The idea of only having a limited amount of missions playable at any time is frankly baffling, disregarding not only the wants of players but the requirements of their weekly quest as well. Worse yet, not being able to manually select the difficulty of the mission that interests the players is terrible. Want to play damnation with Endless Hordes ? Better hope the damnation missions available have that modifier.
Worse yet, picking the “quickplay” option isn’t actually a quickplay option, it just selects from the pool of available missions on the difficulty you choose. For instance, if only one mission is playable on Damnation, and you pick quickplay for Damnation difficulty, you will 100% get that mission with the modifier it’s got on. What even is the point of having a quickplay option if it can’t select a random mission outside of the current available rotation ?
On the topic of modifiers, having only one available at any time and not being able to choose to apply it to the mission we want is terrible. Heroic Deeds were terribly implemented, and this feels like a continuation of taking control away from players when it comes to customizing their difficulty/gameplay experience.
Players shouldn’t have to wait for Endless Hordes to be on the mission terminal to play it, and players shouldn’t be forced to endure total darkness if they need a specific mission or objective.
There is no reason to restrict any of these factors, and not at least letting us purchase a contract for mission X on difficulty Y with modifier Z is awful.
You are severely kneecapping the variety of gameplay that can be had at any moment in the most aggressive and artificial way.
Please, let us select a mission, then choose the difficulty of that mission, then add a modifier (or more) on top of it. The current system is broken on a fundamental level.
So many mechanics in this game feels like they’re lifted right out of a mobile game.
Shop is time-gated with RNG
Missions are time-gated with RNG
Weeklies are time-gated with RNG
No crafting, only upgrading where materials are character specific instead of account.
It’s insane - it feels like we’re just a step away from them introducing Aquillas (the paid currency) to re-roll these. Hell, we already pay in-game currency to reroll the weeklies.
the time gated, limited mission pool is what’s irritating me the most right now. It’s making me not want to play the game for any length of time because after I play a few missions I can’t pick any new missions or have any of the hazard combinations I want. I legit play a few hours, then are off to do something else because there’s not much else I can do in the game.
Oh. That explains things.
Somehow passed me by. Or rather, I’ve forgotten about it. Gee, now I feel bad about playing.
As for the actual design: I am quite ok with it, on a theoretical level.
Kind of like DRG, having to vary your mission grounds a bit is good for longevity.
But, the counterpoints are very valid.
A) Weekly missions might require you to play on maps that aren’t even available, and
B) DRG does not limit any specific mission to a specific difficulty. Also, even ignoring difficulty, they have a lot more missions to chose from at any given time.
It just looks like they badly copied from a game whose developers put more thought into this.
Agreed, it serves absolutely no purpose in its current state. It needs a rework. Here are some ideas just off the top of my head, for reworking this system:
Quickplay
Quickplay lets us choose not only a difficulty level, but set a whitelist of maps we would like to play, choose what secondary objective (if any) it must have, and choose what specific difficulty modifier(s) to use, or random modifiers, or none.
If any of these are not set, then it will not filter what game you join by that parameter. If you don’t end up joining but instead it starts a lobby of your own, then any parameters you’ve not defined will be random in the lobby you start, as you’ve said you don’t care.
This allows for random map, random modifiers, random secondary objectives… Or for you to have defined every single thing about the game you want to have. I think the only thing you’d have to set is difficulty. Nobody queueing for Heresy and Damnation wants level 10’s in their lobby because they forgot to set an option.
System should allow multiple difficulty modifiers. Why not both make the map dark and have endless horde, for example? Most of them don’t exclude each other.
The Mission Holo Display
Honestly I struggle to see the point of this, but I think I think I could invent one - this could be a way to incentivise players out of their comfort zones, instead of always defining all the parameters they want to play by using the above Quickplay system.
This could be basically exactly the same as it is now, but with marginally increased rewards over what you would get doing quickplay. Maybe the docket reward is higher, and/or you get more crafting materials.
We’d be talking about 10% or 20% or something here. The idea would be that these are “Strategically Important” missions designated by the command staff of the Morningstar.
You don’t get to choose specifics about your mission, but you get a little bit of extra money/experience/crafting material for stepping outside your comfort zone.
EXAMPLE USER EXPERIENCE
The player selects which maps are in the pool. Maybe just 1, maybe all of them. It is randomly selected from their pool
The player selects a single difficulty. They cannot randomise this.
The player selects which secondary objectives they’d like. ‘None’ is a valid option in the list. So they can randomise it between the ones they choose, for example None, Scriptures, or Grimwoires.
The player selects which difficulty modifiers they want active. ‘None’ is a valid option. So you’d have None, Random, or a selection of modifiers. Selecting some modifiers would remove others as a valid choice (endless horde excludes fewer hordes).
The game searches for games which match these filters. If you leave a lot of them open-ended, you’ll obviously more likely to find an existing lobby - eg Any map, Any secondary objectives (including None), Any modifier(s) (including None)
If no game matching your specification exists, you create a lobby just as you do now.
You can choose as the host how long the timer is, because it’s ridiculous that we can only wait 60 seconds. I’d suggest upping this to 3 or 5 minutes.
Missions done with this new quickplay system COUNT FOR REQUISITORIUM MISSIONS. So we can actually say, “I want to do a mission for scriptures on a map I haven’t played 10 times today”.
Rewards for these custom missions are calculated using the same or similar system to now, where each modifier or secondary is worth a certain amount.
If you don’t specify your mission using quickplay, and instead do the random time-gated missions from the board, you get some extra dockets/crafting mats/experience for your trouble.
I think you’d have to rename quickplay, because it would be slower than picking a mission off the board - but you’d get to play what you actually need/want.
I never understood the current quickplay anyway, there’s like 9 things on the board, you just pick one in 5 seconds after checking the missions.
The new quickplay would be called something like ‘Custom Play’ or something.
thing with DRG is that you can play any of the missions on the board on any hazard level you want, the things that you can’t affect is level length,cave complexity and modifiers. Here you can’t do that, if a mission is only difficulty 1 and difficulty 5 you have to play 1 or 5 if you want to try that level, that’s the main problem.
So the style is copied from DRG but the main thing that makes that system actually work which is the ability to choose your own difficulty level isn’t and makes this a pretty bad system overall
I’ve been debating the usefulness of DRG as a comparison for some time. Everything looks scummy and wrongheaded when put up next to it.
Though, much as I’ve heard Deep Rock was the inspiration behind the mission terminal, I’d liken it more to Payday 2’s Crime.net - and, well, Overkill got the hint and put in the contract broker. Feels pretty bad that a game being released within the coming week hasn’t learned from the mistakes of a game that old.
To be honest, you’re just flat wrong. The option you’re asking for is an ability to farm specific missions on specific levels. The ability to speed run content is requested in literally every game with a levelling system, it’s like people are conditioned to believe they’re not playing the ‘real game’ unless they leap-frog to endgame within a week.
No… we just prefer being able to choose the missions we want to play. Especially with the dismal weekly mission system. Getting 3x the same mission on 3 different difficutly levels and two with side objective and one Modifier IS BAD DESIGN!
Especially considering that htere are penances that require playing specific missions…
Also, same with VT 2, the game only really becomes fun once you’re int he end game, with as many characters as possible preferably, because hten you can just play as you want… before that, you’re trying to reach the power level to play the difficulty to want on all the classes you want to play as to be flexible.
I waited all weekend to play an investigation mission, but for some unfathomable reason it’s just not going into the rotation. Why is the game locking me out of content I want to do?
and how would that be bad? Considering how terrible the progession is? Once you’re set, you don’t really have much reason to “power farm”.
And in any case, if oding that is the main incentrive, then the blame is with FS. Few had any issue with Vermintide 1 and 2. Sure, some people did do power farming to get new stuff… But that certainly wasn’t the average player.
A whole lot of the baseline of this game is inconvenient dreck with far too much reliance on RNG for: What missions are availabe.
At what DIFFICULTY these missions are available.
With what SIDE QUESTS these missions are available.
With which modifiers these missions are available
IF You get an Emperor’s Gift
What weapons are available in teh store
What weapons are available at Melk’s
What quests are available at Melk’s
ANd that’s absically everything outside character levels and the maps themselves…