Impassable story bug (Devastation spoilers)

[Discipline Before Dishonor]

In the ninth obstacle section found on the wiki right here, https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Guide:Devastation_area, I can't get past the fence. I can enter the present to get past the fence, but then I can't go back into the past to continue through the passageway. I had to enter creative and break the blocks just to get through. Livestream evidence can be provided upon request.

Edited Saturday at 03:48 PM by Discipline Before Dishonor

[LadyWYT]

20 minutes ago, Discipline Before Dishonor said:

I can enter the present to get past the fence, but then I can't go back into the past to continue through the passageway.

It's not bugged. Once you reach the fence in the past, you need to switch to the present to pass it, then switch back to the past right after you've passed the fence in order to proceed through the door ahead. You won't be able to switch to the past if you go further than that, as the way is blocked by rubble.

[Discipline Before Dishonor]

46 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

It's not bugged. Once you reach the fence in the past, you need to switch to the present to pass it, then switch back to the past right after you've passed the fence in order to proceed through the door ahead. You won't be able to switch to the past if you go further than that, as the way is blocked by rubble.

I can provide livestream evidence that this isn't true

[Discipline Before Dishonor]

This whole parkour part is a mess actually, I had 210 people watching me do it and everybody was pissin' themselves laughing at how badly designed it was. I watched a youtube video about the parkour part before I did it on stream, and the guy said that for the whole game you can pole up to heights, but in the one place you need to do it, there's an arbitrary limitation upon you stopping you from doing it. Moreover, whenever you switch from the past to the present, everything moves a few blocks over. You'd think you could map out "okay, I need to jump here, time switch, and land there" but every piece of machinery and every wall segment actually moves several blocks over between the past and the present, so you can't actually map it out, and you're constantly paranoid that if you try something it simply won't work and you'll fall to your death. I got very high up on permadeath wilderness survival and simply used creative to fly back up every time I fell down, I burned through a whole bunch of bandages but eventually I ended up in a place that I couldn't get past because there was no parkour option to use, and after half an hour, neither me nor my full chat could think of what to do. We didn't look up a guide or anything, but it was a mess. Eventually I died to a fall while trying something new, a profoundly uneventful end to an 80 hour long series in permadeath. Objectively speaking this part needs tons of work to be viable, this glitch with the iron fence needs to be addressed, and the parkour part at the end needs to be greatly simplified. Explain to me how I'm supposed to hold shift to sprint, press w to move forward, press spacebar to jump, and ALSO press Y to time switch, all within a fraction of a second. It literally takes two hands to do. I think we all know this can't remain the way it currently is. I was playing an oceanic world (definitely the way the game is meant to be played, and I think we should update random world generation to include oceans and islands as a default mode of playing, and make the sailboat 2x faster with multiple sail upgrades available) and really enjoying it, had ten tons of fun. But this one part is nothing like the resonance archives, it's actually just purely annoying and takes everybody right out of the whole experience of the entire playthrough, and after half an hour of playing this part, you're kind of okay with stopping your playthrough, even if it is 80 hours long.

Edited Saturday at 05:09 PM by Discipline Before Dishonor

[LadyWYT]

4 minutes ago, Discipline Before Dishonor said:

I can provide livestream evidence that this isn't true

I was able to complete it just fine in a test world before making my earlier post. If you're not standing right next to the fence when timeswitching, the timeswitch will fail due to debris blocking the path. It's a tight space to work with but it is manageable.

If you still believe it's a bug, you should report it on the bug tracker, where it's guaranteed to be seen by the devs.

Just now, Discipline Before Dishonor said:

Explain to me how I'm supposed to hold shift to sprint, press w to move forward, press spacebar to jump, and ALSO press Y to time switch, all within a fraction of a second. It literally takes two hands to do, it's ridiculous lol. I think we all know this can't remain the way it currently is.

You can scroll over the timeswitch icon on your hotbar and right-click to activate the ability. There is no need to use two hands.

As for the parkour puzzle, some of the jumps are tricky, but they are doable. If you fall, you should be able to call the elevator and use it to return to whichever floor you were on.

3 minutes ago, Discipline Before Dishonor said:

Eventually I died to a fall while trying something new, a profoundly uneventful end to an 80 hour long series in permadeath

It's worth noting that Vintage Story is a very easy game to die in. Permadeath is especially brutal, especially on Wilderness Survival. If it's not enjoyable, I would recommend either playing with unlimited lives, or otherwise adjusting the settings to something that is less frustrating.

[Discipline Before Dishonor]

2 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I was able to complete it just fine in a test world before making my earlier post. If you're not standing right next to the fence when timeswitching, the timeswitch will fail due to debris blocking the path. It's a tight space to work with but it is manageable.

If you still believe it's a bug, you should report it on the bug tracker, where it's guaranteed to be seen by the devs.

You can scroll over the timeswitch icon on your hotbar and right-click to activate the ability. There is no need to use two hands.

As for the parkour puzzle, some of the jumps are tricky, but they are doable. If you fall, you should be able to call the elevator and use it to return to whichever floor you were on.

It's worth noting that Vintage Story is a very easy game to die in. Permadeath is especially brutal, especially on Wilderness Survival. If it's not enjoyable, I would recommend either playing with unlimited lives, or otherwise adjusting the settings to something that is less frustrating.

Well, I'm grateful to know that you can right click to time-jump, but that still doesn't solve the problem of the fact that me and 200 people spent half an hour trying to figure out one part and never even figured it out. It was the same floor where you can first activate the elevator switch, we couldn't get past that. That one floor needs a tremendous amount of parkour simplification, because honestly, we tried countless things, and nothing worked. Our ideas became increasingly radical until eventually I died to a fall, and it shouldn't be *that* hard to figure out.

[LadyWYT]

6 minutes ago, Discipline Before Dishonor said:

problem of the fact that me and 200 people spent half an hour trying to figure out one part and never even figured it out. It was the same floor where you can first activate the elevator switch, we couldn't get past that. That one floor needs a tremendous amount of parkour

As in you couldn't get to that floor, or couldn't get past that floor? 

To get to the first floor from the ground floor, you need to go up the flight of steps in the past, timeswitch to the present as soon as you reach the top, and then carefully make your way across the floating debris to get through the hole in the wall where the door used to be. Once on the other side, you should remain in the present and should see a ruined chest before you. Jump on top of the chest, and then jump from it to the ruined table on your left and make your way up the stone blocks to the second floor. 

Like I said before, the parkour in this area is very tricky. Mistiming a jump can sometimes mean death, making it a good idea to bring a glider with you in the event of a miscalculation, though it will still be very brutal to complete on permadeath just due to the nature of permadeath rules. The wiki has a complete walkthrough of the puzzles, complete with some video clips for the Tower portion itself should you need a visual reference.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Guide:Devastation_area#The_first_floor:_boiler

 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

never had an issue with it that couldn't be solved by using my eyes to see the differences between past and present and wearing a glider to ensure falls weren't... deadly. 200 viewers couldn't figure it out? some of them were trolling you.

[Discipline Before Dishonor]

I watched a video guide and I literally tried the exact jump that the guy did to complete that floor, I just didn't try it enough. I tried it three times but couldn't make it. Right here. I literally tried to do it multiple times without succeeding and came to the conclusion that it wasn't the right path, and thusly, it should be tweaked. It should be something that you can figure out without watching a guide, this was the only part that I couldn't figure out - and it was the reason we died. Irony is, I *did* figure it out, it just didn't result in success, likely because I was wearing steel armor and couldn't get enough momentum for the jump. Which is counter-intuitive, because in a place this dangerous, you DEFINITELY shouldn't have to remove your armor. And I was able to complete the ENTIRE tower up until this point with my armor on, so this jump should not be any different. This floor definitely needs some form of tweaking and adjustment, it needs modification and improvement from the devs.

 

Edited Saturday at 06:44 PM by Discipline Before Dishonor

[Teh Pizza Lady]

oh yeah that's definitely one of those that requires you to pop in and out of the past/present multiple times to just see how it changes and where you can go. Gotta time those swaps in mid air and keep your glider on in case you miss.

 

EDIT: IT's very tricky, but it's one of the challenges of climbing the tower. It has to be hard otherwise you would find it too easy and not worth the boring climb.

Edited Saturday at 06:18 PM by Teh Pizza Lady

[Zane Mordien]

God mode fly to the top and call it a day. I did this miserable thing one time and that was the only time I will ever do it. 

[Discipline Before Dishonor]

13 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

God mode fly to the top and call it a day. I did this miserable thing one time and that was the only time I will ever do it. 

That is exactly what I told my viewers after I died, I told them that no self-respecting individual should slog through this like I did, and that no sane developer would leave it the way it currently is forever. I stand by the former, and desperately hope these devs constitute the latter 

Edited Saturday at 06:32 PM by Discipline Before Dishonor

[Zane Mordien]

12 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

keep your glider on in case you miss.

That thing is a death trap in itself. Unless they made flying easier since I first tried to use it. You read the lore book about flying and think... wow that would be cool! You get the glider and well... it doesn't add up to the lore story and if you are slightly off on your landing you go splat.

Edited Saturday at 06:30 PM by Zane Mordien

[LadyWYT]

14 minutes ago, Zane Mordien said:

God mode fly to the top and call it a day.

For those who hate parkour, this is likely the best option.

[Zane Mordien]

5 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

For those who hate parkour, this is likely the best option.

It's okay until the crazy jumps at the end where you miss by a pixel and you fall to your death. Some of the earlier levels are kind of fun puzzles. Doing the exact precision jumps at the end are just annoying to be annoying.

Edited Saturday at 06:39 PM by Zane Mordien

[ifoz]

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

For those who hate parkour, this is likely the best option.

Personally I still think a decent compromise would be if they added a nearby mini-dungeon of sorts, where you could get a special Jonas part that fixes/activates the elevator early.
That way you can either do the parkour yourself, or take longer to raid a dangerous structure and be rewarded with the option to skip it.

[MKMoose]

17 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

For those who hate parkour, this is likely the best option.

I think in most cases it's less "hate parkour" and more "can't be bothered to suffer through this particular course".

On my first run through the tower most of my frustration stemmed from issues that weren't even directly related to the parkour itself. The glider has a different activation condition from a regular jump for some reason, which caused me to plummet to the ground a couple times where I expected to jump normally, after which I just ditched it and didn't bother bringing it to the tower, which then made falling a much greater risk. The elevator's functionality wasn't particularly clear, and I initially thought it was just decorative because nothing I did would get it to work (could just be user error, but I tried a whole number of things initially and didn't pay too much attantion to it after I started ascending the tower, leading to not noticing until after two or three deaths that I have to set the height manually). It also didn't help that the earlier sections took me more time than I would have liked, which was partly a consequence of not having brought a lantern with me, and caused me to have to choose between rushing some parts of the tower and going the 15k blocks or so back home empty-handed. On the whole, I died I think 4 or 5 times then, every single one to gravity, and the biggest threat besides gravity turned out to be hunger.

I'll also note that the player has little way to know what they are even supposed to look for in the platforming sections. Personally, I ended up skipping the last floor, because I just couldn't find a way to do it and was already kinda rushing due to multiple deaths and depleting supplies. One of the biggest issues for me was unironically that I was expecting to have to climb the rubble of the tower walls more, and not random pipes, boilers, machinery, chests or whatnot.

If I were to point to one issue with the tower, it's that there are too many sources of pressure on the player that compound into an experience which tends to be more frustrating than it arguably should be, especially in the first and currently only major platforming section in the game. It's a long distance away, takes a fair bit of effort to get to initially and it's an unfamiliar environment unlike practically anything in the game which needs getting used to, the land claim is pretty inconvenient, there's hunger, other sources of time pressure like incoming storms or winter with all the preparation for it, high risk of fall damage or death (especially fun if you don't set your returning point near the tower and have to run back the whole way), and the bird constantly screaming doesn't help either.

When I returned to it later in creative to analyze it more, I speedran the tower itself in 3 minutes on the first attempt using the intended route which I was figuring out easily on the fly, simply because I didn't have nearly the same pressure on me. I actually think the platforming itself is really easy in isolation, but it's quite challenging to figure out the correct route under stress.

 

13 hours ago, ifoz said:

Personally I still think a decent compromise would be if they added a nearby mini-dungeon of sorts, where you could get a special Jonas part that fixes/activates the elevator early.
That way you can either do the parkour yourself, or take longer to raid a dangerous structure and be rewarded with the option to skip it.

One thing I'm unsure about is how to communicate the alternative option to the player and balance the two between each other. A clearly broken or deactivated part is not necessarily a bad idea, but then 1) why is it broken in the past and 2) how do I know what to do to fix it? A diegetic "requires power from external generator" or some similar sign would probably be suitable, or tracing power cables or something could also be a thing. It may then be difficult, though, to make anyone ever attempt the parkour if the game practically tells them to use the elevator.

 

A common strategy in game design is to introduce a mechanic in a risk-free environment first, before progressively adding more complexity, more dangers, iterating on the mechanic and combining it with others, and finally coming to a conclusion with some sort of final level or boss. The tower has been designed really quite well with this in mind for the most part, but the added pressure from multiple sources can easily make it feel like the "learning" portion is practically nonexistent and it goes almost immediately for an extended final challenge.

If I were to give a single suggestion for it, it would be to actually keep the tower itself mostly or entirely unchanged, but add a similar platforming section earlier into the game (potentially also making use of the time switch mechanic or something similar), in a way that would get the player more familiar with what they need to do in a lower-stress context. It could be an earlier part of the second story quest, or it might be entirely unrelated. I thought about giving the player a random platforming or puzzle room to solve each time they die, or a static pocket world which contains some optional challenges, but that may or may not be a good idea. If not something too out-there, then it might be a good idea to revise the section under the tower, to more naturally introduce the platforming mechanics before adding the threat of fall damage and the bird. This might be associated with increasing the threat from the bird to make it more central to the challenge.

Edited Sunday at 11:57 AM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

One thing I'm unsure about is how to communicate the alternative option to the player and balance the two between each other. A clearly broken or deactivated part is not necessarily a bad idea, but then 1) why is it broken in the past and 2) how do I know what to do to fix it? A diegetic "requires power from external generator" or some similar sign would probably be suitable, or tracing power cables or something could also be a thing. It may then be difficult, though, to make anyone ever attempt the parkour if the game practically tells them to use the elevator.

I would say just make the elevator broken but repairable in the present. The main issue I see though is, how does such an option get balanced so that the intended method of climbing the tower doesn't just get bypassed every time? The immediate solution would be to just make the repair option very expensive, so that it's there for players who really don't want to do the parkour for whatever reason, but won't see the majority of players sinking the resources into it over figuring out the jumping puzzle. The problem though, is that making it an expensive repair is likely to result in several complaints about the expense; a cheap repair though will just mean most players end up skipping the puzzle, which isn't ideal.

One thing I'm not really partial to with this idea, is setting the precedent for an easy-out every time the story presents the player with a tough challenge. 

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

A common strategy in game design is to introduce a mechanic in a risk-free environment first, before progressively adding more complexity, more dangers, iterating on the mechanic and combining it with others, and finally coming to a conclusion with some sort of final level or boss. The tower has been designed really quite well with this in mind for the most part, but the added pressure from multiple sources can easily make it feel like the "learning" portion is practically nonexistent and it goes almost immediately for an extended final challenge.

If I were to give a single suggestion for it, it would be to actually keep the tower itself mostly or entirely unchanged, but add a similar platforming section earlier into the game (potentially also making use of the time switch mechanic or something similar), in a way that would get the player more familiar with what they need to do in a lower-stress context. It could be an earlier part of the second story quest, or it might be entirely unrelated. I thought about giving the player a random platforming or puzzle room to solve each time they die, or a static pocket world which contains some optional challenges, but that may or may not be a good idea. If not something too out-there, then it might be a good idea to revise the section under the tower, to more naturally introduce the platforming mechanics before adding the threat of fall damage and the bird. This might be associated with increasing the threat from the bird to make it more central to the challenge.

Tweaking some of the surface and underground ruins to include some basic parkour would probably help, though the timeswitch mechanic should be left to the tower and later story points given that that ability is a pretty significant development. Overall though...I think the tower basement does a decent job of allowing the player a safe spot to figure out the mindbending weirdness of the time-switching puzzles before they unlock the door on the ground floor and begin the real challenge. One thing I will note in the design, is that the key is paying attention to the details of the set pieces on whatever floor the player is currently on--there's always something there that stands out to indicate to the player where they should go(like a lamp or a prominent window). 

As for the pressures, I think the pressure at the tower is fine, for the most part. It's a risky adventure, yes, but that's rather fitting for the location in question and by this time the player should really have learned to reset their spawn points via temporal gears when doing dangerous things like this. A couple of tweaks that I'd be more inclined to make are preventing monsters from spawning/entering a certain radius of the tower, and allowing Tobias to give the player some more useful advice/items should the player have visited him prior to retrieving the Lens. The former tweak would mean players don't have to worry about getting picked off by bowtorn and could be easily passed off as the Crow not allowing anything or anyone to get close to the tower. The latter would give players a little more option in how they approach the story, as well as some help for that challenge should they think to ask for it. 

[Discipline Before Dishonor]

23 hours ago, ifoz said:

Personally I still think a decent compromise would be if they added a nearby mini-dungeon of sorts, where you could get a special Jonas part that fixes/activates the elevator early.
That way you can either do the parkour yourself, or take longer to raid a dangerous structure and be rewarded with the option to skip it.

Hell yes! Like maybe there's a deep dark cave passage with several deep silt shivers, nightmare drifters, rust gear bowtorns, and maybe a couple bells, and you have to defeat them all and fight your way through the passage to reach that jonas part on the other side. That sounds amazing. You can handle quite a bit (even on wilderness survival permadeath which is my purview) by using fences to inch forward in caves. I've beaten two bells at the same time this way, kept pushing my territory forward with the fences until I'd finally cornered and defeated them, beating their spawns along the way, including but not limited to bell head shivers. This would mean you'd still have to fight the boss to get the lens afterward, but you could bypass the parkour headache bits by engaging in an extremely perilous combat option instead, if you preferred that

Edited Sunday at 09:38 PM by Discipline Before Dishonor

[LadyWYT]

44 minutes ago, Discipline Before Dishonor said:

Like maybe there's a deep dark cave passage with several deep silt shivers, nightmare drifters, rust gear bowtorns, and maybe a couple bells, and you have to defeat them all and fight your way through the passage to reach that jonas part on the other side. That sounds amazing. You can handle quite a bit (even on wilderness survival permadeath which is my purview) by using fences to inch forward in caves.

If it's a story location, there's no way the devs are going to let players use a cheesy strategy like fences to beat a swarm of enemies like that. Best to tone the enemies down to tier 3, with a couple of tier 4+ scattered into the mix for good measure so that it's a dangerous fight, but something the player can still reasonably manage if they're careful.

Dumping a bunch of the highest tier enemies into cramped quarters though, and then adding a couple of bells on top of that to summon more enemies...that's just a seraph blender.

48 minutes ago, Discipline Before Dishonor said:

This would mean you'd still have to fight the boss to get the lens afterward, but you could bypass the parkour headache bits by engaging in an extremely perilous combat option instead, if you preferred that

Keeping in mind that the general recommended gear quality for Chapter Two is iron(tier 3), and thus the challenges within those locations should be balanced with that general equipment level in mind.