Having to kill remaining enemies is a chore.

I think that once the timer of the portal is gone, you shouldn't have to travel through the whole map to kill an enemy that you left miles away. It ruins the momentum and the sense of emergency. Maybe the boss should be harder, but once the timer is up, you can just go through to the next level. If you don't beat the boss, you don't get the reward. It doesn't feel like the timer is there for much reason, once it ends, its a weird feeling where things stop spawning and you have to go hunting leftovers all around the map. I know it may be to keep the player from skipping all the enemies, but the game shouldn't punish you for not killing monsters, it should reward you for killing them instead.

 

I honestly kind of like sweeping up the last few enemies.

The fact that you're going to have to kill them eventually leads to interesting decisions while you're hunting for the portal (and later, while you're fighting the boss) -- do you carefully take the time to kill enemies as they appear, knowing that this slows you down and could trap you in a cycle where they appear faster than you can kill them? Or do you leave them for later, knowing you may waste more time having to walk all the way back than you'll waste killing them now?

 

Actually I like having to kill the people remaining.

 

I'd always loved the elegant design of the teleporters. Rather than just throwing a boss at you or something, it gives a massive boost to the monster-spawning AI which always results in enough of whatever it is the AI uses to spawn monsters to spawn a boss monster, forces you to survive through the hell it creates for a set period of time, and you have to make sure everything that's after you is dead before fleeing to the next area. Eliminating that last part would allow for anyone to just run around until they can go panic in the next stage without worrying about fighting, becoming a vicious cycle of more panicking as you realize that you have so few items that you can barely survive.

Oh, and you also used a false dilemma fallacy towards the end of your post, there.

 

Not to mention, that this mechanism is also to make the game harder. What i mean is, you survived the teleporter charging up, you beat the almost everything, but you missed one monster on the other corner of the map. So you go there, kill the sucker, but uh-oh, now you lsot precious time, and at the next stage monsters will be even harder since you lost this minute or so finding the lost sheep. Its clearly visible on monsoon (until hahahaha when diff curve starts going linearily... honestly cant spell this but you get the point) where the diff timer jumps every two minutes. So every second counts.

 

Well, as I have tested, everyone once in a while enemies that spawned on the other side of the map, however long ago, just disappears, possibly because of some optimization reasons.
But, as Aquillion said, its an interesting thing that happens in your mind when you know you'll have to get that one guy.

 

Yea, i know about the despawning mechanism, nevertheless there is always some guy which is in the corner. And true, about what Aquillion said. The entire cleaning after activating is justified by so many things i cant even describe how sad would i was, if it was removed.

 

I 100% agree with how annoying this can be, especially when you've got a teleporter on the top of the Sunken Tomb and you've got that one clay man who dove off of the middle plateau into the bottom right side of the level, and so you have to drop down to kill him and then loop. All. The. Way. Back. Around.

An idea that might be interesting to experiment with would be making the teleporter battle a bit more king-of-the-hill-ish. You start the teleporter, and it starts charging, filling a bar, rather than counting down. But then, uh-oh, it breaks down, or it requires user input, and the bar stops filling, or even slowly starts draining... and it's only going to start filling again when you head back to the teleporter and give it a kick. Once it's kicked, you can count on it to keep charging for 15-30 seconds. And you're going to need that time to get away, because every time you kick the teleporter, a ton of points get dumped into the AI director's pool, and the area around the teleporter becomes a warzone.

In Drizzle, a teleporter might only need one or two kicks for the duration of the event. Rainstorm, three or four, and Monsoon, five or six. But the longer the game goes on, the longer that teleporter takes to charge, and the more kicks it starts to require. Never an excessive amount, but maybe after an hour of play, you're having to kick the damned thing two more times than you did at the beginning. The upside is, once that teleporter is fully charged, the AI director gets one last surge, but then the enemies stop spawning, and you are free to either get the hell out of there immediately, leaving all the chaos behind, or to mop up all or some of the enemies at your leisure for extra reward at the cost of more time. The battle stays long and hard, but that's because the teleporter is taking longer and longer to charge as the game goes on, rather than because you have to go around the map on a pilgrimage mopping up enemies who are individually taking longer and longer to kill as the game goes on, and no part of the teleporter battle is any longer required to be a mop-up operation.

Every time the teleporter breaks down, the AI director diverts some of its points towards spawning enemies near the teleporter, so the path back to the teleporter becomes clearer if you've made your way across the map, but when you get there, you're going to have to fight your way through in order to give the thing a kick.

This also adds something to online co-op, a little sumpin' sumpin' that's currently missing that I like to call co-op. Really, Risk of Rain's online co-op has got the online part, but the co-op part is nowhere to be found. If the teleporter event becomes king of the hill, then someone has to go kick the teleporter, and that someone is probably going to need support or a diversion, because god damn does the area around that teleporter get hot.

The toned-down version of this total conversion is that, once the teleporter is ready, you have to activate it and wait 15-20ish seconds before you're actually teleported. Or, if there are still enemies on the map, then you have to stand on it for 10-ish seconds in order for the teleport sequence to initiate. This forces you to either clear the area around the teleporter ahead of time, or to have to fight off enemies while you're waiting to be teleported out. Again, no running all the way across the map to kill the last enemy before you're allowed to leave.

 

It's an interesting proposition, geekofalltrades, but there are some simple solutions that people just pick up along the way.

For me, on sunken tomb, if the teleporter is up top, I make sure to NOT be up there, stay at the bottom area, and then kill as you return.
One good thing about the game is time management, so if its the Damp Cavern (the HUGE one), cheat by changing to the 1x Zoom, and see if the teleporter is on top by walking through the middle, and be able to find it much easier and not waste time.

The main thing with having to waste time to get enemies is that the game is trying to make you learn that certain things work better than others, and find out the most efficient way to do things.
I think that they did it perfectly with the teleporter and the guys being off in the distance. The maps had a lot of thought put into them, and they are made to be a challenge.

 

The very fact that there are twelve different classes with different playstyles suggests exactly the opposite: that there are more than one (at least twelve) different ways to do things.

Running all the way to the opposite corner of the map to dispatch the last remaining enemy is not a challenge. It just takes time. As Egoraptor would say, that's not difficulty; it's just the illusion of difficulty. Sure, in Risk of Rain, time is difficulty, because the higher the clock goes, the more difficult the game gets. But there are ways to drive up the clock that are more engaging for the player than dragging them to every corner of the map to fight leftover enemies who aren't individually engaging.

If the maps truly are consciously designed to encourage you to play them exactly the same way every time, then my opinion of the RoR team's game development chops will be hurt considerably.

 

And what exactly do you mean by "at least twelve different ways to do things?" The characters in this game have different stats, abilities, and item synergies, but the goal for everyone is the same regardless: find teleporter as fast as possible and kill everything that spawns after. Because of the way Risk of Rain works (more time spent = higher difficulty = more regular mobs, more elites, regular boss spawns), efficient movement and map awareness (and consequently ability to 'control' mob spawns) are important metrics of player skill and success rate. Heck, characters like Sniper can't even be played consistently well without having a good grasp of the map, since Sniper requires some degree of speedrunning to make up for their massive inability to deal well with crowds.

How a map should be approached is dependent on starting location and your projected exit location, and yes, there is always a most efficient way to go from point A to point B. The actual level layouts in this game are not randomly generated, after all.