Topic: Splatoon 2

Just wanna throw my 2 cents in. Finished the Octo Expansion last night, and man, that is how you do DLC right! Bursting with creativity, challenging but not cheap. Often difficult but never unrealistically so. The music was great, the visuals colorful, creative and interesting. The rewards for multi-player cool but not unfair to non-DLC owners. Octo Expansion is hands down the best DLC for a shooter I have ever played. It might be my favorite DLC ever overall too. Couldn't really be more happy with it!

Ballpoint seems to invalidate the existence of Mini and Hydra Splatling. Paints amazing, better Special, more mobility and comparable range.

Heavy Splatling is good for Kits and Specials still though.

@-Green- It certainly looks to be the best inking splatling overall... but it's long range performance still pales in comparison to the Hydra, not just due to having a faster fire rate (and thus better consistency in splatting) than the ballpoint's long range mode, but also not having to go through the mandatory short range fire period giving the target time to flee.

Like the HAMR in Black Ops 2, the dual fire rate makes it versatile, but more specialized weapons can get the upper hand in their niches, especially at range.

@meleebrawler Thing is you don't have to go through that short range every time right? You can charge it while it is firing so you can get the long range going and keep it that way until you run out of ink and be more precise with it. (Unless I'm just losing my mind and I'm just wrong on that).

Basically it's specialty is you don't have to stop shooting for an "extended" period of time.

Edit: Yep, I lost my mind. I don't know why I got it in my head it doesn't stop shooting while you start charging while shooting. Ignore what I said.

The next Splatfest will be Squids vs. Octo
https://mobile.twitter.com/SplatoonNews/status/10139810615109...
And the exciting part is that even if you haven’t bought or finished the Octo Expansion, if you choose team Octo you’ll play as the Octoling during the Splatfest!

Agent 8's animations and victory poses are way too adorable not to pick Team Octoling!!

Perhaps I should get all of the Octoling gear then pick Inkling, just for the sake of it.

@NinjaAceTrainer Like dressing up Agent 8 as Agent 3?

@GoldenGamer88 Agent 4 as an Octoling.

Holy heck, Octo Expansion's final challenge is brutal. It's not even a joke anymore.

You know that meme with the woman staring into nothingness while a bunch of formulas and shapes are in front of her face? Yep, that's how I'm feeling right now. As a Splatoon veteran, I'm thinking so hard of all the ways I could best [insert spoiler here]. Like, literally. I've come up with foolproof ways to advance pretty quickly once the challenge's started, but it's always THAT ONE PART that gets me.

Sigh, hopefully I don't lose my sanity over this...

Just finished the Octo Expansion. It was a lot of fun, but I don't understand why people keep talking about how hard it is. The difficulty is really inconsistent, some stations can be done in less than a minute with little challenge, whereas others force you to take notice of everything around you to succeed. Also, the 'bonus challenge' was a lot of fun. Quite difficult, but not ridiculously so. With that said, it was excellent, and I enjoyed every minute of it, especially the final set of levels.

EDIT: Sorry, didn't see the post above. I'm not trying to undermine you.

@NinjaAceTrainer I think the difficulty feels inconsistent because of the non-linear structure of the levels.

I mean all games has inconsistent difficulty levels, but these inconsistencies are usually arranged to form some sort of difficulty curve. Removing that linearity means you're hopping around that curve willy-bully. What you should fine in some consistency within each train time; I noticed some were very easy to run through, and others contained ome punishing level after another.

@Maxz I was suprised to only find about 5 out of the 80 levels difficult, the rest were challenging but they felt just right to me.

There was only one level that I found impossible but I finally managed to complete eventually, which suprised me because the articles here made each level sound impossible...

Yeah. Righteous Rails Station with a Bamboozler is the only thing that I found incredibly difficult though. I eventually lost all of my funds, and came back later with a Splattershot. But when talking about the non-linearity, surely each station should be equally challenging, atleast on a line. I generally went through entire lines at a time, and the difficulty was all over the place.

@NinjaAceTrainer The one that really annoyed me was Girl Power Station (?), well I think that was it's name, it was on the pink line and had a cringey Spice Girls reference anyway.

It was just really difficult for some reason, even though they had all weapon types and specials available! I eventually just remembered all of the enemy placements and timing but it just wasn't fun...at all.

I think they have easy-medium difficulty levels on the direct routes to the thangs and then add a couple of difficult ones to spice things up and make you explore. But the level placement does seem a bit random at times...

@Tsurii Yes it was that one! It was okay at first but then all of a sudden a stingray and an inkjet appears and it ends very quickly..

My Joy Cons also aren't that great in chaotic situations (or in general), I might try it again with a Pro Controller to see if it's easier when the controller fully works

I think the first bunch of players were largely comparing the difficulty to the original Story Mode, and it's hard to deny it isn't a step up from that. Hence the "man, this is surprisingly hard" reactions.

But then the second wave set their expectations in terms of the reactions of the first players, who were all saying how unexpectedly hard it was. But the whole 'unexpectedly hard' thing doesn't really strike you when you're expecting it, which is why I think we this was followed by a second lot of, "y'know guys, it's not that hard" type impressions.

And to be fair, you can pick and choose for the sake of your argument; there are some devilishly tricky levels in the pack which would take most players multiple retries, but there are also plenty of relatively undemanding levels you can happily breeze through. The key word being happily - many of the easier levels were still entertaining and imaginative romps, even if they didn't put your life in much danger.

The difficulty debate won't really go anywhere without some sort of grounding. When people remark that something is 'hard', they usually mean 'harder than I was expecting', which massively depends on what they heard beforehand. Still, I think we can all agree it has some significantly harder sections than the main campaign.

I'm kind of glad there was a mix of difficulty in there. It meant the harder levels could be challenging while still having some simpler bits of fun to act as a breather.

Difficulty is hard to quantify. Some people said Mario Tennis Aces' single-player was hard, but I didn't struggle much with it despite not really playing Mario Tennis much. Some people say Hollow Knight is difficult, but as someone who plays Metroidvanias like mad I got through the true ending with no problem.

I'm not picky about difficulty myself though. I love super difficult/unfair games like Mario Lost Levels and I can love super easy games like Kirby's Epic Yarn as well.

I mean, The Octo Expansion as a whole wasn't too difficult, especially since I only found a few of the missions more challenging than the others (the one where you had to take out all the balloons with a charger while riding on a grind rail was actually the one I found the most difficult, even more so than the "Protect the Orb" mission). It's certainly more challenging than Octo Canyon, but it's not even nearly as impossible.

But at the end of the day, there's obviously a huge difficulty spike going from the missions to the final challenge. There's really no denying that, and it can be a bit frustrating. Even 3D World's Champions Road was the peak of a gradual difficulty spike, so it wasn't as frustrating even though you'd lose a lot of lives. As much as I love difficult challenges, gotta say I'm not sure how I'm gonna feel when I finally beat the bonus challenge...

...There was a difficulty spike? I think the fact that I didn't notice sums up why I didn't think the difficulty was consistent. Finale was amazing though. I got serious Metal Gear vives from the first bit, and there's actually a Metal Gear reference in there. That really made me smile.