Yes, I do, if it should not have been there in the first place. This should not have been part of Freelancer’s design, roguelike or no roguelike. I don’t know any roguelike games and have never even heard of them before Freelancer came and people started describing it as such, but this is a Hitman game, and they should never have such features. Even Elusive Targets let you restart if you haven’t completed any objectives yet. Intentional or not, the entire concept of not being able to try again without essentially cheating the system (which is not meant to be part of it, otherwise IOI wouldn’t have put restrictions on the Alt+F4 command earlier in the year to prevent people from doing that), is inherently flawed even as a way of thinking.
Yeah I do like that part of Freelancer, although when I sometimes slip up and the whole map is alerted, I just think to myself, I just wish I could manually restart this thing
Don’t you think there’s some kind of contradiction in claiming that this mechanic should not be present “whether it’s a roguelike mode or not” while also saying you don’t know much about roguelike games? :x
Besides I don’t think IOI even envisioned Freelancer, Sniper Assassin, escalations or even contracts when making C47 yet they’re present in the WOA games, because they thought those modes fit their vision for Hitman, and as the developers they’re probably more knowledgeable about how the series should evolve than the players, since they also have the knowledge needed to implement those evolutions :x
Not really. What I’m saying is that it being part of roguelike is not an excuse. I don’t play roguelikes; I don’t care about roguelikes. This is Hitman; if making it similar to another type of game requires doing something that so many players dislike that they’re obviously taking advantage of loopholes that you then try to close but have to open again because of people still doing it, maybe you shouldn’t include that thing in the game. It doesn’t have to be exactly like the others that you’re basing it on; it can be “roguelike”, but with the option to restart.
Oh lord, don’t get me started on that argument again.
Sure there are people who dislike the permadeath and will try to bypass it. But save scumming can happen in any game with roguelike mechanics, that’s not something new and that hasn’t stopped roguelike developers from incorporating similar features in their games. I don’t know how many players dislike that permadeath thing, but from what I’ve seen there are also a lot of people who play Freelancer and seem to respond positively to that feature, or at least not dislike it.
Besides I think that IOI backpedaled on the alt-f4 thing most likely because the “fix” introduced a whole lot of other problems (like with power outages and such, something that I sadly know quite well), not because they had a change of heart and decided to be nice to players for once.
I’d accept that. Die and you’re done, but if you’re in a situation where you think you’re about to die and can reload a save in time, you get to continue from there. I’d even accept only a single save option, like in the hardest difficulty in the main game.
Yes, one save per mission. If you die, too late, you can’t load said save.
I force quit, notably when one tiny mistake ruins the third or fourth showdown. I also let the chips fall and take the L sometimes. The quick-reflex choice largely depends on the context of the campaign, how far along I am, what expensive weapons I don’t want to lose early on in my prestige run, how long I’ve dedicated to the campaign, what time of early morning it is, how much free time I have to play the game in general, etc.
I don’t necessarily want to put my voice behind and vote on “enable saving in Freelancer or you suck!” – but I would support one save per mission, if IOI were so inclined to implement that, which I believe they will never be.
I was in Berlin and the leader was up in the sky and “running away”. That is to say, running around in a large circle. I almost decided to force quit, but I shot her and she came tumbling down to earth.
Cool story bro. Get a job at IOI as their new director of game design and you can call the shots.
Until then, you’re just some schmuck like the rest of us throwing his two cents into the void.
I commend you on having the honesty to admit your own ignorance here, but all you’ve done is add weight to my point that you don’t get to call a legitimate game mode and style of design a “flaw”.
No, it’s just a style of gameplay and game design. But you’ve already admitted ignorance, and that you don’t like this style of game.
Instead, how about approaching things in an open and honest way? Tell people that you don’t like it, that it’s not for you and leave it there. This game has plenty of real bugs and unintentional flaws without piling in their intentional design decisions too, just because you dislike them.
Nice speech, but you just focused on the parts I said that confirmed your own views and didn’t pay attention to the important part. Again, even an intentional choice for the design can be a flaw. It doesn’t have to be not working properly as intended to be flawed; the design itself can be inherently flawed starting from the very concept through to the decision to include that design. It’s called making bad or poor decisions. IOI, by making a game mode this complex with this little margin for error, made a poor, and therefore flawed, decision to make a permadeath consequence that prohibits saving (main game), restarting (Elusive Targets), or retrying in the event of failure (contracts mode). That exploiting a loophole in the game’s forever online requirement (another such flaw) is needed to even attempt to achieve these things is a common enough occurrence that they sought a way to prohibit it and would have done so in the first place if they could, only further shows that. Even with bugs and glitches that interfere with the gameplay as it was meant to be, this aspect of the game being meant to be played this way is fundamentally flawed, right at the conceptual level.
I will say, I think the penalty for the Leader escaping is still too harsh.
A lookout can alert them from across the map, they get to an exit before me, and there’s literally nothing I could’ve done to salvage that.
Wait what? You can save during the main game or retry contracts as many times as you want. I don’t understand that comparison :x
They sought to prohibit it because it’s technically cheating and being able to restart Freelancer missions would affect overall game balance. I don’t think we need to look further than than for their reasons :x
The fact that you can is my point. They made it so you can’t save, which you can in the main game; can’t restart, which you can with ETs, at least if you haven’t completed your objectives; and can’t retry from the beginning if you fail, like you can with contracts mode. They had three options and used none of them.
Seems to me what affects overall game balance is not having at least some means to retry a mode of gameplay when making an error, like you can in all other modes of play, instead of making it impossible to recover or even stop playing in the middle of gameplay if you have to put the game down for something without being forced to accept a full failure. The only means around this is to technically cheat the system itself by disconnecting from the internet and then restarting. There’s no reason that is logical or acceptable beyond their desire to needlessly emulate other roguelikes for IOI to not have used one of the three options listed above, keeping the mode consistent with the rest of the game. What I’m ultimately trying to say is, their reason for why they did this doesn’t matter; whatever the reason was, it was the wrong decision.
Now, I’m not necessarily suggesting that they do anything about it. Like the need to always be online, it’s a bad decision that I wish had never happened and hope will be corrected someday, but for the foreseeable future, one I’ve learned to live with, as we all have.
So in short what you’re saying is that IOI wanting to “needlessly emulate other roguelikes” “was the wrong decision”. Seems to me that it’s just a gameplay choice you don’t agree with, just like I don’t agree with their decision to make ETs single-try and time-gated, rather than a “flaw” of their game design :x
