Richmond, TX
Quoted from Rdoyle1978:I’ve gotten to the Big Final Heist numerous times (couple times from a regular game but mostly from a save state). I can’t really get past the first section. It is HARD to progress through the stages - multimorphic has a real old School approach to difficulty (the games get hard!)
Like others have said, go back and get the macguffins to make difficult stages easier. But also, there’s no such thing as “the first stage” in the Big Final Heist. The stage order is decided by the order in which you gather your crew in the main game, and like a choose your own adventure, we subtly adjust the cut scenes in the BFH to accommodate for different events happening in different orders. The exception is that we always end with the same last two stages, but you can experience the BFH many different ways depending on how you got there and what macguffins you collected along the way.
That’s one thing about the save state BFH, it’s always gonna give you that version of the BFH, but you can go set up many different BFH save states! If your save state BFH starts with a no macguffin hacker stage first, yeah, it’s gonna be rough every time. (Even starting with that save state, you have the option of going back to unlocked modes to get missing macguffins before you start the BFH. So you could save an even better save state from there.)
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And I’ve seen people asking P3 fans to justify the screen to them. I’ll say this as the person who poured so much or their life into this game. I don’t feel like we could have made this type of game experience with a traditional painted piece of wood with inserts. The P3 platform lets us do things with the environments and storytelling and world building that is truly unique in pinball. We were able to actually dangle a cat burglar over the items she was stealing in the lab. We were able to let the crane become a helicopter searching for the wheelman on the city streets with a spotlight and then lock on to him during the high speed pursuit when you made the wrong shot into a police trap. We were able to have scoop wall waves be an actual police car or armored car with good or bad consequences for hitting them. Every single character in the game got to take over the world of that playfield for their modes, and the player never once has to take their eyes off the playfield for any game information. And yes, we also use the ball tracking for cash collection and the safecracker side job and a few other things.
With the crane we have the widest variety of short shots in all of pinball, and the thing can dangle balls for you to hit and it can fling them at you. We tell classic heist tropes without forcing the player into predictable linear paths, and I think we pulled off a pretty fun pinball story in the end. And the screen enables people like Nick Baldridge to build games like Silver Falls with his daughter, and swappable games like Drained, and I think that is incredible. Without pulling the playfield I can switch in seconds to a bunch of other software games.
I try and think about making this game with blinking inserts and backbox animations, and some stuff just wouldn’t work at all and the rest just gets the life sucked out of it.
I don’t think everyone has to love the platform or the stuff I and the incredibly talented people I work with make. But this small team is pulling off amazing things and I for one am incredibly proud of the games we are putting out. The existing library of games on the P3 is incredible and, as a P3 owner myself, it’s awesome watching it get better and better.
Ok, back to work making things betterer.
