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Anthem
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aaronjumper wrote: »Oh the Interceptor is a lot of fun.
Who needs guns when you can twirl through a fight cutting everything down.
The shields recharging faster if you keep your speed up makes for great guerilla fighting.
Looking forward to starting proper now I've the basics unlocked.
There is a masterworked machine pistol that when you shoot it point blank, you deal 100% extra melee damage for 3 seconds and it stacks.
The fun you have as an interceptor with that
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Former Diablo 3 Designer, Travis Day posted his opinions and suggestions on how to fix Anthem's loot issues
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheGame/comments/ato54p/reward_structure_issues_and_ideas/I've been playing Anthem for the last week and really enjoying myself. However the game seems to fall into a number of reward system related traps that I wanted to take a moment to point out and offer some possible solutions to in an effort to help make this game, which I'm enjoying, more compelling.
"Dead" inscriptions -
By now I suspect many people have seen items roll with stats that they don't understand. TLDR Man icon means it effects everything you do, Cog icon means it only effects the item that it rolled on. Currently the game allows for items to roll inscriptions that literally can not effect the item they are on. Example, Venmous Blaze with item specific Physical damage, +% Weapon damage, or +% Cold damage.
Having items roll affixes that are sub-optimal is standard practice for this kind of game but I think there should be a hard distinction made between "bad" and "literally doesn't work". Currently this causes a considerable amount of confusion for players learning the game as their initial assumption is to think anything an item rolled will work on the item it rolled on. Since that isn't true I assume the design intent was to create a larger spectrum of item power based on the rolls, I would argue it comes with too many drawbacks. Keeping the spectrum of item power large could easily be accomplished by simply changing the relative weighting of affixes while restricting them to things that actual work on the item. Alternatively items could have an affix range, MW could roll 2-4 or 3-4 properties on creation so that there is still the same amount of item variance but the affixes that show up continue to still "work" on whatever they rolled on.
Risk vs Reward -
This is a pretty common pitfall that a lot of games run into, the games I worked on included. It's always going to be subject to some amount of individual perception about what is easy vs what is hard. At present it seems that the 3 strongholds have different relative tuning of the final boss encounters, the Tyrant < Temple of Scar < Heart of Rage in terms of overall difficulty. The first time I went to fight the Heart of Rage boss it took 30 minutes for my group to defeat the end boss, relative to the time it takes to kill the Tyrant this felt wildly disproportionate. My take was that they didn't have many dungeons so they wanted them to effectively be tiered in difficulty, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any reward incentive to justify the scaling between the 3 dungeons within a given difficulty setting. Even ignoring that particular case the difficulty between the Tyrant boss and the Scar boss is vast based purely on the invul windows and the difference in fighting swarms of spiders vs swarms of scar enemies.
There are a number of potential solutions on that front, whether it's bringing the dungeons into the same relative difficulty scale or increasing the rewards to match the difficulty. Either direction is reasonable depending on the design goals, but at present it's considerably mismatched in both directions.
Lack of incentive for random strongholds -
I'll put this here since it's directly related to the stronghold issue and whether or not this is even addressed is determined by the solution to the above stronghold risk vs reward issue. If the intent is that dungeons are tiered then this isn't something that needs to be addressed, if the intent is that dungeons are comprable in difficulty then the lack of a bonus or incentive to diversify which dungeon I run is an issue. Players will generally follow the path of least resistance, at present that means run Tyrant mines repeatedly. This also increases the speed at which players will "burn out" since the game feels shallow and lacks variety.
There is a lot to be said for diversity of combat environments and situations. While I personally am enjoying trying to optimize my path through Tyrant mines it is certainly making me bore of the, somewhat limited, content that is available.
Simple solve assuming dungeons are roughly equal in challenge is add a random stronghold to the available mission ques and attach some kind of luck/magic find bonus for doing it.
Player agency / targeted farming -
I like the recent change to help distinguish the different activities from each other. Strongholds always drop a MW skill, legendary contracts always drop a MW class mod. Giving players a degree of agency over their rng is great, in this kind of game players will always set goals "I want item X" "I want to make build Y" the typical point of frustration is when players can't deviate their gameplay patterns to work towards whatever goals they set. At present I can chain run strongholds to try to hunt for specific skills, and thats great, unfortunately legendary contracts aren't something I can explicitly farm. I can do the couple I get each day, and I in theory could chain que quickplay in hopes of getting match made into more, but that leads to que dodging behavior.
If the intent is to give players agency over their activity they need to be able to actually commit to that choice. At present if my goal is get better class mods I have a very limited degree of control after which I'm, unfortunately, incentivized back into dungeon farming. One large problem there is that MW skills have tremendously different value depending on how I'm trying to approach the game, if I want to be a Storm who has incredibly well rolled skills and shoots guns as filler or buffs (looking at you Elemental Rage) then this is great, but if I'm a Colossus who uses my skills for their utility and focuses primarily on the damage output of my gun then farming dungeons isn't reasonably moving me closed towards my desired goals.
Personally I like the idea of leaning into different activities guaranteeing me different item slots, the only real problem here is that I can't make that choice every time I enter a que. Skills are covered by dungeons, components have limited coverage based on players inability to chain que them, and weapons have no activity directly offering them.
Lack of granularity in difficulty -
Given the structure of loot in this game, the relative power level of any 2 given players doing the same content at end game can be enormous. Players goal is to find better items and continue advancing through the content and challenges. As it stands the difficulty jump between GM1 and GM2 is big enough that once you reach the point where GM1 feels trivial and attempt to enter GM2 you find enemies feeling like bullet sponges who 1 shot the frailer classes in the party. I love a good challenge but going from "this is trivial" to "this is hard and definitely not worth the time and energy" causes players to continue farming content that is "easy" without ever feeling they should put themselves in positions where they are reasonably challenged.
Ultimately for this style of game I think you want players to have peaks and vallies of challenge where they enter a new tier, feel like they want to find things that help them survive as they continue to expand their knowledge of the ai of creatures, eventually gaining enough stronger gear to where the challenge feels moderate to low, and eventually transition into the next difficulty tier. Going from hard to GM1 felt great, the early power jumps provided by the introduction of MW felt good, GM1 went from being "holy ****" hard to "this is trivial" over the course of MW and legendary acquisition. Unfortunately the transition from GM1 to GM2 doesn't deliver that experience.
Tuning content for a power band as high as these types of games allow is difficult and it's important that the risk vs reward not push players into thinking the correct thing to do is fight impossibly hard content because they are Over rewarded. Either tuning for GM2/3 needs revision or new intermediate difficulties should exist.
The end -
I hope this sparks positive conversations about the parts of the reward system in need of attention. I've been enjoying the game greatly and am intimately familiar with all the problems that come with trying to set up reward structures for a game of this nature, hopefully this is useful and can contribute to Anthem becoming an even stronger game over time.
Thanks for reading to the end.0 -
It can be if you don't change tactics but I'm enjoying it though so why not.Playing a Ranger at the moment. Watched a few Interceptor vids - does it ever feel a bit hack'n'slashy?
Warframe suffered a bit from that at times, wondering if this is similar.
You see, knives never run out of bullets.
Never played Warframe.
Tend to fight the bosses from range until I get my ultimate.
I get put with a lot of Rangers and Colossus who only have eyes for big targets, if they can stay out of trouble I work the sides on mob control while flicking some acid onto tougher enemies that I or teammates are fighting.
Zooming around, twirling and flipping is great craic. Got my power to 31 will be at it again later.
Find your preferred style and run with it I'd say.0 -
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