A somewhat long rant about unbreakable barriers

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Unbreakable barriers. You all know them, some love to design with them, but I personally hate them. This is not about hard stats or data, or its value in certain levels’ design, this is about how it feels when facing up against this thing - a thing which just as important if not more so in game design, because a game is only as good as the feelings it provides when you’re playing it.

After 500+ hours, why do I hate it so much?

I find that having them limits my options in any given level that has them.
For a game that promotes open exploration, picking and choosing your fights, you can’t really choose the levels that are in said fights. And if a level has unbreakable barriers, you most likely won’t be able to choose how to fly said level - there’ll often be only one way to solve it. And it’s not like I can do anything else about these barriers - they are unbreakable.

Having more choice on how to fly things makes things feel like the game acknowledges what you do, and that you and your choices matter in each flight. It’s not a “No, you literally cannot do this, this thing is unbreakable and you will die if you do this, no questions asked”, but more so a "Yes, but doing this isn’t easy, or you have a higher chance to crash while doing this, or … " something that does not outright stop you from trying to do something like that in the first place. It just doesn’t need to have a 100% chance of failure or disappointment at the end of it like it does with unbreakable barriers.

This is why I enjoy playing the levels as they appear in the Episodes far more than seeing them again in Universe. I get some choice in what to do even though that choice may not be as easy as just doing it in the intended route.

  • In Weakest Link, I can break the small barriers along with the Chicken, blast through the big ones and make my own hole, or try to clear as many of them as I can.
  • For Do Not Cross, I could break the ball very easily and see the desperate chickens all falling down doing practically nothing (I did what the level told me not to do, which is a win in my book).
    • At least until it got tweaked in the Episodes to be practically unbreakable.
      Like, seriously, 2 damage boosted Bombers with max power each and I can’t drop it down to yellow? What is this thing? (edit: i now know that they have 10x more health than the OG version, that’s why)
  • Lethal Connections: breaking some metal eggs before it drops down.
  • … You get the point by now.

The only real high point I ever got from a level that feature unbreakable barriers is in Effervesence, and that is because this is probably the only level that also offers different ways to tackle it - same as the other examples.

  • I can kill the chickens while staying within the intended area.
  • Or I can cheese the thing by moving my ship outside of the intended area at the start of the round.
  • This is not the perfect example, but the point is, it still has options on how you fly the dang thing.

Why is this a problem?

  • From a player standpoint, The game has a pool of levels that it gives out. So at some point, having seen the same gimmicks over and over again, it starts to become really really boring just doing the same thing, the same way, every single time.
    • Mirroring the levels does little to change this experience - at this stage you can tell that it’s just been mirrored. Also because you can’t call the level the same level anymore if too much detail about it gets changed.
  • From a development standpoint, the game has a pool of levels that it gives out. If a level only has a few proper ways to clear it, we’d always have to add new levels in to the game in order to provide something new to players.
    • Which gets boring after a while - I can see why IA doesn’t want to do this for the time being.
    • The better solution would be to implement something that offers new ways to tackle all the old levels, adding new things to do in a much greater scale than adding levels can possibly do.
  • This isn’t really a problem in Competitive, so the potential solution to this should not affect Competitive at all.

A potential solution?

Honestly this is a wider problem that can’t easily be fixed. Doing anything about it requires reworking the levels, or the barriers and how they work, which changes a lot of things that I can’t account for in a simple “How it feels” kinda post. I’m not a developer of this game, after all, so here are some silly tweaks for now that I know won’t get added:

  • Maybe barriers that aren’t meant to be broken should be made breakable to allow for more choices, but they have a bit more health than usual or doesn’t add any points for doing it, or something like that to promote that “Yes … but” thing I mentioned previously.
  • Maybe levels with unbreakable barriers should have some barriers be breakable to offer more routes to approach the levels.

I don’t really know. I’m just raising something that I really, really don’t like and see what you have to say about it. So yeah, let the talk begin, I guess. I’m gonna go get some sleep now.

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That’s the point. It would make the waves so much easier when you just break the wave gimmicks with them.
CIU has passed a lot of rework structures to prevent wave cheesing.
Plus, when you give barrier more hp, it creates an exploit to let you farm accuracy medal.

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In game design, “Yes … but” is still better than a flat out “No”.
You can break the gimmicks, but doing this should not be easy.
I think I already made this point clear in the first post.

As for the exploits … I kinda don’t want to expand on this yet because it’s in the “implementation details” part of the whole deal - and this is just a “How it feels” kinda post. I know it won’t be added precisely because of this reason though.

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Does not mean the barriers are breakable. Not the solution I was looking for.
And I wasn’t complaining that levels with these are “too hard” or “unfair” or something like that. Did you even read the post?

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Why do you even need to break it? You can just follow the given gimmicks and nothing will happen.
And you aren’t supposed to break it in the first place by the way (if you’re talking about The Weakest/Strongest link).

Otherwise, other methods exists.

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Having the choice to do so just makes it more interesting.
Because the available level pool is limited, I’ve seen the same gimmicks so many times now that it starts to get a bit boring just going through it the same way every single time.
I just want some options I can do in each encounter to mix things up.

PS: I’ve added some points I’ve missed from these discussions to the first post.

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Anyway what you on about since you can just ignore them? They maybe annoying but honestly they’re the least of your concerns

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What do you mean I can just ignore waves with unbreakable barriers?
When you play CI or Darkness (or Key Rush) you’re going to get these levels and there’s not much you can do about that. Are you suggesting I do CIU without playing CI? That’s like 2/3 of the title.
(I’m assuming “they” are waves with unbreakable barriers - you didn’t specify at the time)

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“They” probably means the barriers themselves, not waves.

I recommend ignoring these. Some people will just pin anything down on skill issue. Don’t even bother arguing, you’ll just be fighting an uphill battle.

It’s been a while since I played but I do remember feeling far more satisfied when I could destroy barriers in waves like weakest link. As it is rn, it feels…underwhelming? Idk. I think some waves might just not work without indestructible barriers but surely some would, like this wave.

On a side note, for competitive players indestructible barriers are actually better because you don’t have to waste amplifiers just to be able to destroy more barriers.

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The problem is that if you don’t point out what the problem is (or really, what feels odd? wrong?) about the game, the game itself just won’t be improved. Which is why this rant exists.

Also, yes, some waves would work better if the barriers are indestructible like the Vending Machines and Three Stroke Engine because having them breakable would just mean you spend more time in said wave breaking them all before moving on (also because for the most part, they don’t get in your way at all, so you’d feel nothing special if you do get to break em).
Waves like these are partly why I said a single patch won’t be able to fix this issue in its entirety - there are a lot of things to consider as the unbreakable barriers can be found in a lot of the CI levels.

Also, thanks for the note, but I already know about the competitive barriers situation. I even mentioned it in the first post, but just recapped it by saying that that the current state about unbreakable barriers have no problems in competitive play.

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I’m not telling you not to make posts. Hell I am on your side, I think your post is fine. I am referring to replying to the people in the thread that give no real criticism and just say “skill issue” in various ways. I recommend ignoring them, some people here will reply with skill issue to any post that suggests changing a core aspect of the game, especially if they think it makes the game easier. But I didn’t mean you shouldn’t make topics or reply to actual constructive criticism.

Funny enough I enjoy destroying barriers in those waves too, even if it’s a waste of time in vending machine where the barriers are x10 hp in the og ci4 :v

Ik, I just added that indestructible barriers don’t just add challenge to the waves (technically they make some of them easier), they also help not waste as many special weapons and thus keys. Aka slightly less grind. It’s not much, but…it helps

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All good points.

I don’t think either approach (“breakable” or “unbreakable”) is superior in all cases.

The major benefit of unbreakable barriers is that they constrain the player within (or outside) a particular region of the screen. This becomes important in waves where allowing the player to roam freely (free-range player?) would break the wave mechanic itself (examples: “From Cover to Cover”, “Treasury”, “Grand Prix”, “Bird House”, “Dyson Spheres”, “Corridor Shooter”, “Exclusion Zone”, “The Forge”, “Gladiator”, “Hairpin Turn”, “On the Radar”, as well as others already mentioned above).

This makes the waves more interesting. Otherwise they would all ultimately boil down to a single rectangular “fly wherever you like” rectangle. There’s only so many innovations you can introduce based on that (especially since most new waves from now on will most likely feature a gimmick of some sort).

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I know why unbreakable barriers exist. It’s just that having seen and solved these kinds of levels in the same way over and over again, it just becomes really really boring at some point. The novelty wears off after a while for everyone. Mine just happens to be somewhere at the 500 hour mark. And having been forced to solve the levels in the same way over and over and over again because of 1 single obstacle class, you can kinda see why I started to hate these things in particular.

But anyways, I just want to at least have a different way to tackle the same old levels to make them feel a bit more exciting if I see another one of those things. They don’t have to be as easy, nor should they give you an edge over those that did the levels the “intended” way. It’s just a way to make them feel a bit less stale, as it were.

A new booster or ship variant would also work since it would offer new ways to tackle all the old levels, adding new things in a much greater scale than what can be done by just adding levels or tweaking existing ones.
Though this is probably the hardest option - having done something like this before as mods for different games, I get that designing new and unique perks while also keeping them balanced with the others is not easy. But it’ll be worth it in the long run.

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Grand Prix wave could easily have a few barriers among them be breakable to give funny side paths and cheat the chickens, but I don’t think it would feel as satisfying.

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Yep. That would’ve been something that felt intended instead of you actually having done something you’re not supposed to kinda feeling. It’s why I said a solution to this won’t be easy.

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Not easy but possible, however if IA doesn’t feel it worth entertaining and can justify why, then coming up with and justifying specific cases for certain waves is tough.

As a compromise, maybe we can have alternate versions of some waves that replace the normal one some % of the time (as opposed to adding to the wave pool).
Thoughts on this? @InterAction_studios

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