Hot News!  /s

Kotaku’s Jason Schreier released a report on the development issues surrounding Anthem.  Jason has a rather large network of game development contacts, and he seems to have this magic “suggestion box” that people put trust into.  The end result is that he seems to have the best odds of having a behind the curtains look at game development.  Generally speaking, the articles tend to point out the poor development health issues, evidence that not everyone should be a manager, and that the likely end result for large gaming developers is that unions are going to be pounding at their door unless they change their practices.

Next, a recall of my previous post mentioning that the management team of Anthem should be changed.  In particular –

Each patch somehow manages to make the loot part of the game less rewarding. I firmly believe that everyone has the best of intentions, but at this point it’s abundantly clear that the leadership of Anthem has to go. I know that in 6 months, the game can find a footing – but the culture and direction up top needs to change so that fun & quality are achieved before change for the sake of change.

Back to the actual article.  There are many points made, and at a high level we see:

• The mandatory use of Frostbite across EA hampers game development that is not designed for FPS
• EA setting a hard delivery date of March 2019, even though the game clearly was not ready
• The direction that they could not compare to Destiny – their #1 competitor in market.
• The culture of crunch in BioWare that lead to significant “mental health” leave, which has a dramatic impact on available resources
• The overall lack of quality resources that want to work in Edmonton, Canada.
• The lack of effective management/direction on Anthem
• That Anthem really only had 18 months of development, the majority of which happened in the last 6
• BioWare Edmonton thought they were untouchable and ignored feedback

There are general rules in any large company.  At lower levels, you can get by pretty well with average talent, and manage the poor ones.  When you reach the management level, it gets a lot harder, but it’s possible to correct it with another group.  At the director/exec level, that’s where things go off the rails.  When you only have one lead for a major project, and that lead is not made for that project – things go bad real quick, and cascade down.

People will stay around in shitty working conditions because of other people.  People will quit a great job if they hate their boss.  People will take on tons of work if they trust their workers and boss.  Seen it countless times.  When the top performers / leaders start dropping, or losing faith… you have an avalanche of impacts.

In Anthem’s case, EA really doesn’t come off as the bad guy.  Sure, the need to use Frostbite is going to end up costing them tens of millions more than if they simply licensed Unreal (not to mention being unable to recruit talent on proprietary code).  Setting a delivery date when the product is clearly not ready is going to burn them for some time.

But the weight of the problems here are clearly on BioWare direction, or lack thereof.  The culture the doctors put in, where they made clear decisions for the entire group left when they did.  At multiple times, and through consistent feedback, it’s clear that the development teams lacked the necessary direction (even at the concept level) to do their work.  True or not, it’s clear that someone realized this and threw Mark Darrah at the problem 16 months before launch.  In effect, what we have played is the result of his direction.

Which begs the question as to what Jon Warner, Mike Gamble, and Ben Irving did in this large process.

I won’t go into details on BioWare’s tone deaf response.  It’s a self-inflicting wound, that simply re-affirms the entire article’s position that BioWare leadership isn’t actually paying attention.  My gut says this will be enough to make some staff leave.

Final Thoughts

Anthem is the main reason Origin Access Premier exists.  EA is driven on that success factor, and I highly doubt Anthem is going anywhere.

EA’s drive to push Frostbite everywhere is part of the direct failure of two high profile BioWare games.  There are no good news stories about Frostbite.  EA made a bet, and they lost.  There’s no reason to double down (or triple down in this case).

BioWare as a company is going to hemorrhage developers and have a damn hard time recruiting new talent, unless there are major (and public) shakeups with management.

Anthem requires a transparent State of the Game message from upper management, with clear and honest acceptance of the issues and a high level plan to address them.

The game industry as a whole is still reeling from the RDR2 crunch articles… this is just more push to unionize.

I rather enjoy the series.  I put in a lot of time in the first one, and double that in the second.  There are DLC through the nose, and right now the entire series is on sale on Steam for ~$15.  Great value. Course, the timing is due to Borderlands 3 being announced.

There are some interesting bits of this series, namely that the 2nd in the series really hit some amazing high notes for the time – and really kicked off the looter/shooter genre.  2012 also saw Diablo 3 (yes, it’s that old) and Torchlight 2, and I think it fair to say that D3 really missed the target with the loot mechanic that year.  It gave Borderlands 2 a chance to really go for it.  The DLC covers a pile of stuff

• New areas
• Extra levels
• New items & rarity
• New stories, bosses, skins, secret loot (headhunter packs)

OP Levels

This was a neat variation on New Game+.  The level cap ended up at 72, but by completing a specific level at max level, you could increase the enemy/loot level by 1.  Every completion added another level, up to 8.

Enemies could then spawn 1-8 levels higher than you and come with some pretty heavy damage reduction values – starting at 10% and up to 99.2% – full on damage sponges. An important bit here – enemy damage did not scale like this.  They did marginally more damage, but the real challenges was their increased hit points.

Loot Variety

Simple concept – you had guns, shields, and relics (stat boosters effectively).  Each “type” aligned with a particular set of “manufacturers”.  If you wanted elemental damage, then you wanted to find Maliwan brand weapons.  The stats of the weapons then were rolled within a range of that manufacturer, a factor based on the rarity of the item.  There were 8 ranks by the end.  Really, that meant that all Rank 3 Maliwan Pistols had the same stats, but Rank 4 had better stats.  Though a Rank 3 Maliwan Pistol was certainly a lot different than a Rank 3 Bandit pistol.  And better effects – rank 8 weapons had different ideas.  Send a shock, shoot multiple bullets, launch grenades… all sorts of stuff of different value to different classes.

Build Variety

While all guns could be used by all classes, each particular class came with a skill tree to differentiate.  Zer0 was a ninja sniper, and his signature move was to lay a decoy and boost his stats for a short period.  He had 3 skill trees that focus on sniper kills, melee kills, or improving his signature move.  It ended up with a build focused on a particular playstyle.  Salvador, for example, with the Money Shot and Inconceivable skills was a boss killing machine.

Also helped having 4 weapon slots to change your damage potential.  Keeping a sniper rifle in the back pocket, or a minigun for those tight fights… always fun.

Story Mode

Are there gamers who don’t know who Handsome Jack is?  As much as I re-ran missions for loot in the game… I always knew who the main bad guy was, and what he was trying to do.

Plus, Tiny Tina is scarred on my brain.

I couldn’t bother telling you the story of the Division, Destiny, or Anthem.  The premise in each, sure.  The actual story and point?

Moment to Moment

It’s an FPS.  Enemies had a fair chunk of variety but it always resulted in the standard “shoot before dying” gaming model.  The game was an in-your-face gun fest, and defensive play wasn’t really a strong point.  Enemy AI was pretty dumb, but made up for it in sheer volume.

As the game levels progress, the complexity of the enemies increase, and random boss-like enemies can spawn.  It is generally well balanced for the normal mode missions.  After that… it gets pretty crazy.

Bosses are full of interesting mechanics, and there’s plenty of variety between them.  There’s plenty of movement in each of them, so just finding a sniper’s nest and unloading guns isn’t a viable strategy.  The Warrior battle (last main mission boss) is an amazing experience of avoiding telegraphed attacks, and finding the right time and position to do damage.

The Itch.

Should be pretty clear by now that I have an itch for a good loot game.  I’ve put in enough hours in D3, Path of Exile, and Grim Dawn (there’s a new expansion!) to know the systems I like.  I do enjoy shooters (or perhaps better said action games), and Anthem’s combat system is hard to beat.  But it’s loot system is just pure rage, and after a month of dumb, I’m moving on.

I picked up the Handsome Jack collection and will giving that a go for the next little bit, see if it’s enough to scratch the itch.

Patch 1.04 hit last night.  Lots of tweaks.  An astounding level of dumb included.

I ran a Legendary mission, 3 Legendary contracts, and Tyrant Mines.  All at GM2.  At the end, I had a total of 3 MW drops – all mandatory drops from the contracts.  Nothing else.

Belghast’s thoughts

Isey’s here.

Elysian Chests

Concept = unique rewards from killing a dungeon boss.  Need a key to open.  You can get 1 key per day.

Reality = There are 161 items to acquire.  There are 40 days total to acquire them all.  Drops are not guaranteed, so you can get baseline crafting materials instead (which equate to 2 minutes of Freeplay).  Oh, also the cosmetic rewards are not actually awarded.

It is hard to articulate how over promised and under delivered this is, in a loot-based game.   I’ll compare to WoW for a sec.  Imagine killing the last boss in a dungeon, and getting 20 basic herbs instead of a transmog item.

Loot Changes

Concept = More & better items can drop from chests and bosses

Reality = Guaranteed MW items no longer drop from bosses, the quality of items has not improved, and teammates can pick up loot for you.  End result is that your inventory gets more loot you don’t want (since most people avoid picking up blue/purple items).

This is just insane. Quite literally a single run of any stronghold would have identified 100% reproducible bugs.

Legendary Mission

Concept = Replay a main line quest, with a chest at the end, and a super boss.  Key an Elysian chest key.

Reality = Exactly this, including an unskippable cutscene.  I did this on GM2, didn’t see any MW drops.  My key took 2 more missions to finally show up.

The Rest

Lots of quick fixes and balance items.

• Health bug still exists (more accurately, inscriptions don’t always seem to be applying)
• Storm changes need more testing.  I tried some freeplay and my overall damage decreased due to lack of itemization.
• Colossus seems beefier
• The Bloodlust component is indeed OP
• Some item wording is still buggy… I see 0% and 0 seconds on some items.
• Flying duration seems marginally better.

Summary

I have seen my share of dumpster fires.  I have been involved in them.  When you are in them, it sucks the very life out of you, and there’s no joy to be had anywhere.  I feel more than bad for the actual development team.  I 100% refuse to believe that these issues were not flagged in testing – that’s a level of incompetence that cannot exist in a company that size.

Travis Day (the guy who helped implement Loot 2.0 for Diablo 3) gave clear instructions on how to fix these problems.  BW has chosen to ignore it.

Each patch somehow manages to make the loot part of the game less rewarding. I firmly believe that everyone has the best of intentions, but at this point it’s abundantly clear that the leadership of Anthem has to go. I know that in 6 months, the game can find a footing – but the culture and direction up top needs to change so that fun & quality are achieved before change for the sake of change.

Either that, or this is simply the end of BioWare.

Full post here.

That is a heck of a wall of text, which has some interesting bits.

The highlight, to me:

• Elysian Chests which drop vanity items (non-armor)
• Once a day Legendary mission (repeat of mainline story missions)
• General loot quantity improvements (how much is the question)
• Clarification on confusing inscription wording (I still don’t get why there are Shield Delay and Shield Refresh as separate stats)
• Many a bug fix, in particular the HP issue
• Re-balancing of javelin gear

Of this, we got new Universal MW, Elysian Caches, QoL for Forge, and Legendary missions.  No new events, strongholds, social tools, or the actual Cataclysm.

I play Storm as a main, and Colossus in spurts.  The latter scales at a ridiculous level, and deals decent enough damage.  The Storm… is like a wet tissue paper.  GM1 is fine, but past that he’s only good for lock downs.

The actual changes for the Storm appear to be a general nerf on damage – or rather, a push to have everyone run fire builds.  Because fire damage is dependent on Power Level, napkin math says the meta just took a large swing.

Storm is built upon a different mindset than the other javelins.  Gear cooldown reduction + javelin damage + elemental damage.  Weapons are not generally used, aside to provide similar buffs (Elemental Rage for example).  Other inscriptions have minimal value (‘cept maybe Gear Charges on some skills).  It’s also built on 3 elemental attacks Ice, Fire, and Lightning (can do acid with a specific MW skill).

Ice is low damage but freezes targets.  Extremely effective on groups, and teamed with a Colossus is pretty much insane lockdown.  Lightning is very high damage, and goes through shields pretty well. Fire burns through armor (yellow health bars) and does damage over time (scaling almost entirely on Power Level).

On paper, Lightning should always win – and until you get your first legendary drop, that is the case.  The boost from the first legendary though… that makes Fire do insane damage, and this patch just buffed that effect by 50%.  It will be interesting to test this out.

As for Colossus, the patch notes read as an overall buff.  Shock Treatment, Synchronized Frame, and Flamethrower all received some serious fixes.  Also, it looks like Autocannons received a boost on reload speed… so Endless Siege just became even more powerful.

I don’t play enough Interceptor or Ranger to comment on those changes.

I am very interested in seeing how the Bloodlust MW component works out.  A 75% boost to melee damage means that Interceptors and Colossus have a major (if not outright ridiculous) boost to damage output when facing groups.

Overall, there’s a lot of changes here.  Plenty of pages, showing a lot of hard work to get the “quick wins” out the door.  Legendary missions are a decent content addition, and will be immediately compared to Legendary contracts with guaranteed drops and stronghold with guaranteed chests.  Elysian chests… ok I guess.  They were oversold, but are an interesting first step.

There still remains the fundamental issue of gear acquisition (both in terms of quantity and quality) that is at the heart of a looter/shooter.  Maybe it’s better with this patch.  If there isn’t a marked change… then I guess I’m moving on until things get better.  Moment to moment is still a ton of fun, but the days of Space Invaders are long gone, and my game library is aching for some play time.

As a slight refresher, I really like numbers.  Enough to have been a very active theorycrafter.  Even have a page with some info on the concepts.

Anthem has many, many hiccups.  Hiccups that existed in other games prior, yet it would seem there are few lessons learned.  I think the combat mechanics (moment to moment stuff) is top notch, but the numbers that make the system run are simply broken.  And as I play more, I realize that they are not broken in a “this can be fixed rather simply” fashion, but there are some fundamentals that are going to take a long time to solve.

I’ve put my thoughts to digital paper on why inscriptions are broken, and what needs to be done to address it.  If the game was showering you with loot, then broken inscriptions would be somewhat more forgiving.  That’s not the case, and even on the hardest difficulty (GM3), the rate of legendary drops is close to 1 per 3 hours of gameplay.  When you realize that the majority of drops have no real value (more on that), you’re looking at a very long time between upgrades.  The stat weighting is so powerful, that god rolls make the rest of the items look like kids toys (e.g. a gun doing 400% more damage).

This is ignoring one particular item and that’s the Javelin power level – the number in the top right that I originally thought represented simply a summary of your overall gear components.  Which it does, but it also does much more.  Reference this Reddit post for some data from TemperHoof.

Power Level is primarily used for calculating Ultimate damage.  That impacts pretty much everyone in the same manner, and since Ultimates are not exactly common (‘cept one particular Ranger build) it doesn’t have a large impact.  It also impacts melee damage – which is a massive boost to Interceptors (90% of their attacks are melee), and Colossus (the AE attacks get a baseline 50% boost), and some Ranger builds.

The game also has a generic multiplier on all damage abilities based on your Power Level (or rather, the average item level).  For full epic, that multiplier is around 1.5.  For full legendary that number is around 22.6. Math-wise, this is a 1500% increase. Why is this an issue?

First, the actual baseline stats on an item have less meaning. The power level difference between Epic (38), MW (61), and Legendary (75) are quite large.  The first jump is a 40% boost.  The second one is a 20% boost. While you may compare the stats on the face of an epic vs MW item, even if the epic has much better inscriptions, the MW weapon will be better in almost all cases.  Same with MW vs Legendary.

Second, all inscriptions except Javelin % damage are worthless compared to Power Level.  That means in 99% of cases, it’s better to equip a Legendary with garbage stats than a MW version with really great rolls.

Third, a bug in the game right now only calculated equipped slots.  The result of this bug is that if you have 1 Legendary, you will do more damage with just that item equipped than if you had that and 10 MW items in the other slots.  You’d be a glass cannon!  This should be fixed in 1.04.

Fourth, because there are no dependable methods to acquire legendary items, you are completely at the mercy of the RNG gods.  You are better off equipping pieces you don’t want (e.g. a skill/gun you don’t like) if it’s legendary, which makes for some really weird builds.  That reduces the overall fun factor.

Fifth, the loot drop changes in 1.03 made it so that legendary drops are much higher (comparatively) in GM3.  However, you need at least 3 legendary drops to even make a dent in anything in GM3.  This is the exact same problem D3 had at launch.

A Choice

I am of the opinion that this issue is fundamental, and therefore a very complicated matter to address.  Making any change to the basics of a model have long term consequences – managing that change takes time and smarts.  BioWare doesn’t have that much time (or doesn’t act like it does), and the fact that the issue exists in the first place shows that they are not overflowing in the smarts department.

The current foundation of the game makes Legendary items superior in 99% cases to everything else.  The same foundation says that Legendary acquisition is both entirely RNG, and further has such low odds of payout that you can go days/weeks without anything.

That really leaves 2 choices.  Either fix the foundational issues over months of effort, or increase the drop rate on legendaries.

The risk of the first one is prolonging a broken end game, and generally hamstringing money-making for months.  It wouldn’t be a relaunch, but a new end game loot/mechanic model would be about as close as you get.

The risk of the second one is that you’re setting expectations and cannot change it once set.  It effectively negates all other item values, and means that any additional items brought to the game start at legendary level.  People will simply consider legendary the default item level… and that makes GM1/GM2 ghost towns.  Even with crappy legendary rolls, GM3 is more than doable.

I am struggling to believe that BioWare didn’t see this coming a mile away.  I mean at the development level – the folks who play tested.  The last livestream had 2 people who clearly play the game, and it was obvious they knew the shortcomings.  There’s a bit of the “yeah we know, but…” that Wildstar had at launch.

I read a lot on the ship.  Nearly 5 books in the Foundation series.  I’ve read that entire series every 2 years since I was a teen.  It’s vision of hard sci-fi (and everyone smoking) was quite the pinnacle of the golden age.  What it truly missed was Haldeman’s appreciation for rate of change.  Which is fine really, since in the 40s the rate of scientific change was measured in decades.  Today, we’re lucky to go a year without a massive change on the tech scale – primarily driven though insane advances in computing technology.

When I played the original Diablo, what was delivered was pretty much what I got until the expansion launched.  Diablo 2 had more updates, but most were over years. Diablo 3 had big tweaks that took months to roll out –  the concept of Seasons alone was a big shift.

So now let’s look at Anthem.

The game “launched” on Feb 22, so we’re 1 month in.  Next week is patch 1.04, which is not adding content but is addressing a laundry list of bugs and some major complaints on loot.  More info from a recent livestream.

Let’s get to the point though – at launch Anthem’s end game was for most purposes broken.  The content was buggy, unbalanced, and un-rewarding.  Each patch has made large strides to correct this.   As the game stands today, the best way to get gear is

• Run Freeplay only
• Run at the highest comfortable difficulty (e.g. a normal enemy doesn’t take a full clip)
• Kill everything you see (I got a legendary from a regular wyvern)
• Use your highest power level (lower levels get less drops)
• Have ~90% luck (hard cap)

Recent changes have made Freeplay better – Titan spawns are actually manageable, there are more events, and more enemies.  1.04 will add map icons for events (yes!!!), simplify overheating, but won’t address respawn locations.

Strongholds were recently brought in line, so that they generally have the same difficulty / duration.  Running them until you get your first MW skills is a smart move, but after that, there’s little reason to run them.  1.04 will change that.  Daily challenges provide keys, which can unlock after you take down the last boss.  1 chest per player who has a key (so up to 4).  There will also be Legendary Missions (replays of existing quests) – not sure what the rewards are here.

There are still some gaps left to address – among those I consider critical rather than Quality of Life.

• Power scaling (Storm are the worst here since Gear stats are much worse than Weapon stats)
• Support gear masterworks (given that power levels impact nearly every end game calculation)
• Loot drops rates / inscription balancing

I would note that nearly all of these issues were identified in the demo open beta, or within a few days of launch (when people were at max level).  Anyone who’s reached end game could see these issues – which is the topic for another post.

After a month, I would say that BioWare has managed to apply 3 distinct kitchen sink patches, with another due next week.  As much as it’s a symptom of the times that these 4 patches are required, it’s worth note that this cadence of change is insane.  Can you imagine the hours the devs are putting in to push this much out?  I’ve done my fair share of crunch before a product launches, and as painful as that is, it is but a fraction of the crunch required once a product launches and things go sideways.  Taking a step back, I really hope the industry at large takes a look at what’s happened here and does it’s damn best to avoid it in the future.  For half the investment (time), it would have received double the return (happy players and positive news articles).

At the least it’s obvious BioWare wants the game to succeed and is taking very large strides to fix things in a rapid fashion.

A patch is coming on the 12th, with something like 300 bug fixes.  I think that says two things.  First – clearly this game was rushed out the door.  Second – it would appear the devs have not slept in quite a while.

When your game makes the major news waves that it’s potentially bricking PS4, no one is really going to get some sleep.

I’ve also been unlucky enough to have Tyrant Mines bug out on me three times.  This happens when you pop into the dungeon stronghold and end up after the final boss.  Means you can no longer select it from the map.  Thankfully, Isey was there 2 of those 3 times to invite me to a new group, which squashes that bug.

That said, I have been lucky enough to pick up some gear to kit out my storm.  Chaotic Rime & Ponder Infinity work well together.  That combined with some rather significant Gear Cooldown stats, means I can cast Chaotic Rime for an infinite duration – essentially freezing the entire map.

I was however struggling for weapons.

I decided to give colossus thiccbois a chance.  These guys are useless without MW components, then they become iron beasts.  Not only does their armor get an insane boost (5x) and then you can stand toe to toe with anyone and survive.

Again though, crappy luck on weapons.

Targeting Loot

Running a stronghold gives a guaranteed MW skill.  This is useful, since the pool is somewhat limited (~10 each).  A few runs, and you’ll get the one you want (just not the stats you want).  Running a Legendary Contract gives a MW component.  You can run 3 per day.  My suggestion is to run those 3 on a class for which you have not yet acquired all the MW components (e.g. fill out all 6 slots on all 4 classes).

Weapons – there’s no way to target them.  Pure random, and there are a LOT of them.  So what to do?

Crafting

You can craft MW items if you complete the associated challenge.  For gear (skills) you need to complete a mission or freeplay event with it equipped.  Very doable.  For components you need 50,000 of each faction.  That is a VERY high bar.  Unlikely anyone but the most dedicated will get there.

Weapons – you need to kill 10 legendary enemies with that weapon equipped.  Very luck based that you get the weapon in the first place.  A neat bypass was posted on Reddit. Basically you equip the specific weapon sub-type and attack a legendary target.  Someone else needs to hit it with any MW weapon.  Only 1 hit per weapon is needed.  Once it dies, it counts as 1/10 kills. I did this twice and got the following 2 items.

Rather, I crafted the following items.

Recall that it takes 15 salvaged MW items in order to craft 1 of these.  So while not exactly cheap, it’s a good way to fill out some slots and bypass the RNG gods a little bit.

Good luck out there.

Anthem  is doing a hell of a job getting in it’s own way.

It really is two different games.  The 1-30 part is good.  You can get a solid 20 hours of of that part, and generally not have issues.  Then you reach 30, and unlock Grandmaster 1 (GM1), and it feels like self-sabotage.

That’s right – 0%.  Devs put it to this value because a bug caused it to stack to infinity.  At least I get Ammo 33% faster from enemy drops.

The list of bugs I mentioned last post persist.  Still can’t get Tyrant Mine to show up… apparently I need to be manually invited to a run.  Hundreds of posts on the main forums, not a single answer from the devs.  That I found the solution on a major gaming website is more than telling.

Stability

In most any other space, I’d say stop what you’re doing, throw everyone on stability.  Anthem goes to extreme ends to make the gaming experience painful.  I am happy for those that are not having issues – more than happy.  When it works, the combat here is really solid.

But golly molly, what is with this game?  I get Bethesda not being able to tie their shoelaces without burning the house down, but this had 6 years of development and would barely qualify as alpha in terms of stability.  I’m sure in a month’s time this will be old news… but this game doesn’t have a month’s time.  It has 2 weeks until Division 2 comes out.

Focus

I don’t quite understand what Anthem is trying to do.  The story mode from 1-30 is 100% gone at max level, with the aside of talking to NPCs (which add entries to a practically hidden part of the game).  Which is fine.  The issue is that the game insists in putting you back into story mode (Tarsis) at every single step, and go through loading screens that are pointless.  Even the post-mission screen is useless aside from trying to sell you on the cosmetics.

If Anthem is trying to sell me on the looter/shooter, then it needs to actually make it possible to do that.  Looter specifically in that I get loot, I can try loot, and get to content that gives loot in a rapid manner.  Right now, the process is:

1. Load the game (10s)
2. Press space to load into Tarsis (30s)
3. Walk over to the launch bay (60s)
4. Load Launch Bay (30s)
5. Collect all Legendary contracts (10s) (1 place to click, rather than 3)
6. Load Expedition screen (10s)
7. Launch expedition (30-45s)
8. Complete Contract (~10 minutes) (or Tyrant Mine if it wasn’t bugged at ~25m)
9. Load post-mission screen (10s)
10. Skip post mission screen (or wait 30s)
11. Watch loot screen and break down all non-purple items (10-30s)
12. Enter Forge to see if the loot I got is an upgrade or not (20s)
13. Clean out inventory (2m)
14. Load back into Tarsis (20s) (Launch Bay takes longer than Tarsis to load, and is bugged 50% of the time)
15. Turn around and enter Javelin
16. GOTO 6

Step 7 is the one where I actually play the game.  Everything else is overhead.  If I’m doing contracts, that’s ~50% of my time not actually playing the game.

Quality of Life

There’s a long list here, but the more I think about it, the more it’s less about QoL and more about just plain basic functionality in a game made in 2019.

• A functioning & interactive map
• A way to quickly group up with people around you
• Loot that actually feels rewarding (1% more ammo is beyond dumb)
• Meaningful content that is balanced
• Clear messaging as to how stats/inscriptions impact your player (a game based on number chasing should explain said numbers)

Suggestions

• Increase Freeplay to 16 players (I realize this requires “smart” enemy scaling)
• Have the game start you at the gates outside Tarsis
• Allow players to teleport to Strider launch points they have discovered
• Allow players to mark the map in Freeplay and allow other Javelins to teleport to them
• Have the expedition kiosk a MENU item, not a location you need to physically go to
• Have the forge a MENU item, not a location you need to physically go to
• Pre-load the jump BACK into Freeplay when a mission ends, while you are looking at the loot drops
• Set ranges to inscriptions based on rarity (e.g. MW rolls min 50% of max, Leg rolls 75% of max) so that it actually feels like it’s an improvement over Epic gear.
• Launch the additional content now – with a time balance similar to that of Tyrant Mines – at least 2 new strongholds (for a total of 5 BALANCED strongholds).