So, I’m going to start this off by clearly stating: I am not a Havoc player. As is, the current mode has 0 interest to me. From all appearances, most of the playerbase has either not run Havoc, or have only dipped their toes in. Of the players who do run Havoc, most appear to have run it just long enough to get their cosmetics and titles and then dipped out even if they’re skilled and capable enough to routinely handle the hardest the game can throw at them. There doesn’t appear to be sustained interest in routinely playing Havoc outside of a tiny handful of gigasweats.
Why might this be?
From my perspective, Havoc feels like it was developed to meet an internal or imagined requirement, not something that was really developed as a response to market/user demand.
There are several fundamental issues, to my eyes, that keep people from playing or replaying:
1: The requirement to use the Party Finder feels arbitrary and forced. It’s a huge barrier to play and an unnecessary avenue for drama and toxicity with this mode. There isn’t really a reason to require this, it feels like a requirement to justify the Party Finder’s existence, which doesn’t seem to get much use otherwise. Creating features just to justify other features that people aren’t utilizing isn’t great game design.
2: The fact that you can lose ranks is a huge driver of toxicity. In a game where the developers chose not to implement a scoreboard out of concerns over toxicity, this feels like diametrically opposed design. I get Fatshark want’s something to keep playing weekly, a hook to maintain consistent play, but decaying ranks is bad anti-player game design in a coop PvE game that runs directly counter to many other design decisions.
3: The ranking system feels painfully overcomplex. Trying to figure out how it worked, what the changes are, and how it’ll work now just gave me an aneurysm trying to read all that, and I cannot fathom why it needs to be this complicated.
4: Incentives for Havoc are just…not great. Most people play just to get the titles and cosmetics, the resource rewards just aren’t relevant for players at that level. Once you get your titles and black outfit, if you’re not really into Havoc’s particular flavor of Sweatfest, there’s absolutely no incentive to keep going. Coupled with rank decay if you can’t play for a bit or wipe a few attempts, it tremendously discourages continued interaction with Havoc.
5: The game now has an absurd number of difficulty options, spreading the playerbase ever thinner over the existing content. With Sedition/Uprising/Malice/Heresy/Damnation, Auric and Maelstrom missions, and now dozens of levels of Havoc. Aside from some different enemy modifiers, fundamentally these are all the same game/maps/missions/weapons/etc. Making a gazillion different difficulty levels isn’t really adding a ton of content and value, especially for the bulk of the playerbase that’s sitting playing Malice and Heresy.
6: Havoc difficulty largely appears to be built around making things hit harder and take more hits to kill, and limiting ammunition. This is a very hamfisted way of increasing difficulty, that largely just reinforces the popularity of, or essentially mandates the use of, powerful metabuilds, resulting in the perception of an even more restrictive Meta (and associated player toxicity) than we see with the rest of the game.
All of this results in Havoc coming off as something designed in isolation by a dev group that has requirements to develop and launch something, but that don’t actually play the game or interact with their userbase. I’m not sure if it’s in service to some sort of nebulous upper management directive, or just slavish adherence to personal ideas, but Havoc in its current form just doesn’t feel like something the playerbase wanted.
So, when looking at the updates for Havoc, are any of these issues being addressed? Not really. Some minor QoL changes to rank stuff (that remains complex and convoluted) and some new mission modifiers don’t address any of these fundamental issues. It feels like the Dev’s response to much of the player angst around Havoc has been much like it was around Crafting for the first two years of this game, which was just making minor changes that don’t address the real core issues.
What are others thinking, do you see echos of the Crafting experience in the approach to Havoc? Are you liking Havoc as is? Do you see the upcoming Havoc changes as exciting or pointless?
