Hey everyone, we agree that the messaging for the Splinter mechanic ended up a more vague place than intended and discussions are ongoing to see if we can do anything to improve messaging here to encourage more players to play the objective. (This also applies to The Wellspring charging in Defend) Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming!
Hello! We've made some tweaks to prevent the wizard from getting stuck that should be part of a patch in the near future.
Acknowledged! The next patch should contain some tweaks to make this stop happening.
Thank you for this feedback and the suggestions! :)
I noticed an issue with the Toland Patrols while farming them for Cipher Decoders a couple weeks back, and I figure you're probably the perfect person to bring it up to.
Sometimes when picking up the Toland patrol, he would not spawn and we wouldn't be able to interact with him to finish it, so we'd abandon it after a couple of minutes. It didn't happen every time, of course.
I don't know if there's some internal cooldown (My clan mate and I did Toland Patrols exclusively) but my clannie and I thought maybe someone else in the instance interacted with him or was doing another Toland Patrol in the same area so he wouldn't spawn.
Obviously I have no idea, and have no recording of it happening, but figured I'd let the man himself know. Thanks man!
I've made note and when I return to the office I'll poke folks about this as it sounds like those patrols may have a few issues. Thanks for the report!
Also, the Toland patrols on Luna complete immediately now instead of having to wait for Toland's monologues to finish.
A part of me misses the narrative, but these are now the quickest patrols to do.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Dreaming City ones are the same, but the travel time between pickup and destination will be higher.
Are you saying the dialogue doesn't play at all or just that the patrol completes at the start and you have the choice to stick around and listen or run off? If the former that definitely sounds like a bug and I can go poke people about it!
Hey all, I want to note that these systemic changes affect patrols on *all* planets (e.g. collect patrols on EDZ, Nessus, etc. can also be completed in any bubble) though we're aware the strings still name a specific bubble. Our design mentality has also shifted as many have noticed (more heavily favor kill patrols, etc.) and this shift is only reflected in the new content (Europa/Cosmo). Glad you're enjoying the update and we look forward to hearing more feedback!
The lighting changes on EDZ and Nessus are interesting but the HDR, especially the blacks, are really bad and crushed. Any chance the HDR will be fixed?
Unfortunately I can't say much there as I'm not on the graphics team though I have seen some internal discussion on this recently. Also, one of our graphics folks posted a comment a while back explaining some of this, feel free to read it here.
Thanks for this feedback! We're definitely thinking about how to expand and improve this system in future content. I will say upfront that it's unlikely this would be added to an existing planet due to how complex it was and how many teams had to chip in to make it happen.
However, any future planets we make are fair game! We do want to be careful though to ensure it feels unique each time we do it. Simply adding foggy storms to every planet would then make weather no longer feel unique because *all* planets would be foggy. :P
Fun fact: This actually came about when, due to COVID complicating things, we were unable to book Drifter's voice actor for this mission as it was intended to be him providing the radio dialogue. One of our writers had the idea to have Ghost just pretend to be him instead (As scheduling Mr. North lined up better) and wrote all this awesome dialogue. Apparently on the first take Nolan perfectly imitated Drifter and had to be instructed to intentionally do it worse.
The end result is some of my favorite dialogue from this release.
Wasn't there low gravity in the Crucible map on the Reef in D1?
There was a map called The Drifter which had no gravity for dynamic objects (Props, bodies, etc.) but not for actual gameplay. (E.g. jumping and throwing grenades were unaffected)
I've heard that this was experimented with early in D1 dev and, as some comments here have pointed out, apparently it was really cool and interesting for about 5 minutes and then just became frustrating. Imagine getting used to 10+ different variations in jump height, grenade arc, fall speed (And thus damage), etc.!
We've actually played with this idea on occasion. Open-ended PVP is completely out of the question for the reasons you list and many more - but we've pitched ideas before about having arenas in the world where players can opt into temporary and controlled PvP experiences. We've never actually built them though, but who knows maybe some day. If y'all have feedback or ideas on how this could work, we're more than happy to hear it. :)
Read moreIn strikes right now almost all of them are:
run down this hallway killing guys. Eventually you will get to a room where you have to slam an orb, kill waves of guys, or none of these. You get to a boss, which do offer a nice diversity of fights. Get a purple item of random slot.
I think that 2nd part of that statement is where the improvement can be. Some things i would love to see.
- Split paths where guardians have to accomplish similar goals.
- Branching paths that end with different loot... Want a lot of glimmer? Go down this path, kill/save these things. Want upgrade mats? Go the other way. Finish the strike where each member of the strike went different paths/completed goals successfully? Get all rewards.
- Sparrows being incorporated where we have to race against time. Something like an escape or race to stop something from exploding.
- Community challenges for night falls. Maybe there's a chest ...
For your second suggestion(Branching paths/rewards) do you have any ideas on how to handle the following possible outcomes:
I don’t view that as the main issue with strikes tbh. People played strikes a lot in D1 before strike-specific loot was a thing. I think just overall better loot and better strike design to make them more fun would be the first steps. Strike-specific loot would obviously be welcome but I think other things should come first.
Can you elaborate on what kinds of things you mean when you say "better strike design to make them more fun"?
For some reason I've read the title as "Strikes 2.0"(we could really use those as well) and was confused for a second.
What kind of things would make up "Strikes 2.0" in your opinion? (Not to derail this thread!)
Haha, I actually don't know if I've ever heard that one. :P
When the team was making the title for completing a lot of the Shadowkeep triumphs (Which shipped as "Harbinger"), I pitched that it should be called "Lightmare". Can't win 'em all!
One thing, I'd really like to have like, a tiny bit of choice, or the ability to reject and replace a crapshoot objective that I'm NOT going to do.
Part of the reason I didn't like objectives as they were implemented was that if I didn't want to do one, I didn't really have any other options, and the problem here is psychological in part.
Fortnite has challenges that are given to you daily, and you have the option to replace one a day if you don't like it (IE: Play a match with a friend). I feel like this is an acceptable compromise, I'm not sure how you'd work in the option to replace one though.
What objectives would you be likely to want to skip? Is it a specific type of objective, does it depend on the exact situation, etc? Can you give some examples? I believe a more ideal approach to this issue would be to design objectives that players don't want to skip in the first place!
First I would like to say this was a very well written post from OP and also, a great response from yourself. With that said, I do have an issue that caused immense frustration yesterday while playing.
Loaded up Mars patrol to finish my weekly flashpoint and run some public events but there were two guardians in interceptors who were camping the rally flag killing all other guardians in the area. Never knew this was a thing but it was a very frustrating experience. Even when the public event did spawn, they clearly were only going after other players instead of participating in the event. Fast traveled out of there and said screw it until I was put into another instance.
there were two guardians in interceptors who were camping the rally flag killing all other guardians in the area
How were the players in the interceptors killing other players? This should not be possible as they should deal no damage to and physically pass through other players.
Challenges should have just been endless, like repeatable bounties. You clear one, get the reward, a new one loads into its spot.
A public event update might be good. The vex invasion felt kinda fun, but my favorite thing in d1 was where a taken event and public event happened at the same time. Patrols also need a bit more enemies on the map, especially because player presence actively causes enemies not to spawn. I've legitimate had players abuse this to get me to leave the zone. That's a bigger problem with "final blows" style bounties and objectives though (btw, final blows quest steps actively suck and cause way to many problems in this game) and less about other problems.
Event overlap is awesome and something we're definitely interesting in continuing to do & do more of!
Patrols also need a bit more enemies on the map
How do you feel that the number of enemies in D2 patrol areas compares to the number of enemies in D1 patrol areas?
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