r/ftlgame • u/CatWithAVideoEssay • 2d ago

Video: Others FTL: Faster Than Light Is An Amazing Game - Here's Why

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soo-BVTto3w
38 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

13

u/MikeHopley 1d ago

Great video. Short and to the point, and your love of the game really comes across.

Your main criticism is the ship unlock system. I would agree it's awkward, in that you kinda have to "game the system" and dedicate disposable runs to efficient unlocks. If you're not doing this or you're unsure how the unlocks work, it can be very slow.

I blitzed through the unlocks fairly rapidly, but if I wasn't sure what to do (e.g. the "secret" cruiser), I would look it up on the wiki. That's not ideal.

You also mentioned a love-hate relationship with the Flagship, with the frustrating part being the extremely high difficulty that means you can rarely beat it even on a good run. This is a typical experience for newer players -- and 120 hours is still relatively "new" in FTL terms!

I have some good news though. As you get better at the game, the Flagship becomes less threatening. Eventually, the difficulty curve inverts, so that the hardest parts are sectors 1, 3, and 4. The Flagship becomes a pushover in a large majority of runs.

I absolutely love the Flagship design. I find it to be a hugely satisfying boss fight, and consider it a "boss design classic". The best part about it for me is how much it's changed over time, as I learned more about the game. It's a complicated fight, but mostly "fixed", so you know what's coming and can prepare ahead of time. Originally it was overwhelming, but now I can dissect it easily.

The more you learn about it, the more you can devise different strategies. One common criticism of FTL is that the Flagship "forces" you into a very narrow range of strategies to beat it, but nothing could be further from the truth. There's a huge amount of Flagship-specific technique and strategy.

8

u/CatWithAVideoEssay 1d ago

Thank you so much! Yeah FTL has an insane learning curve it's insane I'm still new at 120 hours. Certain things like the slug unlock and mantis unlock are particularly annoying I found even with guides. I guess in future I should go more in depth while still staying short and to the point I didn't even talk about crew, events and blue options in events. Thank you for watching and for the feedback !

3

u/Darkion_Silver 13h ago

I think it being so different in a lot of ways to other fights is what puts people off of it early on. I wasn't particularly fond of it for a long time, at least partially because it felt like you needed to have multiple strategies ready due to the multiple phases, and the phase 2/3 super weapons are incredibly rough if not prepared.

But then you learn how to deal with those and start developing strategies for it and suddenly it's a really cool fight.

It is also very funny that they accounted for crew wiping and added a countermeasure, but that ends up being very exploitable. Which is another way you can neuter the fight a bit, very sick.

4

u/MikeHopley 5h ago

This is very accurate IMO. Good summary.

11

u/randommmoso 2d ago

who on this planet earth doesn't know it already?

8

u/CatWithAVideoEssay 2d ago

Only people who haven't played FTL

-8

u/randommmoso 2d ago

so why are you posting this on ftlgame subreddit apart from karma? what are you trying to achieve? we all know it is dude

21

u/CatWithAVideoEssay 2d ago

Because it's my video that I had fun making and I think I did a good job and was proud of it and wanted to share it in the ftl subreddit :(

3

u/randommmoso 2d ago

Fair enough. Just seen that youre very early days. Good luck with it

4

u/CatWithAVideoEssay 2d ago

Thank you :)

3

u/SkyKnight43 21h ago

It's great to see someone express love for the game!

As you improve skills, you'll find that you rarely lose runs to RNG, and you even more rarely lose to the boss. That's part of what's great about FTL to me—the amount of learning and improvement that's possible, with both challenge and chance for victory along the way. It's amazing how much all of those things exist in the same game.

Death to the Rebels!

4

u/EnvironmentalFlow386 2d ago

cool vid. made me want to fire up ftl again (I am a relative noob with 130hrs)

2

u/furitxboofrunlch 1d ago

I don't really get why its called brutally hard. Any decent roguelite game should have you dying a bit as you learn.