The Elite Forum
Nonsense Time => FFA => Topic started by: Shadow on November 29, 2021, 10:02:21 pm
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I just have to vent for a bit. I don't know what the game designers were thinking here. I went through the entire game, collecting all the coins, breezing through the stages and largely enjoying it, despite the somewhat clunky hitboxes and controls at times, and then I get to the final stage.
What is up with this?
No checkpoints and a stage that is say, five times as long as any single stage, and some of the most intricate and trickiest platforming of any portion of the game? This is like taking all the temples in Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze and stringing them together and saying you have to beat them all in one sitting.
Thankfully they at least patched it to allow for a few checkpoints now but still, I don't have time to sit there and play it over and over. I found this to be one of the most frustrating experiences in a long time. If I had several hours to just sit there and work on one single stage, I could beat it but I don't have that kind of time and honestly find it a waste.
What were the developers thinking here? I would guess that only 1% of people who bought the game bother to beat the final stage, is that really what you want to do to your fanbase?
And then to get the golden tonic you have to beat it without taking a hit, first try? Including difficult challenges is fine, but this just seems like a horrible idea.
The 1% who do beat it will think it's just fine and everyone else should just get gud but wow, this seems like one of the worst design choices I've seen in a long, long time.
What makes it worse is that it's a bit buggy still, so sometimes I'll get hit and then when I try to get on a platform again, I just fall through the floor. So one mistake leads to multiple penalties. Once I "failed" even though I still had 44 of my 48 bees (hits) left. I don't ragequit games but it's getting very tempting here...
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This game sounds very strange and unusual.
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old outdated game design the developers can't move on from, grasping at straws to recapture unrepeatable magic missing the mark badly
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Infil is here to help!
[3:33 PM] Infilament: the final stage is indeed really long (like we're talking 15-20 minutes) and at launch, there were NO checkpoints at all
[3:33 PM] Infilament: every time you died you had to start from the beginning and it was hard
[3:33 PM] Infilament: they patched in some checkpoints later
[3:34 PM] Infilament: actually the stage might be closer to 30 minutes your first time through tbh
[3:35 PM] Infilament: the trick is, you get X hit points based on how many stars you found in the game to that point, so if you 100%'d the game before the final level, you get like 70 hit points
[3:35 PM] Infilament: but the stage is 5x harder than any other level they made you do, so you get hit a lot and you'll have to get 10 minutes into the stage, finally die, then redo all the 10 minutes before it to even see the next part of the stage
[3:36 PM] Infilament: anyway, i actually didn't beat the last level despite 100%ing the rest of the game, not because it was too hard but just because i started playing another game and didn't go back to it
[3:36 PM] Infilament: i should prob do that
[3:39 PM] Infilament: it's still nowhere even close to the difficulty of a game like celeste tho
[3:39 PM] Infilament: it's kind of "trial and error" hard
[3:39 PM] nstinson: Celeste is designed to be hard though
[3:39 PM] Infilament: yeah but so was this
[3:39 PM] Infilament: well, not the rest of the game, but the game is called "the impossible lair" so i'm guessing the lair level was meant to be challenging
3:40 PM] Infilament: it's closer to donkey kong country level of difficulty (which is not that hard)
[3:40 PM] Infilament: but is sometimes a little hard
[3:40 PM] Infilament: although the bonus levels in the new DKC games like tropical freeze are quite tough
[3:41 PM] Infilament: but yeah if i had to guess, based on what i remember, i'd say the lair level is about as hard as an early dark world level in meat boy
[3:41 PM] Infilament: except if it was 30 minutes long
[3:43 PM] Infilament: the bigger problem is not the difficulty, just that it takes so long
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I 100%'d the first game (it was bad) and I didn't know they made a sequel. Honestly though given how bad the original was I can't imagine this one is worth anyone's time.
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old outdated game design the developers can't move on from, grasping at straws to recapture unrepeatable magic missing the mark badly
This is a great post, I can imagine everything from this one phrase. Well done.
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So note that "Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair" is a 2D sidescroller, unlike the original "Yooka Laylee", which was a 3D platformer. In many respects the "sequel" is far better. It has a great soundtrack (David Wise, Grant Kirkhope), a very interesting overworld and characters and some pretty good levels. Each level has two states and some action in the overworld affects which state you enter the level in. That is pretty cool actually.
It's the final stage that was just messed up. Infil's postings were a bit inaccurate but the one thing he really nailed is that the final stage is so long. And it's designed to go through slowly and wait for timing rather than go fast. So you'll spend ten minutes getting to a spot, encounter a new obstacle, die figuring it out, and then have to play through the entire first part again...and again...and again.
I finally beat it yesterday and I'm glad to have it over with. I understand why the developers thought it was a good idea, but it really wasn't.
The rest of the game is pretty good though.
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But is it ACTUALLY pretty good? Now you can find out for yourself; free this week only!
https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/yooka-laylee-and-the-impossible-lair