(Alpine Unrest Spoilers) An idea how the defense mission and maybe similar missions in the future could be improved

Feedback/Feature Requests
1

In short, I think that missions that can be failled and are suppossed to be repeatable until one is successful should take place in their own instance.

Why ?

Because if not, this can a) lead to frustrating gameplay, and b) really break the immersion and atmosphere.

Rigth now, the defense mission plays out something like that:

You interact with Anita, after which a countdown starts and additional supplies, for example a mine stockpile next to the bear statue, spawn in the area, but only once.
Once that timer runs out, multiple waves of enemies spawn and attack the player characters and the hotel itself.
You win if you successfully defeat all enemy waves, you lose if you leave the area or the enemies destroy the hotel.
If you lose, the hotel is healed back up to 100%, enemies stop spawning and you can talk to Anita again in order to give the mission another try.

But, what that means is:

Your inventory is not reset, the resistance supplies, like the mines, don’t respawn, and the enemies from the failed attempt don’t despawn.

So you can potentially burn through all your ammo, use up all supplies like mines and gas tanks and have a massive horde of machines in the area that you have to get rid off before your next attempt.

Also, from a story and immersion perspective, it just feels strange that if you fail to defend the hotel it just repairs itself and everyone is ready to face down the machines agin like nothing happens.

So, how I think this could/should be solved:

Once you talk to Anita, the inventory of every player character in the session gets saved and a new instance that only contains the hotel and some of the surrounding area is loaded up. Things like the mine stockpile should also be resricted to this instance.
And should the mission be failed, the open world gets loaded up again, the players spawn in front of Anita and their inventories get reset to their pre-mission state.

This would remove the issue that you can potentially waste all of your ressources on one mission, with the only effect of having a massive horde of enemies around the hotel.
Also, at least for me, a cut to black and “time rewind” would be much less immersion breaking than a hotel that magically repairs itself, among other things.

PS:
In case instanced mission aren’t possible, I would suggest that at least the supplies should respawn whenever you restart the mission and the enemies should despawn if you fail.

PPS:
There’s already a post by me that covers this mission, but it’s really ranty and emotional, so I wanted to make a more coherent and thought-out post about this.

1 Like
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Impossible to defend a hotel in that circumstance anyway. Why stop at three waves, or indeed twenty? Once he’s found you, you’re toast. This should have been a withdrawal-in-contact mission, so that you give the survivors time to go somewhere else and hide. Anything else is just arbitrary.

But I like going down to the basement and looting their suitcases while they’re, like, just standing there. Wimps.

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Impossible? No. Very hard for solo player? Yes.

If i’m not mistaken, there are 7x waves, 4x from the front and 3x from the side, alternating each time.

Though, The Resistance mission is the first mission in GZ where emphasis is on co-op and it’s best done in co-op. Co-op is also the main way of the game and rather GZ being just another online game which can’t be played solo, devs made a superb decision to enable the game for solo play as well. Latter is something rare to see with latest/ most popular games. Of course, playing solo in a game which was designed for co-op adds greater difficulty for solo players, most evident in The Resistance mission.

In the Alpine Unrest, there are 2x missions that you can fail but you can do them over and over until you complete them. It’s a change compared to the vanilla missions where you could take your sweet time and as long as you completed each and every task, the mission is successful.

The two “new type” missions both have some form of timer in them. One being “Unorthodox Skiing” and another “The Resistance”.

In “Unorthodox Skiing”, you have actual timer in which you have to reach certain point. If you do not, mission is failed and you need to do it again.
In “The Resistance”, there is a timer between machine waves but the real timer is hotel’s health bar, since if you wait long enough, machines will deplete the hotel’s health bar, thus failing the mission for you.

These two missions can produce different opinions. Some could say GZ it’s straying off from the original mission system (no mission fails), where others could say it’s a welcoming change in mission system (possibility to fail a mission).

Failing a mission isn’t pleasant since we’d all like to get it right on the first time or the very least, complete it eventually. And when mission is failed, different games use different systems to punish players for it. Some games don’t punish players at all where players can repeat the mission over and over again without any retribution whatsoever. Other games give out varying of degree punishments, up to the point where failing = game ending.

Mission failure punishment in GZ isn’t that extreme as it can be and while it isn’t pleasant to hike back on top of the mountain (Unorthodox Skiing) or looting for your supplies again (The Resistance), it is still a good punishment for the player.

Here, i don’t find that removing all the punishment from the mission failure (inventory reset + spawning back at the mission start loc) and leaving only gentle slap on the hand (notification that mission is failed) is a way to go.

With mission punishment in place, players would have more initiative to make it better next time around, to avoid the punishment and get the sought after reward of mission completion.

4

No, you misunderstand. It would be madness to try to defend the hotel for more than enough time for the survivors to escape, since all 80 tanks, 400 Hunters and 1200 runners all now know where you are. See? Impossible.

5

If you take it realistically, then yes. Also, when taking realistically, there wouldn’t be any machines in the first place.

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Personally, I really appreciate the new variety in missions, but the punishment for failing “The Resistance” feels really bizarre to me.

It’s not like I don’t like punishing games, I for example really like Darkest Dungeon and XCOM, but I think this is the most frustrating punishment I’ve seen up to date.

Because a), games like XCOM or other games with permadeath or similar punishments tend to clearly communicate to the player what they can expect. If Generation Zero had warned me that I won’t get my supplies back in case of failure I wouldn’t be as frustrated.
And I think this should be communicated, because it’s a new mission type and I’m pretty confident that I’m not the only one who expected the game to “reset to last checkpoint” after failing.
b), the mission is presented as extremely important.
But if you fail, what happens in the game world is that the hotel simply repairs itself. I don’t know about other people, but for me it’s really immersion breaking, more than a cut to black and “time rewind”.

Personally, the current punishment hasn’t motivated me to gear up again and try again harder, but instead turned me away from the mission.

1 Like
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Given machines theey aree bright enough to remember where they saw you, and in the story they are being controlled by someone, who is also bright enough to remember where you were. The fact that we must suspend belief thus far, does not mean that the spell cannot be broken if it becomes too absurd.

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Mine was glitched - I was sent back to Anna four times mid-fight with a half-healthy hotel… I didn’t bother again.

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The current theory about control is (at least from my understanding) -

The one you know to control these bots is actually dead or has suspended complete control. FNIX is an operating system, but also an execution system. My understanding is that Prototype enemies, ticks and seekers are run by program. FNIX, heavy bots and facilities are run by FNIX’s actual human-mind network.
Would explain why prototypes are easy to fool, pass and avoid. Ticks and seekers have new strange behavior, but I’ve not yet checked if prototypes are in any way improved in behavior.
The general idea of Why a teenager can survive the Mechanic attacks is that the Machines are programmed with general military protocol, which does not work well against guerilla warfare. Just like some times the devs themselves prefer saying ‘machines’, than ‘robots’.

If there’s any punishment at all, this is good. I solo’d and was close to failure on my first try, was too afraid to lose, so hauled ass to defend that hotel. It was good motivation (even when the NPC’s I defended were just empty vessels), but I never wanted to find out about failure, if any at all. This posts makes me realize that failure is actually not so punishing. The survivors don’t die, you just gotta gather up more resources. Purely subjective to what skills you’ve chosen, though. I get double the findings because of a skill…

The mission itself is a good change IMO. It’s something different, it has triggers and checks for the area of the mission, health for the objective and I just see potential of flipping this in more missions. A nice change of pace. Though, I understand that some still wouldn’t enjoy this, if the rough bumps are not patched up with meeting other scenarios in the mission… other than… Winning or Failing… :smiley:

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In some ways, GZ is more true to the older games where game doesn’t tell players all in front. Instead, players have to find it out by themselves. Be it good or bad. It’s one of the reasons why i like GZ. Of course, this lack of info isn’t liked by all and that is understandable.

When to think about it, GZ makes clear well before reaching The Resistance mission that players won’t get their supplies back when loosing combat (or in this case, loosing mission).
For example: battling with e.g mission specific tank (e.g Last Stand mission) or any machine in that matter. Tank downs the player and without any a-shots, player is spawned back into the safehouse of their choosing. Once player respawns, player gets the “combat failed” pop-up but the used supplies won’t be spawned back in player’s inventory.
And in order to take on that machine again, player needs to resupply his/hers gear to fare better next time around. Perhaps even try different tactics.

It seems that these two timed missions are like “tests” on devs part to see how such missions fit for the game. If there are more such missions to come, i’m fairly confident that devs would polish the mission tasks and success/failure transitions better than it currently is with the first iteration of such missions.

Same here. I’m also solo player and when i read what is going to happen (machines coming for an attack), i gave everything i had and then some to protect the hotel by any means necessary. That mission was tough as nails because i didn’t know what exactly is coming, from where and how many there are. Did manage to complete it on my 1st try though. Still not completely sure how. :thinking:

Only downside for me about this mission is that i can’t do it again in my solo game. If i could, i’d prepare myself far better and try to make it without concurring as many losses (“Downed”) as i did 1st time around. :slightly_smiling_face: