Hard Reset’s soft reset

Posted by on September 23, 2011 in Games

Hard Reset got a patch today that made a few significant changes to how the game plays. Mostly for the better.

Some commentary, after the jump

Sprint (shortly) even while still recharging – Sprinting is now possible at any moment – you don’t have to wait till the sprint bar fills up.

I assumed this was an intentional design decision. I liked that sprint required a full refractory period before you could use it again. I say this having done a lot of half-assed stamina management in Dead Island, where I get a smidge of stamina back and then immediately spend it, at which point I’m right back where I started: getting knocked on my butt by a zombie. Now it’ll be easier to dash around in Hard Reset, which is a key part of some of the fights.

Improved the time between switching between N.R.G. Weapon adn CLN Firearm.

I also thought this was a design decision, but I’m not sorry for anything that makes it easier to use different weapons. A constant tension in Hard Reset was “Do I keep shooting this gun, or do I start the half-hour long animation that will switch me to the other weapon?”

Single Switch-Weapon Button – the F key will now switch between weapons.

Ah, thank you! I could never keep it straight which gun was the Q key and which gun was the E key. I wonder if there’s any chance we’ll be able to assign hotkeys to specific weapon configurations? Or is that part of the design? That we have to calculate which configuration we have assigned to a weapon at any given time so that we know what’s coming up when we switch weapons?

Mid-game difficulty change – You are now able to switch difficulty midgame (the lowest difficulty ever chosen during the whole run determines the achievements unlocked).

Whatever. This was probably a widely requested feature by a bunch of whinybaby gamers who can’t commit to a difficulty level. The next step is a giant “I Win” button on the main menu.

In-game Score report – You are now able to check your Mission stats while in-game pressing the Tab key.

Very nice, Flying Wild Hog. A lot of Hard Reset’s replay value is based on us caring about the scoring system. Thanks for letting us monitor it. But for a best-case example of how this should work, check out Avalanche Studio’s superlative Renegade Ops.

Disable logos – You are now able to disable starting logos in the Game options menu.

Always a good thing, but Flying Wild Hog’s logo cinematic is a grand one that I don’t mind watching.

Small healthpacks now regenerate 20 HP instead of 30 HP.

Ooh, that’s going to hurt.

The complete list of changes is here. But the bigger news, which isn’t really news until we know more, is that Flying Wild Hog let slip they’ll add a new mode in a few weeks. No word yet on what this is, but any new way to play Hard Reset will be welcome.

  • Alistair

    You probably know this… but the number keys do switch to a particular configuration. I guess you mean independently of which weapon you’re using. But then you’d need all the keys from 1-9 or 0 and what kind of lunacy is that?

  • Anonymous

    Correct, Alistair. It can take multiple steps to switch from my blue zappy gun to my grenade launcher if my grenade launcher is in, say, shotgun mode. It’s such a convoluted process considering the pace of the game that I can’t imagine it wasn’t intentional.

  • Nightwish

    ”’Whatever. This was probably a widely requested feature by a bunch of whinybaby gamers who can’t commit to a difficulty level. The next step is a giant “I Win” button on the main menu.”’
    I think it’s great that you can spend your whole life gaming, Tom, but most of us have something else to do other than guessing what “normal” means for a particular game or playing the same thing again and again.
    Not that I care about FPS of the week type games.

  • Anonymous

    I’m being a bit facetious, Mr. Wish.

    For me, a lot of the value in Hard Reset is pushing through some of the harder encounters to the next checkpoint. But I do appreciate that they’re tying achievements to sticking to a single difficulty level. If I only I could bring myself to care about Steam achievements…

  • Zeewolf

    I wish they’d allowed me the mid-game difficulty change back when I was playing. I couldn’t pass that annoying Atlas-boss on medium, so I had to play the rest of the game in godmode (which is what the easy difficulty setting really is) as I couldn’t switch the difficulty back up again. And that was annoying.

    (if I’d known that the difference between easy and medium was that huge I probably would have given that bloody boss a few extra tries, but the problem was that a) it was really frustrating and b) bosses are almost never fun in the first place, and this guy was certainly no exception)

  • Anonymous

    Can’t you pick your game up from the boss level again, with the difficulty still at medium?  I’m pretty sure all the checkpoints you’ve reached in the game are saved in a list.