{"id":53851,"date":"2022-02-15T06:00:59","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53851"},"modified":"2022-03-06T07:17:30","modified_gmt":"2022-03-06T12:17:30","slug":"resident-evil-5-3-a-miner-setback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53851","title":{"rendered":"Resident Evil 5 #2: A Miner Setback"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight <a href=\"https:\/\/everytimezone.com\/s\/374234c4\">at 7pm<\/a>, you can <a href=\"https:\/\/www.twitch.tv\/ramblepak64\">join Chris and I on his Twitch channel<\/a> as we guide our hapless protagonists from one ill-advised misadventure to another.<\/p>\n<p>I have to make a minor correction: Last week I claimed that the developers designed the game with the intention that Sheva gets the rifle and Chris gets the shotgun. Since we did it the other way, the game was always giving us the wrong ammo. It turns out I was wrong about the cause of this problem.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.twitch.tv\/?video=1292334601&amp;parent=www.shamusyoung.com&amp;autoplay=false\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" frameborder=\"0\"scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>As it turns out, the game does this no matter what weapons you have. If Sheva breaks open a container, then the game creates ammo for Chris. If Chris opens something, he gets ammo for Sheva. We played for two hours last week, and this behavior was incredibly consistent. I opened countless containers in this play session, but the only time I got shotgun shells was when Chris opened a container.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I guess this is to reinforce the &#8220;cooperation&#8221; thing the designer is selling us. The problem is that it&#8217;s completely undercut by the intolerable inventory. I&#8217;m supposed to pick up ammo for Chris and hand it to him. And he&#8217;s supposed to collect ammo for me. But you can&#8217;t collect ammo for your friend when your inventory is ALREADY FULL. <\/p>\n<p>Your primary weapon takes one slot, and its ammo takes another. But you can&#8217;t use that all the time, so you also need to use two more slots for your pistol and its ammo. Your armor takes another slot, because I guess you keep your armor in the pocket of your armor. Great. Now you should probably have at least one grenade for when one of those ridiculous bullet sponges show up. <\/p>\n<p>So your normal, baseline, bare-minimum loadout takes 6 of your 9 slots, leaving you with 3 slots to work with during gameplay. Now you have to contend with the fact that this game has like four different kinds of healing items.<span class='snote' title='1'>Red herb, green herb, healing spray, and &#8220;egg&#8221;.<\/span> They don&#8217;t stack, but some of them can be combined. Oh, and your bullets don&#8217;t stack that much, so sometimes your pistol bullets will overflow and eat another slot during the ebb and flow of shooting and looting.<\/p>\n<p>All of this gets worse if you decide to carry the rifle. The rifle doesn&#8217;t get enough ammo for general use, and it&#8217;s not really suited for most of the close-quarters fighting you&#8217;ll be doing. But once in a while you&#8217;ll be in an open area and the rifle is really helpful in those situations. So if you choose to carry the rifle, then you&#8217;ll <strong>also<\/strong> need a shotgun or SMG to use as a main weapon. <\/p>\n<p>A lot of the time, you&#8217;re just not going to have the space to grab that ammo for your friend. I understand what the designer was trying to do, but playtesting ought to have revealed that this system leads to more frustration than cooperation. Instead of each of us looting half the area and trading ammo at the end, we each break open half the containers to find stuff we can&#8217;t pick up, then run around and collect from the containers our partner opened. It actually makes the game <strong>less<\/strong> cooperative, since we both need to visit every container.<\/p>\n<p>Just&#8230; yuck.<\/p>\n<p>I want to make it clear that it&#8217;s not all bad. In fact, I&#8217;d say the game does an overall good job of fostering cooperation and making it interesting. I like how using healing will heal both people if you&#8217;re close together. I like how teammates can save each other if they get swarmed \/ low on health. I like that the game gives me a way to locate my teammate, but it doesn&#8217;t just show them through walls at all times. I think the various doors, bridges, and gates that require teamwork are kinda fun. Fights are really well-balanced for a group of two. We can each cover a couple of entrances, and it&#8217;s rare that we end up competing for targets. <\/p>\n<p>Overall, this is a pretty good co-op game. But the way ammo is distributed is horrible. And that&#8217;s only horrible because the inventory system sucks. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight at 7pm, you can join Chris and I on his Twitch channel as we guide our hapless protagonists from one ill-advised misadventure to another. I have to make a minor correction: Last week I claimed that the developers designed the game with the intention that Sheva gets the rifle and Chris gets the shotgun. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-streaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53851"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53968,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53851\/revisions\/53968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}