In yesterday’s post, I wrote about beating the first brutal boss of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty (Team Ninja) and feeling more upset than elated. I talked about it in the RKG Discord, and someone who is a game developer said it almost certainly was a glitch/bug rather than a deliberate choice. She was trying to be encouraging when she said not to be discouraged. Other people chimed in and said that you had to expect glitches and bugs with a triple-A release like this.
I don’t know anything about that because I normally buy big games many years after they release or get them on Game Pass. The exception is FromSoft games, obviously. Now, anyway. Ian reminded me that Elden Ring had MANY bugs on the PC port when it released.
He’s not wrong. But I didn’t have to suffer through any of them. Because of my beefy machine, I had microstuttering and one hard crash. That was it. But there were many problems for other people with lesser machines. Even with equal machines. I heard about one guy who only had invisible enemies once he got out of the tutorial. He thought it was just FromSoft. Which, bless him, he’s not wrong.
I’ve said it many times about how people think the start of Dark Souls is brilliant. “Two paths that are clearly too hard and one that is just the right amount of hard!” Yeah, if you’re a Dark Souls aficionado, that makes sense. You know that the game is hard, but it’s not supposed to be super-hard. But what does the average person know about the game? That it’s crushingly hard. I mean, the PC version (with everything) is called Prepare to Die Edition. What do you hear about the game? You’re going to die. A lot. Often. Over and over.
So what are you going to think when you run into ghosts you can’t kill? Or skellies who one-shot you? That it’s part of a game that you were told is really, really hard. The third path, by the way, is less difficult. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s appropriately hard.
So. Back to the first boss of Wo Long. People telling me that I have to expect glitches and bugs in a Triple A action adventure game are missing the point. Or the bigger picture. How the hell was I supposed to know there was a glitch of that kind? Yes, if I knew there was supposed to be a cutscene, I could look out for that glitch. But I went into the boss fight without having seen the second phase of the fight. So how the hell was I to know what was supposed to happen?