So far I’ve been enjoying crucible farming a lot. However there’s one big design decision that pisses me off so much that I did rage-quit farming crucible a few times already, both pre-breach and post-breach update :
FALLING
I can’t stress how bad it feels to put hours into mastering the game’s combat just to end up dying from fall damage. In crucible, there are 2 distinct arenas that I have an issue with :
- The arena where you have to climb stairs and fight monsters on tiny bridges feels very bad. Falling from the last bridge is nearly a death sentence at 270HP.
- The boss arena : I’m not sure where the issue is here, either the arena not having walls is the problem or the boss having a lot of pushback on some of its attacks is. But one of those things here has to be addressed. The boss is already difficult enough for the average player, where taking 5 - 15 minutes to reach the boss just to fail to dodge / parry a single attack that has a lot of pushback and falling to death is gonna turn quite a few people away from crucible. I think part of why this feels bad here is the fact that getting to the boss takes some time, so “cheap” deaths like that become more infuriating than they usually are.
To me, falling to death against a boss doesn’t have the same feeling as falling to death while exploring the world : Parts of level design sometimes require me as a player to have proper position and that’s fine. However when it comes to fighting a boss, falling to death just feels cheap and unfair, even tho I understand the same positioning rules apply here.
I consider myself a very resilient video game player (I cleared all 3 main KH games in Critical mode with 100% completion rate, which is up there in terms of enjoying punching yourself in the b**ls) so if I end up getting tilted over this I’m sure a lot of people will as well.
Or maybe I’m just an idiot. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!
I agree, this feels awful to play atm
Fighting on narrow ledges, beams, and bridges is not just a crucible problem, it’s in a lot of the game and the reason it doesn’t feel good is because enemies have a lot of knockback/pushback built into their attacks, and your attack sequences also forcefully displace you. The fact enemy archer arrows stagger you is silly, and I’ve encountered during the Marin pestilence certain bruisers that are pulling out daggers or spears out of their pockets and just lobbing it at you.
The answer to these scenarios would be the ability to have viable ranged attacks for precisely these situations. But most builds can’t, especially with the rework to focus requiring up close melee. Not only that, but in ledges and beams you can’t even safely dodge, so they should allow a larger much more generous parry/deflect window for ranged attacks.
Then there’s the grenade consumables. They just SUCK. I remember when I started the game I was impressed by the 45 damage scrap bomb as it felt like a powerful but limited item that could help me clear certain tough mob packs or deal with a grenade lobber mob from a distance since they were on ledges and beams.
But the grenade items quickly becomes absolutely useless because their damage doesn’t scale at all into useful territory. 90 and even 135 damage is NOTHING at lv20, it barely scratches an enemy let alone boss.
I know why they’re letting grenades suck, it’s so players can’t just farm grenades and simply spam a boss or area down without engaging in real combat.
But at this point I’d rather they let grenades be powerful and simply place an in-combat cooldown like hunger where you get 2-3 throws but those throws really hurt and count.
I agree fighting on narrow ledges and bridges isn’t just a crucible problem, but I pointed out crucible specifically because I feel like in a “gamemode” like that, having those kind of area designs doesn’t have the value that it has when designing other game areas.
For example, in souls game you’ll often see similar level design in SOME places. The first and best example that comes to my mind is blight town in DS1. Blight town can be frustrating, yes, but it’s part of the challenge that this area presents to the player and I think that it’s ultimately fun to have some of that in a game.
But if there was a specific piece of content in a DS game that’s meant to challenge my skills by making me fight stronger foes than usual, I wouldn’t want this piece of content to ALSO add the “annoyance” of restrictive area design (restrictive as in it’s restricting the amount of ways there are to deal with the current situation). When you design a gamemode like crucible where it seems to me like the idea behind it is “let’s challenge the player’s skill and how well he learned to play the game, if he succeeds he’ll get great rewards unavailable elsewhere”, any kind of PERCEIVED unfairness (overwhelming monster composition in the level, lots of bridges + lot of pushback from monster attacks) just gets amplified. On top of that, the fact that a lot of the interesting endgame gear is locked behind said content can leave the player feel very helpless and stuck in his progression.
That’s my 2 cents. As for grenades, that’s a completely different topic but I agree with you. If there’s no topic about it, you should create one!
All the fkn platforming sht should be gone yesterday from crucible. Literally 100% of my deaths are from falling. Worst design ever.