Is the geyser climb section in Faith and Flame, supposed to be the point that demonstrates the difficulty of the game, and separates the casul players from the end-game players? After all, the game takes from Dark Souls, where Sen’s fortress was a thing., and people were expected to give up in frustration: it was the whole artistic point of Dark Souls (Going Hollow - the inevitability of quitting).
If not, there are several the section has several things that may make it harder than intended. There are two back to back. platforming sections where you have to climb nets while geysers blow up under you. The first is a leap to catch the net. The edges and gaps in the net are particularly visible, so there are places you character will fall or refuse to climb when under time pressure.
The second is a net under two geysers, where you have to weave from side to side while climbing to avoid the explosions. Again, the edges and gaps in the net aren’t visible, so you character just hangs a second, or refuses to go sideways when needed. Also, there are ground textures that prevent your character from starting to climb when they reach the net, so they get blown up at the bottom, or lose precious time to get up the net enough to have a chance to go sideways. The sideways leaps either don’t trigger or turn into just hanging there.
Suggestions :
Add Another way around the double geysers.
Add a bit of net on the second climb where you can get on it without being blown up (and still have to weave as you climb. )
Horizontal Geysers.
Contrasting color and no gaps/hang trap points for the net.
Wider net with fatter, slower geysers.
Move the short cut from before the leap-climb to after.
After the second set of attempts ended by needing to repair gear, I logged in, killed the creep in the shortcut, stripped the character of all equipment and kept trying until the creep re-popped. No luck, and talk about fan dis-service…
If Wicked ever gets invasions, this is where I’ll be with knockdown shot and drone trap. The area’s missing the snakes part of snakes and ladders.
The damage caught me off-guard after the patch, but I don’t consider it a hard platforming/timing section. I’m comically bad at those normally, and I made it through with few deaths, and my friends without any.
Did you feel the same about Iona’s Cavern?
Iona’s Cavern didn’t surprise me with difficulty because it was surrounded by difficult areas. The geyser climb sections comes at a point when builds are online, brains are slightly off, so maybe that gives you that jarring feeling?
From trillions of hours of Souls games, I have developed something of a sixth Sen’s for difficult sections. It helps that From telegraphs these really well.
From the way the lava geysers were introduced, I wasn’t surprised by lava geysers doing no damage initially. If this isn’t just my experience, something could be tweaked to warn players and set better expectations now that they’re lethal.
No, I did not think this same about Iona’s Cavern. The main difference was that the controls worked as expected in the cavern, whereas the controls on the net climbs don’t.
In the cavern your character goes where you press the stick, and jumps where you point them.
For the geyser climbs the character doesn’t always go in the direction you push the stick, doesn’t climb when they are directed onto the net, doesn’t jump when you push the button and occasionally just hangs there until they get OHK’ed by the geyser.
It’s the combination of lack of control, and time pressure that makes the geysers much worse than Iona’s
Since video is better for showing what the problem is, here’s a little youtube to show you all what I mean. https://youtu.be/j7AeXEOBWpU Loop it about 9 times for last nights session. Here’s the walkthrough:
0:08: Flame hitbox bigger than visual. The burn was going to kill anyway…
0:25: Want to be evil, put a rock right here to mess up the runback.
0:52: Made the first jump that time.
1:07: Character dangles when commanded to jump up. One shot by the Geyser.
2:03: Character takes extra time to get on the net, does not jump right when commanded. One shot by the Geyser.
2:53 Character takes extra-long to get on the net. Another One-shot.
3:48 Character jumps up instead of sideways. Oneshot.
4:50 Another drop from a invisible unclimbable bit. Yet another oneshot.
5:00: run for repair…
As you can see, if a single hit of damage was survivable or if the jumps actually worked as commanded, it would be fine. It’s just the combination of one-shots and losing control of the character that makes it unfun.
The point about controls is insightful, as is the recording. Thank you.
Really not sure what happened at 1:06. Looks like letting go, then re-grabbing the wall. You sure you didn’t touch B instead of A there? Since it’s the same at 4:51 and you say there’s an invisible unclimbable bit, I guess not. I’ll run there to check in a bit.
Is the recording horrible or do you always play with this kind of performance? The inconsistency would drive me nuts, and I’d even consider whether controls and performance are related. Inaccuracies like the non-parabolic jump at 2:42 or the sliding at 3:32 look like massive performance drops issues to me, to such an extent that the physics get wonky. I wonder if the long time to start climbing the roots could be related to performance too?
You sometimes survive the geyser, sometimes not. Wonder if you’d get through easily with fire resistance and lowered performance settings. You could’ve definitely healed the first death for instance, and maybe gotten out at 2:04 with a buffered roll.
The stick direction issue is not something I am experiencing.
The quality is a little bad 'cause YouTube, however there are a few things that happen in play that make me wonder if there’s a performance issue. For example the characters sprint out of combat like real people: slowing down after a sec, then speeding back up as they regain their wind. Could be an intentional design decision or could be a performance issue.
That run had all the fire resistance I could find in my stashes and I am a pack rat. So no more elemental resistance gems, and out of mats to roll for the fire resistance facet.
I’m certain that I haven’t touched B at least once in the 10 or so times I’ve fallen from that particular spot. Know of any good packages to include control inputs in a video?
Good idea about intentionally dumping performance: lots of older or sloppily coded games tie damage and collisions to frames displayed, maybe this one does it too. I’ll try tonight with low frame rate.
I can relate to that sometimes its like the character slip on something slippery without me ever hitting the drop button but only when im using a controller, however it doesnt seem to happen when im using a keyboard, and its pretty random for me when it happens so its hard for me to reproduce.
But it doesnt happen for me at the spot you are showcasing or well its random..
(i have a very old controller too so i cant rule out the possibility of it being my own controller but i can atleast relate to the experience you describe and showed in the video)
What you describe about running sounds very much like a performance issue. Here’s a small clip of what running, ladders and roots look like for me for comparison – I doubt what you’re describing is by design, as movement speed feels consistent to me, and ladder-grabbing smooth.
I can reassure you that Wicked’s game logic isn’t tied to framerate. It’s possible that your system can’t keep up with the (framerate-independent) physics simulation or loading, especially if you’re bottlenecked by CPU or hard drive. The game’s loading ‘chunks’ of the world constantly, especially while moving around. Still worth a shot to lower settings, even if it’ll mostly free up the GPU.
There are, at minimum, five survivability options you could try: the Heat Resistance rune (but that one’s rubbish), vials of defence, health-boosting food (Sirloin Platter), Pulse of Health, and plate armour. Vials and armour increases all resistances, fire included. You’re already in mesh, but maybe plate or the Stone Tusk Ring make the difference.
For input recording, there’s input-overlay for OBS. Since you mention ‘packages’ and may have named yourself after /dev/null: it works well on Linux. Installation is easy (link to guide).
(I’ll verify whether that particular root is bugged once I arrive there in my current run, although it sounds like askan94 already verified it’s not an issue with the spot.)
Lowered my settings and things worked better. Still would dangle if I hit “that spot” but the start of climb was quicker, so the first sideways jump cleared it because I was higher up when I had to jump.
The loading stuff is very strange. I have enough -free- RAM to copy the install directory twice over and still it needs to load things…(