Gonna add Kingdom Hearts to this (cause Sqenix), because I was playing 1 as a preteen, beat Cerebus, got in the Gummi ship, and promptly got lost on where to go after. Bonus for stopping the game for months, picking up again, and being lost so I just never beat it. I plan to finish KH1 this summer after beating Metaphor Re:Fantazio, but I probably will reset to get that full experience factor 😅
I was playing Star Wars: Bounty Hunter on Switch today because of the current free trial. At first, running around as Jango Fett in the Gamecube era was fun, but then shortly after getting my jet pack, I get completely turned around while chasing the bounty guy and spend over a half hour being lost. Called it quits after that.
I spent so long on the 3DS in ocarina of time just running all over the entire map not sure how to progress, I eventually gave up. Those stupid boulders are supposed to give you tips but idk I just couldn’t figure it out back then.
I never used a guide or anything either, I was 13 when I beat it the first time, but finding that one missing key always trips me up for at least a few minutes.
Atari’s ET. Game was bugged. Every 80’s kid that bought this was disappointed. It is the worst video game in history and all unsold copies were buried in a landfill only to be rediscovered decades later.
It feels like such a silly example now that I know the game, but tales of symphonia made me give up for about three years before coming back and beating it. There’s a section where you’re supposed to go to a specific city to progress, but there’s a semi-secret long way around that lets you experience a different character’s story early. Well, I somehow sucked at following directions and went the semi-secret way, and then couldn’t figure out how to get ANYWHERE that let you do anything. I wandered around the same continent for several months (playing a few hours a week) before moving on.
This one’s pretty controversial, but if you’ve never played it before,
Half Life 1
It’s really confusing and enemies will pop out of nowhere and kill you instantly. Not really fun imo, but then again I AM playing it for the first time 27 years after it came out 😂
Which bits in particular? Because on one hand it’s a fairly linear design, but on the other there are some bits that can loop around themselves and objectives aren’t always obvious.
Oh I completely get you, on a rail is a famously difficult spot for a lot of people. I think the lack of landmarks and long duration really hurts that chapter. If it’s any consolation it’s mostly a one off situation, and yeah black mesa doesn’t really have an equivalent.
Make sure you listen to the NPCs. They give you clues like being quiet around the big beaky things that one shot you. Also, if it is really big you guns do nothing. Go and find the other way to destroy it.
To be as specific as I’m feeling right now, feel free to tell me to dial in further, and coming from having only played Arc Raiders and only watched Marathon vods here is the main difference - Marathon’s devs are making a lot of promises vs Arc Raiders delivering on those same promised plans.
For instance marathon is promising to launch with 3 maps, arc has 3 maps today.
Marathon is promising tense extractor gunplay with high stakes loot, everything I heard from multiple streamers/reviewers say the tension isn’t there and the loot isn’t there. Arc has tension and definitely has loot. Their guns have clean 1-4 ranking and the weapons are rarity binned. I’ve yet to use most of the weapons available in Arc because I haven’t focused on crafting them and haven’t found them, theres already a ton of width to the pool.
Marathon is promising strong PvE encounters with raid boss like content (or maybe the raid boss promise was actually people just speculating on where they could take this). Arc has boss like encounters with the Queen (and honestly fuck the Rocketeer and the Bastion those guys are tough little bastards that will punish you if you make a mistake).
Marathon is promising dynamic events during the match. Arc Raiders already has dynamic events on a per map basis, night raids, and in server events like rocket landings, middle barages, etc.
I would pay $60 bucks today for Arc Raiders as it is now. My friends and I would play the fuck out of it. And if they would do DLC instead of battle passes we’d continue to financially support the game.
Based on what I heard and saw of marathons identical closed alpha, I don’t know if there’s enough content there for more than 10 hours and none of it excited me because it seemed like 20% of what they promised.
I think people are hyped by the concept of Marathon and the hope for an old Bungie game. But I think right now the reality is they’re not the same Bungie as the one that gave us Halo, I personally never got into Destiny, and they’ve only gotten more corporate not less.
If in 6 months they can spin up what seems to be 80% of a game, then I’ll be there and interested. But if Arc released next week, or spent the next 6 months adding content and I had to pick one, I’d be playing Arc without question.
the timing seems very crucial for swingcustomers (as in swingstate, not the dirty way I know you thought that) - good for us consumers if they drop it earlier short term.
On the other hand, in regard of long term quality of the game, I kinda wish they ensure to expand and refine first before releasing, since even its embark… idk updates once in post-production dont offer gamechanging features anymore. As listed in the arc-but’s (why my neologism game seem dirty) above theres lots of things that might cause a drop in success overtime similar to division.
Would love your thoughts on how they specifically delivered or unsatisfied the listed promises
I’m struggling a bit with what you’re asking for but here’s what I think you’re asking for. You brought up two worries with Arc
longterm gunplay
meta progression
I think gunplay is at a really good point systems-wise in Arc. I think at this point the important long term factors are balance and variety. Balance is anyone’s guess in any single game or with any single company, sometimes they get close at the start and just make nothing but bad calls from then on like in Helldivers 2. So no comment on Arc’s long term balance but I’d give them no worse odds than Bungie to fuck that up - and based off the technical alpha feedback Arc is in a great place in terms of balance and Marathon is most definitely not.
Variety is an easy solve with extraction shooters in my opinion because you can control so many variables. You can have a busted gun but it’s ammo or durability decay is so large you only use it one run per find, you can make it a legendary drop, you can make it only good against players or only good against bots, etc. There’s a lot of factors in what makes a gun good when an economy and RPG elements are brought in. I imagine if they released a new gun every season or every 6 months or released a set of consumables and legendaries the variety would be maintained for a decade. Again, because there’s a bigger PvE emphasis in Arc than in Marathon from what we’ve seen, I’d bet Arc is able to keep things fresh for longer. Imagine a Javelin in Arc - it sucks against players but it crippled the Queen, that’s cool as hell and reasonably feasible. Marathon screams Apex gun design and I think Apex didn’t do a good job with their gun pool - every expansion felt like it hurt the pool instead of making it more diverse IMHO but that could have also come down to balance - I suspect marathon will be the same.
Meta progression is easy. Arc has a skill tree that I like (although it’s missing details which I think is important) and bench upgrades (and maybe vendor levels?). They also have battlepasses but this is actually a negative for me, I think current battlepass design sucks even if they’re going with the friendlier Helldivers style passes. They’re just boring. Still, more little “achievement” targets and rewards.
Those have been very compelling. Marathon has quests for a half a dozen vendors. I believe that’s it. I don’t recall a skill system, I don’t recall bench upgrades, just quests. I like the aesthetic, and I don’t really mind it all being just quests but between the lack of personalization in meta progression AND the fact it’s a hero shooter the game lacks the golden itch of individuality that I love when games have. I think marathon has significantly worse meta progression today AND I don’t think they’ve promised to make it better. That’s super important to me. Hunt Showdown is a great game but it’s lack of meta progression has made it feel shallow for me. Marathon, I imagine, will feel the same way.
Again, this comes down to Arc being good to go today with systems I can dream about them expanding. Marathon isn’t accessible outside the US right now and I imagine even if I could play it it wouldn’t feel even close to a finished project - and with a bunch of corpos making promises to the cameras my gut says if the game is good it’ll be in a year or two and even then it’ll be corporate good and not artist good.
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