Definite minor spoilers and possibly major spoilers below.
Last night I played thru the new Special Assignment with my (very rusty) Ogryn pal on Malice as I leveled up my Hive Scum, and I had to come write a little about it because it was so damn good and got me so flipping hype.
First off, the mini-arc Special Assignment is great. We’ve had these complicated, expensive assets (levels) that definitely feel like they hold things up sometimes. But now there’s a framework to take those, combine them with specific, thematically-appropriate modifiers (if not specific seeds?), and inject some lighter assets (voice work & cinematics) to build out a chapter in the story.
I love it, and I hope we see a lot more of this, with or without a killer new map reveal at the end…and No Man’s Land is indeed killer!
I’ve only played it once, so I can’t speak to its replayability, but it’s instantly one of my favorite maps. Just an amazing visual identity with the smoke and foxholes and rubble. Really really sold the Gaunt’s Ghosts feel for me.
And then the ending cinematic…and Dukane’s words…
With the heretic stronghold in our hands, the task now is to decrypt the intel gathered from within its walls.
This will take some time, but already it is clear that Admonition has a presence in Tertium’s fringes, and perhaps even in the desolation beyond.
…and then the words of Victor Magnuson about the story from his recent interview:
“We will be, in the near future, going places you would not have expected to go.”
Drunk on hype from the level, and with these words rattling around in my head, I just can’t shake that we’re on the road to DT’s version of Chaos Wastes!
And we all know that’s not some crazy idea. We’ve had dialogue about a second city in the “wastes” for ages (maybe even since launch). And CW is pretty well-regarded. And FS (I believe Strawhat?) said ages ago that Mortis is not the CW equivalent for DT.
And now we’re actually outside the city. And we’re directly participating in gameplay that is unlocking something. That something could just be the next story beat…
…but…
Looking through the code, as I tend to do after updates, I happened to notice something added in Bound By Duty: a single, seemingly useless file. A file that, along with its parent folders, appears to have been wholly removed from the files with the No Man’s Land update…
And the file and folders was: “content/levels/cinematics/outro/fail/expeditions/generic/world_volume_data.lua”
