New Player Help for The Surge can be found here. Tips on how to get started and beginning concepts will be listed here once more information is known.
New Player Help Information
At the start of this game, you will have a chance to become a Heavy Operator or a Field Technician, this will affect your starting gear. Check our Gear Set page for gear bonus. If you take the Rhino (Heavy Operator) gear set to start with, you will be given the blueprints for the Rhino Arm and Leg pieces, and the same for the Lynx (Field Technician) set, but almost all of the enemies in the first zone are wearing Lynx, so it's simple to build a full set of Lynx very quickly. If you want the ability to have armor variety earlier, take the Rhino option and then defeat enemies to get Lynx. The enemies in the first zone that are wearing Rhino are very dangerous in comparison to the other enemies in the area, so minimizing the amount that you have to fight them early on might be helpful.
When fighting humanoid enemies, remember that if you sever the enemy's right arm using a Finishing Move after doing sufficient damage to the arm, you may acquire its weapon. You will also get Tungsten fragments from severing right arms, and you can get armor leg/torso, etc scraps from severing the other parts. You can take the Tungsten and armor scraps back to Operations and break them down in the Gear Assembler for use in creating new equipment from discovered blueprints, and also for use in upgrading your existing weapons and armor pieces.
If you die you will drop all of your Tech Scrap, but you are given a little over two minutes to go back and get it - this does not sound like much, especially considering that you will have to fight all of the enemies that you fought to get to where you died, but for every enemy you kill you will be awarded another 30 seconds of time - this makes it easier to get back to where you died in time, but be careful! If you die again, you will lose everything that was in the first "drop", and only be left with the scrap that was in the second drop. When you die, you do NOT lose anything other than the loose Tech Scrap that you were carrying - all of your implants, weapons, armor scrap, and "scrap metal" caches will still be retained in your inventory - you will find plenty of loose Tech Scrap while playing, so do not be worried about losing a few thousand scrap early on, you will get it back soon enough. :-)
Helpful Tips & Tricks
Dash Attack is the most useful ability to apply damage to enemies especially during Boss Fights. Simply evade after the enemy attacks but when it recovers to unleash its next attack, charge in with a dash and quickly apply damage. Shoft away from it and then dash in to attack again when it is safe to do so. Rinse and repeat to quickly destroy foes and to receive minimal damage.
Evade goes without saying is the most important to avoid receiving damage. It is advisable however to execute evade more than once every single time to put more distance between you and the enemy. This is crucial especially during Boss Fights as they are generally huge and each attack have high damage and covers great distances. So generally evading much further away then run and dash to apply damage on enemy in order to receive minimal damage and apply maximum damage on enemy.
Block is best to not use often because majority of the attacks from enemies are unblockable and the player will often still suffer damage especially duing Boss Fights. Block is however only useful if you can predict enemies' movements before they attack or you can manage to always time a perfect block for a counter-attack in order to avoid damage but apply hit points on the enemy. (Like in the Souls games, it is generally not recommended to block attacks but it is your game, you will have to decide yourself what suits you best)
Running away is probably the most cowardy thing to do. But it is however the wisest way to win a fight. Come back later if you feel like you have ran out of medi-injectors or when the enemy is too tough. It may even be that your armour and weapon isn't good enough so don't be araid to retreat, upgrade then return for vengeance and show them who's boss.
Operations are places where you can refill health bar and all your injectables, upgrade gear, upgrade core power, swap implants, change rigs and communicate with an NPC via hologram. It is obviously the best place to be in the game where you don't have to worry about enemies but also the worst because the damn song about just kept playing non-stop. It is advisable however to not visit operations too often as it resets your scrap multiplier and respawns all enemies. So visit operations only when it's really necessary, be confident, have courage and fight on.
The Falling Attack Exploit
Feeling impatient riding the elevator? Daring for shortcuts? Falling from ANY height does no damage whatsoever if you attack while in the air. Very very useful. Just make sure you are actually landing on something solid.
Note: This appears to kills you if you land on an area where you're not supposed to be yet. As of Patch Update 53172 (P4) / 33503 (SVN), this has been patched out.
AnonymousThank you fellow adventurer for your very useful information. I am not proud or do I have an ego. At seventy-one years of age I am past all that. I started RPG video gaming to keep my eye/hand co-ordination sharp but fell in love with the gaming fun. I have filled a graveyard with the times I have died while gaming and admit it freely. I am reading the WiKi game manual so I can perhaps advance in this game a little more than going in blindly. It was here that I saw and read your advice. Thank you for helping me and others that have read, and taken to heart, your words of wisdom. R S Jensen AKA = RayRay.
- Anonymous
You can't just run and hit something till it dies all the time. Some enemies will not be overwhelmed and will punish you for recklessness instead. Dodge and block, then counter. Don't be so greedy with combos, esp if it won't stagger, just a few hits them back up. If you want a body piece, you should note that the enemy is tougher there, you can spare one or two hit to a the face, or some unarmored part, then hit the body a lot. ( the body must take majority of the damage or the carve will fail, don't bother if it's a brittle enemy) I also want to emphasize luring. Use the drones laser from afar to take advantage of dumb ai, and drag one enemy away from a large group. Pick them off one at a time. . I've got a lot to say about blocking. The first is that this isn't NOT dark souls and there more merit to blocking. If you have a single sword, your blocking is meh, but if you have dual claws, or large weapons, it's 100 percent damage reduction unless the enemy is huge.striking after a block will yield a counter move which has some nice stagger power. Against mobs, it's pretty handy. Even some of the bosses, like fire bug. His single robo hand slam can be blocked, then you can counter him faster than backing up and running to him again.
- Anonymous
In the gear assembly, you can directly craft higher tier gears or upgrade to higher tiers by clicking Q or E to chance what mk you want to craft the armor/tools into, meaning if you don't have to track down low-level enemies to get new gears or upgrade new weapons.
This is probably obvious to most people, but I didn't realize it at first, so I wasted a lot of time backtracking to gathering lower-tier materials for new gears and weapons. Don't make the same mistakes I did people!
- Anonymous
Some more tips:
- Techscrap modifier increases with the NUMBER OF ENEMIES KILLED, not the amount of techscraps you carry.
- Carrying large amount of techscraps only gives bonus buffs. So far, I've only discovered increased stamina (need confirmation), and (maybe) health regen when near death.
- If you're on PC, you can use the quicksave feature. F5 to save, F8 to reload. The quicksave state gets deleted when you exit the game. Utilize (rather, exploit) quicksave to reduce med-bay usage and keep your techscrap multipliers. But of course, that would ruin the fun of the game.
- You can also warp instantly to Operations by using the quicksave bug:
1. Quicksave before a fight.
2. Right at the moment of your death, quickload. You'll load back to Ops without losing any techscraps.
CORRECTION: Visiting Operations does make enemies respawn, but it DOES NOT reset techscrap modifier. It is only reset when you use Med-Bay.
- Anonymous
You can favorite a second weapon to switch between with left d-pad.
There's bonuses to holding high amounts scrap vs storing them in the bank. Using crafting or op-med will reset bonus counter.
* You gain a free injection "charge" every time you accumulate enough tech scrap to level up - you will sometimes hear a funny noise like you've used an injection when you kill an enemy, that noise is your injection charge counter going up by 1 (assuming you weren't maxed already). * If you get stuck on an enemy (like the first boss), go back through the level and accumulate more crafting bits to upgrade your gear - the difference between fighting PAX with a rank 0 weapon and a rank 1 weapon is noticeable. * If you die, you have roughly 3 minutes to get back to where you died - killing an enemy while running back will add time to the counter, and raising the counter past 5 minutes (and again past 7 minutes) will actually give you a bonus to your scrap once you finally pick it back up. * It's easier to get accurate executions with a one-handed or staff weapon, and it's easier to overpower enemies with the twin-rigged (dual-wielded) ones. The Single-Rigged and Heavy-Duty weapons hit like runaway locomotives, but are very, VERY slow. * When fighting a new enemy that you want to take gear off of, it's sometimes safer to just dance with it and dodge in and out with a one-handed weapon and wear the enemy down slowly so that you can get your execution. (This is especially important when fighting "smart" enemies like Black Cerberus or the ANGEL zombies.) * When fighting a new enemy, it pays to be patient and watch how it moves - don't try to attack or overpower it right away, just let it fight and miss over and over. You will learn more about the enemies by being patient and letting it swing wildly than by rushing in and dying quickly. * The bosses are HARD - expect to die a lot, and you will likely need to adjust your implant set specifically to kill the boss (usually by stacking injections and HP, instead of energy and utility implants). * Bosses will kill you a LOT, but your tech scrap will remain in the room with them as long as you get back in time to pick it up each time. If you accumulate a lot of tech scrap but keep dying while learning the boss, you can purposely die next to the glowing doorway and when you respawn the scrap may be close enough for you to pick up through the barrier without going back in. * All of the bosses drop a fairly nice weapon, but they also have a upgraded "v2" variant of it if you kill them in a specific way - if you want their goodies, you will need to read up on the boss wiki pages, because the game does not tell you the secrets to beating them their "special" way, and you cannot go back and farm for the drop you didn't get the first time. * Don't break your back trying to build and upgrade everything - it's totally viable to play the bulk of the game with the weapons and armor you get in the first zone, so find something that works for you and just stick with it - there's no "wrong way" to play, and you can try new stuff on the NG+ runs.
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