I cant help but feel extremely disappointed. I hope I’m not the only one. Its just gonna feel shallow if there are no RNG buffs/Boons you can buy/earn from challenges through the map. This roguelike element is personally special and a make-or-break for this upcoming game mode.
Just having roguelike changes to maps and conditions dont feel that replayable if we cant mess around with insane builds those RNG buffs/boons we can buy/earn.
if only we can just strip off Mortis trials, shut that game mode down and move those elements into this mode….
I wanna be happy about this. I really do. I sound really ungrateful but I just wanna get my thoughts out there first. I hope im proven wrong since it this content comes out sooner than later.
I love roguelikes & roguelites, and I’m quite fond of CW, but I don’t think this new mode needs Mortis/CW-style buffs…and it might not even need a power curve/journey through a session like I associate with CW and similar roguelikes.
This is looking like a pretty different thing so far!
nah thx, felt cartoonish, over the top and took any challenge out of the mode instantly.
instead in the new mode difficulty should scale upwards through actual encounters rather than number tweaking now that maps are modular instead of linear.
it’s a chance that should be taken, not spoiled by turning in it into a better meat grinder like mortis
I agree about boons, they added a lot of replayability. You could do builds for only one of the weapons, or no weapons at all, stacking various “spells” that you unlock via boons. You could get characters be extremely tanky, even if they’re usually pretty frail (Sienna, some other careers). You could create builds around consumables (bombs and pots) and there was a meta-game of planning ahead with how you spend your coins.
For now, with the info we currently have, it doesn’t look like this gamemode will be as replayable as Chaos Wastes. Also releasing with one map only hurts it the most, even if it has slight randomization. Mortis Trials got stale because they take forever to add new maps, even though they are basically an asset flip of adventure maps. And now they have to maintain 4 gamemodes, so they all remain fun at all times and not just once per year– when they add one new map or one new modifier to them.
you can definitely do it in a way that does not feel “cartoonish”. As they mentioned in the dev blog, buying in air support and supplies. perhaps those supplies can give you buffs like empowers your power sword to have some arc lightning effect as well. stuff like that. nothing too fancy.
It doesnt have to be mutually exclusive? They can be both. Helldivers with roguelike elements from Chaos Wastes but just more grounded in the 40K verse. of course you cant get something similar to “when critting you throw out magic missiles”. maybe on psyker but it can work here with some reasonable level of believability.
The format is short maps, 10-30 mins. You can’t have any meaningful roguelike run during that amount of time, as is proven by Mortis Trials.
The fact that it seems to be built around quickplay also suggests that your “campaign” will be joinable by different randoms on each new step, which would be really awkward if there were actual meaningful roguelike mechanics. In fact I think there can’t be any meaningful progression in that format at all. Imagine just joining a different chaos wastes map every time you quickplay chaos wastes. It doesn’t work I think.
My current expectation is that it’ll be a not-havoc rank system to handle the matchmaking. You queue up for an “expedition+40” and it’ll put you into someones expedition+40 he’s hosting. Maybe it’ll be partyfinder, but I doubt that because they explicitly encourage you to drop out of unfinished missions. I hope it’s not another stupid rank system but to me right now that seems like the most straight forward way they would set this whole concept up
I will be very happy if I’m wrong though, just trying to look at what we got.
I’m not getting the same read as you. The mode reads to me like a campaign based on the quote below, so like CW, where there’s a little bit of agency around what levels (runs) you play. So progression (roguelite or otherwise) is definitely possible.
Dunno about all the other thoughts…we really don’t have much info yet.
I don’t see how that’s unifiable with playing with different people every single step of the way though, and apparently even within missions if someone drops out early. It would mean that a lot of the time if you want to play this, you’d drop into a random ongoing mission. That can be fine but it would just be ‘ok you get random ass modifiers enjoy’ if there was anything “built up” to that point I think.
Like as a comparison, think about what it’s like when you queue up to chaos wastes and you get dropped into the citadel of eternity that other players built up to. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the point of a “campaign”?
Maybe they’re reworking the mourning star and we get an actual lobby system? I’m not holding my breath for it but that’d be one solution
Is this a reference to something said/implied in the announcement?
At any rate, I don’t really see an issue here. If drop-in quickplay will be part of this (and I surrrrre hope it will be, along with single drop-out-with-some-progress), there are surely viable strategies for figuring out a decent catch up mechanic that feels good for everyone.
Very anxious to hear more! Really don’t know what to expect from the “end game” of an Expedition either!
They said people would be able to pick and choose when to leave a mission which I take to mean randoms can just drop out and it’s going to get backfilled (which reminds me is currently bugged, I hope they figure that one out before releasing this)
Unless it just means the team can vote to end it early, which sorta counters the “you can choose to play just ten minutes” appeal because then you can’t actually choose, your team chooses
It’s just important to remember that 75% of everyone pugging it would be getting caught up to someone elses “campaign”. It sounds a little rough and hard to be invested in, so it’ll either just feel like random modifiers in practice or they’ll avoid making any meaningful progression in the first place.
We really don’t have the details yet. Maybe these maps are like Arc: Raiders…maybe they’re multi-multi-player. Like, that’s how little we know right now!
You might get your wish and it might be partyfinder only. Who knows!
Just realized the devblog addresses this partially:
The climate outside of the Hive is very volatile and unstable, causing the long range sensors of the Mourningstar to struggle with updated information about enemy movement and the general lay of the land. This means that the Expedition Map will update on a regular basis, presenting new challenges and setups to explore.
This suggests it could just be one map, the same for everyone, and they change it “on a regular basis” (like Havoc seasons? Global conditions? Probably every few months then) and you work through it. This would also function with matchmaking and not bring up any issue, because the modifiers would then be the same for everyone. It’d basically be a big mission board with static maps with expedition modifiers.
A bit like weaves, but different. In fact the longer I think about this, the more I think they built this on the foundation of weaves. Plenty of potential for it to be good despite that though, what with the different maps and nobody knows what the actual in mission gameplay will be like.
