Reply To: AB 2 Glitches and Bugs

Home Forums Angry Birds 2 Forum AB 2 Glitches and Bugs Reply To: AB 2 Glitches and Bugs

David Martin
@david-martin

Allow me to play devil’s advocate on the topic of new levels being released more frequently. I like having new levels, at least in principle. I re-play through the existing levels a fair amount just because I enjoy doing so, and I’ve even found that some of the newer structures introduced in later levels have a way of cropping up in the earlier levels after game updates. Even though each one was not fully designed by a human to be 100% unique, I am surprised at how much the variance can cause me to really have to think through a level layout that seemed easy before.

For those who don’t want to slog through the new levels – which I understand because they can be challenging and often seem repetitive – are you losing out on something by not doing this? My understanding was that if you wanted to skip those and just do the Arena, you were welcome to do that. Is the issue more than now you can’t get to a new and different area of the game when one is released, such as not being able to play Gravity Grove because you haven’t made it through all 60 of the water levels? (The issue of not being able to play it due to the game crashing notwithstanding.) Maybe that could be worked around by more clearly dividing the levels into chapters, a la Seasons and most of the earlier AB games, where you can skip to the beginning of any chapter but you have to start with that chapter’s first level in order to unlock the levels after that. (It would certainly make browsing the levels a lot easier – if I’ve finished the last level and I want to scroll all the way back to 1 and start over, that takes a while!)

My main issue with the random structure selection within each level is that it sometimes seems rigged against the player. Especially in a six-room level, if you’re going to make it all the way through, you basically have a “par 2” for each room. From Pigsyland onward, there are often situations where there’s a tall enough structure on the left that I can’t get my first bird over it, and of course there’s a magician pig in the rightmost structure. I want to hit him first to make him move, but I can’t. So bird #1 has to knock down the leftmost structure, bird #2 has to knock down the rightmost one, then the magician reappears in a part of the level I’ve already cleared and I have to waste bird #3 just to get him. If a “strike-able” room doesn’t come up at any point after that, I’m out of luck. This is especially irritating on boss levels where the only viable strategy is “have a lot of birds leftover to beat the snot out of the boss because you can barely get him to budge.” I feel like the game should at least make sure it doesn’t set up situations where you have no choice but to waste an extra bird and can’t make up for it. If there are truly humans involved in the level design (and I believe Rovio’s statement that there are), they should take more precautions to make sure the procedural level generation rules out some of these extraordinarily unfair scenarios, so that the game can go back to a state of just being mildly unfair.

I’ve also noticed in Pigsyland that several of the trampolines cause the birds to act as though they have hit hard surfaces – e.g. red losing his ability to yell, or Bomb being activated upon impact. This makes certain layouts nigh unwinnable that, before whatever update caused this glitch, were relatively easy because you could count on trampolines to get your birds to far corners of a room without “activating” them. Nowadays, if you don’t have Terence available at the exact right moment, you’re up a creek.

And don’t get me started on the indesctructible tiny pigs. There’s no way to predict when one of these guys is going to survive an improbably high fall and roll into a crack where no bird can possibly reach him (except for maybe Bomb or the Chili spell). Sometimes one ends up where I can’t even see him! I’ve got several screenshots of such scenarios completely impeding my progress in a level – far too many for me to believe it’s just a fluke.


@aeshna
– I’ve come to expect the whole “Terence bouncing off of stone structures” thing and actually used it to my advantage in several layouts – for example, if the rightmost structure is all stone then underneath it to the left, there’s a flower or geyser or something that will direct you back at the middle and leftmost structures. If Terence can at least crack the middle part of the rightmost structure to make it slowly crumble, and he gets fired back toward the other structures, it’s possible to get a Strike in such a scenario.

I agree that it’s still annoying and seems like a bug, though. What makes far less sense to me is how Terence can get completely deflected by a tiny balloon.