What ? Is Egg Rock Zone too hard for you ? Well...

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The final boss and other bosses still fail from at least not telling you what the boss attack will be. Seriously, no Sonic boss would attack in such a way where you wouldn't have enough proper time to react to the bosses attacks. Some of the bosses in SRB2 don't do this.
Take a good look at this video right here. This shows all the bosses in the original Sonic and I think srb2 needs to pay attention to this a bit more ((I mean other than making it as easy as a lot of them were)) because attacks weren't unexpected. You could STILL react to a boss attack but still be bad at it. SRB2, on the other hand, fails to understand to show the player what the hints and signs are for certain attacks or changes a boss will make. Sonic bosses are usually pretty predictable but even then the moves aren't unexpected. You know what will happen if you do something. The only boss that gives you proper warning for the attack is metal Sonic, and even then you don't know which laser attack he does.

But going back to Egg Rock Zone in mind, I think Brak eggman needs to be fixed a bit because the attacks that he does ((not WHEN he attacks, WHAT he attacks)) you have no idea in what he's going to do, which can result in a cheap death. Like when he fires the knockback missile and you get sent flying. It's a 3D Game, and unless your camera is constantly centered on the boss like most modern 3D Sonic games, you need to give us a better cue as to when and what they'll be attacking with. I'm not saying they should scream "FLAMETHROWER" or "BOMB" just like a distinct sound BEFORE they attack with it to let us know what's up. Those are just my thoughts anyways.
 
And another thing on the bosses, don't make them too easy. Make them fun.
Increasing difficulty on bosses is not fun, it's annoying and unnecessary.
Take DSZ3's boss for instance. Before, it was fun, because you got to spinjump into him and find out different ways to attack him. You also got plenty of time to leave the water if you fell in.
But in the new update? I audibly groan before facing DSZ3's new boss encounter.
 
And another thing on the bosses, don't make them too easy. Make them fun.
Increasing difficulty on bosses is not fun, it's annoying and unnecessary.
Take DSZ3's boss for instance. Before, it was fun, because you got to spinjump into him and find out different ways to attack him. You also got plenty of time to leave the water if you fell in.
But in the new update? I audibly groan before facing DSZ3's new boss encounter.

Actually I disagree with you. Increasing difficulty on a boss actually makes it better. There just needs to be a fine balance between "difficulty" and "cheap" because if a boss is really hard, awesome and epic, it's really great. I don't want pushover bosses like some of Sonic 2's bosses I want things that are hard and challenging but it is always my fault if I end up dying to them as opposed to the enemy's/boss's fault.
 
Adding on to what Sonoob said about Act 3, it is an absolute pain in the ass for slower characters.

I understand that with Tails and Knuckles, you can easily take shortcuts, and I am very thankful for those. But there gets to the point with the spike room (with the platforms you have to jump on to proceed, or wait for metal) that Metal WILL get ahead.

He breaks through the spikes or outruns you at that point. That EXACT point. The gravity room is a piece of cake with Tails or Knuckles, but Metal absolutely tears through it nearly as fast as you do.

And finally, the red hallway. At this point, if Metal isn't behind you, you're screwed. Spindashing or Spinflying does absolutely nothing at this point, because the timer has started and you have no chance.

I blew about 12 lives as Tails on this level before finally succeeding, but BARELY. By barely I mean Metal was right on my heels.

I also tried the level as Sonic, and it becomes hell. The platforms should be a bit wider at least, but I kept finding myself overshooting and landing in the pit. Only a minor complaint there.

I'm just gonna throw a few tips out here, because this level can be completely obliterated as Tails or Knuckles. (As in, being 20-30 seconds ahead of Metal type obliterated)

The First Hallway: Don't jump over the spikes, but take a higher passageway only accessible by Tails or Knuckles. There's a Super Sneakers box in there.. not that you need it. (Personally, I find the Super Sneakers rather disorienting when playing as any character that isn't Tails - but that's probably because I'm not used to the new speed limits yet.)
The Spike Room: If you've taken enough shortcuts at that point, you can take the upper room (with enough time to get hit by the laser, mind) and still be ahead.
The Laser Hallway: My strategy for this bit is simple: Spin, and lose rings. You don't really NEED your rings at this point anyway, so I just spin to gain some ground. The conveyor belt below will accelerate that spin to immense speeds - so much so that after you spin off the conveyor, you'll probably trigger the gravity-flip thing before you even land.
The Gravity Room: Fly or Glide straight for the exit, ignoring all the platforms. You'll gain about a 10-15 second advantage right out of the bat here - arguably the biggest shortcut in the level.
The Red Hallway: .. Spindashing is useless, what? Clearly you didn't charge it enough. My first playthrough of this level as Tails had Metal ahead of me (mainly due to not knowing the Gravity Room shortcut at the time) - a well-charged spindash into jumping made me overtake him, grab the checkpoint and land in the zoomtube. The spindash is practically essential here. It's so much better than in 2.0.

And yeah, as Sonic I often found myself overshooting and falling down too - but I think that's mostly due to my miscalculations of jump distance, as I can completely obliterate that stage now.

And another thing on the bosses, don't make them too easy. Make them fun.
Increasing difficulty on bosses is not fun, it's annoying and unnecessary.
Take DSZ3's boss for instance. Before, it was fun, because you got to spinjump into him and find out different ways to attack him. You also got plenty of time to leave the water if you fell in.
But in the new update? I audibly groan before facing DSZ3's new boss encounter.

Apart from the contradiction at the start, I'll have to disagree here. Difficulty can be fun if it's done correctly. Although the difficulty should come from the player's lack of skill, not the boss' ability to do undodgable attacks or having their pattern be completely undescipherable. (I'll bring DSZ3 into here: There's no obvious indication which Eggman you can hit, especially when they turn into black silhouettes [Although I think that's a bug])

Although I will mention - bosses in SRB2 are made quite a bit easier for the sheer fact that rings exist. Shiny, circular items which make you completely unkillable (except to death pits and crushers), and can be picked up again when you die. And the way I see it - players should be given a chance to pick up their rings again (looking at YOU, DSZ3..), or having the player's available rings slowly dwindle during the fight due to them being dropped in a particularly difficult place (especially when they fly far after your "hit cooldown" has been built up a bit).

Bosses should be difficult, but not insta-death difficult. Rings should be lost, but at least some should be re-gatherable*. The pattern should be recognisable, but not trivial to dodge (unless the player has skill, that is).

Pretty sure that's the whole reason why ERCZ gives you five rings, which I personally believe is too generous for a final boss
 
I'd like to note that back in the old days of the 80s and 90s (I know, dinosaurs roaming the earth and all) games were actively designed to make you lose repetitively and often. Video games were also entirely assumed to be toys for children. As a child, I played many games and many of them I never beat until I got older, because that's how games were designed. In particular, Super Mario Brothers 3 comes to mind as a game I absolutely loved as a child but didn't beat until a couple years later when I was smart enough to figure out the world 8 mini-fortress. If you turned the system off, you had to restart the entire game from scratch, too. SMB3 isn't even a particularly hard game, either. Many games of that era weren't just hard, they were patently unfair, REQUIRING the player to put levels into muscle memory before they had any shot in hell of beating the game.

While SRB2 isn't intending to be unfair like Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden, it IS trying to emulate an era in gaming where failure was an actual option. This is not the modern era, where every game was designed to make sure every player succeeds. The player is expected to lose their first few attempts at Eggrock, and that's actually okay! What's not okay is when the player feels discouraged to the point where they feel they have no chance of winning if they put in the time and effort to practice. Finding that line between temporary failure and permanently giving up is what difficulty testing is all about.

To that end, the goal is to change things that are SO difficult the player will ragequit from frustration, but keep things at a high level of difficulty. There are definitely things we've learned from 2.1's release, and as always SRB2 is a work in progress. 2.1's difficulty curve is far better than 2.0's, and the plan is that 2.2's difficulty curve will be far better than 2.1's.

Thanks for the clarification. As I said, the game I was talking about is from 2003, so it has been released more recently than SMB3. I think that this will all look better when the whole game finally gets longer again (ACZ2 and RVZ2 are really important right now).
I still want to stress though that I strongly recommend an easy mode for the game. I'm personally fine with the difficulty, but an easily beatable mode should be in the game. Maybe make it so you don't get rewarded for it at all (no level select after beating it, no emblems, no unlocking levels for time attack et cetera...)
 
In that case, let's agree to disagree then. Also thanks for mentioning the pit room with laser walls. I forgot about them and their cruelty.

Still, you asked to mention a platformer that doesn't teach playing making you lose : Mega Man in most case. The exceptions I can think of are the wall bombing boss in Mega Man 2 (which was stupid), and mayyyybe the Yellow devil in Mega Man 1, since it is so fast you have to learn by trial and error. But those are never levels.
I don't want to cite badly made Mega Man games like Mega Man X6 or Mega Man & Bass, which had awful level design that never let you any chance.

In Mega Man you learn in way that a blind player could actually not die while still feeling a great challenge.
I also feel dumb in mentioning : Super Mario World... because it was just right there.


But it's alright, let's just agree to disagree.


No problem, it´s just a different point of view on platforming games. About Megaman and Super Mario World, I don´t know, I´ve gotten plenty of Game Overs before on both of them. Megaman requires to play huge chunks of the level after each death and has plenty of instadeath traps. I didn´t expect that answer, as I feel ERZ is similar to Megaman o_O Haven´t fully played SMW, so I can´t comment much on it.


Thanks for the clarification. As I said, the game I was talking about is from 2003, so it has been released more recently than SMB3. I think that this will all look better when the whole game finally gets longer again (ACZ2 and RVZ2 are really important right now).
I still want to stress though that I strongly recommend an easy mode for the game. I'm personally fine with the difficulty, but an easily beatable mode should be in the game. Maybe make it so you don't get rewarded for it at all (no level select after beating it, no emblems, no unlocking levels for time attack et cetera...)


I would personally love if Easy and Hard settings were back. I know they were removed for a reason, but it would be great for every kind of player.
 
Knuckles MetalMind said:
I would personally love if Easy and Hard settings were back. I know they were removed for a reason, but it would be great for every kind of player.

They can't come back. We use the flags that formerly were there for stuff like object flip. We'd lose that functionality in place of difficulty settings
 
Here's some honest constructive criticism. The snailer in the Mega Man room of Act 2 (I entered that room with 8 lives and left with 2, and that was after about, say, 4 game overs.) needs to go. Hopefully in a 2.1.x style patch, maybe. The sooner the better. This has already been addressed in this topic, but I figured it would be appropriate to add to the public consensus. I found the rest of ERZ1 and 2 very, very fun, however!

My second complaint is that the game doesn't save until you beat all 4 acts of ERZ in a marathon run. An ideal situation would be to have the game save at ERZ3, so you only need to beat Metal Sonic and Brak Eggman at once, instead of the entire zone. That would be a little more forgiving, and allow for muscle memory to develop in ERZ3. The level's almost perfect, I just want to be able to go back to it quickly when I fail so I can iterate my technique. I entered once with ten lives and managed to make it to the boss room with 1 life to spare, which I promptly lost to a boss I was unprepared to fight.

My third complaint is probably a little more vague. Brak Eggman's very, very unforgiving, which is to be expected from a final boss, but it would probably do with a little tune-up around the edges. A potential suggestion is to give his sniping and rocket attacks a little more time to allow people to react- the sniper would probably benefit from a whole second extra, while the fast rocket attack would maybe benefit from a couple of quick warning beeps before he shoots it so we can know when to get strafing and stop attacking. The only issue in this situation is my reaction time; I am willing to accept that the developers may consider this a fault of me and not of the game, and I recognise that it is a less objectively needed change. But you asked for feedback, so I might as well give it just in case.

There's also an OpenGL glitch where the Wind Fortress-style laser-shooting polyobject ends up disappearing inside the ceiling of that room, so you don't know where it's going to shoot. That's not on penalty of death, and it's not so much a level design fault so much as a glitch, so it doesn't really matter. But since we were discussing things that made ERZ more difficult, this probably goes here too.
 
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Also, I just realized what bugs me about ERZ4.
The boss uses a sniping attack that is common in classic Sonic games. The thing is, when it appears in the classics, you have to move fast enough to avoid the reticle.
But here it's just confusing, because if you've played Sonic on the genesis, then you'll try to avoid the reticle by running away from it, which is not how it is avoided at all.
I still think the barrels should be up the whole time, because normally they aren't up, and people don't even know that they exist.
 
While I'm considering delaying his LOS attack, I'm not changing Brak's rocket attack. I tried that once and it felt all sorts of wrong.

However, I should note that his laughing actually has a purpose. He won't attack again until he's laughed, so if you need a signal to "stop attacking", that would be it. On the upside, attacking him before he laughs is totally safe. That said, the time between his attacks ending and him laughing gets shorter the lower his health is, and his attack occurs at random after laughing (so you can still chance an attack if you want; otherwise, just wait for him to do his attack and try to hit him the instant the attack finishes).
 
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They can't come back. We use the flags that formerly were there for stuff like object flip. We'd lose that functionality in place of difficulty settings
It might be possible to add it, by loading a different map(a edited version of the map) when playing on hard. That would allow more level "redesigning", level designers could add more platforms over pits or make the level shorter.
 
While I'm considering delaying his LOS attack, I'm not changing Brak's rocket attack. I tried that once and it felt all sorts of wrong.

However, I should note that his laughing actually has a purpose. He won't attack again until he's laughed, so if you need a signal to "stop attacking", that would be it. On the upside, attacking him before he laughs is totally safe. That said, the time between his attacks ending and him laughing gets shorter the lower his health is, and his attack occurs at random after laughing (so you can still chance an attack if you want; otherwise, just wait for him to do his attack and try to hit him the instant the attack finishes).

Thanks for thinking about delaying the LOS attack. It's a whole different kettle of fish to the rocket, where the laughter allows you to get into a dodging state of mind (thanks for the tip, by the way). That would, of course, be counterproductive if it were a LOS attack, though, because you'd be dodging around the middle most of the time- away from the barrels.
 
The sheer number of levels in SRB2, and their scale (ERZ2 is 3+ megabytes!) means that adding different copies has a huge impact on the filesize. Oh, let's not forget about how there's no way to synchronize changes between the different copies of the levels, and now imagine trying to keep all of them consistent.
 
An easy or hard mode is probably something better suited to an external addon anyway. Though for hard stuff, there's always -ultimate! (I've almost gotten past GFZ in that mode!)
 
The sheer number of levels in SRB2, and their scale (ERZ2 is 3+ megabytes!) means that adding different copies has a huge impact on the filesize. Oh, let's not forget about how there's no way to synchronize changes between the different copies of the levels, and now imagine trying to keep all of them consistent.

Well, what about, rather than creating easy/hard variations of levels, why not just create easy/hard variations of things, they would only spawn on their respective difficulties.
 
Well, what about, rather than creating easy/hard variations of levels, why not just create easy/hard variations of things, they would only spawn on their respective difficulties.

There was a reason why that was removed back in 109.4.

Listen guys... You guys are complaning about a Sonic fangame that is being made by people that are not getting paid, (in fact they loose money) about a final boss that is "unexpectantly" hard. There is a reason that's the "FINAL" zone in the game. Honestly, this is a cakewalk compared to "Mystic Realms 2nd Quest PAZ1." You wanna know something that is REALLY hard and annoying, try Srb2 ultimate mode. That is sure to make you punch your computer moniter.

Bottem line is, Eggrock is souposed to be hard. What were
You expecting? Springing Around zone?
 
This thread is going nowhere.
Look people, if you don't have anything to say besides "I had no problems with these levels" or "get better at the game", you're just wasting time and dragging the thread off topic. You're good at these levels, that's nice! Nobody cares! That isn't what we're talking about here.
 
Seriously? I've been following this thread and there's been a lot of detailed arguments from both sides of the spectrum, and no doubt STJr is taking it all in. Are you really even considering the other argument at all? Who are you to call it off?

Just to add my own thoughts, ERZ is almost perfect (remove the snailer from the megaman room). It's masochism at it's finest, and it's the perfect send off for the SP campaign. The only flaw with it is that it just needs the missing zones to ramp up the difficulty more appropriately. And this is not new, these thoughts have been repeated numerous times throughout the thread.
 
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