Just logging back in to also express my concern for the mastery system.
I’m a dad, and have a full time job that often dips into OT. Generally speaking, I do not have a whole lot of time to sit down and play games. Which is why I loved the Tide series, it was very easy to just fit in a game or two and then call it there.
Mastery system is concerning to me because if progression is going to be very grindy per weapon, then most of my playtime is going to be stuck playing low powered weapons which doesn’t sound very fun. The idea of having to grind out mastery for every weapon type that I want to try, on top of the continued existance of the RNG layers makes me still not interested in coming back and playing the game again.
If I was 15 again and didn’t have much else to do with my time then this might have sounded great. But my time is already short, I don’t want to spend it with crap weapons.