New to the game. Playing on easy difficulty. The grey box area was fun but Saudi is a huge leap in difficulty in mini games. examples are below, is this normal?

 

hacking - went from 35 seconds in the training area with large codes to 15 seconds and 4 or 5 character codes

lock picking - was very forgiving about how close you were to the line to being exact and a similar time crunch

the circuitry thingy - in training they were 4 circuits. my first one in Saudi was 8 circuits and 15ish seconds, my second was 12!

 

What happened? is the game really this difficult? did my difficulty setting somehow change? how do i change it back?

 

thanks for any advice

There's an item you can buy on the Clearinghouse called Printed Circuitry that lowers the difficulty of all hacks and the like, and the level 2 skill of the Sabotage tree, Breaking & Entering, really reduces the difficulty of all hacks, locks and circuits as well. Plus, they stack.

 

Later on in the game you can get Integrated Circuitry (an upgrade to Printed Circuitry), and Breaking & Entering has an upgraded form (though you have to specialize in Sabotage to get it, but I recommend doing that anyway so you can get Improved Data Theft and its two upper tiers as well) also. These two also stack.

 

Failing all that, the level 1 Sabotage skill is called Interference, which lets you bypass all that minigame crap so long as you have EMP grenades in your inventory. But it takes a lot of grenades, though.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Also, kudos on thinking the Greybox was fun; most people are turned off at that part.

Thanks for your help I thought it may have been a bug. Instead i think Ive figured out that hacking and lock picking etc scales to your skill. When I turned level 2, 3, and 4 I dropped all my points into the tech skill and bam the codes got shorter and the time allotted decreased. On my second attempt at this game Im keeping the tech and sabotage skills at 1. to my surprise i havent seen anything above a 6 circuit lock and 30 second hacking time allotment. I could be wrong but it looks like the puzzles are matched to your skill. which imo is amazingly upsetting. i have not tested this beyond my two "mikes" so i accept i could be entirely wrong.

 

anyway clearly this isnt a bug sorry to whatever admin needs to move this.

 

thanks again for the advice

 

 

There's an item you can buy on the Clearinghouse called Printed Circuitry that lowers the difficulty of all hacks and the like, and the level 2 skill of the Sabotage tree, Breaking & Entering, really reduces the difficulty of all hacks, locks and circuits as well. Plus, they stack.

 

Later on in the game you can get Integrated Circuitry (an upgrade to Printed Circuitry), and Breaking & Entering has an upgraded form (though you have to specialize in Sabotage to get it, but I recommend doing that anyway so you can get Improved Data Theft and its two upper tiers as well) also. These two also stack.

 

Failing all that, the level 1 Sabotage skill is called Interference, which lets you bypass all that minigame crap so long as you have EMP grenades in your inventory. But it takes a lot of grenades, though.

 

Hope that helps!

 

Also, kudos on thinking the Greybox was fun; most people are turned off at that part.