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How to make better jumping puzzles - [Merged]


Fipmip.7219

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  • 2 years later...

When you can't get past one point in a jumping puzzle because you can't decipher exactly where to stand and exactly which way to face, it is no longer a challenge, just an annoyance. I'm to the point where I no longer get anything but what I collect until I can get more mastery points. I've tried for several hours to get past the second jump in Zephyr's ascent and gotten nowhere. Some of us don't have the dexterity and hand eye coordination to complete jumping puzzles. I've had help from high level Mesmers that just got pissed and gave up trying to help me through jumping puzzles. At this point the game is no longer fun or a challenge, just an annoyance. I've made the jump numerous times outside the season 2 chapter.

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@"jahaan.1405" said:When you can't get past one point in a jumping puzzle because you can't decipher exactly where to stand and exactly which way to face, it is no longer a challenge, just an annoyance.

Jumping puzzle.

Also I fail to see how "I can't finish it" [due to lacking abilities or w/e] = "it's no longer a challenge". Getting annoyed by not being able to complete/succeed at something is understandable, but it doesn't make that something overally bad or not challenging.

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If Zephyr's Ascent is the problem, that can be solved. EU or NA?

High level Mesmer does not equal good jumper. Most Mesmers I've met in Jumping Puzzles play that class to have easier re-tries.

If you happen to have LW4 E2 unlocked, pay NPC Hafren near Anniogel Encampment Waypoint (Sandswept Isles) a visit. The NPC sells the Prototype Position Rewinder, which is a personal return-button for difficult jumps with a very short cooldown.

If you have no access to that map, you can use a Necromancer's Spectral Walk utility-skill, which works almost the same as the rewinder.

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@Alatar.7364 said:Can't remember since when did the definition of word Puzzle became equal to Obvious.

It is supposed to be that way and I have fun doing them.

The puzzle should be using your brain to figure out something that is not obvious, not trial and error to figure out which pixel on the ledge I am supposed to land on.

To be fair, I do no think the jumping puzzles in GW2 are that bad. However, Anet should make attaching to ledges easier and falling off harder.

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@sorudo.9054 said:i personally think that all the puzzles should have no enemies, i don't see the fun in doing a puzzle while fighting an enemy every 2 jumps.i can understand traps, they are fun since they punish you from not being careful, enemies just don't belong in any puzzle.

Does getting into combat still decrease the distance you can jump?

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@Hesione.9412 said:

@sorudo.9054 said:i personally think that all the puzzles should have no enemies, i don't see the fun in doing a puzzle while fighting an enemy every 2 jumps.i can understand traps, they are fun since they punish you from not being careful, enemies just don't belong in any puzzle.

Does getting into combat still decrease the distance you can jump?

Since being in combat reduces your movement speed, which is used to calculate your jump range, being in combat should still cause shorter jumps.

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For the love of the six, I wish the following were implemented in combination:

  1. remove the ability to glide in the JPs OR allow a different keybind for the glider
  2. add checkpoints with an automatic revive at the last checkpoint.

Other players in other threads have already pointed out that those of longer ping means we tend to soar past the jump point because it is difficult to know when the server has registered our key press as a jump rather than glider. I have had numerous experiences of tapping my jump key, only to have it not register and see my avatar fall down. Then I get to that point again, hold the key down a little bit longer and watch my glider deploy and I soar past the jump platform.

I've seen the "advice" of just tap the jump key again to get rid of the glider. If tapping the jump key worked in the first place the glider would never have deployed.

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Hmmm I don't know about this glider thing. I never noticed anything buggy about it, like keys not registering. Mastering your keypresses, feeling for your keyboard is a part of platforming though. So if there is no bug it is all part of the game.Maybe it is just a bad keyboard. I have a bad keyboard lately and it is like night and day. Never again do I buy Razer keyboard and mouse. Expensive crap that has worse key registering and feeling than the cheapest Logitech stuff.

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@Cuks.8241 said:Hmmm I don't know about this glider thing. I never noticed anything buggy about it, like keys not registering. Mastering your keypresses, feeling for your keyboard is a part of platforming though. So if there is no bug it is all part of the game.Maybe it is just a bad keyboard. I have a bad keyboard lately and it is like night and day. Never again do I buy Razer keyboard and mouse. Expensive kitten that has worse key registering and feeling than the cheapest Logitech stuff.

Longer ping, which fluctuates a bit. Also has the fun effect of sometimes, in wvw, autoclosing a guardian tome immediately after you tried opening it. It was only me and the Aussie guardians which seemed to experience it.

And when I say longer ping, I mean >250 ping.

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Laugh in crash bandicoot. Really, gw2 jumping puzzles are fun. And quite simples for most of them. I struggled with dement clocktower but it was before understanding that I do have to jump down at the middle of the jp (thought at first there was no solution to go further). I will only agree about the fact that LA jp is not very clear, but to me it s because it is too dark and don t see anything (boosted screen gamma). I don't think the puzzles are the issue but more the cameras or knowing where you are and where you are aiming for. (Through shame on myself I enjoy doing jp with my engie and its rifle jump shot to do precise jumps)

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Wow this topic got revived huh. Reading back, I think that jumping puzzles have improved. There are still some with very unforgiving space for jumps, but overall it seems that these puzzles have gotten tighter, the directional cues have gotten better, and it feels more like I'm being taken on a fun journey through different vistas and scenery rather than choked through some bdsm house course. The jackal portal puzzles have been particularly cinematic and the normal on foot ones seem clearer. It was especially fun figuring out the dwarven ruins puzzle. Still some camera fighting issues but honestly that seems inherent to a lot of the game, not just jps

By the way, some people seem to like quibbling about the semantics of 'puzzle.' To be clearer, I define this to mean an encounter whose rules are clear and require mostly just logic to solve. This does not mean obfuscating directions and asking the player to guess which bit of muddy terrain to try and navigate, as the solutions to these are arbitrary and ask the player to read the mind of the developer that made it.

I picked Wingnut's revenge as an example because despite being one of the easier puzzles, it still has the problems that I was trying to highlight in the OP and the above paragraph.

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@"Fipmip.7219" said:A moderately well known fact about Nintendo is when Shigeru was making Super Mario 64 for the nintendo 64, he discovered making pinpoint accurate jumps within a 3D space is just something that does not work. At all. Making a jumping game in 3D requires a pretty high degree of forgiveness to make it fun, a certain understanding of the player to make "good enough" judgement for a jump. However, the fine fellows at Anet don't seem to have gotten the memo, and as such we have minuscule stalagmite platforms, catchy headbanging geometry in awkward places, and unclear directional cues.

The pirate cave in Lions Arch immediately starts off with a *Guess the pixel perfect position you have to drop down into to even start the god kitten puzzle." There's no time to avoid obstacles if you get it wrong, and you can barely move in midair to begin with. You are then lead through a pitch black maze in which if you miss the rather unclear cue to walk through a wall and turn left at the end, guess what you'll be wandering through pitch blackness for as long as it takes you to realize you can use your minimap to navigate through without the help of the spirit in the first place. When you do finally get out of the maze, it is again, extremely unclear where to go, the answer is to spam jump your way up some rather badly textured geometry to a tunnel above and to your right.

There's problems with pretty much every puzzle I've tried so far with absolutely no signs of learning from Anet throughout the years of releasing expansions. I would like to at very least like to see some clear directional cues with the puzzles released in PoF, with the path clearly laid out in what you're supposed to do. I get that from time to time you may want players to navigate some form of maze, but the fact the maze is there and the different possible paths the maze has needs to be clearly shown. Don't make people randomly jump off unrecoverable cliffs just because they think you might have hidden the correct path down there. If you want to make a jumping puzzle difficult, you'll want to outfox your players using clever tricks, not make them struggle to overcome core gameplay elements.

It all boils down to the same problem we have in raids: Lack of difficulty modes.

Jumping puzzles with different routes with different rewards at the end would be fine, since everyone would be able to complete them. Stuff like checkpoints in exchange of worse rewards would be great too.

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@Fueki.4753 said:Given us back Fall damage reduction would also help a lot on many Jump Puzzles.If not in traits, Arenanet should reduce is baseline for everyone.

I don't see anything wrong with being able to fail some of the content. In fact it would be weird for me if you couldn't and it seems that's exactly what some people here want? Nobody just deserves succeeding for simply showing up. Not only that, but the rewards for jps are usually pretty low, nothing about most of them is mandatory, so if it's so hard/unenjoyable for someone then... just don't do them?

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@Sobx.1758 said:

@"Fueki.4753" said:Given us back Fall damage reduction would also help a lot on many Jump Puzzles.If not in traits, Arenanet should reduce is baseline for everyone.

I don't see anything wrong with being able to fail some of the content. In fact it would be weird for me if you couldn't and it seems that's exactly what some people here want? Nobody just
deserves
succeeding for simply showing up. Not only that, but the rewards for jps are usually pretty low, nothing about most of them is mandatory, so if it's so hard/unenjoyable for someone then... just don't do them?

Did you ever try out the Griffon Rook Jump Puzzle without the bomb, after Arenanet took fall damage reduction away?Some of the jumps are taking away over 90% of your health and you land immediately next to griffons.That's hardly fair.

And "Not so secret" already was impossible for many (maybe even most) players with the fall damage reduction.I can't imagine the nightmare it is now.

Just because falling damage would be reduced doesn't mean people automatically "succeed for simply showing up".If one can't do the jumps, that player will still fail them.And if getting rewards "for simply showing up" was a problem, Arenanet could always disable portals.

Having less falling damage means less people die, thus less time is wasted by waypoint'ing and running back.There may even be less players giving up on Jump Puzzles, since they are no longer getting frustrated due to dying over and over and over again.

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@Fueki.4753 said:Given us back Fall damage reduction would also help a lot on many Jump Puzzles.If not in traits, Arenanet should reduce is baseline for everyone.

I don't see anything wrong with being able to fail some of the content. In fact it would be weird for me if you couldn't and it seems that's exactly what some people here want? Nobody just
deserves
succeeding for simply showing up. Not only that, but the rewards for jps are usually pretty low, nothing about most of them is mandatory, so if it's so hard/unenjoyable for someone then... just don't do them?

Did you ever try out the Griffon Rook Jump Puzzle
without the bomb,
after Arenanet took fall damage reduction away?Some of the jumps are taking away over 90% of your health and you land immediately next to griffons.That's hardly fair.

And "Not so secret" already was impossible for many (maybe even most) players
with
the fall damage reduction.I can't imagine the nightmare it is now.

I don't see how that changes what I've said. Am I supposed to repeat what I've already said in the post you're answering to?I don't see anything wrong with being able to fail some of the content. In fact it would be weird for me if you couldn't and it seems that's exactly what some people here want? Nobody just deserves succeeding for simply showing up.

Some content is challenging to some players. Yes. Yes it is. And it's supposed to be. You're not forced to complete it and you're not automatically obliged to complete it just because you've decided to try.

Just because falling damage would be reduced doesn't mean people automatically "succeed for simply showing up".If one can't do the jumps, that player will still fail them.And if getting rewards "for simply showing up" was a problem, Arenanet could always disable portals.

Yes, they could.And I think it is better for them to have the jps how they intend them to be without the need of speccing into some gimmicky trait. I think removing that effect isn't a bad thing at all (quite the opposite for me), but I understand that's just my opinion. Having those traits was a weird choice to make in the first place imo. Now, if anet thinks the fall damage is overtuned, out of order or overly problematic in some areas of the game, then they sure should rebalance it. But, again, personally I don't think it's problematic or somehow mistuned.

Having less falling damage means less people die, thus less time is wasted by waypoint'ing and running back.

I have nothing against making some starting point at jps that you could choose to get rezzed/respawned at (maybe something along the lines of adventures/race restarts) if running back to jp from WPs takes too long in some cases. Actually I would be completely on board with that idea. There's a difference for me between just restarting a jp and having to run to jp from wp over and over again.

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@Fueki.4753 said:

@Fueki.4753 said:Given us back Fall damage reduction would also help a lot on many Jump Puzzles.If not in traits, Arenanet should reduce is baseline for everyone.

I don't see anything wrong with being able to fail some of the content. In fact it would be weird for me if you couldn't and it seems that's exactly what some people here want? Nobody just
deserves
succeeding for simply showing up. Not only that, but the rewards for jps are usually pretty low, nothing about most of them is mandatory, so if it's so hard/unenjoyable for someone then... just don't do them?

Did you ever try out the Griffon Rook Jump Puzzle
without the bomb,
after Arenanet took fall damage reduction away?Some of the jumps are taking away over 90% of your health and you land immediately next to griffons.That's hardly fair.

And "Not so secret" already was impossible for many (maybe even most) players
with
the fall damage reduction.I can't imagine the nightmare it is now.

Just because falling damage would be reduced doesn't mean people automatically "succeed for simply showing up".If one can't do the jumps, that player will still fail them.And if getting rewards "for simply showing up" was a problem, Arenanet could always disable portals.

Having less falling damage means less people die, thus less time is wasted by waypoint'ing and running back.There may even be less players giving up on Jump Puzzles, since they are no longer getting frustrated due to dying over and over and over again.

Part of being successful in jumping puzzles is managing all the variables they throw at you, including certain death falls, traps, mobs etc. There are a great many JP which are very easy, and there are a handful which are fairly hard, but all the JP can be accomplished on any character with the tools given in the game.

What I keep seeing with this game is players complaining about the skill ceiling being higher than they like. All these JP can be accomplished with no additional skills or traits, and always could be. The hardest ones require more player engagement to figure out the best paths, and can take many attempts to complete. However, JP are usually a one and done type thing where a player goes, does it and never comes back. As such, players don't always get to enjoy the rhythm or flow of a JP by mastering it, rather they do just enough to finish it and move on, usually not gaining much skill or experience in the process.

Looking specifically at Mad King Tower and Wintersday JP, both of these JP are 'relatively easy' if you try doing them dozens and dozens of times. They are hard to learn, hard to master but, once you get the flow, it is really a lot easier than it appears. As these are farmable JP, one is likely to try many times to complete these and slowly master each step of the JP. Unfortunately, there are few incentives in other challenging JP to promote players farming them, and if there is, someone is parked there for a TP or Port, removing the need to learn how to do that JP.

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@Mungo Zen.9364 said:The hardest ones require more player engagement to figure out the best paths, and can take many attempts to complete.For me, most of them take many attempts to complete. For me, I would rather spend my time in GW2 doing other things. I'm glad that people enjoy this challenge and that it is not content that is required. I really despise them. ;)

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