Mission progress rework. The current system has three problems:
All your characters share the same mission progress and map discoveries;
All players in co-op instantly synchronize mission progress with host;
No way to start a new game, but new characters are still level 1.
.
Each new character needs to have their own separate game. Players should be able to have one character to play solo and one to play with their friends, for example. What’s worse is that if we make a new character they are level 1 and can’t do missions to level up because their main character already did everything, and we can’t start a new game without deleting everything. Finally, if you played this game for 30 hours and decide to join a friend who just started, you instantly lose ALL progress because you will sync with your friend’s game progress. That is simply absurd.
An easier way to swap ammo types. Currently, we need to open inventory, find our gun, open attachments, select the ammo attachment and select the ammo type, then close the inventory. This is horrible to do during combat. We need a hotkey to swap ammo types like we can swap fire mode with V. Perhaps holding down R (reload) could bring up a popup list of ammo types to select, or perhaps pressing T just simply cycles through all available ammo types for the selected gun. Just please, give us a way to change ammo on the fly.
More storage space. The weight limit in the storage is simply too low. That needs to be an entire order of magnitude higher - or even better, no limit. There is simply no justifiable gameplay obtained from limiting storage size. It doesn’t make us “plan ahead”, it just makes us waste a lot of good loot. And one of the pillars of this game is looting - you are punishing us for doing what we are supposed to do.
You will have host’s mission progress as long as you are in his/hers game. If you return in your own game, your mission progress is at the same point where you left it.
Devs are aware of this popular request and we’ll see when and how it’s implemented.
Personally, i say to this a: No.
Carry and storage capacity has been increased several times already and any substantial increase would be just ridiculous, especially infinite storage.
end of August '19 - Plundra (storage box) inclusion.
Plundra - 100 slot storage space
end of March '20 - Crafting + new inventory system.
no Carry Capacity skill - 48 units inventory storage
Carry Capacity skill lvl 1 - 64 units inventory storage
Carry Capacity skill lvl 2 - 80 units inventory storage
Plundra - 200 units storage space (double the space)
Recycling Station - 250 units storage space
end of April '20 - Inventory capacity tweaks.
no Carry Capacity skill - 64 units inventory storage
Carry Capacity skill lvl 1 - 80 units inventory storage
Carry Capacity skill lvl 2 - 96 units inventory storage
Compared to the year ago, you can now carry almost double the amount you could at game’s launch. Also, you can store more than double the amount you can carry where crafting resources have their own, separate storing place.
Thank you for your input, Aesyle. I’d like to address some of the points you made.
That explains their version of character respec, but it still has a flaw in itself, which is the fact that your new character will be level 1 and won’t benefit from mission experience to level up, only combat. On top of that, bosses will be higher level, meaning that you’ll have to grind to even match them. I would rather be able to respec my character than be forced to start one from scratch in a previously explored world, but that’s just me.
They don’t have to abandon their approach to character respec, by the way. We could have separate save slots for story progress, each one with up to 4 characters that share that world. That would give us the ability to play separate games, keeping their own system intact while allowing us to start a fresh game without having to delete our files.
I don’t know what to tell you, but my experience was that ALL of my friends who were playing with me progressed with me in the main story, and upon going back to their own games were exactly where we had left off, same mission and map progress as me.
I did the following test with a friend:
First, we backed up our old game and started from zero.
He completed the first mission and picked up a side mission, which he didn’t complete.
I started a new game and he joined me.
We only did a few steps of the first mission and did not pick up the side mission;
When he returned to his game, his progress was reverted to the few steps of the first mission that we had done together, and he didn’t have the side mission he had picked up in his own game anymore.
This test suggests that the progress he obtained while playing with me overwrote his own game progress. We only tested it once, so perhaps it could have been a bug. If what you said is true, then I will run more tests to see what happens.
I understand what you’re saying, but I think that’s beside the point. Just because they have increased it in the past doesn’t mean that they’ve already reached a good balance, it just means that during the first year, they noticed that their initial idea needed improvement.
Please, note that I am talking exclusively about the storage box. I have no problem with personal inventory. Our characters can carry up to 96 wt, but that enormous box can only hold just over twice as much, which doesn’t really help after a few hours into the game. From a gameplay perspective, it makes no sense that your base should have any sort of limit in the first place. It doesn’t add to the challenge, and that’s not what players should be tested in. The challenge is supposed to be choosing what gear you bring with you in your adventure, and how that will affect the loot you can bring back.
The storage box and recycling station already magically move all your stored goods wherever you access it, so there is no excuse for infinite capacity, or at least in the thousands. The less time we waste deciding what goes into the box and what is thrown away, the more time we get actually playing the game. Not to mention that throwing away loot, which you had to work/fight for, is demoralizing.
More storage space is fine, however unlimited storage space is, probably not technically feasible. Eventually, you’d exceed some internal value, and end up destabilizing your save game.
That said, there are major solutions which could radically reduce our footprint. If weapon mods were unlocks instead of items. If we had the ability to unlock persistent ammo stockpiles from the storage box (or maybe some kind of armory), and if we had the ability to do the same with weapons, and some consumables… you could create a situation where the entire storage box itself would be unnecessary beyond a few unique items, like experimentals.
So, there are ways to solve this, but they’d involve significantly altering some systems to get there. Still, not impossible, especially if the process of unlocking and expanding your armory involved a lot of exploration.
When i created my 2nd, 3rd and 4th chars, i mainly hunted relay beacons (easy 1000 XP per beacon) and also joined MP games where doing mission in their game i got the mission XP as well.
Machines won’t scale with difficulty alongside your char level or mission progress. All machines still have the same amount of HP and deal same amount of damage, regardless if your char is lvl1 with few missions done or lvl31 with all missions done.
Only in-game difficulty level changes the machine HP and damage dealt.
I’ve finished all my missions in my SP game and when i join MP, my mission progress is the same as host has it. However, when i get back to my game, my mission progress is still where it was - all missions done. It has been so for me always. I have never lost any mission progress.
At the beginning, there was a good challenge of what to bring and what to leave since what you only had was your carry capacity. But hoarders weren’t happy. So, the Plundra was introduced where to store the loot.
Did it make the situation better? For a while, until hoarders met the 100 slot Plundra limit and weren’t happy anymore. Even more requests were made to increase the capacity limit. And with new inventory system, a lot more carry and storage capacity came as well.
Is it enough? Seems like it isn’t. Since the thing is, hoarders will never be happy until there is unlimited storage, both in inventory and in Plundra.
That was the challenge in the beginning and i loved it. To bring the challenge back, Plundra should be removed from the game completely, not make it infinite storage.
That sync was made for the ease of gameplay. Else-ways, try to remember and find the 5* scope you put in one safehouse Plundra while there are around 100 safehouses with Plundras in the entire game.
In every game where there is proper inventory, inventory management is part of the game. E.g Rust, DayZ, 7 Days To Die, Subnautica.
Only games where focus is more on the action/survival than inventory, there is very little if any inventory management. E.g Doom: Eternal, The Solus Project.
Even dedicated looter-shooter games, like Borderlands 3, have limited inventory. And by the looks of it, Borderlands 3 inventory is very limited where you will be throwing away a lot more hard earned loot than you can keep them.
Speaking of loot, in GZ, loot is plentiful and you won’t be fighting over each and every piece of it. A lot of POIs are completely unguarded with occasional patrol roaming the area. Also, you can scrap the weapons/mods you don’t use anymore to get crafting resources from them.
While it may be possible to implement all those, it also changes the game beyond recognition. And with that, i’m not okay with.
This feature reminds me Doom: Eternal where weapon mods are unlocks rather than separate items.
Ammo vending machine? Isn’t that a thing in Borderlands 3?
Weapon vending machine, consumable vending machine… these are part of Borderlands 3.
Vending machines pave the way to the microtransactions and i’d hate to see that in GZ. Personally, i’d take inventory management over microtransactions any day of the week.
Except that’s not how it works in Doom: Eternal. In that case, weapons have two modal options that significantly alter the weapon’s performance.
I’m talking more about something in line with the more recent Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon titles or The Division 2.
Again, this actually fits better with how weapon mods are selected in the current UI. If we’d kept the old grid inventory, I might not even suggest this.
No idea.
Not what I’m talking about anyway. I’m talking about ammo refills. As seen in many first person shooters.
And discussing microtransactions paves the way to microtransactions, which I’d rather not see, so maybe that was a mistake you made.
No, I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about finding caches of weapons that can be hauled back to a safehouse and added as permanent unlocks for your armory.
For example, you find a large crate of AG4s. Haul that back and now instead of storing individual AG4s in your Plundra, you have the ability to pull an AG4 from storage. Now, maybe the AG4 crate you found was gray rarity, so you can only pull one crown ones, but if you hunt around, maybe you could find more crates to upgrade the quality to green or blue.
If you needed to find a total of 80 crates to max out your weapon stockpile, that would involve a lot of exploration. To say nothing of then also needing to find crates for all of the different ammo types and other consumables like medkits. Forcing you to dig around for a lot of items in the world.
You could even gate some of these crates so they’re not even accessible until specific story checkpoints have been passed. Sort of like how some of the five crown weapons don’t spawn into the world until specific missions have been completed.
You could also add crates for weapon mods, again, 5 crates per mod, and ask the player to do even more exploring on top of that.
It would also be easier on the devs, because they could be sure that players had access to certain resources regardless by dropping some basic breadcrumbs in front of you as you progress.
Checked Division 2 to see how it’s implemented there and my question would be from where all the weapon mods come from? Once you unlock, e.g Tactical Mag, it spawns magically out of thin air?
And while you can equip any unlocked mod at any given time, they all are stored where?
Division 2 and GZ are night and day when it comes to the weapon mods implementation system.
Oh, those random piles of ammo on the ground when you walk over them, your ammo is instantly refilled?
Me mentioning microtransaction as part of the discussion and as an one possible conclusion to one possible feature doesn’t make it happen in the game.
That notions towards centralized base, perhaps one per region. This deviates from the game’s current flow where the idea is to keep moving, with several safehouses across the map.
Weapons in GZ doesn’t degrade where when durability reaches 0, the weapon breaks and can’t be used anymore, giving the need to find a new weapon. Or pull new one from the infinite storage of that weapon crate you found and hauled back to your base.
Btw, Fortnite has this system going on but instead pulling another copy from armory, you need to craft the weapon again, given that you have the schematic for that weapon.
Level/mission locked items may suit linear gameplay games but in open-world game with a lot of player freedom, those restrictions hurt the gameplay.
I get your ideas of no storage system in action games. I just don’t think they fit in GZ.
You didn’t check very closely. You find schematics for weapon mods. You then go back to base, craft the schematic, and at that point your character has that mod. It’s not being conjured out of thin air, it’s actually in your inventory, along with things like trinkets. The most, “unrealistic,” element is that you can apply the same mod to multiple weapons simultaneously. Which is bizarre, but is also far easier to keep track of than juggling multiple, identical, copies of the same mod.
This is also a serious step up from the first Division title, where weapon mods were items with randomized stats, and were also a nightmare to manage. Ironically, slightly worse than what we have in GenZero, because of those randomize stats. So it wasn’t enough that you had x15 scope, you also needed to keep track of the scope’s headshot damage multiplier, see if it modified stability, or increased your reload speed. I was, charitably, a mess.
No.
I’m talking about you walking into a military bunker, that was set up to survive a Soviet nuclear strike, and finding that there are no medkits in the infirmary, there’s no weapon stockpiles, there’s just some cargo containers with lamps, couches, and a few dressers.
It’s no less apt than what you said.
To be precice, you said that, “Vending machines pave the way to the microtransactions.” Which is not true in the slightest. Predatory monitization schemes lead to microtransactions. If vending machines were anything more than a weak corollary, we’d have seen microtransactions in games like System Shock 2, Bioshock, or the original Deus Ex.
The developers of Generation Zero have already included microtransactions in their titles. Most recently in Rage 2, so they’re clearly aware of the concept.
The command bunkers are already in the game, and serve that exact purpose already, as they provide a safe source of consumables that you can farm up. This would only expedite that process while encouraging further exploration by the player.
This is not relevant to my suggestion or the discussion at large. If you’re wanting to suggest a weapon degradation system, I doubt you’ll find much support, as that’s a particularly tedious system.
I understand that this part confuses you, and I’ll say it again:
There are only three purposes to having a weapon unlock system in GenZero:
It facilitates equipping alternate characters.
It reduces inventory load in storage.
It provides some RNG protection for players who have bad luck getting certain weapons to drop, through no fault of their own.
It also has the benefit of encouraging players to explore their world more thoroughly.
So, that’s not the same system at all.
These already exist in Generation Zero. You cannot obtain the gold RPG until the relevant mission has begun. The same is also true of the gold AK, as I recall. They simply do not spawn into the world at all. Others, like the gold MP5 are gated behind doors that only unlock at certain points in the story.
While I am aware that these kinds of systems better suit linear games, they’re already at use in GenZero.
Again, there’s a significant discrepancy in Generation Zero, between multiple game types.
There was an inventory system that was more in line with survival horror games. And, as I’ve said, I actually miss that system.
There’s a combat tempo, and a focus on farming enemies, that is better suited for an action title.
You can say, “that’s not my playstyle,” and that’s a fine statement on its own, but that is how you approach the game.
While I agree that inventory management should be a serious consideration out in the field, the current game we have has an identity conflict, where you’re encouraged to stock up and then go out. At that point, it makes sense to streamline the stocking up, while simultaneously encouraging players to focus on exploration. Right now, there is not enough incentive to encourage players to explore.
I agree that the loot placement inside the bunkers isn’t logical but spreading loot boxes all over it encourages players to explore the entire bunker. Else-ways, only infirmary and armory would be explored, skipping the nice living quarters bunkers have.
I’ve played all those great games but back then (2000’s), microtransactions within games weren’t a thing. Mainly because it’s next to impossible to put microtransactions into offline game.
Since 2010 and onwards, when tablets became popular and games started to be digital downloads with online requirement, the rise of microtransactions came.
The fixed spawn locations of some 5* weapons are, yes, locked behind missions. Though, is the random spawn also locked until you haven’t done the mission where you get them?
I can’t recall if i got the fixed spawn 5* weapons 1st from the mission or from FNIX tank because i did those missions literally 1 year ago. Though, that much i remember that my 1st 5* weapon was .243 s-rifle from the 1st FNIX tank i was brave enough to engage in my solo game.
At current date, 6* weapon spawns are locked behind char lvl25, but if you trade it with someone, you can still equip and use any 6* weapon, regardless your char level.
This is actually individual. Some players may need golden carrot for an exploration reason while others don’t need any loot reward but instead are sight-seeing.
There are ways to keep areas like that relevant, like including schematics and clothing items in the world.
This is not correct, at least not fully. While it’s true that System Shock 2, from 1999, predates microtransactions, Bioshock comes from well after the era when microtransactions were coming into use. In particular Nexon was implementing that stuff back in 2005. I’m not 100% sure when the first microtransactions first hit the industry, but it was well before Bioshock.
I literally got the 6 crown Glock at level 4.
Here’s the thing, this isn’t a potential random spawn, this is a guaranteed supply. Not a replacement for random drops, but a supplement. Meaning that even if you have terrible luck, you could still get access to those weapons with enough time and perseverance.
Important to understand, and I think you’re missing this, is that I’m not talking about removing drops, I’m talking about a reliable, labor intensive, method for a player to “make up” for bad luck on the drop pool.
At this point, you need to decide, whether you are advocating for others, or yourself. Either, nothing should change because it fits what you want, in which case, great, whatever. OR, you’re worried about how it will affect other players. When you’re waffling between these two points, it sounds (correctly or not) like you’re trying to say that you speak for all players.
So what’s up with the special machines which keep leveling up? The named ones, who show up in the map, and whose level you can see if you click their picture in the map and look at their profile? I assumed they were leveling up as a consequence of my team getting stronger. Are you saying that their level doesn’t mean anything at all, and a level 1 character would have no problem fighting a level 20 “Wolf A-414, the top dog of the south island”?
Well, something is very weird about this. After our last session, one of my friends, who has been in the group since we started playing, doesn’t have some of the progress we’ve made together. We unlocked the safe house bunker in the first island, the one that has the barcodes to get in, and we did everything with the whole group online at the same time. When he went back to his game, he only had things saved up to the farm before that. His character spawned inside the bunker, but he couldn’t use the storage, the power was out and he didn’t have the barcodes to open the door, although we had done it together.
So, the game is finnicky about how it saves things, and this unreliability should be addressed.
Absolutely not. The challenge is what you bring out of the safe house with you, into the open world. The stuff you have stored should have no impact whatsoever in gameplay, especially when you can have 4 characters sharing the same stash and might be running several builds and require to store more weapons and ammo than you would with a single character. If the problem is running into a stack overflow error, then set a sensible limit, not barely twice as much as you can carry. At least 2000, or 5000, or 9999. Something that would allow you to actually store a proper amount of loot, not 200.
I’m not criticizing it. I’m using it to support my argument that it shouldn’t be an issue coming up with a reason why we can store 5k units of weight, for example, if we already have “magical” boxes that teleport items everywhere. The number 200 is completely arbitrary, and it’s proving to be a poor pick. Of course hoarders were complaining at no storage, at 100 and now at 200 - all those limits are ridiculous. I imagine people would consider it fair to be able to store 20-50 times more loot than your character can carry on their back. Heck, they can even just rework the existing carry skill to increase storage too, justifying it as a “better inventory management” skill that allows you to pack things more efficiently: +25/50% personal inventory and +250/500% storage box.
Except you can sell stuff you don’t want in those games for money, especially in games like Borderlands, and use that money to buy something else, which is not a feature in this game. You are literally throwing away loot. Another reason why BL3 is a bad example is that you have an enormous ammo capacity that doesn’t take away inventory space. Games that have physicalized ammo often allow massive quantities to be stored somewhere. Some games use inventory expansion as a money sink (Diablo 3, MMOs), and games like Subnautica, 7 Days to Die and Rust are base-building games, which often allow you to expand inventory by crafting additional boxes. If you think about it, you almost never waste loot in any game, unless you really can’t be bothered taking an extra trip to the vendor.
Forcing players to throw away loot because there is literally nothing that can be done with it is a bad design choice.
They’re called, “Rivals.” They only level to 4, but a level four Tank will be a handful. I’ve never seen the specific buffs that rivals get based on their level, but it’s significant.
Can a level 1 character deal with a level 4 rival? Not after the patch. At least, not unless they are very well geared out.
1st rise of microtransactions and pioneer in this “gerne” was Second Life (2003), where you could buy in-game items with real money.
2nd wave was in the late 2000’s, early 2010’s with mobile games like Farmville (2009) and The Simpsons: Tapped Out (2012), where you could ease your gameplay, e.g shorten the timer by paying real money.
3rd wave and most impactful for PC gaming was with the Fortnite (2017), where loot boxes were made part of the microtransactions.
We’ll see when and how this bad luck protection is implemented.
As said by Starke, they are Rivals. Basically mini-boss. And max level they evolve to is 4.
Can lvl1 player take down lvl4 rival? Yes.
The main difference between rival and regular machine is that rival is much tougher to take down. Rivals may also have different tactics compared to their normal counterparts.
Plundra’s 200 unit capacity isn’t 200 items, instead it is 200 weight (kg/lbs). In 200 kg/lbs, you can store a lot of weapons and ammo.
For example, 1000 rounds of 9mm FMJ SMG ammo weighs only 4 kg/lbs. With 200 kg/lbs limit of Plundra, you can store 50000 rounds of ammo. Or you can fill Plundra with 100 weapons since one weapon weights 2 kg/lbs.
In my Plundra, i have 26 fully geared weapons, about 11000 rounds of ammo (all different ammo types combined), 100+ first aid kits, 50+ a-shots, 30+ weapon mods, several field radios, response packs and other items and total weight is 181 kg/lbs.
