Another winner. The way it forces everyone to huddle around the torch really gives it a tense atmosphere which I think fits the game perfectly. A friend I was playing with said it was ‘the way the game was supposed to feel’. I love the ‘last stand’ feeling you get when things get crazy and we have to drop the torch and fight around it.
I think the placement of the torch could have been better though. We quit the first run before it got going because the torch spawned behind us and we thought the lighting had bugged out.
The darkness certainly makes things interesting, and there is a certain oppressing feeling about it all - a nice thing to change the atmosphere of the game somewhat.
But unfortunately, I (together with my friends) didn’t find this one quite as fun as Tzeentchian Twins. While staying together around the torch changes gameplay significantly enough, I felt it was too restrictive and ended up tedious. It also discourages any kind of exploration: Even the usual Grimoires and Tomes need to be fetched together, and you certainly cannot (effectively) go search for the art pieces. I think it might also feel too similar a restriction to the (showcased in the dev Stream) Mutator that forces us to stay together or take damage. After all, with only one torch, we’re effectively bound to a single small area anyway.
I think that adding one more torch, so that we could (occasionally) actually split up, or someone could take a quick peek in a corner, could actually ease up at least some of these. It would also allow a bit larger effective battle area even when the torches are tossed down to fight. I’ve seen some people asking for a torch for everyone, but I think that’d be overkill, and would take away a lot of the special challenge anyway.
For veterans with all the reds/perfect orange combos, this is something different and challenging, no different from V1 mods like deathwish on cataclysm.
For a much larger percent of the population who are still farming materials and weapons, they have next to no incentive to bother with these weekly challenges (yet).
The new paintings offer me 0 incentive to give a damn. I pick them up when I run across them or if teammate spams location, but I won’t go out of my way in a match to look for them.
An extra torch wouldn’t hurt, I agree. I suppose I’m not too worried about exploration because I’ve played every map a hundred times and like @Para-Medic , the art doesn’t really do anything for me.
It’s not so much that the darkness changes the gameplay that I like, it’s the change to the feel of the game. There’s a sense of exposure and vulnerability that isn’t there when you can see everything.
The art pieces aren’t horribly important to me either; we’ll find enough eventually, without needing to grind for them or look particularly hard. But as long as they’re there, it’s still fun to search the maps for possible locations, to see where to poke our noses later on. The single torch pretty effectively prevents that (and as I mentioned, it makes even fetching some of the normal books more of a chore than usual as everyone needs to be very close to each other).
Here’s hoping all of these comments get heard and the Mutators adjusted for the next time they’re on…
I’ve always been a sucker for the dark areas. This is a neat little week event. I actually find this one more of a different experience in the old maps than the previous mutator.