[2020] Endless Hunt mode First Session Feedback

Greetings Slayers of Ramsgate!

With the addition of the Experimental realm, we got hands-on a very cool new feature - which feels like a good first step towards the open-world - called Endless Hunt.

What we essentially can do is queue up into a lobby like the Training island, but this time instead of the dummies we have actual behemoths to kill and run around on the map while they are respawning.

DAUNTLESS EXPERIMENTAL BUILD

It seems to be a very cool game mode. However, there are a couple of things I'd like to address based on what I have seen so far in the little live-stream we had on Discord. I will try to collect the dev feedback and questions so we could avoid asking the same things and perhaps do some progress feedbacks as we get more and more information and implementation from the Devs.

With that out of the way:

ENDLESS MODE

Right now we can switch gear anytime just like on a training island (as a placeholder feature), go up to any spawned behemoth and kill them. Once a behemoth spawns it will replenish the aether vent, but collectables and consumables are not refilling. Additionally, revive stims are replaced with a respawn mechanic that allows you to spawn nearby with full health to continue the fight after a brief period of getting downed.

DAUNTLESS EXPERIMENTAL - ENDLESS HUNT

GAMEPLAY LOOP

1. Find a suitable behemoth to kill
2. Fight and potentially not use any consumables
3. After the kill, refill your health with the vent
4. Change your gear with the looted cells, and adjust specials and mods
5. Move to Ramsgate for upgrades and crafting consumables (not available in the experiment yet)

This is pretty barebone, but since we no longer spend 2-3 minutes in each hunt on a loading screen it feels very satisfying. There are some core loop features that would add some depth:

1. Refill your flasks at a set location(s)
2. Change your builds with cells, specials and mods at a set location(s)
3. With the death of the behemoth, replenish collectables nearby

WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR

• The idea is to have an endless mode where we can spend hours at a time before heading back
• The map is not going to be this small, they do have ideas to chain multiple islands and make them bigger
• The behemoths have a difficulty rating so you have an indication of how hard is a particular fight
• There will be rare spawns that are more difficult to take down
• The layout/gear change on the fly is not going to be available all the time, probably you need to be out of combat or visit a certain location for it (TBD)
• Refills of potions and Collectibles are something that Phoenix Labs looking into
• Global buffs like Conduit will only affect the in-combat party who is in close proximity
• The behemoths scale with the number of slayers hit it, and it does scale down after a timer passes since your last damage contribution
• The scale is more on the side of Escalation like +44% per slayer, though the number is not confirmed yet
• Part breaks will be only provided if you contributed enough to a fight
• You have a respawn mechanic after being down more than 10 seconds
• The behemoths are super territorial, they don't leave their arenas so no double encounters right now
• There are bugs as part of the nature of this experimental build
• It seems there are some modifiers like Desperation added randomly, and another for Aethermode which makes some fight a bit tougher
• Hunt pass XP is going to be farmable per each encounter, but this is not implemented yet.

FLOW OF COMBAT

Currently, the match is super fast-paced, you go around kill after kill with very little downtime as you zip around the map. This is very good, and quite often you can set the speed by choosing the path between the spawn locations. However, there are a few things that would be nice:

• Once a behemoth is discovered, by any player, we should see them on the compass
• Aethervisps should respawn so we can run fast between the locations
• We should have a clear indication when player join or leave a fight, perhaps show them as party members, so we even know their state
• Territories are way too small: This is mostly because the map is not designed around this mode, but it would be nice to deliberately lure a behemoth into another to let them fight and gain some advantage.
• Have different tiers for these endless runs, so players of any tier of levels can enjoy a proper challenge.

With the last point, I have to elaborate a little:

Right now, the length of a fight is about 60-120 seconds, which is very fast, and honestly feels very illusion breaking that these ferocious creatures can be exterminated like that.

Each encounter should be an investment of time to feel rewarding. I still remember times when the scaling was not adjusted when people left and quite often you ended up fighting a 4 man scaled behemoth for 4-6 minutes at a time and flee 3 times until you were able to kill it in about 14-18 minutes.

Those encounters are the ones that I still hold in my memory very dearly as those were huge achievements and Dahm satisfying to pull off.

I am not saying that we should have that super hard mode every single time, but I feel like we could easily scale the balance with 1.5-2x in favour of the behemoths to make each encounter take about 3-5 minutes to kill on any respective scaling level, where the more veterans would have a hard time to break the 3-minute mark in their power level matchup.

If nothing else, we could experiment with that scaling to see if these old difficulties would still hold up for many players and would feel satisfying not only for the veterans but to the newer players as well.

ENDLESS MODE FOR LEVELING

For levelling up hunt pass, mastery or gear, this mode is amazing, but there are a few key pillars that we should have for this goal:

• We have to have a way to navigate around the map without going through an arena. This is partially working right now, but a new map should consider this point so people could choose their target without risking their lives to pass through a threat they cannot defeat.
• Behemoth tagging to get loot should be possible - it is right now and we should not remove it -, it helps a lot to level up players quickly if we can let the boosted slayers tag and a couple of higher levels finish up the kills.
• Friend/Guild/Party only sessions would be awesome, I have no real issues to do public hunts most of the time, but when I do want to focus on a goal, for example, a Bounty, I cannot rely on randoms to help me out or just not bother me with my own fight.

ENDLESS MODE FOR ENDGAME

Currently, escalations are very good for levelling up mastery and poor lesser embermane to farm consumables. Furthermore, to farm archonite, we do that via patrols and mostly via daily chests and then usually log out for the day. The new mode could be a mesh of these perks by:

• Allowing the collectables to respawn by killing the behemoths
• Random chest locations for that extra patrol chest loot instead of daily time-gated chests
• Get XP orbs instead of parts just like in Escalations, but not as much

This would transform this game mode to a Patrol++ where we can play the game normally in an endless loop while Escalations still can be used for a particular element with extra fun boosts.

However, the main benefit of this mode could be the collectables, while escalation could remain the best for mastery and to have a whacky fun time with the amps.

I think both modes should have a role in terms of progression, but both should do offer the same loot just the balance of the contents should differ, just like we had patrols and expeditions in Beta.

MAP IDEAS

Obviously a much bigger map is needed than the current Sandrian Stone. This is planned anyway, and I'd like to add a few ideas that would be nice to be considered when designing the new map:

• The scale should be about 5-10x with about 6-7 spawn locations, perhaps even a new type of spawns where the behemoths are not standing still but following a patrol route.
• Between spawn locations, we should have routes that are occupied with smaller critters that would give us stacks and allow us to charge up our lanterns.
• There should be camps that we could use to replenish our consumables and heal up before advancing. Perhaps even socialize and form a party.
• We should have posts that allow players to interact and queue up for any other match or just go back to Ramsgate. Currently, this is only possible via the Main-Menu that breaks the immersion.
• Based on size 1-4 unique locations, things like an abandoned village, a mine perhaps each overrun with a dedicated behemoth.
• The arenas should be separated a lot more, to make these arenas more interesting to approach like it was done with the Sovereign's Throne map.

FEATURE IDEAS

The current set of features are there for the prototype, there are things that I am sure Phoenix Labs already have on their list, I hope I can give a few more point there with these:

• This is planned to be addressed, but instead of allowing to change gear anywhere, fix it by a location where perhaps our ship would land and station with our gear to swap and work on. We should not get upgrades, but only modifications.
• This is also planned, but consumable refills should be possible at the previously mentioned post locations, or perhaps Bosun could act as a field alchemist, maybe even Xelya could show up at the camps to fill that role.
• Allow consumables to swap in mid hunt via a scrolling menu. It was always a huge limit in the more controlled environment but in this mode, we could potentially utilize more slots by rotating consumables around before we would need to get back to refill.
• We should get new animations for each behemoth spawn, it would be nice to not just pop into existence but to actually see something that lore-wise makes sense. However, if the map is big enough there are territories that are always free to spawn because the slayers cannot cover it all.
• While many players will use Discord or Teamspeak, it would be super cool if our lantern would properly act as a radio and that is how we actually get to communicate until we get close to each other. With that, it would be nice to add the radio effect to the sounds as well.
• Let us party up to the max amount of players in an endless session possible. That seems to be around 8 right now, but not entirely sure how much could it be with a bigger map. Perhaps also make it possible to once joining into a random session organize the slayers based on friends if there are active sessions.
• Have an achievement for killing X amount in this mode, and perhaps trigger a mini-event when the participants kill every behemoth and none is alive on the island. This could be something like spawning a rare higher difficult foe that the whole session has to take seriously to kill and no other behemoth would spawn until this threat is dealt with. I would scale it to have a fight about 8-10 minutes long.

USER INTERFACE IDEAS

With this mode we got a few UI changes during the hunt, these are generally pretty good starts, and iterating on top of that:

• Since we no longer have a party and they form sporadically, it would be nice to have the party extend automatically based on the behemoth scaling and the linked players. Of course, if we have a premade party we should see them always even if we are separated.
• The power level and difficulty stars would be nice to display in a badge style where the border of the badge could indicate the level, and perhaps we could adapt that border to player avatars (from the flag) too.
• The difficulty is pretty arbitrary and varies for each player, perhaps instead of that use the already existing Threat level with a little overhaul to have more values within a tier than the current 1-2.
• The combat log gets very annoying with a very active session, we should have separate combat and chat log so we could hide the messages that X behemoth was killed.
• The loot popup would be nice if contains the kill time, perhaps even the scores we have currently as these are excellent indicators for players to know if they got better or worse. Of course, this mode's chaotic nature makes it hard to properly assert growth like that, but feedback always good to have.
• The loot popup have up to 4 items, perhaps we could have smaller icons to show up to 8-10. The rarity glow is interesting but I think a border would be much better as it would not block the view of the part icon.
• Experimental has this new overlay at the bottom, I think it would make sense to not only mention the release but also include the build number. This would help later to identify footage age, so too old reports would not get into the way of building and iterating the experiments.

CURRENT BUGS

While naturally, this is not a final form, there are a few bugs that would be nice to be addressed with the next build:

• Bounties do not count until you requeue
• Once we get hit, we sheet our weapons. This is pretty annoying
• Swapping weapons allow you to get max meter charge
• Broken parts are not despawned, this seems to kill the servers -> perhaps this could be a cool minigame to collect the tails/tusks to display at the starting camp for maybe extra loot

ENDLESS HUNT INSTEAD OF PATROLS AND PURSUE

This is a topic that seems to come up with new modes added to address Match Making issues with the Patrols and Pursue, that use the more fun game mode with better queue times instead of the old modes. I genuinely think that this new mode can replace Patrols, it fees like a proper patrol as an activity.

However, Pursue's goal to specifically target a behemoth, most often for their parts but also to practice the mechanics, master the encounter. The practice is done often for Trials, but also for personal enjoyment and even to learn tricks.

With this new format and the old I have two ideas for a potentially good replacement for Pursue:

1. Use the current Pursue as the mode, but add story elements to the islands, perhaps even make the behemoth flee from you until its cornered and absolutely have to fight. Right now what's the most annoying is the required loading time, but if we have a story element where we would spend proportionally more time than the loading screens then I think everybody would be happy.
2. Make a nest in a bigger map, have territories for each behemoth so we could go to a location and expect them to be there every time, perhaps even make these nests as an arena where many of the same behemoths will chill out, and only one of the members jump into the fight and the others watch until you die or beat a behemoth. When you beat it, another jumps in and the cycle goes on until you decide to back off. This can be also varied to have double encounters with smaller behemoths or even getting more and more difficult matchups over time.

THINGS TO ADAPT TO THE MAIN MODES

We already have a few cool ideas that feel very promising and perhaps we should have those in the current live hunt modes like Escalations, Patrols and Pursue:

• No loadout and ready screen: This is very huge, I think we should move the notion for ready up to Ramsgate with a party, but without a party, you can assume that people are ready to fight. If we have a way to change our gear at the landing site, then even a last-minute gear change could be done.
• Showing the power level instead of threat level, it makes the game much easier when you can compare numbers easily, and since we get our power levels clearly, the idea to show the behemoth's power level is much more pleasing. The thing to add here is a diff percentage indicator to know how much we are under or over-levelled, perhaps make it like an MMO style where if you under a lot you would see a skull marker to not even try.

What's your favourite point, and what did I miss?
I'd like to hear your feedback in the comments!

Until then,
Clear Skies!

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