I’m going to throw my two cents in here since this is my thread.
I don’t want any grind. Man, just imagine, imagine, if Left 4 Dead 2 had you grind for stats, grind for different weapon class, grind for perks, grind for character levels, and so on and so on. It would SUCK. The reason why Left 4 Dead 2 was such a household label was because of how easy it was for people to get into it. I used to play that game with my brother back on the Xbox 360 and we could easily just pick up a game, play online, and have fun. There was no barrier to entry. Left 4 Dead was a game you could get a party of friends to play because of how casual it was.
There’s a reason why that game is STILL being played to this day. There’s also a reason why that ‘Back 4 Blood’ “successor” bombed so horribly.
Heck, just look at Vermintide 2. People already complained about that game’s itemization. Now imagine how more awful it’d be if you had to grind for power rating, stamina, push/block, critical chance, etc; just to have a sword behave as a sword:
What’s that? New weapon dropped? Too bad! I have to grind it out first just so it can behave as a regular weapon - never mind the fun part of customizing it or tinkering with different blessings.
This is to give a sense of progression to confidently go up difficulty levels as new players try all the wepons out from level 1 to 30. Not that big of a deal to do it once and its over, not RNG
Obviously I would prefer no grind and instant access to everything. That includes doing away with the class leveling system entirely.
Not a single game company would ever do that today.
Considering the wide variety of options, the ability to unlock all tiers of blessings, and pick how you want to enhance weapons, I’d say the grind presented is fair enough, especially considering that, as they’ve noted, existing blessing progress with weapons will turn into immediate EXP for this system and probably let you get everything you already had earned back and more. You’re not starting from scratch.
And I mean, progression in the game right now is an endless RNGfest of crossing your fingers and pissing away endless hours worth of resources to even try to attempt to get a weapon that’s okay, and waiting for Melk across several months to maybe get a specific T4 Blessing… so yeah, I think I’ll take this new system.
But it’s only torturous because materials are so damn meagre. If plasteel was as plentiful as dockets, and locks removed, then the current system has the potential to be almost fun. It would still be RNG but you’d be able to play with it more and still get some of that gambling dopamine they are counting on for retention.
Slot machines in casinos are seriously cheap to play… So people end up playing for ages. It’s basic psychology (and generally cruel but FS want this).
If slot machines cost 5 bucks a spin (equivalent to our current system) then no one would want to use them.
Boost plasteel x10. Remove locks.
An hours work from FS and such a simple fix for current pains. Then they can spend their time on new maps/weapons/events and perfect the new system for DT2.
It won’t, because the RNG is still there. It will always be possible to find a weapon with slightly better stat distribution, or slightly better max potential stats. Never forget, they are keeping the RNG, and putting grind ON TOP
Guess the game wants me to play low tier missions to collect low tier blessings to contribute to mastery head start later on since I’ve completed collection of T3/T4 blessings…strange but ok.
or buy armory weapons to collect T1/T2 blessings as well…
What is even the point of T1/2/3 blessings though? They’re pointless.
There are a handful of t3 blessings that are unique (eg. Run and gun etc) but they should just be put in to a single blessings pool with IV blessings. No more tiers.
I can’t think of a single reason to collect or unlock T1-3 blessings (aside from those handful of unique t3 ones).
I think the poll is badly made and obviosly created in a way that makes people vote for less grind, instead of helping to unerstand what people actually want.
It is unclear, if you mean
more grind than now, in order to get to the same power
the listed amount of grind per weapon, per weapon family, per loadout, per class or per account
the listed amount of grind, when starting the game, or after already having played and hoarded ressources for 1000+ hours
Those things are massively different from each other.
Thanks for the feedback. So how would you revise the following poll options into a clear concise way. I’m neither a good poll creator nor a good thread starter; thus I’d appreciate any and all advice towards this.
Yeah does seem that way. I just ignore everything except IV blessings and still struggle to get anywhere as plasteel is so pathetically meagre.
Always seem to unlock 50 of the same t3 blessing and spunk thousands of plasteel doing so. I’m sure some of the RNG is forced into bad results unless I’m just seriously unlucky with my dice rolls.
There are a lot of ways to “fix” the current system with little effort from FS, but at the end of the day earning Blessings would still be a major crapshoot. If they just had it be where you got endless Plasteel and rolled Hadron over and over to try to fill out your Blessing pool it’d just be weird by that point. It’s not surprising they’re trying to make a polished product where players work towards them rather than roll. They’re trying to make something presentable for past and future players that were put off by the current awful system too, after all.
Not to mention, Blessings no longer filling out a collection of potential rolls meant that they went ahead and made multiple more of them for each weapon. (This isn’t listed in the dev blog, but was part of the Spanish article). It would have been obnoxious to have even more blessings than we already did per weapon with the current slot machine system and that is a real limitation that this new one will thankfully break and allow for more content.
I’m not sure how to answer to that poll.
I’m not at all excited about having to play with gray weapons for hours to unlock blessings. I wanna be free to try out new combos and maybe build something thematic and fun right away.
However, I like the idea of earning weapon mastery through gameplay. It would be great to have weapon specific victory poses, emotes, titles, cosmetics.
I want to play the game, I don’t like when the game is gatekeeping me from playing.
I vote no because the game is content enough for me. I find no external reward for “earning” gear, currency, or else.
Instead I’d be far more delighted to experiment freely and find my own niche builds that work for me. It’s what I do now anyway, but I am a bit sick of all the hoops.
That said I’m aware there is an audience for progression systems, so I’ll compromise — just as little as I absolutely need to
Change minimum weapon raiting drop to 350-360 for 30 lvl. Add new crafting option to merge 2 weapons to improve stats, or some another way to work on weapon stats - done. Not the best system in the world, but fine enough for players not to hate your game immediately.
I would suggest something like
After reaching lvl 30 on your character:
Modifiers are maxed and you can imediately pick the exact perks and blessings that you want, at no cost. Playtime past lvl 30 earns you no power and no additional options.
It takes ~10 hours of playtime to completely max out all weapons on one character
It takes ~10 hours of playtime to completely max out one set of weapons
It takes ~10 hours of playtime to get to 90-95% power for one set of weapons. The remaining 10% are locked behind another 20+ hours of playtime.
