Friday there were several people that informed me the Special Conditions had started rotating again. So I re-installed and checked the Mission Board. Lo and Behold there were no Hounds! Or Power Outtage, or High/Low Intensity, or Vent Purge…or any for that matter. It happened once or twice that there were no conditions at all. Then there were several rotations with every mission having Power Outtage. I didn’t see the Vent Purge though. Anyway, it would seem that the Conditions are changing which is nice to see. Though there may be some minor glitches with the Conditions rotating. I hollered at a few people on Discord, we got a Strike Team together and played a few missions. It was fun to hear our friend that joined recently enjoying the Power Out. Eventually the refresh felt stale though and the Shrine of the Omnissiah is still a disappointment.
So I decided to play something else. I had just been gifted a copy of Outriders from a friend that got it on humble Bundle for about 15$. Figured sure why not. So we installed that and played for a while. It’s “The Division” in space…kind of. It lacks the open world and I’ve seen 5000 cutscenes of my character opening doors. When it comes to the loot and gear though, the game has a simple system that works just fine. Any gear I don’t want I disassemble into materials for crafting later. Any gear that has Mods or special attributes adds those Mods to my library that I can add to upgraded gear later. This means that I can change the shotgun I have that’s basic, to a shotgun with Mods that boost my abilities or adds some true usefulness to the weapon or armor. There’s even the whole “once you change a Mod the other one gets locked in” like in Darktide. The difference is that none of the Mods are worthless crap Mods that give me Experience I don’t need, or increase my odds of getting gear I don’t want. Quite the opposite. I have an ability that increases my chances of getting better shotguns, who would have thought it could be possible?!
And my point is a friend gave me a $15, “mediocre” Division clone with a pretty basic story that had no surprises for me, that I had a handle on in 15 minutes of gameplay, but was happy to play all weekend because it was a finished product that had crafting working correctly so I could enjoy gearing myself up for the next challenge. And I could have spent the weekend on Darktide…but I didn’t. This was a long winded way of me saying, “Get it together FatShark. FFS get it together.”