Betrayal isn't just too hard; it's bad design.

A good game tells you its rules. It's normal in ARPGs for some mechanics to be hidden or lied about simply because of the complexity, but these effects should be minor numerical discrepancies.

Betrayal is full of hidden mechanics. This is especially bad in the mastermind fight. A puzzle boss where the only hinting is in the form of notifications that I've failed a challenge is trash. A game where a wiki and regular updates from famous streamers are necessary rather than a convenience is trash. This league is trash and you need to stop, GGG.

You've developed a pattern of increasing this kind of artificial difficulty since Bestiary. In Bestiary and Incursion, you could at least kind of blunder through it. In Delve, you just wouldn't reach the bad content if you weren't a high-level player. In Betrayal, the unreasonable punishment is made part of the core game design. Rethink this or it's time to uninstall.

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007Bistromath wrote:

A game where a wiki and regular updates from famous streamers are necessary rather than a convenience is trash.

This statement is nonsense.

We are so used to "all on a silver platter" game design with ingame tutorials, fail safes, question marks floating above every NPC that has something meaningful to say, arrows on overlay maps pointing us through "labyrinths", ... everything is toned down so much today that every idiot can have a good time.

Games used to challenge you in the past: invest time, learn stuff via trial and error, earn your victory.

GGG stated many times that they want to cater to the crowd of people who remember those old days.
They acted against their own design philosophy multiple times already, but some of this will always remain, and that is why a lot of us play this game (over, let's say, diablo 3).


If you cannot be bothered to run around a bit in a bossfight and see what the boss is actually capable of doing, and then to adapt to this, this may not be the game for you.

Dude, no. This isn't an appropriate place for old men yelling at clouds. I grew up with the C64 and the NES. Games that don't tell you how to play them are bad, and it's a testament to the maturity of this medium that so many developers realize that now. Challenge should be about difficulty of planning and execution, not fumbling around being unaware of the rules.

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007Bistromath wrote:

Dude, no. This isn't an appropriate place for old men yelling at clouds. I grew up with the C64 and the NES. Games that don't tell you how to play them are bad, and it's a testament to the maturity of this medium that so many developers realize that now. Challenge should be about difficulty of planning and execution, not fumbling around being unaware of the rules.

Games that don't tell you how to play are bad ?

What ? I remember clearly no being informed how to play megaman in NES days and it took me countless hours / days to finish it by trials and errors. Now, with experience in gaming and knowing the game it would take me 2-3 hours to finish it.

So no, games back in the old days of gaming did not tell you how to play them...

Now games have evolved. They are more in depth and need hundreds of hours to finish with mechanics far more complex than they were in the 80's.

Beside that point, Betrayal need some tweaking in power, but the mecanics are fine.

Go look up "affordances" and then tell me Megaman didn't tell you how to play.

The more complex a game is, the more explicitly it needs to tell you its rules. An ARPG is a very different animal from a platformer. That is what I meant by "the maturity of the medium." Games in the old days didn't give you much to read because it wasn't necessary.

GGG - I have a solution to all these Betrayal complaints.

Make it harder for HC and let live us plebs play peacefully in standard format? Since HC players like to boast about their prowess anyways even when shamelessly using the logout macro!

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007Bistromath wrote:

Dude, no. This isn't an appropriate place for old men yelling at clouds. I grew up with the C64 and the NES. Games that don't tell you how to play them are bad, and it's a testament to the maturity of this medium that so many developers realize that now. Challenge should be about difficulty of planning and execution, not fumbling around being unaware of the rules.

What exactly is the point of playing games if they tell you how to do everything? There literally isnt.... Seems like the new internet generation may be rubbing off on you as people feel "entitled" (Everything should be easy and done MY WAY)

This game never was and never will be hard.

Hard imply that you can pass this game without gear, only with your player skill (positioning, fast decisions, accuracy, manual dodging etc.)

POE require absolutly no player skill. If someone thinks that making a build is player skill then he/she have no idea about it.
Making a build require knowledge with isn't skill, additionaly its bad design because builds can be easly copied from others where like most people do it here. Also its only 1 time job, you do it once (even before you actualy play the game) and the rest is just implementation.

If you want to define "creating a build" a player skill, then sharing builds should be prohibitet. Since only builds truly created by you should count as your own skill.

Anyway, POE can't be hard as a game. So please stop posting stuff like "GIT GUD". POE partialy have bad and flawed design. GGG dont have control over some game mechanisms. Streamers and more knowlegable guys know how to abuse some items/combos thus abuse balance. We could even say, that they exploit incompetence of GGG for their favor. And GIT GUT only means "exploit it too or you are noob".

Unfortunatly we live in times where people dont respect facts, all they want is to be viewed as someone better than others without any reason to be viewed as such. False claims, fake achievements, everything handed on gold plate.

PS. I even know guy who killed all the game bosses except uber elder (since he didn't have luck to find it) and he didnt know how to read numbers. Though that 100 000 is a million LOL. Thats how POE is "hard".

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Linear_Alphas wrote:

GGG - I have a solution to all these Betrayal complaints.

Make it harder for HC and let live us plebs play peacefully in standard format? Since HC players like to boast about their prowess anyways even when shamelessly using the logout macro!

Shots fired.

Hey, I used to be a HC only player tho.

That logout macro tho, never used that. The game is hardcore in standard if you play a hard build ^_^

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Azarhiel wrote:

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007Bistromath wrote:

Dude, no. This isn't an appropriate place for old men yelling at clouds. I grew up with the C64 and the NES. Games that don't tell you how to play them are bad, and it's a testament to the maturity of this medium that so many developers realize that now. Challenge should be about difficulty of planning and execution, not fumbling around being unaware of the rules.

So no, games back in the old days of gaming did not tell you how to play them...

Not only would Megaman have an instruction manual, but the majority of NES and Arcade games (and incredibly hard ones aren't an exception) have some kind of attract mode that will demonstrate the gameplay and sometimes even tell you how to play it. Often times instructions will be printed on the arcade cabinet itself.