10 Things I hate about WipEout Pulse

[mdhay]

I wish I could quote you for truth, fox, but my PSP doesn't allow that much text.

Annoying, isn't it?


Shame about the whole mass - market affecting WipEout. It was going to happen anyway.

[Dogg Thang]

I guess so but it seems slightly self-defeating to me. The Burnout crowd is well catered for with games like, well, Burnout. I love popping it on and getting straight into some cool races. That's the draw of a game like that. But looking at the huge sales figures of something like that would, to me, show a market that already has their needs filled.

And Wipeout is unlikely to really capture that crowd.

It's like trying to sell a fine wine to beer drinkers. Diluting the wine and trying to make it more beer-like won't make for a better drink and will just alienate the wine drinkers. Everybody loses. Best thing to do is accept what it is and try to make the best fine wine possible.

Hmmm... that sounds familiar. I think I've made that analogy before. Possibly a few times.

[infoxicated]

As for Wipeout 3, I've been meaning to make a "10 Things I hate about WipEout 3", but I don't want to get banned already...

That... well, that's just about the most ridiculous thing you could have said.

If you really think you'd get banned for giving your honest, considered opinion on any of the games then I don't know what forum you've been visiting, but you're confusing it with this one.

[guillaume]

Before listing any bad points about Pulse, here is my 'WipEout profile'.
I didn't know about WipEout before Pure.
I played Pure, I'd say, at least 200 hours. I played internal view only. I played multiplayer about one hour. I played Triakis and Piranha mostly.
I played Pulse about 20 hours, solo only, Assegai only, internal only, hard difficulty level only.
I started a first profile, played about 4 hours, then read about the records bug on WZ. Checked my profile, dropped it because it was buggy, started a new one. Played it about 3 hours, then saved a broken record. I hadn't realized that leaving a tourney after exploding is not enough...
So I started a third profile, which is clean until now. Probably because I quit the game the second my ship explodes, and that I check my single race records about each time I start the game. I am a maniac freak.
So!

The first point would be:
- The records bug! How come a bug like that made it through debug sessions? It was in Pure already (as well as the missile thingy which appears even after you shot the missile).

- The fact that your ship will stop completely for a second or so if you hit a wall at high speeds. It looks like the collision system isn't fast enough to compute the results.

- Linked to the collision system: you can often see the inside of the track ground, eg when you drop from a jump, you go "lower" than the track ground, which is quite disturbing.

- The AI aggressivity. It is too much. I don't know if Assegai is made of paper, but it feels like I can go from 100% to 0 in 5 seconds.

- The difficulty level bug when resuming a tourney. So with what is listed above: I blow my Assegai on Outpost 7, the 7th track of a 12 tracks tourney. I quit the game. I re-launch the game. I delete the tourney progression. So I have to start the tourney all over again. Boohoo me

- It feels like the ships stick more to the walls than in Pure. Maybe that's just me. Shouldn't the ship go away from the wall instead of sticking to it?

- I liked having each ship's time at the end of a race. I miss it in Pulse.

- In a tourney, I don't like the fact that the results screen switches between race and tourney, most of the time I skip the first thinking that I'll see the second one later, then realize I missed it.

- I don't like how loyalty points are displayed at the end of the race. Why not have '10 x 1 zone' instead of 1 zone, 1 zone, 1 zone, ...?

- I don't like mag-strips very much. When they're implemented like in Vertica, because I get sick. And when they're looping because I don't see more than two meters in front of me.

- Some tracks are too dark. Because the PSP screen is like a mirror and that I can't always close the curtains. So I get better on tracks that are clearer.

- I don't like intro movies the way they were made. Why not show all the track, instead of parts so tiny that I don't understand what I'm looking at?

- I don't like the bomb's blast radius. It is so big that when I drop a bomb it usually touches me. Having to look backwards before dropping a bomb is not very newcomer-friendly

- I don't like the leech-beam making your ship go crasy. Isn't it enough that it sucks my energy? And you're still able to pick up weapons while using your leech-beam, which makes it a super-weapon to me.

- I don't like that you cannot pick up weapons while using autopilot. Once you knew the tracks well in Pure, the autopilot was only useful in precise locations of the tracks. It's become even weaker in Pulse.

- I don't like the barrel roll bug. If it couldn't be fixed in Pulse, well... it should have been! At least, couldn't the energy be taken only if you actually got your boost?

- I don't like eliminator mode. I would have been happy if the time spent on it would have been bugfix time instead.

- Less details, less FXs would have meant no sound glitches nor framerate drops. When you boost then do a barrel roll, you never get the sound of the latter, even if it worked (I think so).


I guess I have to stop Sorry my post is not very 'forum-friendly', it went in all directions... It's more like a customer report...
Because until now, I think I prefer Pure over Pulse. But there's a good chance it'll change in time! And there are many things I like, so I'll post in the '10 things I love...', otherwise it wouldn't be fair to the game

[rejj]

However, the genie is out of the bottle with regard to barrel rolls now. There is no going back.

Just because there've been barrel rolls for two games now doesn't mean that they are a must have feature for every game to come, surely.

• Wipeout 3 didn't have a turbo pickup.
• Autopilot behaviour has changed greatly between games.
• We now respawn instead of having a rescue wagon.
• Fusion let you shoot backwards.

etc.
Things always change. We have barrel rolls now, but hopefully we don't have to always have them.

I think the recent (PSP) games have made some great additions to wipeout, also - sideshifting and absorb are both changes that I like. I don't want to sound totally down on Pulse: I've been having fun playing it. I'll use barrel rolls because they are in the game, but I wish they weren't.

[HISHO[JP]]

I saw this.

So one new hate thing is "Mirage is not free for multiplayer".

£1 = about 240~260yen
£3.49 = about 872yen

Maybe Mirage is not free in JP version too...

[Rapier Racer]

Heh hey they are charging for the packs, as I expected.

[TearsToShreds]

Mark my words, theyll release some sort of special pack after the initial packs with one extra track and all ships available online. :/

[Tomahawk]

I've finally reached more than 35 hours of playtime on pulse. Time for my two cents in this thread.

1. the finish line bug
I don't know if it's a real bug or if the developers wanted it to be like this: if you're crossing the finish line with your ship sticking too close to the tracks' wall you'll hit an "invisible post" and your ship will all of a sudden come to a complete stop and/or fly straight up into the sky. I want to see what I can hit with my ship! If I don't see it, I can't fly around it!

2. collision with walls
For me it often feels like my ship is "sucked" into the walls in pulse. I've experienced that when I hit a wall and want to steer close of it again by pressing the nub away from the wall I just don't get away from it. Instead my ship sometimes sticks to the wall as if it was glued onto it. I have to steer away from it by holding the nub in the direction I want to go for a long time. In the higher speed classes this kind of "necessary heavy steering" made me hit the wall on the opposite side of the track right after I came free...

3. race time bug
It's been said often enough I guess, but I have to repeat it again: If I get killed in a tournament race a broken record is saved to my profile and I can do nothing to delete it. A bug like this should never have made it through into the final version of the game not because it's simply annoying to everybody. It's also causing some serious issues on the official records tables at wipeout-game.com where I can only upload my full profile to the database and am not able to select single records to upload. The tables look like they'd be full of cheaters this way.

4. no tracks shown in tournaments
If I'm entering a tournament I don't see what tracks the tour is made of or how many tracks the tour consists of. I really like the idea to be able to customize your tournaments for offline or online racing, but I'd really like to be able to see at first sight what tracks I have to race before the tour starts.

5. no free play mode
What's the deal with the speed lap race mode? Only 7 laps but I can race it as often as I wish in racebox? That feels like a crippled free play mode including unnecessary long loading times. I think it would have been better to put the free play mode into the game instead of the new speed lap mode.

6. weapon collison
This might be the point that has been the most frustrating for me until now. It seems like it doesn't matter what kind of weapon hits your ship, nearly everything makes you come to a complete stop, be it missle, rockets, quake, a few rounds of the cannon, a bomb or mines... It's also most annoying that if I get hit by something and my ship gets pushed over the edge (on the free track sections at tech de ra or arc prime for example) the game won't let me continue racing immediately after I'm respawned. Instead I have to wait another fraction of a second until the weapon damage effect wears off completely as if being pushed over the edge and getting respwaned isn't enough punishment already...

7. barrel rolls
Too much of them in the game, you can't pull them whenever you want to do so (framrate issues) and the ability to be able to link one br to another only by using the airtime and speed you get from the first br just pisses me off. If the br feature is added to the game in this way it's not necessary to do the most perfect laps or have the best racing line on some tracks, but to do the most barrel rolls at the most ridiculous places during a race and the win is yours for sure. Simply annyoing!

8. cheating AI
I say that the AI is cheating in pulse, at least in hard mode! I've never been on the edge of throwing my psp out of the window and stomping the pulse umd to tiny bits and pieces so often compared to any other game I own. If I'm overtaken on the long straight at moa therma black by an AI ship using a turbo boost and the same AI pulls over right in front of me after it passed me, dropping a bomb right in front of my nose without passing over a single weapon pad then I call this cheating! It's also always very surprising to see how the AI seems to be able to control turbo boosts right through the narrowest curves and 180-turns or how often I get hit by two or three quakes in a row after I have taken first place in a race... The AI in pulse is the best and hardest to beat compared to any other wipeout game up to today, but I still don't feel as if they'd really be racing me on a fair basis.

9. price for DLC
I've written enough about my opinion on the price of the pulse DLC, so I won't go into any details or repeat myself over and over again here. Just two words: RIP OFF!

That's been 9 points that I don't hate about pulse, but that I really don't like about the game and I hope that they'll be fixed in some way for the next wipeout game that'll be released.

[BARTgai]

couldn't agree more with 3, 5, 7, and 9

[guillaume]

I completely agree with your 6th point. And one of the consequences of being completely stopped in a race, combined with the packed racing of the AI, is that you often go from 1st to 8th just because of a weapon hit. I may be exaggerating a bit but not that much. With the AI being that aggressive, it's hard to pass all ships, then in one second I come back to 8th.
And then I'm sad, you see.

EDIT: A weapon hit also annules the boost of a barrel roll. So instead of trying to BR to countereffect the hit, you avoid the BR to avoid losing energy for nothing. I'd very much like to know if it was thought this way or not.
Because it's naughty.

[zargz]

yeh, the annoying part is that when landing you can hear the boost-sound.
I think that if you do the br, get hit in the air and when you land don't get the boost
it's ok, fair enough but if you don't get the boost then don't do the sound

on the other side you could get stopped in the air but then when you drop like a stone
may be you should get the boost anyway since you've completed the br.

which one is more logical? I dunno. either way sounds ok to me
however if there's a sound there should be a boost, logically.

now that I've noticed that I don't count with a boost anyway.

[Dogg Thang]

Well I think I'm at a point now where I can contribute to this thread. In particular order -

1. Bug: Ambient sound vanishing. In general, I wish more had gone into the ambient sound. For example, I feel the crowd in Amphiseum should sound huge and I'd love more sounds from the ships in Vertica. But it wouldn't matter anyway as, once the PSP goes into sleep mode, crowd sounds vanish and the other sounds disappear randomly. It's a bug that never should have got through.

2. Overpowered weapons. Coupled with the overly aggresive AI (which I'll just lump in with this one), the weapons are a pain in the ass, plain and simple. That producers interview where he talks about pure racing and balance is quite ridiculous. Unless you're doing TT or have weapon off, this is a combat game.

3. Price of download packs. Beyond ridiculous when you consider what percentage it is of the full game price. Of course the full game contains the game itself with all the coding that entails, the music, 12 tracks, 8 ships, all the modes, front end and so on. So to charge what they are for just 4 tracks and 4 ships is quite crazy. Splitting the black and white runs is nasty. And the ships can't be used online? I imagine that is due to a bug or two.

4. Bug: crashes caused by the addition of the download packs. I'll also add the horrendous loading times in here too. I was happy enough with the Pulse loading times on my PSP Slim but the packs have bumped them up far too much. Everything takes too long to load. That assumes, of course, that it will load and not crash which seems pretty common now. That should not happen. At all.

5. 'Leave no space unfilled'. SL can model some lovely background elements but, in my opinion, composition is a real problem and few, if any, of those elements are used as well as they could be. This was a problem in Pure - everything felt so close and claustrophobic. Pulse is much worse in this regard. It's hard to tell what is what half the time because everything is thrown onto the screen at once. I didn't know there even was a ship in Vertica until I crawled through the track on a sightseeing mission. Why model it if you can't see it? Edgewinter is the ultimate in this.

6. Bug: Just a small one but a little frustrating. The game won't remember you're using a custom skin after coming back from sleep mode. Why?

7. Barrel Rolls. Don't like them but we can also add, Bug: they don't alway work because of the frame system.

8. Bug: Race time bug. I'm not even all that competitive when it comes to games like this so I hate to think how annoying this must be for the serious wipers. This should never have happened.

9. Floatiness, or lack of. Coupled with the odd inconsistency like, Bug: when your craft stops dead after a jump and then suddenly boosts for no reason whatsoever.

10. Waiiiiiiiiiting for online games to continue. Given that with the loading times and the amount of botched games due to bad connections or people leaving or whatever, to compound that with almost a minute of waiting between anything online seems nuts to me. Quite simply online is too slow an experience for me. It's far more waiting than play.


Seems there's a pattern with much of this: bugs, bugs, bugs. Wipeout Pulse is by far one of the most bug ridden games I have ever played. Now Pure was pretty buggy so I would have hoped more effort would have gone into quality control in Pulse but it seems that hasn't happened. The only other game I can think that compares was a cheap conversion of Super Puzzle Fighter for the GBA that crashed on a regular basis. I can think of no other that is in the same league as Pulse. Why no quality control?

And of course the packs have tipped this well over the edge with their crazy pricing and adding loading time and more bugs and not being able to use the craft online, allowing me to get to 10 'hates' quite easily.

[BARTgai]

I have noticed a few bugs...

1. When the AI fires a Leech at another AI, my ship will sometimes show the blue energy waves on my craft, but they wont be moving. happens a lot more on eliminator

2. On Talons Junction, the part where the track makes the U-Turn under the suspended car things that move along the tracks. There are a few where the car is missing, but the bottom is still there, so it looks like one car with a floating light in front of it.

3. Metropia. on the black run in the intro, there are two smaller buildings on the left. in the white run, they are missing.

all I have found so far...

[Nadia Elenova]

Now that I made up my mind about outpost 7, it's no longer on my list but:

1- Leech beam effect on player's ship. You all know what I'm talking about.

2- Dark track sections or entire dark tracks. Makes it impossible to play in good lighting conditions. (Even on a rainy day)

3- Sucking walls. Mag-Strips on walls too? no, thanks.

4- Player's ship is the AI's target of choice. Why shooting a missile to the ship in front when you can drop a bomb to player's ship? And they always have a quake when you're first.

5- The price for download packs.

6- When you're hit your ships makes a full stop, why? You can drop from firts to last just because a missile hit.

7- No unlockable concept art.

8- Finishing line bug, landing bug, etc. that makes your ship stop and then boost without a reason.

9- Consecutive Turbo for an AI, should have been restricted, when you got two or three consecutive Turbos?

10- It's pretty difficult to eliminate a ship, that's because the AI barely hits each other, as mentioned in point 4.

UNBELIEVABLE UNFAIR AI BEHAVIOR
Ok, I've just played a tournament, rapier, medium difficulty, track: Moa Therma Black. I was first place, then I got hit by a missile, my ships stops (as always) and then I got another missile hit (well, annoying but may happen). Then, when my ship is ABOUT to start moving again I got ANOTHER MISSILE HIT from the last ship. At this time my ship is about to explode, but I continue the race, pick up a weapon and absorve it. When I passed the last ship, IT SHOOTED ANOTHER MISSILE and set me about to blow (and my ship too). So I got last place in the last lap just because the AI is WAY TOO UNFAIR. If it were in hard difficulty, what the AI would have done? Wait behind a corner aiming backwards with a Plasma loaded? Don't **** me!
(<--- smile at the end)

[Nadia Elenova]

Some people got reaaaaaaaally confused when reading my previous post so I wan't to say I'm not complaining about AI developing at all (wiper since 2097 and now this ). It was just a curious thing that happened during a race and posted for fun. Maybe needed a smile at the end.

[guillaume]

Other negative points to me:

- When you shut down the music, you don't hear the man voice during introductions.
- Colliding with other ships gives damage. What is this for? Realism?

Overall, I think that Pure was almost pure, and that Pulse is messy. Too ambitious with not enough time, maybe. Certainly not enough tested.
That makes me wonder, even if I don't know if this can be answered:
What did SL want for Pulse? What did Sony want?
I don't know how reacted the majority of newcomers to WipEout, but despite the efforts made for them, I believe Pulse is too frustrating, because of both bugs and some elements of gameplay (sticky walls to name a major one).
So if Sony rushed the release of Pulse, and that at the same time they wanted to enlarge the audience, I think they made a mistake. I wouldn't advice anyone to buy Pulse, whereas I'd go on for hours worshipping Pure.

[zargz]

- Colliding with other ships gives damage. What is this for? Realism?

imo that's a good thing

[BARTgai]

Overall, I think that Pure was almost pure, and that Pulse is messy.

That is exactly what I thought

[master bruce]

1. difficulty level. I believe this game is too hard for most average players. I think that while hardcore players welcome the challenge, I think the points necessary to unlock things should be lowered.

2. not enough rewards. I think the game should have more rewards...ie for getting all gold in a grid.

3. the DL packs seem a bit too pricey imo...buying all four would make the game about $60!

-------------

this is mainly a response to Colin:

As a casual gamer and newcomer to Wipeout, I just wanted to offer you my perspective on how you could make the next Wipeout even more accessible to mass audience. I think this board may skew people's perspectives, since as you said, most of the this board are the very top players.

1. add a tutorial mode: to give wipeout noobs an introduction to how wipeout physics differ from normal driving games and to introduce the weaponry and items, to teach the barrel roll, airbrakes, etc.

reason: even though most on this forum will consider it unnecessary, having a tutorial mode (even one that isn't that useful) will really make it feel more accessible and friendly to newcomers. Also, you will get brownie points with reviewers who will point out accessibility to beginners.

2. Lower the bronze requirements - so players can generally open up all the grids. This doesn't affect hardcore players since gold requirement can still be set high so good players are still rewarded, but noobs can still finish the campaign rather than getting stuck and giving up on the game.

3. make the AI on the easy level easier. I find them still to be too aggressive.

4. have more rewards (concept art, more skins, etc) to motivate the noobs to stick through the initial learning curve

5. maybe have a story campaign mode...where each team gets a story to progress through. This would give someone more of a reason to play through the game rather than the arbitrary goal of getting medals and such.

6. make the differences between the ships more obvious