Lots of bug fixes but here are the gameplay changes:
• Tweaks to Doomsday weapon OIs to increase visibility
• Added HUD message when Doomsday weapon spawns in Seoul
• Added new Load Screen hint
• Added shards on map when relevant Agency upgrade is purchased
• Lowered difficulty of the foot race during Fortune Personal mission
• Guaranteed Contract found in every Large Chest
• Added chests to temple area
• Changed rewards for mission replay
• Fixed inaccessible chests
• Fixed incorrect rewards granted after completing Outpost
• Fixed player unlock of Yeti’s “Russian Frost” weapon skin
• Balance change in Hollywood personal mission
Hmm, they didn’t fix the bug that makes me always want to play Scheherazade because she’s clearly the best character in the game. Maybe that’ll be in 1.04.
Ha, that’s not completely random, by the way! There are bits of dialogue in the game about Rama and Scheherazade playing ping-pong. Not sure why Rama is playing with Kingpin on her side, though. That’s probably what’s tripping her up.
Well that was disappointing… So after capturing the world map, and doing that special level 10 dungeon, the rewards I was expecting turned out to be so mediocre that I don’t want to ever do it again. AND the whole world map resets again, because lets just repeat everything till you say NO MORE!
But you only get elite gear for whichever three characters do the Moscow base! If the world didn’t reset, you wouldn’t be able to get the elite tech for the other characters.
Now if you don’t care about the elite tech, that’s fine. But if you really want to optimize a character, which is what you do in an action RPG, you want to get his or her elite tech. Unlike other tech, which modifies a single gadget, elite tech modifies all three of an agent’s gadgets. I thought it was a pretty cool boost.
I’d hardly call waiting for a cooldown timer “grinding”. You can certainly argue there’s grinding in Agents of Mayhem – grinding is what people call “gameplay” once they’re sick of a game – but there’s no meaningful gameplay in sending agents onto the world map. It’s little more than a timer.
-Tom, resident apologist of all things Agents of Mayhem
Grinding generally means repeating content. Grinding levels, grinding reputation, etc. All the content in the city resets, eventually, and since the city doesn’t have enough original content for you to level all your chars to 20, you are forced to… grind.
Oh wow. I guess by that definition, every game of chess is a grind. Every racing game/CaRPG past 30 minutes or so is a grind. Most of the Heroes of Might & Magic series is a grind. All of Adventure mode, the Rifts, etc in Diablo 3 are a grind.
My definition has always been that grind is when you’re performing activities in a game primarily for the reward or power increase you expect to get out of them, rather than for their own sake. Whether you’re repeating the content or not doesn’t matter, other than that people will often keep playing a game they’re bored with because of lizard-brain acquisitiveness.
So someone playing stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. 100 times in a row, or trying to perfect a single-credit clear of Ikaruga isn’t grinding, but someone playing a newly released daily quest in an F2P game because they want to collect the reward crystals is, even if it’s their first time playing that particular quest.
For their own sake? I get what you’re saying, but why is there ever any reason to play a game – to pursue its activities – than for its own sake? :)
And while @Balasarius has the right idea by specifying that it involves repeating content, the chess counterargument is important. Not all games takes a once-and-done approach to content. Besides, content in action RPGs is the characters, so technically I’ve never repeated a single shred of content in Diablo III, Agents of Mayhem, or Guild Wars 2 any more than I’ve stepped in the same river twice.
It’s all a semantic discussion – a perfectly viable one! – about the various baggage that goes with the word, but I’m pretty comfortable calling it out as the word someone uses when he’s bored of a game. You call it “gameplay” while you still like the game, and then when you don’t anymore, you call it “grinding”.
Sheesh, I make a concerted effort to avoid triggering your hangups by saying “for fun”, and this is the thanks I get? :)
And you’re right that you are always playing a game for its own sake, but I meant that phrase to apply not to the game as a whole, but more granularly to each individual activity within it. And you absolutely can engage in activities not for their own sake but for an expected reward – you’re bored of the daily quests in your MMO du jour, but you keep at them because you want the leet mount you’ll get after another month. Would you still play a given bit of content if there was no loot?
I completely disagree with this characterization. I have absolutely thought “I’ll just go grind for a few minutes to get ready for the next boss” in games I’m still enjoying a great deal. And conversely, I’ve gotten tired of games and stopped playing even though I wouldn’t call them grinding at all.
I know, I was just giving you guff. A lot of grinding is tethered to a reward system specifically designed to obscure the grind. And I can see through it every time! Even when I know I’m a thrall to it.
Oh, sure, I have, too! I use “grind” without any negative connotation all the time. But I’ll refer you to @Balasarius’ post above. It’s the word people trot out when they don’t like the gameplay anymore. I wasn’t trying to lay out a definitive definition so much as interpret a frequent context. I probably didn’t make that as clear as I should have.
