I like it, I admire it, but it is much too frustrating


Is the balance between accomplishment and frustration right yet?  

146 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you like this game?

  2. 2. Do you think it is too hard to "win"?

  3. 3. If your answer to the above was "Yes", rate your level of satisfaction vs frustration

    • I am completely satisfied with the gameplay balance
    • I am basically satisfied but feel it needs tweaking in favor of the player
    • It is way too difficult to merit a long-term commitment unless it gets fixed


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Hold on a moment there. No need to go all aggressive on this.

Even if (and I stress if) some players have cushy gameplay via saving, you're speaking about something literally a generation ago. 

(I swear to god, if you make me start some, "when I was their age" rant....)

Yes, I'm old enough to remember the original Rogue.

Need I remind you that came out in 1980, when many people weren't born yet? Considering millennials weren't even around at the earliest-as in born-until the 1980's, I doubt they would have played Rogue. 

 

And about the game Rogue then, I wouldn't have given it a second thought at the time.

It's the current popularity of the roguelike that got these games in fashion.

 

But many of the new players for this Invisible Inc game got some review on Steam or other gaming site, likely comparing the game to Xcom and the old Steam site had the Roguelike/permadeath buried in the game description not clearly listed. (I should know, I quoted it. )

 

 

But if we were able to look at the old DS responses (if the old forum were still around,) I'd bet a lot of what was said here about it being "too hard" would be true. But get basic game fundamentals down, and the game stops being so "impossible." 

 

And I'm replying to all this between my 10-20 hours played so it's kicking my ass still.

 

Heck, if you saw the Twitch this Thursday it even kicked Bigfoot's ass and he said that was supposed to be so. You have to do tactical planning and play like you would with a roguelike both, or the game will own you. And he being  distracted with the convention (PAX) and the chat (Twitch) could not.

To his credit he completed the mission the second time around,

 

(And I think we're changing the game's name to Chin Inc and will have donut traps, but maybe not...you had to be there, right The Letter W? :razz:

 

I'm not even nearly old enough to "remember" the original Rogue. Heck, Rogue is 15 years older than me, even. But a bunch of years ago all this roguelike stuff got popular, the first I saw being FTL. I liked it quite a bit and how I often didn't even get to the final level, that I decided to look into this so-called "Rogue", since it must be really good to define a whole genre!

 

I wasn't disappointed in the slightest, it gives time to think, is wits-based instead of all those fancy skill-based games nowadays and I liked it. And I especially like that it whooped my behind. And the next try I beat my score and got to the next floor. And some other tries I managed to beat another floor more. And so on.

And I really loved that, the feeling that you'll try everything possible to make it furthest, but the difficulty being really high so you can't just blaze through it like in games nowadays. Rogue has just a bunch of kilobytes and yet it provided more of a game to me than any Call of Doods ever could.

 

Now when I look at those modern "roguelikes" I sometimes can't help but shed a single tear. They wanted a genre based around a game that's defined by being insanely difficult, but all the fans yelled that it's too hard and it gets dumbed down yet again, just like most other genres already.

 

And now there's this Invisible, Inc. being actually challenging and hard and I fear that all the fans yelling "nerf the game pl0x" will just yet again ruin another proper roguelike.

 

Also have this, you said you wanted it: http://oldforums.kleientertainment.com/forum.php

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I've been not even playing for 20 hours and I've already done the main game (finished the last mission, that is).

I've learned the basics by something called common knowledge and slight curiousity. It's not hard to understand at all. And if something is, please tell me what it is so I can understand you people better.

 

I'm pretty sure all you people have no proper clue of what a roguelike is. I'm assuming barely anyone here played the actual Rogue before, but there the first few attempts you won't even beat the first three levels. Did people cry about that that it's too hard? No, it instead defined some sort of entire genre.

So don't go on about how hard Invisible, Inc. is. It's not hard, you're all spoiled by games where you're able to save every ten seconds or have an autosave at every corner, and if you mess up there's no penalty whatsoever.

 

that's a bit aggressive.

 

From my perspective, the game is intended to be longer than four mission (hinted by the final mission) and with the current hardcore (or ironman for XCOM) mode many players won't be able to finish the campaign. Right now when the agent is down, you have no backup whatsoever to replace the team that MIA and the game practically force you to restart... hours down the drain.

 

While many players interpret this situation as challenge, many simply don't. The game can cater both types of player easily by adding manual saving and different leaderboard (if there will be one) for each type of game.

 

Problem solved.

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To each his own, but i also think the difficulty is fine. The complete randomness can make things difficult until your team is good equipped.

 

I am playing Endless right now, i'm on day 6 and i didn't get a single one detention center mission. So i am still stuck with two team members. Which kinda sucks. They gotta work on the mission ratio, i am getting swarmed with the escort and knock out the mole missions, but no detention centers.

 

But hey, as long as the core game and difficulty stays the same, why not implement an easy mode for people who need it?

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that's a bit aggressive.

 

From my perspective, the game is intended to be longer than four mission (hinted by the final mission) and with the current hardcore (or ironman for XCOM) mode many players won't be able to finish the campaign. Right now when the agent is down, you have no backup whatsoever to replace the team that MIA and the game practically force you to restart... hours down the drain.

 

While many players interpret this situation as challenge, many simply don't. The game can cater both types of player easily by adding manual saving and different leaderboard (if there will be one) for each type of game.

 

Problem solved.

 

Thing is, you can't just snap your fingers and implementation happens.

 

Klei has resources, and for now they should focus on the actual game, not on alternatives. Heck, it's still Alpha.

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Right now when the agent is down, you have no backup whatsoever to replace the team that MIA and the game practically force you to restart... hours down the drain.

 

First: Use Med Gel

 

 

Second: Also a good idea i think, would be to have a chance (50%?) that the downed agent you cant revive gets MIA. The Agent would get available again after freeing him out of a detention center.

 

i think there will be more agents as the game gets updated more, so a loss hurts, but the game is far from over.

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Thing is, you can't just snap your fingers and implementation happens.

 

Klei has resources, and for now they should focus on the actual game, not on alternatives. Heck, it's still Alpha.

 

Not really the point to dismiss the idea, imo.

 

Klei has resource and the more players satisfy with the game, the more they are going to buy it. The more they can polish and expand the game. XCOM proved that both options can exist side by side without degrading the difficulty of the game.

 

I highly doubt that adding/changing save feature is particularly taxing. 

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Not really the point to dismiss the idea, imo.

 

Klei has resource and the more players satisfy with the game, the more they are going to buy it. The more they can polish and expand the game. XCOM proved that both options can exist side by side without degrading the difficulty of the game.

 

I highly doubt that adding/changing save feature is particularly taxing. 

 

Of course it's not taxing at all. In fact, the save feature is already there, they'd just have to make an ingame button to save and load the save, which is just, programming-wise, referring to commands which are already there.

 

No, I don't like the save feature because you can just save, storm into a room, whoops 6 guards pointing at me, reload. It's simply stupid in this game. If they implement a save feature it should only be one or two retries for a mission, not infinite saves and reloads.

 

By the resources I was mainly speaking about the leaderboards you mentioned and "options".

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Adding player-controlled save fucntions would severely impact the game's claim to being a permadeath roguelike.

 

XCOM has saves because that was never the point. It's based on the old XCOM, in which manual saving and loading was core to the game mechanics. This game isn't MEANT to allow you to undo your mistakes. You have to think carefully about everything you do. You have to take calculated risks, and if the risk doesn't pay off, you SHOULDN'T be going back and saying "yeah, I don't like how that played out, load previous save". You should be saying "that didn't go how I hoped, better luck next time!" and either carrying on or restarting, depending on whether you have any other agents left or not.

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Adding player-controlled save fucntions would severely impact the game's claim to being a permadeath roguelike.

 

XCOM has saves because that was never the point. It's based on the old XCOM, in which manual saving and loading was core to the game mechanics. This game isn't MEANT to allow you to undo your mistakes. You have to think carefully about everything you do. You have to take calculated risks, and if the risk doesn't pay off, you SHOULDN'T be going back and saying "yeah, I don't like how that played out, load previous save". You should be saying "that didn't go how I hoped, better luck next time!" and either carrying on or restarting, depending on whether you have any other agents left or not.

 

Someone obviously didn't know about ironman mode.

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Having an OPTIONAL mode which removes manual saving is VERY different from having it as the standard way the game works.

 

Many players (and a few of the devs) said that ironman was how XCOM is "meant to" be played, but that doesn't stop the majority of players from NOT doing so. The game has permadeath, but very few players actually accept those deaths.

 

Also, unlike this game, XCOM only saves at the end of the turn, so a well timed restart of the game can give you an undo button even in ironman mode.

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I'm not even nearly old enough to "remember" the original Rogue. Heck, Rogue is 15 years older than me, even. But a bunch of years ago all this roguelike stuff got popular, the first I saw being FTL. I liked it quite a bit and how I often didn't even get to the final level, that I decided to look into this so-called "Rogue", since it must be really good to define a whole genre!

 

I wasn't disappointed in the slightest, it gives time to think, is wits-based instead of all those fancy skill-based games nowadays and I liked it. And I especially like that it whooped my behind. And the next try I beat my score and got to the next floor. And some other tries I managed to beat another floor more. And so on.
And I really loved that, the feeling that you'll try everything possible to make it furthest, but the difficulty being really high so you can't just blaze through it like in games nowadays. Rogue has just a bunch of kilobytes and yet it provided more of a game to me than any Call of Doods ever could.

 

Now when I look at those modern "roguelikes" I sometimes can't help but shed a single tear. They wanted a genre based around a game that's defined by being insanely difficult, but all the fans yelled that it's too hard and it gets dumbed down yet again, just like most other genres already.

 

And now there's this Invisible, Inc. being actually challenging and hard and I fear that all the fans yelling "nerf the game pl0x" will just yet again ruin another proper roguelike.

 

Also have this, you said you wanted it: http://oldforums.kleientertainment.com/forum.php

 
This is almost word for word how and why I also returned to roguelikes. I've stated multiple times my thanks to FTL and Vanguard of Valor for this being why I go interested in DS, so I'll skip that story for now.
 
(And my thanks to Palpetinus edit: but I meant the forums long before 2013, around 2012 i think even before when they were replaced by this BBS software. Not the recent forum upgrades which I was here for. ) 

 

First: Use Med Gel

 

 

Second: Also a good idea i think, would be to have a chance (50%?) that the downed agent you cant revive gets MIA. The Agent would get available again after freeing him out of a detention center.

 

i think there will be more agents as the game gets updated more, so a loss hurts, but the game is far from over.

 

Funny you should mention that

 

And Klei has stated they will have up to six agents to select from eventually. But not in the next update (Daemon and program only for content, the rest being bug fixes like that ^&&*^%^&* auto-shoot without overwatch.) 

 

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Someone obviously didn't know about ironman mode.

 

Some players obviously don't know the reason for easy mode. What I can't understand is when you have players saying they don't want to manually choose an easier difficulty setting, that the standard difficutly should be easy enough even though the developers said they want the standard game to be challenging.

 

What's even worse is when players say they never play on a difficulty below hard, then complain that hard is too difficult want it to be toned down. That's a different story, though.

 

Basically, request an easier difficulty mode that players can select. The end.

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Adding player-controlled save fucntions would severely impact the game's claim to being a permadeath roguelike.

 

XCOM has saves because that was never the point. It's based on the old XCOM, in which manual saving and loading was core to the game mechanics. This game isn't MEANT to allow you to undo your mistakes. You have to think carefully about everything you do. You have to take calculated risks, and if the risk doesn't pay off, you SHOULDN'T be going back and saying "yeah, I don't like how that played out, load previous save". You should be saying "that didn't go how I hoped, better luck next time!" and either carrying on or restarting, depending on whether you have any other agents left or not.

Preach bruh

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Basically, request an easier difficulty mode that players can select. The end.

I agree.

They said during the devcast that both easier and harder difficulties were being implemented, I personally can't wait for a harder difficulty.

 

I just hope that they cater to both the people being frustrated by the game being too hard and the people that think it's too easy, which they said they are going to do with optional difficulty levels.

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In contrast I am not waiting for higher difficulty (Story Mode is pretty challenging as it is), but something like X-COM: the game "adjusting" difficulty to your progress (by introducing more different enemies, different daemons, different traps and devices), so you can't simply steamroll through missions the more agents and items you have in longer period of time.

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Not that I'm taking sides here, but for all the people complaining about how the game shouldn't have a save system, two points.

 

Unless we are talking about technical specifications, which are objective and can be assigned numerical values, how "Good" it all is is subjective. You can't really say that "It ruins the game" just because you think it does. The other guy might like it, and you can't really tell him his opinion is wrong because it's not your opinion.

 

Additionally, if you really don't like it, then just...don't use it? It's not like you'll be held hostage and forced to make manual saves every turn.

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Not that I'm taking sides here, but for all the people complaining about how the game shouldn't have a save system, two points.

 

I might be wrong, but ain't the lack of saving going hand-in-hand with the concept of permadeath that's one of the selling points of the game? If the game is considered roguelike, and Invisible Inc. is, then it stands to reason why there is no way to save the game at whim, so "all the people complaining about how the game shouldn't have a save system" do have a point.

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No, no I don't think they do, seeing as, like I mentioned, it can be a permadeath game if they want it to be. They don't have to use a save/load system.

 

Just because they want to play it that way doesn't mean that they get to make everyone else do it that way too.

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I agree with your logic (it's akin to people asking for removal of fast travel in TES games. I never complained about fast travel and used it the way it suited my playstyle). My point was that permadeath comes with the whole package. It's hardcore game after all. Saving at any moment would, by default, make it much less hardcore as one could save scum through the entire game, thus making its design principles - and how the game is marketed - out of touch with reality.

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I agree with your logic (it's akin to people asking for removal of fast travel in TES games. I never complained about fast travel and used it the way it suited my playstyle). My point was that permadeath comes with the whole package. It's hardcore game after all. Saving at any moment would, by default, make it much less hardcore as one could save scum through the entire game, thus making its design principles - and how the game is marketed - out of touch with reality.

 

Yeeeeeees, but it can still BE a hardcore permadeath experience even with a save function because you don't have to use it.

 

As for the marketing point...I don't think I understand. Things change throughout their life-cycle. That's how it goes. I don't get the issue?

 

If adding a new feature that doesn't remove anything messes with marketing (Which I've almost never seen, It's a procedural turns based stealth game, I've not seen "Rogue-Like" anywhere but on these forums, from players), then just update marketing materials. Or not, because as mentioned, the permadeath stuff is still there.

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Yeeeeeees, but it can still BE a hardcore permadeath experience even with a save function because you don't have to use it.

 

As for the marketing point...I don't think I understand. Things change throughout their life-cycle. That's how it goes. I don't get the issue?

 

If adding a new feature that doesn't remove anything messes with marketing (Which I've almost never seen, It's a procedural turns based stealth game, I've not seen "Rogue-Like" anywhere but on these forums, from players), then just update marketing materials. Or not, because as mentioned, the permadeath stuff is still there.

 

Check the Invisible, Inc web page, the description clearly states the game includes perma-death by default. If you don't want to deal with this feature, you have two options:

 

1) Manually back-up your saves.

2) Play something else.

 

Not to be rude, but it's a selling point of the game. I shouldn't have to avoid a save feature that the developers include in the game just so it can live up to its feature list; telling players to avoid saving so it feels like perma-death is still a feature is nonsense.

 

Seriously, wait and see what the easier difficulty mode does for you on Tuesday. But I doubt Klei will uproot the core design to allow save/load between missions. The players who want saves should be the ones to go that extra mile to make manually back-ups, since as you say, it's not like you have to respect the proposed rules given.

 

For reference:

 

http://www.invisibleincgame.com/

 

Edit:

 

For the record, your agents do not "die". They go MIA and can be revived during the mission with a non-consumable item.

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I didn't write they marketed it as roguelike (nor used exact wording).

However, they do put emphasis on procedural generation, permadeath and stealth being fundamental principles of their game. In stream they underlined the importance of making  though choices and having to deal with what would seemed to be impossible scenarios or situations and their consequences. It all led me to conclusion that they wouldn't forget to put save feature - that is, other than what we've currently - had it not been their conscious decision to NOT do so.

Of course, I can be wrong.

 

In any case, having the ability to save at any point or not won't impact the way I play. I used "soft-Ironman" to be able to play X-COM: Enemy Unknown with saves serving as fail-safes in case of game bugging out on me (and destroying my whole run in the process) and I had enough willpower to not use it to save scum. It won't have less now.

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Alright, let's start responding to things as they come up.

 

Firstly, if you are allowed to claim that you shouldn't have to not use a feature, then I can claim that I shouldn't have to go through a tedious manual process because you think that giving people an option to do things a way that's not your way makes your way less valid.

 

I don't understand your issue here. There is nothing stopping you from playing your game as hardcore as you want to play it. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be an option for people who want to take it a bit more gently. Your claim of it being a selling point of the game doesn't make any sense, because it still can be? Adding the ability to save doesn't remove the ability to not-save. In fact, it can be spun off into another thing to sell the game on, about how you can do it hardcore/ironman if you want, or take it more gently.

 

Secondly, see that ticker at the top? General Discussion? It means we can talk about the game here. This includes bits we do or don't like.

 

Thirdly, and this is important. Advertising a game for not having a useful feature that almost every other game does isn't advertising. That's like advertising an airline with the tagline "We don't bother to service our aircraft". Omitting features is bad, not good, and is an example of this trope:

 

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverNeedsSharpening

 

Fourthly, yes, we all know what medi-gel is. I don't understand what you hope to gain by pointing this out?

 

Fifthly, having development forums and community input on early access games is specifically so that the devs can get an idea of what people want, it's literally the main point. If they see enough people asking for something, should they just ignore it because it wasn't part of the original design document? The entire point of this forum is gather suggestions to change the game with!

 

Sixthly, I'm fine with permadeath, I stated at the very beginning that I wasn't taking sides in this debate.

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I started this thread because I was frustrated with the game's uncompromising difficulty but even I would not advocate a save option. Whether you intend to use it or not, it's very existence influences the way you play and this game must be played on a one mistake and you're out basis. As I get better at it I am no longer even advocating intel re. the location of the elevator. I just wish it were possible for someone with my relatively meagre talent and available time to get past three consecutive missions; I have abandoned all hope of ever getting to the end.

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