finales and events are fun because people need to do tasks that distract them from fighting. in interrogation events, players need to render themselves defenseless to solve the minigame. the team then needs to protect these players. it’s a fun dynamic that adds pressure to the event and forces them to coordinate, pick their timing to do the event, and not unimportantly, have less people available to do the actual fighting, making pressure higher
by allowing one player to send a servoskull to do the event mechanic, the entire event is neutered and turns into a 4-player survive-anywhere event, while being designed and balanced around players needing to do an interrogation task, i.e. a 3-player hold your ground event where you need to protect a specific zone, the interrogator location. this neuters the event from two different angles. you can now just make the skull solve it while you hold out in a choke.
i think mechanics that neuter game mechanics and directly solve a gameplay task for you are boring, and ultimately bad design. please reconsider letting servoskulls do this. it’s thematic, but it will make the game less fun by removing complexity and decisionmaking.
if i had to suggest an alternative, why not allow the skull to hack into the minigame for the skitarii and alter it to become easier to solve? the compromise still keeps the dynamic intact while still being a cool thematic benefit. for example it could show the upcoming letters on the letter minigame, or show which circle must be pressed on the hab dreyko minigame
this has been pointed out by other people before, but i’m a hopeful type of guy so i decided to make a thread for visibility
Every update is FS ensuring the player needs less and less interaction with the game’s actual mechanics and constraints. There’s no vision. Just power creep and senseless game modes.
i just wanna ask who thought a word search was a good thing to have to solve in the middle of a firefight. that takes a full minute for me. it’s so much more obnoxiously long than any of the other minigames
EDIT FOR POSTERITY: The word search is the only minigame I cheat in. Everything else, even the train minigame, I do as intended. It just feels like it takes far longer than it realistically should - you should have to guard the other player for a max of 15 seconds IMO.
No joke I saw one person solve the tree mini game in 2 secs, twice in a row.
Mods have now went from revealing pattern solution to now taking over player input to move cursor and keypress rapid instantly in split sec like macro.
So it negates tree game, horizontal sweeping timed cursor game, 4 symbol pattern game - all turned into 2 secs.
I find mini games the least enjoyable team mechanic, so I’m fine with optimizing to a servo skull at added time lapse.
Distance limitation may be part of it or at least would add some balance; was one of my suggestions for Tech Priest to use mechadendrite to auto complete mini games but servo skull for Skitarii makes just as much sense.
Really hard to tell before launch how OP these mechanics will be but mostly its a boost to QoL. The team play I enjoy is fighting back to back and knocking off disablers.
it’s slower but i don’t think it matters much. in fact i think that just makes the objectives more boring, because now on top of being less involved and interactive, they take longer
I really like the tree puzzle in Hab Dreyko and I like the train level puzzle, but I’ll gladly take skitarii to solve countless puzzles in Expeditions. It’s tiresome how much they spam it there.
End and mid events are already the easiest part of every mission, so on that front I really don’t think it’ll be that impactful on gameplay, just something nice to have. If FS ever makes events actually difficult then I would agree with this.
eh, you dont really see people complain about vet or zealot stealth when they let you ignore a lot of aspects of gameplay, includin the minigames, so i dont really think it will be much of an issue
I don’t know… What I experienced the last couple of weeks is that many teammates actually do not cover you while you try to solve the minigame or, if you do not work on solving the minigame, noone will… I was wondering what changed the last couple of weeks (I didn’t play the game for months and came back recently to give the game another chance). It happened in the past every now and then that the teammates are totally ignorant about solving the minigames but that was pretty seldom. Now it seems to be the opposite. But maybe I am just unlucky and the only one with this issue.
But I agree with your general take: It is another step towards “team work is NOT necessary”.
That comes down to behaviour with randoms in quickplay. Hence you see how it us with randoms with medstation and ammo sharing. Maybe 50/50 you get some sort of team work or resource sharing in quickplay games. So 50/50 someone might provide mini game cover.
Do we actually know the effective range? If you have to be relatively close to it the second issue you bring up may not be a factor. I hope that is the case because I agree sending it to do it for you from a mile away would be pretty dumb.
I hope that enemies can knock the Servo-Skull off the hack, so you have to at least defend it. And/or it costs something to perform, so that having the Servo Skull solve it takes up some resource you’d want. Blitz charges, maybe.
