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Soft Locks

First off, I have to say that I absolutely love this game. I've been a fan since Killing Floor 1, and have always wanted more story mode content for the game. Incursion does a fantastic job of delivering that, and makes for an amazing and frightening co-op experience!

That said, I have identified a few soft locks in the game while playing with my friends. For reference, these are all Intel systems with nVidia GPUs and HTC Vive headsets.

Tutorial Teleport Softlock
Some of my friends are already familiar with the typical movement scheme in VR games. When they first entered the training level, they immediately started teleporting around, even before being instructed to do so by the game. When they were instructed to move, they continued to teleport around, but the game just kept encouraging them not to be afraid to try movement, and they were unable to proceed. Sadly this is a very bad first experience for new players, and it actually happened twice. I had to instruct them to not touch anything until instructed to do so.

Tutorial Ammo Crate Softlock
At the gun station in the training level, two of my friends continued to target practice after the station was complete, and picked p the Ammo Crate to the left of the station. When they went over to the station that introduces you to the robot that helps you locate items in the level and pushed the Ammo Crate button, the robot flew over to the Ammo Crate next to the gun station instead of the one in the center of the room. It is important to note that this happened once when a player pushed the locate ammo button before instructed, but also occurred even if the button wasn't pushed until the player was asked to do so. In both cases, the player is unable to teleport and the game softlocks.

Catacombs Skull Explosion Softlock
In the Catacombs level, one of the skulls that you need to place on the tri-skull stand in order to proceed is located across the bridge in front of the large (initially closed) door. In my frustration to try and open the door, I threw a grenade at it, which blew the skull way down into the water, which alone softlocks the game as you are unable to proceed. When I attempted to locate it when the robot, the robot flew down towards the water, would then disappear and reappear before reaching it, and repeat the process. I was able to teleport to the robots location before it disappeared, and then I was stuck floating in mid air.

Catacombs Walk Through Barrier Softlock
While in a co-op session in the Catacombs, the players were at the point where you needed to shoot the damaged code to unblock the barrier to the (then still not constructed) bridge area. One of the players went right up to the barrier via teleportation and then walked forward in an attempt to bypass it. They were then teleported back to the point where you need to place the skulls on the two pillars to proceed, but with a barrier in front of them blocking them from accessing the part of the level with the code they needed to remove (and where the other player was). The other player attempted to reproduce this, and sure enough got teleported to the same location, softlocking the game completely.

These are all of the softlocks I have discovered so far; I will update this post if I find any more. The developers did a fantastic job with the game, and fixing these issues would help prevent the extremely immersive experience from being broken.

That said, there are two other issues that I thought I would bring up as well:

Teleporting changes your direction
When you teleport, sometimes the game seems to randomly change the direction that you are facing; this makes it easy to get lost and is very confusing for new players, and I can't seem to figure out what causes this.

Teleporting back to start when getting stuck in objects
Related to the Catacomb's walk through barrier softlock, if the player "moves" in real life too far into a solid object, they seem to get teleported back to the start of that subsection of the level instead of being pushed out of the object, which is a very jarring and confusing experience for the player. I believe this teleport location being set wrong for that section of the Catacomb level is the cause of the aforementioned softlock, which would seem that this behavior was programmed somewhat on purpose. I was wondering what the logic behind this was and if it plans to be changed, or if players need to be extra careful when walking into solid objects (which can be hard to do when your feet are being chewed on by crawlers!)

I hope this helps! Feel free to ping me on here or Twitter for any additional information.
 
Kittenmittens;n2312141 said:
Glad to hear you're enjoying the game! Thanks for taking the time to write up this report and send it! We'll be looking into these.
For the Catacombs skull, that should have reappeared back where it was originally found. This should be the case with any of them.

Awesome! Thank you for looking into these. That does appear to be the case sometimes if you simply drop it; maybe have QA try to reproduce the issue by setting off a couple grenades in close proximity to the skull on the ground. Perhaps if it has enough velocity it can get to a place it normally shouldn't where the game won't move it back. :)
 
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