Desolation Tower Gameplay

[Geomancer]

SPOILERS!!!

 

 

IMO, and that of my wife, the Desolation Tower is absolutely awful.  The parkour is tedious, janky, punishing, and frankly, awful.  We love this game.  We've got about 140 hours in our world at the time of writing this.  We traveled some 30,000 blocks to get here, and we are about to rage quit and head home without even reaching the boss.  The time switching mechanic is cool, and a few floors of using it would have been fine.  But NINE?!?  With nothing like a safety net so you can royally screw up and fall ALL THE WAY BACK DOWN?!?  And the freaking bird randomly knocking you off WITH NO WARNING?!?  I don't know what platformer-loving masochist designed this, but it's awful and most people are going to hate it. It's not just hard gameplay, which I am fine with, it is just awful for the sake of being awful. 

Something needs to be done.  Either add some sort of checkpointing system via another special power, or redesign the surrounding debris so you can't fall multiple floors down if you screw up and just fall back to the floor you are currently on, reduce the number of floors of parkour before the elevator works, or a combination of both.  

Please improve this, and soon. Please. 

[Zane Mordien]

I understand.  I did it with my 9 yr old son and i was ready to just be done with it. It was a disappointment after all the fun of the RA. We had a blast doing that the first time a year ago. He went to school and wrote stories about how fun it was beating the Edilon with daddy. There were no happy stories about this fight. 

 

I wish the elevator could be unlocked after you reach it on each floor. At least that way you could avoid redoing the parkour as you try again where you failed. 

Maybe some loot would be nice as well. Doesn't have to be great but something to make me feel like I got a trophy for getting to the top of the tower.

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @Geomancer

I despise platformer games, too. Back in the days when there was Commander Keen or nothing, well, Commander Keen it is. But I probably won't repeat Chapter 2 until at least Chapter 4 content comes out. One new chapter just is not enough to make doing that again worthwhile.

I have an hypothesis about what's going on, but I think it should probably be on its own, in either the Discussion or Vintarian Discussion group.

[Never Jhonsen]

I know some people have used creative to get to the top (and there is nothing wrong with that), me being one of them; got up to floor 6 before I gave up. 

I had the unique issue of no bird however; it took me sitting at the top for three ingame days straight before she showed up. I would /hate/ to be fighting around that parkour with an angry bird trying to knock you out

Anyways, my point being, I think the average person dislikes how hard it is. I think if you could “fix” the elevator at every other floor, then that’ll make it much more doable.

[Thorfinn]

I don't mind the difficulty. I'm pretty good at platformers. I just don't like them. At all.

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! I'm not really a parkour fan, but I did enjoy the Tower more the second time around than I did the first time. I figure it's certainly a section that will be one players either love or hate, with little in-between. Those who enjoy parkour will love it, and those who don't will likely hate it.

That being said, I do agree that it wouldn't hurt to have some alternate method of reaching the top. The parkour could perhaps be the most expedient method, but having some sort of method to bypass it via activating the elevator early(perhaps spend several temporal gears to do so?) would also be nice. Or perhaps hide a widget that fixes it in one of the major ruins of the Desolation, along with a riddle in the Tower's ground floor on where to find it...though that might be a bit much. If nothing else, visiting Tobias and asking for assistance could be a decent option as well. Maybe he could simply give you a one-use widget that teleports you to the top floor(but not the very top of the Tower) so that you can activate the elevator.

[ifoz]

My main problem with the tower was just that it totally broke my immersion.
VS is a very grounded game, and the story locations and their gameplay before the tower reflect this.

Then you're suddenly thrust into Parkour Civilisation and led to believe your Seraph would be physically capable of performing these acrobatic leaps and bounds that just so happen to make one precise path up a decrepit tower of nine floors.

I loved chapter 2 and I love this game, do not get me wrong.
I just think there needs to be some sidequest to activate the elevator early and keep my immersion intact. 

[Rosaria]

Getting to the top wasn't the hard part for me, it was not getting knocked off by the crow once I got to the top. The fact that melee doesn't register even when it lands is also a problem, especially for anyone who might be playing blackguard.