I also had no idea that there was going to be as much emphasis on refined movement and player abilities, which just boosted my excitement for the game. Can't wait to play it when it's released!
Ha, that's mostly because none of the footage from any people playing at expos or from game journalists ever shows them using the abilities.
It's a little maddening to watch people never use EX shots or Supers on bosses and then complain that the bosses have too much health.
Ditto for never using dashes or air dashes and saying that some stuff is hard to avoid.
Or calling the game "bullet hell" when there's rarely more than 3 bullets on screen at any time, and you can parry those bullets, absorbing their power into your Super bar, allowing you to fight back harder. Or using the parry bounce to maneuver around the screen more nimbly.
Or when they never switch weapons mid fight to capitalize on the different strengths and weaknesses depending on the situation the boss is putting you in.
Or ignoring all of the above and saying the game is incredibly simplistic while simultaneously being too hard. The simplicity I can kind of understand to a degree; it's designed to be immediately pick up and play. But when you design the ability set that we have in player movement, you have to have bosses that reward using that variance to the player's advantage. As such, not using those abilities makes the game feel relatively thin and much much harder than it is.
But all of that, I think, comes from what I call "Expo Exposure". People stand in line, get a 30 second tutorial on how to play and then 10 minutes to play. They are told about all the abilities, but when a boss starts leaning into you, you forget all about what someone told you you could do and just freeze up or jump into a bullet three times and die.
I think levels will help a lot with this; reiterating advantages to player abilities, repeating challenges while consistently ratcheting up the difficulty, and creating combinations of those encounters to allow the player expression in overcoming them. It's something that's easier to do in levels than in bosses. With bosses, the progression is all things that happen TO the player, whereas in a level, the player controls the pace of encounters, which allows them to learn and experiment more easily. With early levels, we can create very specific challenges that require knowledge and use of the abilities in a less stressful environment. Hopefully that will encourage them to use that knowledge to their advantage on the bosses.
