Control by Remedy Catch All

Middcore wrote:

Regarding the mold quest and Ahti

Spoiler:

It is not necessary to do the mold quest for Ahti to give you his Walkman so you can get through the ashtray maze.

Huh. When I first got the "Talk to Ahti" in the ashtray maze...

Spoiler:

...the quest that activated was to clear mold in the pump room, then the one to clear the mold in the cooling chamber. Then it told me to go to the janitor's office to see Ahti. Not sure why it wanted me to do those two first then...

tanstaafl wrote:
Middcore wrote:

Regarding the mold quest and Ahti

Spoiler:

It is not necessary to do the mold quest for Ahti to give you his Walkman so you can get through the ashtray maze.

Huh. When I first got the "Talk to Ahti" in the ashtray maze...

Spoiler:

...the quest that activated was to clear mold in the pump room, then the one to clear the mold in the cooling chamber. Then it told me to go to the janitor's office to see Ahti. Not sure why it wanted me to do those two first then...

Had you never done any side quests for Ahti before?

I know I had done at least two, but not the mold ones. I wonder if you have to have done some tasks for him before it will let you go get the Walkman from him.

Middcore wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:
Middcore wrote:

Regarding the mold quest and Ahti

Spoiler:

It is not necessary to do the mold quest for Ahti to give you his Walkman so you can get through the ashtray maze.

Huh. When I first got the "Talk to Ahti" in the ashtray maze...

Spoiler:

...the quest that activated was to clear mold in the pump room, then the one to clear the mold in the cooling chamber. Then it told me to go to the janitor's office to see Ahti. Not sure why it wanted me to do those two first then...

Had you never done any side quests for Ahti before?

I know I had done at least two, but not the mold ones. I wonder if you have to have done some tasks for him before it will let you go get the Walkman from him.

I had done the "Restore the power" ones but none of the ones from the bulletin board.

It may have been that my active mission had just flipped to the next one on my list before the "Visit Ahti" one became active and I never bothered to look to see if it was a main or side quest.

pyxistyx wrote:

the "wobbly tony stark learning to fly in his iron man suit" levitation effect is one of my fave things in games this year I think. It's just so satisfyingly implemented!

100% agree. At first I was disappointed; from the trailers, I thought I'd have flat out flight, and at first I found the levitation difficult to control. But once I got used to it, it's kind of a magical dreamlike feeling.

pyxistyx wrote:

Totally agree. Nothing kills the pacing for me more than that.

Spoiler:

I still can't beat the Mold boss. And it doesn't help that the checkpointing is pretty bad, so you have a long load screen, then a walk back to the boss between deaths

The optional boss you mention is the very last final thing I did in the game. I was struggling enough with that (and one of the other optional bosses) that I wanted to have the very best possible weapons and mods and leveled up abilities. And it still probably took me like twenty tries.

There is some hidden stuff in the game, and if you want to grind up some real power...

Spoiler:

Google "Control Furnace TVs" and "Control Hidden Locations."

The first can give you a mod for the Grip where any bullets that hit are returned. For a big boss like Mold-1, you can practically fire nonstop. I took that, two high level additional damage mods, maxed out my health, and basically just counted on my DPS being higher than the boss. Still took a few tries but when I did beat it, I somehow beat it with a lot of health left. You still want to stay in the air a lot because it keeps filling the ground with poison.

The second one, the Hidden Locations, is just to grind out the extra ability points and resources to max out my health and try to craft better mods.

I also struggled with one other optional boss, and I ended up Googling strategies and basically cheesing it. Wow, I am not great at shooters, this game was TOUGH for me.

I stumbled across a few officially marked "hidden areas" as I've gone, but not found that many. and I didn't know about the TV thing. interesting. Looks like i need to do some snoopin'

half my problem for a lot of the set pieces is that i was zooming around so much and not paying attention to footing and then ending up just falling down bottomless pits all the time, which was a fair bit frustrating given the loading times. I do wish it just relented and restored you immediately at the door to whatever boss/set piece you were attempting.

Right, so I'm on the third main mission of the game and have five of the powers. I've played a chunk of the game, enough to know I'm enjoying it.

Remedy's gotta work on their combat and encounter design, man.

On a most basic root level, of the three gun variants I have, none of them feel as good as they ought to in a shooter. The pistol's accuracy is wonky. Even if I'm hovering over their head and the crosshair is highlighted to indicate I'm pointed at an enemy, shots will miss. This means, even with that magnetized aim assist for controls, there's something going on in the game's code to make the pistol inaccurate to some degree. This sucks because you don't want that to happen with the pistol due to it not being rapid fire. The Scattershot, which is effectively a shotgun, is also okay. It's the closest you have to one-shotting enemies, but you need to be up close, and that leads to problems I'll get into later. Basically, close-range combat feels encouraged and discouraged at the same time. The Spin gun, or machine-gun, is also mid-to-close range, similar to the Scatter, which means it's just a matter of which of those two you prefer as your secondary. It feels weaker and less accurate than comparable (sub)machine guns in other games.

I feel like the shooting in this game could be better if the guns were tweaked to be at least a little bit more useful. Granted, the real fun of the game is in using all those powers, right? Well... sort of. The shield is nice but it can't protect you from everything. Launch has a good range but some of the most frustrating foes tend to camp as far from you as they can, meaning you kind of gotta hope the big couch you toss will hit guy 3 of 5 shooting rockets at you. Which is where Telekinesis comes in as wonderful under most circumstances, but the game's ability to wreck everything so you always have something to launch means you struggle to target very specific items. Namely, grenades and missiles. The latter especially. I feel if you know there are missiles, just stop using telekinesis so you can always be ready to try and grab one headed your way. If you can grab the missile instead of another random piece of environment, then you need to get rid of it quick because there's never just one rocket guy. I feel like there's a 50/50 I grab that rocket heading my way.

This is also where I go into my constant grumbling of skill trees. I'm already unlocking new powers throughout the game. Do I really need to unlock abilities like "chuck shield at foes" or "grab grenades and missiles" rather than they just be built-in aspects of the power? Spider-Man did this as well. I miss when part of the fun was in naturally discovering the depth and versatility of certain weapons or abilities. Nintendo turns this sort of logic into entire game gimmicks. Skill trees are just a way of dragging stuff out or having no faith in the player discovering it on their own, so you just drip feed it to them in a fashion they can figure out.

Even so, none of these things would be too bad, all things considered. Clearly combat isn't the game's strong suit, but it doesn't need to be.

But when they do initiate combat, they make sure it takes a long time. Reinforcements just keep rolling in. The more the merrier. What, three snipers and two rockets plus a bunch of basic mooks headed your way followed by five exploder fellows? Yeah man totally balanced. The safest bet is to hang back, wait for foes to come to you through a bottleneck, and pick them off... which means the close-range of the shotgun plus melee puts you into the middle of danger, and possibly even in the middle of the next spawn.

There are times to get close and melee, of course, and I do feel like you want to steadily move forward little by little. So clear enemies on the stairs, then clear the enemies at the bottom of the stairs while on the stairs, then clear the enemies in the connected room from the bottom of the stairs, etc. It's definitely best with a sense of forward progression. It's just annoying when suddenly you get two rockets and a big giant bullet sponge dude and now you're trying to launch every projectile flying your way and wait they got regenerating health too what the heck why?

I feel satisfied after every combat encounter, but when I die I feel frustrated because it's usually a result of not knowing something was there or being overwhelmed, despite not running into the very center of the fray. Not overly cautious, but not directly in the enemy's face either, and often swapping between powers and guns as I wait for one to reload/recharge. Swap back and forth while the other refreshes.

One last question: did anyone else have issues with the second battery/power-cell not appearing in the Astral Spike's chamber until they left the area and came back?

do you have the actual upgrade to catch grenades and missiles? because as soon as I got that it always picked them up as priority for me if one was close enough. Honestly, once you unlock all of your powers the Side Arm really for me just become a thing I was rely on while waiting for my energy bar to refill.

It is a bit frustratingly difficult sometimes though in general - though admittedly most of my deaths were either because the lag from my rickety old laptop did me in, or from falling down pits that i either didn't notice or forgot about while zipping around.

I don't think i ever missed any power cells. Usually they give you much more than you need in case of that sort of problem arises.

Yup, bought the power. I was able to catch the missile or grenade in the air enough to know the power was working, but there would be times I'd look right at the incoming missile and pick up a chunk of floor instead.

Dunno why.

This is also post-patch. Which does include some slow-down still, so performance hasn't improved dramatically. Might also be due to turning off motion blur and film grain? I know both of those can be used to make a game look better. Dunno how they'd reduce slow-down, though, so opposite might be true.

oh i totally had to turn of motion blur. not only was it making me ill but it was really tanking performance for me. soon as i disabled that it was a lot better.

This game has the most satisfying supernatural powers combat of any I've ever played, and yet I still don't understand implied complaints about the usefulness of the Service Weapon. There are late-game/post-game boss fights where judicious use of the upgraded Service Weapon in the correct form is the key to victory and offensive use of powers is practically pointless.

And BTW, no, actually, there's basically never a reason to close and melee, unless you have a Board Countermeasures task to kill guys with melee.

ccesarano wrote:

But when they do initiate combat, they make sure it takes a long time. Reinforcements just keep rolling in. The more the merrier. What, three snipers and two rockets plus a bunch of basic mooks headed your way followed by five exploder fellows? Yeah man totally balanced. The safest bet is to hang back, wait for foes to come to you through a bottleneck, and pick them off... which means the close-range of the shotgun plus melee puts you into the middle of danger, and possibly even in the middle of the next spawn.

Although you can do this sometimes, the way the game "wants" you to play is to constantly be moving. Enemy accuracy when you are sprinting around is awful, and they mostly seem to expect you to chuck a few throws or fire a few shots (not stopping to aim for headshots unless you're on a PC or Really Good) then start moving again.

Now I'm not going to argue that everything is great, the upgrades are all balanced, that I wouldn't tweak combat differently... But it did help a lot to accept that the game is not forgiving about different playstyles, that it really wants you to fight a certain way.

Just felt like there were upsides and downsides to hanging back vs charging the fray. Let them bottleneck from a distance and you take less damage, but get no health. Charge in and wreck em, take more damage, then you get the health right away. Seems pretty balanced to me.

Have to agree on the skill tree front. Its not worse in Control than any other game, but 90% of skill trees are a design crutch.

It was worth it to fail the obstacle course two or three times. Jess makes me realize how few protagonists get frustrated with their situation in a way that feels genuine.

On a most basic root level, of the three gun variants I have, none of them feel as good as they ought to in a shooter. The pistol's accuracy is wonky. Even if I'm hovering over their head and the crosshair is highlighted to indicate I'm pointed at an enemy, shots will miss. This means, even with that magnetized aim assist for controls, there's something going on in the game's code to make the pistol inaccurate to some degree. This sucks because you don't want that to happen with the pistol due to it not being rapid fire. The Scattershot, which is effectively a shotgun, is also okay. It's the closest you have to one-shotting enemies, but you need to be up close, and that leads to problems I'll get into later. Basically, close-range combat feels encouraged and discouraged at the same time. The Spin gun, or machine-gun, is also mid-to-close range, similar to the Scatter, which means it's just a matter of which of those two you prefer as your secondary. It feels weaker and less accurate than comparable (sub)machine guns in other games.
I feel like the shooting in this game could be better if the guns were tweaked to be at least a little bit more useful. Granted, the real fun of the game is in using all those powers, right? Well... sort of. The shield is nice but it can't protect you from everything. Launch has a good range but some of the most frustrating foes tend to camp as far from you as they can, meaning you kind of gotta hope the big couch you toss will hit guy 3 of 5 shooting rockets at you. Which is where Telekinesis comes in as wonderful under most circumstances, but the game's ability to wreck everything so you always have something to launch means you struggle to target very specific items. Namely, grenades and missiles. The latter especially. I feel if you know there are missiles, just stop using telekinesis so you can always be ready to try and grab one headed your way. If you can grab the missile instead of another random piece of environment, then you need to get rid of it quick because there's never just one rocket guy. I feel like there's a 50/50 I grab that rocket heading my way.

I haven't seen any issues with accuracy.. it feels like when I'm accurate I get rewarded properly. I know frame rate dips can make it seem like you are not as accurate as you should be, but in general for this game I thought combat was outstanding. It's very much a Remedy game.. no difficulty sliders and combat is very unforgiving. But as I mastered the game I started to get better and better and certainly using all your skills and options given to you is key.. Seize can turn the tide of a routine battle.. and those renewing health enemies? Well Seize the Hiss Orb healing them and the Orb will start healing you.

There is no single best method to kill the variety of enemies (that would be bad game-play). You shouldn't be able to use a single method to most efficiently kill everything.. Some guns work better on some enemies.. Melee is surprisingly effective on heavily armored enemies.. and Spin works well on enemies that move around and dodge in the air.

Grabbing Rockets and Grenades was easy enough for me but not so easy to make it trivial... it felt just about right to me given the risk reward for the action.

I found the end game I was using all sorts of techniques.. the ground slam was effective as well and even shield became useful to protect yourself to wade into danger to pick up health drops. In short use every option at your disposal.

Just popping in to say I started this game over the weekend on Xbox One X. I was, of course, optimistic about the game after everything I'd heard about it, but even still was surprised by how much I enjoyed my first couple of hours with it. It's a nice feeling to find yourself just falling into a world the way I've fallen into Control. Anything that can melt away the layers of my brain that are thinking about all the things I have to do in my life is a very good thing.

Some stray thoughts on the first few hours (I've acquired a power and left off at something like a boss fight):

I love all the little security lockdown rooms. So well designed. There's a mechanical quality to them that makes them feel extra plausible to me.

Is the exterior to the Oldest House at the beginning game explicitly based on the FBI HQ in DC? I used to walk past that building on my way to work and the exterior of the Oldest House shown at the beginning of the game looks quite similar. Perhaps all vaguely brutalist government office buildings look similar enough to that, I guess.

So far I am liking the radius on the UI highlighting collectibles. I really want to see all of the collectibles I can, because so far they've been great, but I do get tired in games of having to explore every inch of every room. Right now I'm feeling like, because of the distance at which collectibles become visible, I won't need to worry too much about that. I would love it, though, if the map would at some point be upgraded to show whether a room has been cleared of secrets or not. I haven't heard any suggestion that that happens, I assume it doesn't, but it would be nice.

Control is another in a long line of games where I feel the subtitles make clear certain lines of dialog that there is zero chance I would have heard and understood if not for subtitles being on. I always feel like a mistake is being made in that situation, although I'm not sure in which direction--if the dialogue being subtitled is being played that quietly, perhaps it's not intended to be discernible and thus should not be subtitled? Or if they're showing you the subtitles, maybe the intention is for you to hear and understand the dialogue but the sound is just getting lost in the mix? The fact that the murmers and whispers in other areas aren't translated to subtitles, though, suggests to me that the subtitles are working as intended.

I'm surprised I hadn't heard anyone make one fairly obvious comparison to another game: Deadly Premonition. Jesse's narration is directed to another person much the way York talks to Zach, albeit without a name or pronoun attached to Jesse's narration. It's eerie and a little confusing but in a fun way as I consider the intended recipient of her narration.

mrlogical wrote:

Is the exterior to the Oldest House at the beginning game explicitly based on the FBI HQ in DC? I used to walk past that building on my way to work and the exterior of the Oldest House shown at the beginning of the game looks quite similar. Perhaps all vaguely brutalist government office buildings look similar enough to that, I guess.

The exterior of the Oldest House is 33 Thomas Street, New York City. This is confirmed by artistic representations of the building exterior found inside the House and documents listing the address.

However, if you look out the front doors at the beginning of the game, you'll see signs indicating the House is on "Barley Street," which does not seem to be a real street in New York.

Ah interesting, thanks. A quick Google image search (that probably put me on some watch list) and the entrance looks reasonably similar to the FBI building entrance, but probably just a result of one bland yet imposing office building looking like most others.

TheGameguru wrote:

Well Seize the Hiss Orb healing them and the Orb will start healing you.

Thermonuclear facepalm that I did not know this. I beat the main storyline last night, and man, would that have made a difference.

Podunk wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

Well Seize the Hiss Orb healing them and the Orb will start healing you.

Thermonuclear facepalm that I did not know this. I beat the main storyline last night, and man, would that have made a difference.

If I recall correctly: You need to significantly level up Seize, but it tells you in the level up screen when you look at the required node.

It feels really good to be practically invulnerable for as long as the orb lasts.

beeporama wrote:

If I recall correctly: You need to significantly level up Seize, but it tells you in the level up screen when you look at the required node.

It feels really good to be practically invulnerable for as long as the orb lasts.

That must be it - I only leveled seize up to tier 3 or so. Curses!

Did I mess something up?

Before going to a sort of mini-boss fight in the Mail Room, I was exploring off what appeared to be the critical path, looking for secrets, when I came across a long, slightly narrow room, where the last chunk of the room had that fizzy pink infected look to it. I saw a highlighted object in there that I could hold X on to do something, so I raced through the damaging stuff to hold X on whatever the object was, hoping it would maybe cure the infection. Instead, I got a message that I believe was telling me I had earned some sort of ability point, but before I could read anything more about it, I died from standing in the infected zone. Now the UI seems to indicate I have an ability point (at least, there is a "1" count up in my menus whose purpose I don't know), but I don't see any option in my menus for what to do with such a point. If I just keep playing the story (I just got The Hotline) will I be introduced to ability points and shown how to spend it? Or is something awry here because I got this point early and/or because I died immediately upon getting it?

Hoping this will sort itself out soon, but I'm a little worried I could need to restart my game, which would stink!

mrlogical wrote:

Did I mess something up?

I think I know exactly where you are talking about! I also killed myself trying to get in there too early, if it's where I'm thinking of.

I don't remember where/when you are allowed to spend ability points (they are used to level up health or abilities), but that will come.

Ability points are mostly gained through completing missions, but you also get one for every "hidden" area you enter. Some are legitimately hidden and hard to find; a couple, like this, just require that you be able to survive the infection to reach them (which is something you have to find much later). You kind of "tricked" it by apparently making it to the "hidden" area before it killed you; the infection should have killed you before you got that far.

mrlogical wrote:

Did I mess something up?

Before going to a sort of mini-boss fight in the Mail Room, I was exploring off what appeared to be the critical path, looking for secrets, when I came across a long, slightly narrow room, where the last chunk of the room had that fizzy pink infected look to it. I saw a highlighted object in there that I could hold X on to do something, so I raced through the damaging stuff to hold X on whatever the object was, hoping it would maybe cure the infection. Instead, I got a message that I believe was telling me I had earned some sort of ability point, but before I could read anything more about it, I died from standing in the infected zone. Now the UI seems to indicate I have an ability point (at least, there is a "1" count up in my menus whose purpose I don't know), but I don't see any option in my menus for what to do with such a point. If I just keep playing the story (I just got The Hotline) will I be introduced to ability points and shown how to spend it? Or is something awry here because I got this point early and/or because I died immediately upon getting it?

Hoping this will sort itself out soon, but I'm a little worried I could need to restart my game, which would stink!

Just keep playing. You didn't mess anything up, just managed to exploit something.

and seriously... don't you care about your character? Throwing them into a horrible death.. geez

Thanks, both, good to know! I guess I'm just fast? I was hoping the thing I was interacting with was like a "cleanse room" kinda thing. A thing I haven't quite figured out in this game is how to notice when I'm taking damage short of when I'm near death--something about where the health display is on the screen just leads to it not registering with me a lot of times.

mrlogical wrote:

Control is another in a long line of games where I feel the subtitles make clear certain lines of dialog that there is zero chance I would have heard and understood if not for subtitles being on. I always feel like a mistake is being made in that situation, although I'm not sure in which direction--if the dialogue being subtitled is being played that quietly, perhaps it's not intended to be discernible and thus should not be subtitled? Or if they're showing you the subtitles, maybe the intention is for you to hear and understand the dialogue but the sound is just getting lost in the mix? The fact that the murmers and whispers in other areas aren't translated to subtitles, though, suggests to me that the subtitles are working as intended.

FWIW I played the whole game without subtitles, and I don't feel like I missed anything.

Also, somehow I beat the game without ever getting whatever it is that lets you go through those poison rooms. Where is that power/ability? Do you get it from a side quest?

DevilDancer wrote:

FWIW I played the whole game without subtitles, and I don't feel like I missed anything.

Also, somehow I beat the game without ever getting whatever it is that lets you go through those poison rooms. Where is that power/ability? Do you get it from a side quest?

yes

Spoiler:

Once you get to the research division you need to drop down a broken elevator pit in central research, look for the moldy area at the bottom of the stairs.

The strobing lights in the game triggered a migraine for me yesterday morning. So you know, cool and stuff. Yes, I know there's a epilepsy trigger warning, but Control is absolutely excessive with the stobing effects.

Only played about three hours so far today but really digging this. Feels like a worthy successor to Alan Wake. I feel like the story is going to go into a really meta/4th wall breaking place and I'm eager to see how this all plays out.

I'm further in now--I just arrived in the Ritual Division. I am having some trouble with the combat...it can be really tough! Earlier this weekend, I quit after failing the same combat 4 or 5 times in a row. It was a very large room with elevated parts on each side, the first room where I saw enemies floating around on chairs. Once I'd trigger the enemies, there were enemies on the opposite side 2nd floor who would shoot these rockets at me that took off a ton of health, and also seemed to pass through walls/floors on occasion (maybe just a large blast radius, but on several occasions it seemed like I should've been safe). It can be very frustrating how I can clear out 1 or even 2 big waves of enemies, but suddenly a third wave comes in, especially if they're coming from an unexpected location or have a different weapon type, and then bam, I'm dead and have to make my way back to the area and start from scratch. I'd appreciate more generous checkpointing. It's gotten a touch easier since I got the dodge ability, but I know there's a shield ability somewhere out there that I hope I can find soon--I bet that would be really useful for the rockets and grenades, which seem to cause me the most trouble.

I'm seeing a few performance hiccups on Xbox One X, some framerate drops when encountering 10+ enemies. I also always get a 2-3 second stutter after unpausing the game, although strangely, I don't get the same stutter after going into the inventory menu and coming back. The game still looks gorgeous, though.

The story is still great, and I love the collectibles. Looking forward to digging deeper in this whole thing.

I actually know exactly which room you're talking about, and it was one of the areas that I began to note my own criticisms with its execution. As you can see, some of those criticisms aren't shared.

Shamus Young has a theory that the game has adaptive difficulty, but adapts based on number of deaths and how long since you last died. This is evidently what Remedy did with Max Payne, and evidence suggests they haven't stopped doing it this way. Unfortunately there's no concrete evidence, and by the end he proposes that the manner in which rockets can home and turn on a dime might be based on system FPS (so PC players running 144fps are going to have more trouble dodging rockets than console players locked to 30fps). Again, these are based on observation and occasional tests but nothing concrete.

If this is true, then I'd consider it pretty poor and old-fashioned. The Half-Life 2 method of basing it on health quantity has been known for a long time (I was in College when I read about it on Gamasutra for the first time). It makes a lot more sense to work to keep the player near death, but not dying. It turns out Resident Evil 4 used this sort of adaptive difficulty as well, increasing or decreasing the amount of ammo drops you'd find based on your performance.

In the end, I think this would still just be a symptom of the problem, with the greatest being that every encounter simply has too many waves of foes in unbalanced encounters where different weapon types feel chosen haphazardly. It's going to be quite a shift to jump back out of Destiny 2 only to jump into Control again, I can tell you that much.

It is coming today. My wife and son are traveling to my in-laws for a few days so I have until Sunday to finish this game. Wish me luck.