BloatedGuppy said:
Zhukov said:
Uh... yeah. It's a linear game. They're a thing. Not sure what would have led you to believe otherwise. You're still not quite out of Tutorial Town. Later areas have some wriggle room, making "corridor runner" a definite exaggeration but it's unquestionably a linear game.
Okay, I'm getting some flack from the linear lobby in this thread, and I should probably elaborate. I don't think the game should turn into Fallout New Vegas or anything. I was thinking more along the lines of some of DE:HR's city hubs. Make an AREA part of the progression of their journey, but give the player some leeway in terms of how they approach that area. I don't think having J/E rooting around in trash bins for bottle caps for 45 hours would improve the narrative, but I don't like feeling like I'm on rails, either. There has to be a middle ground.
Uhhyyeahnooyeummmambivalent.
On the one hand, I'm a fan of the
Deus Ex school of level design with a linear game made up of semi-open levels. It seems to like a best-of-both-worlds deal.
On the other hand, the city hubs in
Human Revolution were the worst part of that game for me. They completely threw the pacing out the fucking window in favour of making me trek back and forth across the same city block to perform mostly irrelevant oddjobs.
At the end of the day I don't think it would have fit with the brutal apocalyptic road trip structure of TLoU. The game didn't need hub based side quests. It really,
really didn't.
I do not consider "linear" to be a dirty word. Most if not all of my favourite game are linear. Yes, there is such as thing as
too linear. For me that point is when my actions as a player feel scripted and the game raps me across the knuckles for daring to deviate. I do not think TLoU ever crossed that line.
Well, what's cover, though? What qualifies as cover? What qualifies as "too much noise"? It wasn't until I was in this thread I heard the first thing about a rising hum, bricks hitting carpets, or that accidentally punting a soft drink can could break stealth. Either I missed a tutorial sequence explaining all this shit, or there wasn't one and TLOU is one of those "Enjoy learning how to swim" games. I've gotten better at managing stealth, although I find stealth sections to be cramped and patrol patterns tight, to the point where I almost invariably get fed up and start shanking people just to get them out of the way, since I'm still not confident eyeballing cover or safe distance.
Cover is... being behind something. I never found that hard to judge. If it helps, your character's animation will reflect when you are "officially" is cover. His stance changes a bit and he'll lean into the cover object or place a hand against it.
I found those other elements pretty intuitive. You kick a can, it makes a noise and the clickers come a runnin'. Tutorializing that would be like a shooter tutorializing the fact that having a poorly thrown grenade bounce off a doorway and land at your feet is a bad thing.
Incidentally, were you trying to be stealthy in a non-lethal fashion? I've never actually tried that. If nothing else, it always seemed more fitting to Joel's character and to the setting to kill everything in the way.
I still remember a moment in the third XCOM game, Apocalypse, where I had two soldiers flanking a doorway. Cultists kept running through it and dying. There was a pile of bodies in the doorway, and each new cultist had to step over them to fall into the obvious trap. This has happened twice in TLOU. Hardly the end of the world, but I thought it was funny. "OMG they got Joe! And Sam! And Mike! And Tim! I better check out this shadowy alcove alon...ggggrrlrl."
Well, yeah. I'm pretty sure that's possible in almost every stealth game ever made. The only one I've seen where it wasn't was, funnily enough,
Splinter Cell: Conviction. After you took out a couple of them, enemies would stop coming for you, back up a bit and stand ready looking in the direction they last saw you.
I saved up my vitamins (really guys, give me less vitamins and make everything cost less) and bought the "shank a clicker" ability, and boy is it fussy. I think I have a flaky controller or it's just REALLY unforgiving, because there's a split second of time you can do it, and then the clicker eats you anyway. I guess it's better than nothing. Shotgun and Hunting Rifle have made Clickers significantly less threatening though. I just wish they'd stop mixing two into a wave o' zombies, so you get the Clicker surprise when you're thumping a regular around the neck and shoulders. They always zoom in on me too. I suspect I'm wearing eau d'protagonist.
Oh, that reminds me, save your shotgun ammo for infected and clickers in particular and always have it accessible in their areas. Don't use your shells against humans. You probably figured this out on your own, but yeah... there ya go.
There's only so far I can throw a bottle though, yeah? If you and I were at one end of a gymnasium, and I threw a bottle to the other end, you'd hear it. In game it goes "piff" and nothing happens. I've stopped throwing things as far as I can, and started using distractions as molotov bait instead of "distractions" as was suggested earlier in the thread.
If I wanted to get pedantic I'd point out that I might well disregard a distant noise coming from one gymnasium's length away, but a sudden noise from ten feet away is definitely going to make me turn to look.
I actually like the narrative quite a lot, so I am soldiering on. I end each session when the game pisses me off so much I cease wanting to play for a while. Last time this happened was with the Boomer. Fucking bullet sponge. Is there a trick to those guys beyond "shoot em lots"? It took an emptied .45 and emptied shotgun plus my NPC chum shooting him 11,000 times to kill him (I rather suspect the NPC damage isn't counted against his hit points or something).
Burn 'em.
Molotovs do a number on Bloaters. Nail bombs aren't half bad either. After that, yeah, shoot him a lot, preferably with weapons upgraded for armour piercing. Friendly NPCs do inflict damage, but it's heavily reduced.
Other miscellaneous tips:
- Hard difficulty is best difficulty. Anything less is for babies that don't appreciate challenge and scarcity.
- You want the weapon stability and health upgrades more than you want any of the others. In fact. you don't really want the others at all.
- Don't bother upgrading the 9mm and snub-nosed revolver.
- At some point you will find a home made flamethrower. It's essentially useless against humans due to tiny range but will turn infected encounters into minor speedbumps. If you wish to preserve the challenge then you might want to not pick it up.
- Meleeing someone with a brick is a noisy insta-kill. Meleeing with a bottle is a stun, allowing you to use the subject as a human shield. Clickers can be bricked to death, but the timing is brutal.
- Human shields are great. Grabbing one will cause a lull in proceedings, long enough for you to re-position, and gives you at least one free shot. You can also bluff it out with an empty weapon.
- The brick-o-bludgeon is extremely powerful. Throw the brick or bottle to stun, then charge and melee. Insta kills basically anything. This was my bread and butter technique.
- At some point you will get a weapon called the 'Diablo'. Upgrade it to high heaven. Armour piercing and capacity in particular. You'll be glad you did on the final level.
- The bow is an insta-kill with a bodyshot on regular infected or unarmoured humans if they are unaware of you and the arrows have a decent chance of being recoverable. However, it insta-kill clickers only with a headshot. Given how clickers have a nasty habit of erratically moving their heads, it's generally not worth using the bow on them unless they're dormant. Even then, you need to watch they head movements carefully.