Game Journal: Killing Floor

written on Saturday, May 23, 2009

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

I've definitely turned the corner on Killing Floor. Now that a bunch of us are getting our perks up to level three or higher, Hard difficulty is becoming feasible. Take this picture, for instance.



Those are the two surviving members of our four man squad standing over the last boss. On most Hard games we don't even get to see the last boss. I don't think our tactics have changed or improved that much. I think it's just that with higher level perks, we do more damage and can hold our ground against the horde. Also, I can solo the game pretty easily on Normal now, which I do to level up my perks because in co-op games I like to be lookout / backup and don't get many kills.

Speaking of which, here are the slow motion clips out of a solo playthrough I did tonight. It's much cooler when there's six guys laying into a wave full of monsters, but even solo it shows the game's gore, sounds, reload animations, etc.



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I just wish I had the HDD space to be recording all the time. Some of the stuff I saw today was utterly glorious. There's a map called Manor which has a fence monsters jump over to enter play. We had six players on hard difficulty and a freaking avalanche of Clots came over it. Me and two other guys whipped out our knives and destroyed an avalanche. How often does that happen?

What does happen fairly often is that by wave four or five, the group holes up somewhere and creates a kill zone. People have accumulated enough money to have good weapons and when the monsters are pouring in, covered in fire from the flame throwers, being torn to bits by the shotguns and grenades, and the slow motion kicks in and it's all just hanging in the air as you keep firing, it's amazing. I stuck with Killing Floor because I was bored. But now I'm sticking with it because it's providing me awesome on a regular basis.

I'm still not convinced that having it take weeks for players to build up their perks to the point where they have access to that awesome is anything but a mistake, but now that I'm enjoying it, I don't care. :P

The perk system does also raise one other issue. If we can beat Hard now, but it's just because our perks are high enough that it plays like Normal, it makes the difficulty system seem more like raiding tiers in World of WarCraft than standard FPS difficulty settings. It's not about how good you are. It's about how long you've played. And we're talking about substantial differences here.

A level zero Sharpshooter does +5% damage with certain weapons. A level five Sharpshooter does +50% damage, has -75% recoil, and reloads 50% faster. There's no comparison. The game rewards grinding over good play. Ideally if you play so much, you get good anyway, but there's no guarantee of that. Additionally, you get money for kills, so if the level five is killing everything, you may not even be able to afford a better weapon and armor the next round. That seems like it could be a problem for getting new players to stick around.