challenges, or making them replayable missions, which really isn't something to take lightly. What I suggest is to mark the final objective on the map, so that you can mark it or memorize it, allowing you to practice and find alternative routes beforehand. This way it wouldn't step on other people's experience. I know you'll argue against that, but the truth is that for me and many others, we like doing things like that more than once before succeeding, because it's a challenge, and forces us to perfect our run the most possible.
A star system would benefit all of us, but as you said, it would require lots of tweaking and isn't so likely as you've stated. I'll have to check that it doesn't do this already (for the marking the final objective), but if it's not, then I'll put it on the list. I did some research, and did some gaming (of course), and it appears that the suggested route is always possible, though by flawless I mean properly flawless (which can be pretty **** hard), but if I succeed, I always win or come very close to the objective. But as you and many have said, this isn't possible for everyone. Whatever the case, let's try and keep this nice and friendly, as the circumstances definitely have the potential to be offensive to each party.