05-30-2023, 08:32 PM
Was surprised and a little excited upon seeing the release trailer. Was disappointed after actually getting into the game.
Worlds doesn't offer anything new to the table. Almost all of it has been seen in previous games, from characters, to the map layouts, to the gameplay. At this point, practically anything of substance would be a valid suggestion for the game. Something to make Worlds its own actual game instead of S2 with S2D maps.
Yes, I know there's an open world mode. It suffers from the issue that many open worlds suffer from: a lack of anything in the world. All you get are some hats sprinkled around that you collect once then never open the mode again. Yeah, you can talk to other players. You can also do that in actual dedicated community forums and servers with much more ease and freedom. Social games work because you play to achieve a goal with other players. Without the goal, you have no reason to play. You don't even have anything to really mess around with other than some superficial monsters that you gain nothing for dealing with and can just idly run away from anyways. If you're playing this mode to play with others, you're probably already friends with them and have plenty of better things to do with them.
As for the part that actually has some gameplay, it's just the same old collect formula. At least none of them are a complete joke like in S3, but the gameplay still isn't that much better. Surprisingly, Main Land actually has the best gameplay for actually forcing you to deal with the monster. Tinky is significantly faster than you and most likely will kill you if he spots you, forcing you to stay out of sight and be wary of his movements while collecting custards. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the other maps.
In the Lake, Dipsy is also faster than you. However, the darkness makes it nigh impossible to see him coming, and even when he does chase you down, he's completely stopped by the water. This is where the recycled maps starts to become an issue, because the designs were not made for a player that can jump and enter water. You can tell, because they come from a game where the player cannot do either of those things, and surprise, the enemy can't either. So you can just wade through the water with ease, knowing Dipsy can't do anything to stop you.
The rest of the monsters can't really catch you if you keep moving away from them, so the only thing that really differentiates them from here is how open the maps are. Maps like Cave and Research Lab are very tight and leave little room to maneuvre around enemies, so if you get caught in a tight dead end, you die, sorry. On open maps like Outskirts, or maps with little to no tight dead ends like Satellite Station, you can just keep running around for free. The spawning method of monsters becomes a big issue on the former set of maps, especially on Research Lab, where you can get spawncamped by the New Born repeatedly spawning on a custard close to the respawn hall.
The takeaway here is that the collect mode falls victim to many issues already seen in previous games. Being screwed in tight dead ends and monsters being pitifully easy to avoid in open maps were both seen in previous ST entries. Main Land is the only map that accomplishes anything of note, but it's just one map with little replay value. There's one nice quality of life feature, being the ability to see custard locations at certain times, which is really helpful for the first few playthroughs, since sometimes custards are in some really weird off the road places. It's especially helpful for a map like Outskirts where you can't see jack, and cannot tell where you're meant to be going at all.
So there's like one decent map in one mode, and one nice feature. I haven't touched on the visuals, but it's pretty simple and not super remarkable. It doesn't feel like there was much done to make it stand out, and none of the designs have much of an inspired appearance. That's pretty much all the good I can really say about this game. Everything else is old, empty, and poorly designed.
If you want my opinion on what should be done to the game, it's to change what can be changed to actually play well, and cut everything that can't. Add some sort of ongoing repeatable objective to the open world, preferably one that you'd want to explore around for. Maybe a way to become stronger so you can actually fight the big monsters? Might be insane, but maybe there could be an actual progression and plot where you'd defeat enemies, get stronger from doing so, and defeat stronger enemies? Something like defeating New Borns to get weapons, using those weapons to defeat someone like the Cave Tubby, and using whatever you earn from that to later defeat Tinky. You know, basic stuff that plenty of other games have done. But maybe this is too much for one man to handle.
As for the collect side of things, maybe add some unique mechanics for certain maps. I've always thought a mechanic involving hiding in lockers could be interesting for the school. Maybe in the Cave, you'd have to keep an ear out for the Cave Tubby? Remember when Laa-Laa being blind was supposed to be a mechanic? Just do something for each of the maps so they don't feel like the same copy-pasted enemy in a slightly different playground. Give each of them a gimmick or something.
I haven't even mentioned Versus, but I can't imagine it's much better than the previous entries. The one playing as the monster is utterly helpless 99% of the time, with the 1% being when they sit at a door in front of a custard and completely block everyone else from getting to it. For one, prevent that bullhonky from happening. That's stupid. Remove thin doorways from the maps, force monsters to move, do something about it. For another, give the monster player more information. The monsters have historically had more information on where things are than the players, such as knowing where all the currently existing custards are. Show monsters where the custards are, and give them some sort of way to catch up to other players in an interesting fashion. Maybe give them a charging run, or some sort of ranged ability (it could do something other than damage players, like slowing them down! unbelievable, right), something that isn't just making the monsters run faster, because that'd be incredibly boring and unfair. Make both sides more interesting. Don't shaft the monster so hard.
Then there's Sandbox. There's nothing to really do here except mash some monsters against each other and see who lives. Except even this is way worse than in S3. For one: playing as a monster gives you no abilities except for the ability to punch hard and not die in one hit. And see in grayscale. Unless you chose the New Born, in which case, you're not that much stronger than a regular player. This stinks because the monsters can actually use special attacks, even if they are weird versions of what they had before. So, if you're planning on doing monster PvP, the best you can do is seeing who can mash the attack button better. Another thing: there's no camera transformation. That means you're always a target when trying to make monsters fight, and if you aren't making your screen grayscale, you will die very easily. This sorta screws up any chance of making a cinematic battle, so if you were into that, you don't even get that. So uh, my suggestion is to add the obvious things to make Sandbox a little less barebones in what you can do. Maybe also add some actual functional things, like spawns and gamerules, or something like that, so you can actually make your own gamemode? That'd be neat.
Before thinking of adding new exciting modes, like, uh, Survival again, and uh, Infection again, I'd highly recommend doing something to the existing stuff first. Adding new stuff is just a bandaid fix over the mess that is the stuff currently there, and it's a tossup whether the new stuff is even good. This is seriously disappointing for a game that took two years to make after S3 being legitimately fun, exciting, and new. If you wanna play STW, don't. Play S3 instead. I know there's a bunch of hacked servers and hackers, but there's still regular normal rooms to play in, and if nothing else, the solo gameplay is still better than the nothing gameplay this game has. Maybe STW will be an actual game in the future. I'm not hedging my bets on it though.
Was really hoping STW would be an improvement, or at least show something new. Sean, if you don't want to make more ST content, nobody's forcing you to. I was looking forward to some new good games from you, not this. Please put your time towards something better, for your own good.
Worlds doesn't offer anything new to the table. Almost all of it has been seen in previous games, from characters, to the map layouts, to the gameplay. At this point, practically anything of substance would be a valid suggestion for the game. Something to make Worlds its own actual game instead of S2 with S2D maps.
Yes, I know there's an open world mode. It suffers from the issue that many open worlds suffer from: a lack of anything in the world. All you get are some hats sprinkled around that you collect once then never open the mode again. Yeah, you can talk to other players. You can also do that in actual dedicated community forums and servers with much more ease and freedom. Social games work because you play to achieve a goal with other players. Without the goal, you have no reason to play. You don't even have anything to really mess around with other than some superficial monsters that you gain nothing for dealing with and can just idly run away from anyways. If you're playing this mode to play with others, you're probably already friends with them and have plenty of better things to do with them.
As for the part that actually has some gameplay, it's just the same old collect formula. At least none of them are a complete joke like in S3, but the gameplay still isn't that much better. Surprisingly, Main Land actually has the best gameplay for actually forcing you to deal with the monster. Tinky is significantly faster than you and most likely will kill you if he spots you, forcing you to stay out of sight and be wary of his movements while collecting custards. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the other maps.
In the Lake, Dipsy is also faster than you. However, the darkness makes it nigh impossible to see him coming, and even when he does chase you down, he's completely stopped by the water. This is where the recycled maps starts to become an issue, because the designs were not made for a player that can jump and enter water. You can tell, because they come from a game where the player cannot do either of those things, and surprise, the enemy can't either. So you can just wade through the water with ease, knowing Dipsy can't do anything to stop you.
The rest of the monsters can't really catch you if you keep moving away from them, so the only thing that really differentiates them from here is how open the maps are. Maps like Cave and Research Lab are very tight and leave little room to maneuvre around enemies, so if you get caught in a tight dead end, you die, sorry. On open maps like Outskirts, or maps with little to no tight dead ends like Satellite Station, you can just keep running around for free. The spawning method of monsters becomes a big issue on the former set of maps, especially on Research Lab, where you can get spawncamped by the New Born repeatedly spawning on a custard close to the respawn hall.
The takeaway here is that the collect mode falls victim to many issues already seen in previous games. Being screwed in tight dead ends and monsters being pitifully easy to avoid in open maps were both seen in previous ST entries. Main Land is the only map that accomplishes anything of note, but it's just one map with little replay value. There's one nice quality of life feature, being the ability to see custard locations at certain times, which is really helpful for the first few playthroughs, since sometimes custards are in some really weird off the road places. It's especially helpful for a map like Outskirts where you can't see jack, and cannot tell where you're meant to be going at all.
So there's like one decent map in one mode, and one nice feature. I haven't touched on the visuals, but it's pretty simple and not super remarkable. It doesn't feel like there was much done to make it stand out, and none of the designs have much of an inspired appearance. That's pretty much all the good I can really say about this game. Everything else is old, empty, and poorly designed.
If you want my opinion on what should be done to the game, it's to change what can be changed to actually play well, and cut everything that can't. Add some sort of ongoing repeatable objective to the open world, preferably one that you'd want to explore around for. Maybe a way to become stronger so you can actually fight the big monsters? Might be insane, but maybe there could be an actual progression and plot where you'd defeat enemies, get stronger from doing so, and defeat stronger enemies? Something like defeating New Borns to get weapons, using those weapons to defeat someone like the Cave Tubby, and using whatever you earn from that to later defeat Tinky. You know, basic stuff that plenty of other games have done. But maybe this is too much for one man to handle.
As for the collect side of things, maybe add some unique mechanics for certain maps. I've always thought a mechanic involving hiding in lockers could be interesting for the school. Maybe in the Cave, you'd have to keep an ear out for the Cave Tubby? Remember when Laa-Laa being blind was supposed to be a mechanic? Just do something for each of the maps so they don't feel like the same copy-pasted enemy in a slightly different playground. Give each of them a gimmick or something.
I haven't even mentioned Versus, but I can't imagine it's much better than the previous entries. The one playing as the monster is utterly helpless 99% of the time, with the 1% being when they sit at a door in front of a custard and completely block everyone else from getting to it. For one, prevent that bullhonky from happening. That's stupid. Remove thin doorways from the maps, force monsters to move, do something about it. For another, give the monster player more information. The monsters have historically had more information on where things are than the players, such as knowing where all the currently existing custards are. Show monsters where the custards are, and give them some sort of way to catch up to other players in an interesting fashion. Maybe give them a charging run, or some sort of ranged ability (it could do something other than damage players, like slowing them down! unbelievable, right), something that isn't just making the monsters run faster, because that'd be incredibly boring and unfair. Make both sides more interesting. Don't shaft the monster so hard.
Then there's Sandbox. There's nothing to really do here except mash some monsters against each other and see who lives. Except even this is way worse than in S3. For one: playing as a monster gives you no abilities except for the ability to punch hard and not die in one hit. And see in grayscale. Unless you chose the New Born, in which case, you're not that much stronger than a regular player. This stinks because the monsters can actually use special attacks, even if they are weird versions of what they had before. So, if you're planning on doing monster PvP, the best you can do is seeing who can mash the attack button better. Another thing: there's no camera transformation. That means you're always a target when trying to make monsters fight, and if you aren't making your screen grayscale, you will die very easily. This sorta screws up any chance of making a cinematic battle, so if you were into that, you don't even get that. So uh, my suggestion is to add the obvious things to make Sandbox a little less barebones in what you can do. Maybe also add some actual functional things, like spawns and gamerules, or something like that, so you can actually make your own gamemode? That'd be neat.
Before thinking of adding new exciting modes, like, uh, Survival again, and uh, Infection again, I'd highly recommend doing something to the existing stuff first. Adding new stuff is just a bandaid fix over the mess that is the stuff currently there, and it's a tossup whether the new stuff is even good. This is seriously disappointing for a game that took two years to make after S3 being legitimately fun, exciting, and new. If you wanna play STW, don't. Play S3 instead. I know there's a bunch of hacked servers and hackers, but there's still regular normal rooms to play in, and if nothing else, the solo gameplay is still better than the nothing gameplay this game has. Maybe STW will be an actual game in the future. I'm not hedging my bets on it though.
Was really hoping STW would be an improvement, or at least show something new. Sean, if you don't want to make more ST content, nobody's forcing you to. I was looking forward to some new good games from you, not this. Please put your time towards something better, for your own good.
no