Control DLC - The Foundation Impressions

Anyone play this yet? I was just looking for it today and then learned that it won't be out on Xbox One until June 25th and that SIGNIFICANTLY bummed me out. The reviews looks pretty good all around, but I want to live vicariously through some of you because I am definitely not playing through it again on PS4 or PC even if it is half off right now. I loved the game so much, but there are boss fights I just am not interested in doing again.

Obviously if we could keep spoilers to a minimum it would be great!

Edit: apologies, I messed this up and didn't post it to the Control game forum. Could a mod maybe move it for me?

I played the set up and it seemed pretty interesting. Though after I finished the set up, it looks like it's just going to be a horde mode?

Can anyone quell my fears that this is a full story based campaign, and not a little tiny bit of story in the beginning and then a wave based survival mode or something like that?

It's good in all the aspects the main game is good, but it's mostly just more Control. I wish they'd gone a deeper on the lore, but wasn't really surprised they didn't.

Are you sure you didn't accidentally do the beginning portion of Expeditions instead of Foundation? I don't think there's anything in Foundation that resembles a horde mode.

I have boughten it but haven't started it yet! looks like I rolled back my save to a bit before the ending so I'd need to go down and fight the pit monster and some other stuff again. Might try to crank out that stuff this weekend and get back into the expansion.

@briarpack: lmao I assume that is what happened. Hmm, I hope I can play Foundation without doing expeditions

@methodman008: It's all story, play on

@revengeofthelorax: do you have to finish the game to play this or do you have to get to a certain point in the game?

You have to finish the game.

@briarpack: Thanks, looks like I still have a quite a bit of game ahead of me to get through before getting this.

Bumping this since it seems no one has really gone through it on here so I'm curious if that has changed and if anyone wants to give their take. I just got the season pass two days ago and have put several hours into it so I can't say whether it's great overall, but yes it is more story and a new environment. It's fine (I say it's 'fine', but I do like it, to be clear) but to be honest, the reason I wanted the season pass was in large part due to the second DLC coming out that further connects it to Alan Wake.

Control in and of itself is just okay, but adding in the connections as if The Oldest House is basically The Dark Tower, it's what intrigues me most. Plus, I love Alan Wake. I was going to continue playing last night, but the game glitched in a battle area and I couldn't move on. It was as if I hadn't killed all the enemies so all the exits were blocked off, and so I quit and went to bed. I don't want to hijack this thread and make it into something else, but I am also curious how interested everyone else is in the upcoming DLC.

I wanted to buy it but Season Passes never go on sale it seems and I’m just skeptical of how much more of Control I want unless it manages to maintain that high degree of polish and unique content of the base game - and DLC’s seldom do with a few exceptions. Even though I didn’t like Alan Wake back in the day it still seems like the more interesting of the two, and from what I saw Jeff play the environment of the first DLC isn’t the direction I wanted the game to go in.

@ntm: I bought the season pass when Foundation came to Xbox One. Since that took three fucking months longer than everywhere else, I decided I'd just wait until AWE is out to play both at the same time. Looking forward to it since Control is definitely one of my favorite games of the generation, and Alan Wake is an all-timer for me.

I'm really looking forward to more of Remedy's world building and bizarro narrative defamiliarization. I'm not looking forward to relearning how to get through the fuck off difficulty spikes, but since there aren't any settings for that I guess I'm going to have to brute force it.

I had gone back in to try and play this today (to try and beat it before AWE) and was disappointed to discover that my brain had completely forgotten how to play.

I just found myself dying constantly in every encounter. I powered through some but eventually just had to give up. From what I played though it seems to be more Control? Like what you would expect from a Control DLC that doesn't really add too much story based content, but does add mystery to the old house. Almost like just adding another wing to the corporation.

I played the DLC -- it's pretty good. Some interesting story teases that aren't fully fleshed out but could go in a more ambitious direction in future installments/the Remedyverse. Really short, combat is more Control combat, and after a while the environment starts to get a bit less interesting, but hey. More Control is never a bad thing.

The Foundation is great, especially if you want to learn more about The Board and The Dissenter. It teases a lot more than it answers, but in the same way the core game did. It's very satisfying, it goes a lot into the history of the Oldest House, and the main throughline story is pretty brief and doesn't pad a lot. But there's optional side missions for more flavor and XP/resources that you can also do.

It's a lot like the Spider-Man DLC: if you want MORE of what the core game had, you should definitely get it. If you were satisfied with where things left off, maybe hold off until you can get it all on-sale. But if you weren't sold on Control, this doesn't change your mind.

Well, my biggest complaint about Control (pre-next gen upgrade news) was how brutal it could be. I did all the optional bosses, and it’s not friendly. For a game I loved, I was super worried about trying to remaster it after an entire year away to experience the DLC. But, it seems they’re addressing the difficulty with a patch soon. This article is kind of vague on specifics, but here’s hoping for something resembling Last of Us 2’s brilliant accessibility options. I’m elated at this news. And my excitement for the DLC is renewed.

https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/08/14/control-is-taking-it-easy-in-next-update

@hatking: Most importantly I read that they are adding MUCH needed checkpoints before boss encounters so you're not re-doing everything from scratch. Maybe that final multi-phase boss room won't be as much of a pain for newcomers.

@humanity: one of the optional bosses had you go through like three rooms of encounters. The thing I leaned best during that is how far you have to be away from enemies before they leash back to their room. Boss checkpoints are huge. I’ve been wanting to replay the game, knowing I can avoid a lot of the frustration makes that so much more realistic for me.

@hatking: The side mission 'Swift Platform' was simultaneously the neatest/best part of The Foundation, but also potentially the most frustrating only because if you die you have to go not just back to the intro of the entire encounter, but back to the control point. Oh, (just reading the two last comments) it's like you guys said. So yes, I agree. That said, I didn't really have an issue with the difficulty. Yes, it spikes, but to me, it was never unfair.

Better checkpointing would make it less frustrating, but the difficulty itself isn't an issue for me. I wasn't aware they were putting out such a patch. I'll have to check that out. Something, not really relevant mind you, that I did for the first time was turn off the friendly and enemy levels and health bars. I enjoyed the combat slightly more. I go back and forth with the crosshair. I wish it was an 'only when aiming' kind of thing.

@ntm: the difficulty of the combat itself I thought was fine. As Jeff mentioned on a podcast recently I sort of wish your health would replenish by itself - let’s say only halfway. There were a lot of situations where it was me and the last “boss” enemy in the room and I was down to a sliver of health with no way regain it except to kill the big bad boss without getting hit once. This combat difficulty by itself wouldn’t be THAT bad but then combined with the really sparse check pointing it seemed too harsh at times. It meant that during the Polaris room at the end of the main game instead of engaging in a fun dance of flying debris and destruction I was sniping enemies from a platform away because I didn’t want to re-do all those encounters again so I didn’t want to play more risky.

@ntm: I turned off the levels as soon as I got the game. I hate shoehorned RPG mechanics making their way into every game I play. If an enemy needs a number to tell you how tough they are, the game isn’t doing a good job of telegraphing its intentions. In Control it wasn’t an issue, I forget that stuff was ever in the game until I watch somebody else play.

@hatking: I feel like I should have done it when I started the game, and to be frank, I was kind of surprised I hadn't to the point that I was wondering if they had patched that in at some point after the game's release. The game is largely HUD-less, so it makes me disappointed that they didn't implement some other way to have a crosshair, especially considering they have a flashlight for it in Alan Wake. Turning the crosshair off and simply using the ammo bar (where you aim just above it) works okay, but it could be better. It's a small thing.

@humanity: Yeah, I agree with that for the most part. However, I am used to the way you die and respawn in the Soulsborne games, and Control is pretty much that, but the hardest encounters in Control are less challenging than the stuff in the Soulsborne games. I am not sure I'd use the word 'harsh', but annoying, yes. It is one of those things where you might have fun at first, but then if you die once, die twice, maybe a third, it starts to detract from the experience. So checkpoints at the beginning of, or even in the middle of a fight would keep it entertaining.

@ntm: I didn’t even realize that ultimate edition with all the DLC that is eligible for a next gen free upgrade is only $39.99.. I guess serves me right for buying games when they get released.

@humanity: Such a disappointment that they are doing that.