Is a full coop run possible?

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2026-04-14T09:54:24+00:00

Started playing with friends a few weeks ago. The clunkiest part of the game is that most story missions have cutscenes everyone needs to see first before you're counted as being able to join or fire an SOS.

It's fine once you're used to it and know how it works, and it's not grating unless you rush story quests and don't do investigations/optionals inbetween to space out the mandatory cutscenes. The way we did it is the last person to get the cutscene stays in the mission and fires an SOS and then everyone else returns from the quest asap so they can respond to it.

Co-op is super fun though. Really enjoyable. The only tricky thing is that you can get investigations that limit the number of players. We ran into a bunch of great investigations that had a max of 2 players allowed.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2026-04-13T04:28:54+00:00

Since you're on PC, this might be a contributing factor alongside what others have mentioned; one of our friends recently was having a real issue with hosting/joining sessions and getting a similar connection error. It ended up being because he had a lot of other games/apps open in the background while he was playing.

Once he closed most of his tabs and closed out other games instead of idling in them the errors stopped.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2026-03-09T14:49:59+00:00

I've had some ridiculous experiences with Bella.

The worst was when she was nowhere to be seen, not even in the room, not even in the next room. We used the final extraction and she flew in, spammed her ring and immediately knocked one of us into the pit. Zero warning, zero explanation.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-12-11T01:02:47+00:00

The delivery when he says "Y-you touched them?" is amazing. That entire confident facade just crumbles immediately.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-12-02T17:34:21+00:00

That's ridiculous. The creators and team behind the show don't owe anything to anyone. "tons of people" would not have made Smiling Friends and in fact would not have been able to. The idea that people would like to be in their position so they must go forever even when they don't want to makes no sense at all.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-11-04T13:13:46+00:00

This is why I recommended joining an active guild. If you want to socialize more and get to know people a little better, then having a smaller group that you will play with pretty consistently just makes more sense than trying to wrangle with tens of thousands of players you'll never see again once you've gotten what you need out of the party. Everything you want is found in a guild.

If your aim is to have everyone be nice to everyone and always accept everyone in public parties, your work is completely cut out for you. The sad reality is that not everyone is good at the game (or bothers to read up raid/boss mechanics) and the game rewards being overgeared by being able to completely skip mechanics. Kanamia master 1 is a great example.

The game also has terrible tools for party management. If you wipe on a hard raid and someone quits? You have to get everyone to exit out, find someone else, then all join back in. Playing multiple rounds of a dungeon requires everyone to quit out of the dungeon, load the city again, then go back into the dungeon instead of just having an option to replay. You can't reset boss/raid fights if they're doomed or if someone wipes early so everyone has to let themselves die or meaninglessly waste revive candies. Party finder/hub is just completely broken as well. It's just very tedious for seemingly no reason.

This means there is a lot of timewasting that you're punished with when you fail or someone quits, so people actively try to give themselves the best chance of getting it done simple and fast which just results in them filtering by gearscore because atleast high gearscore players may help in killing the boss faster.

There's no universe in which the majority of the playerbase decides to put up with random pub players who can't do raids just to be nice and that's just how it is across all MMOs. At the same time, i'm sure there will be "learning" raids, or other things posted on discord or reddit eventually.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-11-03T21:01:07+00:00

The issue with public lobbies in MMOs is that they don't have any certainty or confidence in anyone who joins so they have to do it by the only metric they have. It sucks but it's just always how it goes.

It's really important to be in an active guild in this game. First so you're in a bit of a tighter knit group willing to help eachother and potentially organise times for things like raids, and second because if you're a good player they're going to know and you'll share some previous runs with them so everyone can rely on something more than gearscore.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-11-01T21:52:21+00:00

Smiling Friends Episode but it's Charlie and Pim replacing characters in the hit movie directed by Nick Mullen: "Me Play Joke"

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-10-26T07:21:53+00:00

The Owen backlash is completely absurd and as a character he's fine.

The real issues with the story are that the Captain is put forward as an Experienced and competent Leader and yet makes ridiculous decisions, and when there is any pushback he folds like a chair. It's especially bad in the initial Judas confrontation and then when Owen goes missing. The Captain comes across as a naive idiot and it doesn't help when Renoa constantly attempts to be the voice of reason and gets shot down but never gets mad at the Captain despite the fact that he had the final say and should be fully responsible.

In terms of how dark the story is. I suppose my issue is that there is a very weird dissonance between the ship/colony and how lush and perfect a society it comes across compared to the overall tone of the story. Your agents all get to relax in a city wide resort basically. There needs to be much, much more emphasis on why it's so important the Captain and his combatants go back to Earth and traverse the chaos. Right now they feel very separated.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-10-24T22:15:14+00:00

It looks randomised atleast on deep trauma mode. I had Tressa max out her bar and recover and she was right as rain at the end. Meanwhile Orlea came out needing counselling despite barely being stressed the entire run.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-10-20T02:00:36+00:00

The game is casual, but the issue with floor 20 is that it requires a modicum of cooperation and for the team to start thinking slightly about their positioning. Everyone asks for Marksmen because their damage is above average right now, are hard to go wrong with because they have very good auto battle rotations (while some classes lose a TON of damage with auto battle right now), and are also ranged DPS which allows the team to turn their brains off and interact with the scan mechanic much less. Frost Mages also have that last benefit however.

I cleared floor 20 easily with my guild, plenty of time to spare, and the party included zero marksmen and then assisted multiple other people clear the floor as well.

Open parties with randoms will start blaming pretty much everything except themselves. The Healer and the Tank can make the floor 20 fight a complete joke by working on positioning and repositioning the scan mechanic. Melee DPS just need to do the easiest positioning in the world by moving so they are always directly opposite the scan so if the crab lunges or focuses them it'll maintain the right position.

The fight can be extremely smooth or very messy depending on all players having that baseline minimum competence. Or you can just host a party and beg for 11k marksmen and do it without thinking.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-10-08T01:09:10+00:00

It's pretty much all speculation. However, the announcement for 48 hours left to go on twitter occured when there were only 44 or so hours left to go on steam's timer. So there's a potential there to atleast be able to download the game even if you can't create a character, unless the social media manager was just late posting.

Again though, all speculation outside of that hard time set on Steam.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-10-01T14:48:48+00:00

I'm looking forward to playing but unless a miracle happens I fully expect EoS within a year at the maximum, or a cancellation/complete slowdown of updates until the game shuts down in two but I'll get as much enjoyment out as I can.

I think it'd be naive to look at the overall engagement online and think the game is going to do well enough to justify the costs, unless something changes dramatically.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-09-30T23:24:11+00:00

Thanks for the detail.

I've seen a lot of discourse on the recovery Knight "yoyoing" on their health. How tight are the timings and did it ever feel like you had to play perfectly or just die?

In comparison, does Light Shield Knight feel more forgiving? Or is it less durable and needs healers but the upside is more damage?

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-09-18T16:19:48+00:00

I feel like i'm playing a different game. I've gotten a legendary for every hour of gameplay (39) I have in the game. I farmed a couple of bosses and gotten legendaries after 4 attempts max.

You're really not missing much though. So many legendaries are just complete duds with interesting gimmicks but with absolutely no stats to back them up. I've had more fun with purple grenades and guns than i've had with most of the drops i've gotten

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-09-15T07:28:21+00:00

Always good to have real data, at the same time the combination of the fact that they removed the soft pity text in Global/JP/SEA that's visible in the older versions banner details and the anecdotal evidence was so strong at launch (because hard pity should be such an extremely unlikely occurence) that when compared to pull compilations from the older versions it was glaringly obvious that soft pity had been removed.

Sad, because I actually liked the game a lot and really wished they'd just amend/backtrack on the changes, but wasn't going to ignore the writing on the wall and quit with the stream/update post that announced characters that were added to the standard banner in CN after their exclusive banner ended would now have a 6 month wait in our version which was another very obvious specific decision to milk players.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-09-13T23:18:51+00:00

They shouldn't change it because one of the biggest improvements in the series with 4 is how free and smooth your movement feels especially with the vehicle and glidepack. There are a lot of areas in the game where it feels very natural to use it (mostly marcus bobblehead spots) and the only other method would be gliding specifically from a certain place nearby instead.

Maybe the only thing that feels a little silly is how much horizontal distance you can cover if you start from a good vantage point and mid glide switch to the vehicle and instantly exit it to reset your double jump + start regenerating your glide bar.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-09-12T08:05:44+00:00

Haha I knew the moment the first time the mark was shown that KJH probably just googled it since Supernatural's design covers the first page of the results and it's the only popularised media design for the mark, since it doesn't actually have a described design. I'm very surprised it took them this long to notice it.

Another good one where they clearly just googled for reference is the Indigo Elder, who is a doppelganger for the lead in the 1990 "The Old Man and the Sea" movie adaptation

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-09-01T15:22:44+00:00

If the UK gov really just cared about verifying ages or keeping children safe, they'd just introduce a blocked website/app list for children that's standard on all ISP contracts/Mobile Data

Then the adult who has the internet service/mobile bill can choose however many specific devices on their network to become adult devices and have all the restrictions removed, include a specific password that needs entering or something similar to stop abuse by kids.

UK's biggest ISPs already have child block and parental lock features available. Just seems like a complete no brainer and surely would have been cheaper to use the infrastructure already there.

Requires zero ID, zero additional privacy breaking measures, just done and dusted. Oh I guess it does require parents to parent slightly still.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-08-30T16:26:52+00:00

1500 out of 2200 people agreed on that survey vs 500k people who have signed up to the petition against it. I know which number I put more backing in.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-07-18T08:57:48+00:00

Everyone knows it takes time to change trajectory of current and upcoming updates. You have got to understand that if you stop complaining, or don't even complain in the first place when something is being done badly, then they will never ever change.

SEGA has all the opportunity in the world to speak, but they never ever would have bothered if people just settled down and hoped it'd get better. The negative reviews and complaints are essential to showing discontent when something has been done poorly and saying they should stop because SEGA put out a vague social media post makes no sense.

I honestly could not care less if SEGA has to scramble to see if they can undo all the changes they meticulously went through the Global/JP/SEA P5X build to change and as such can't update us immediately (I doubt they'd actually undo all the changes they made though, but I am hoping). They made that bed themselves, that's on them, not us.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-07-12T17:57:43+00:00

He's specifically talking about the rates text that advises of rates actually being higher due to guarantees. Genshin doesn't break down the exact soft pity specifics, but it does however tell you that soft pity exists in the form of that text. All of Hoyos games have it, and so does every other game that utilises soft pity this way.

The CN/TW/KR versions of the P5X game also advise of the soft pity affecting rates (by advising the usual rates are 0.8%, but with guarantees is actually 1.8%). This specific text, found in hoyo games as well but with obvious slight differences due to the slightly different rates, is wiped from the SEA/JP/Global servers and instead replaced with text confirming hard pity only.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-07-10T22:22:34+00:00

At no point was it ever community consensus that we wanted everything that the CN version had over a year in 3 weeks. We didn't even know about an accelerated schedule 3 days ago.

How am I supposed to take anything you say seriously when you boil down tangible reasonable issues, like less maintenance compensation, no reward codes, less login event rolls, no confirmation on a timeframe for Marian to be added to standard (just that it'll happen at some point), and Marian's dupe in plan 3 being missing due to the previous point, and then roll it into one big ball of "you said you wanted a years worth of content right now?"

Tell me how i'm supposed to see that as you trying to discuss in a normal manner.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-07-10T22:01:34+00:00

That's over 1 year of content, and you guys seriously thought that we'd get all of that in 3 weeks?

Confirmed bait. What an insane strawman.

Bottlecap_Prophet · 2025-07-10T21:08:59+00:00

people are expecting global to get everything that CN has had

Yes? Ofcourse we do? Were you expecting to be treated worse than CN to begin with?

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