@Houngan’s question was which of the games had a player base of forum folks, not whether they were any good. :)
I mean, that’s certainly a valid discussion, but probably better suited for someplace other than the thread for a DOA Ubisoft release. But since we’re having it here anyway, I’ll weigh in: I don’t own Rainbow Six: Extraction; I’m personally waiting for Anacrusis to leave early access; I adore Back 4 Blood for its unique card progression and character management; and Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a fantastic tribute to the mythology, but a slightly confused game design.
As for @Houngan’s question about how many forum folks are playing which games, I wouldn’t have any idea.
Thanks. This is actually pretty fun. I like rescuing the victims of my own incompetence. I also like the sticky floor stuff - it gives some role and purpose to the environment, which I think Ubi should lean into, as environments are what they’re good at :)
Now that this is out on Steam – Ubisoft put it on Gabe Newell’s doorstep during the dead of night, then rang the doorbell and turned and ran – I’m giving this a try with some friends. Not bad! Not bad at all!
I can think of worse ways to level up a bunch of dudes, and I really enjoy the risk/reward and roster management calculations you have to do, at least early on. We’re mostly just doing the first objective and then beating feet back to base as we work stuff out and learn the systems, but I think we’re on the verge of figuring out enough character powers well enough to get a groove going. And the game lends itself to solo runs, although I don’t think I’d bother with it if this were my only way to play; R6 Extraction might be dead as a doornail, but if you and a few friends manage to get interested and plink away at it at roughly the same rate, it’s perfect for what it’s doing.
I look forward to seeing how it progresses as we try harder difficulty levels and have to deal with the level variables, or “mutations”. I really enjoyed that element in Back 4 Blood and Aliens: Fireteam Elite, so I look forward to exploring it here.
I only did one mission in the game, but I really enjoyed it too! But it was in single player. And if the whole game is like that, I felt like I’d already experienced the main gameplay loop and enjoyed it and moved on. But I could see enjoying it for a while if my friends were into it.
One of the “systems”, and perhaps even a sort of “gameplay loop” in itself, is the roster management that you’ll have to do over successive missions. Damage/death are persistent, so you have to rescue casualties and heal wounds to maintain your roster. Because of this, you might not always have your favorite character available, which will push you to play and level up different characters, which could mean you’re liable to find a new favorite character.
It’s a pretty clever tweak to the usual character leveling, and I’m assuming it fits pretty neatly with multiplayer because while my Doc – he’s the generic healing character – might be too wounded to bring along for this mission, maybe your Doc isn’t wounded, but he’s not as high level as my Doc. So do we do this mission with your less powerful Doc, or do we do another mission first to let my more powerful Doc heal first? Or do we just try to proceed without a healer?
Other cooperative shooters I’ve played like Aliens, Back 4 Blood, World War Z, and Outriders don’t have any counterpart to these kinds of choices, where it mattered how much damage you took on an earlier mission or who has which characters leveled up or whether you want to risk a valuable character on a dangerous mission. It feels ever-so-slightly like what I wanted from Marvel Midnight Suns, but without having to pretend I’m in high school trying to get Captain Marvel to go on a date with me.
So after playing an absurd amount of this over the weekend, both single-player and with friends, I’ve come up with two observations:
This is the shooter version of a dungeon crawler! You pick your party, or your character, if you’re playing solo. Then the AI DM rolls up a randomly generated mission on your choice of tileset with a random assortment of monsters, modifiers, and victory requirements. You play and level up your dudes, hopefully not taking too much damage, because damaged dudes can’t go on missions until they sit out a few missions to heal up.
This is the cooperative terrorist hunt mode I loved playing with friends in the earliest Rainbow Six games! Except instead of terrorists, there’s a funky alien ecology that lets us do a lot more dramatic stuff than simply sliding fiber optic cameras under doors and timing breaching charges. This is all totally over-the-top crazy Phoenix Point level stuff with gadgets and goo and guns galore, and even though the monsters can look pretty derpy, they’re all in the service of gameplay, of systems interactions. I can see why this game failed. It’s far too cerebral for its own good. Heck, it’s very nearly a strategy game for how rarely you’re running-and-gunning.
Anyway, I’m getting to the point where I think this might have been the game I was looking for while digging around in Aliens: Fireteam Elite and Back 4 Blood and World War Z, looking for something I could do solo and with friends, looking for something that would keep us playing together instead of just going off and doing our own things in some larger world, looking for something with an open-ended level progression and difficulty levels. This is ticking off a bunch of boxes on my own idiosyncratic list of what I want in a cooperative shooter.
My kid and I bought it last year and played about 6 times…6 one or two level runs. It was somewhat fun and I personally played solo some after that as my kid was onto something else new. It’s a decently fun game for sure.
Sadly, it doesn’t have a very compelling intro. You start without the character powers really coming into play yet because they’re all level 1. You only sample a few of the basic monsters, and the introduction to the ecology, the character progression, and the difficulty level (they nailed what I want in an interactive risk/reward difficulty system) is sprawled out over a bunch of obscure lore logs and blink-and-you-miss-them tutorial nags. You can also get shunted toward what feels like a failstate if you’re reckless. If ever a shooter could have used a manual…
Basically, the early game can be really underwhelming, and it was only because @Jason_McMaster kept explaining how certain elements had been lifted directly out of the Rainbow Six games that I looked closer and started trying to flex different characters in different situations. There’s a bunch of crazy stuff in here that you’d never know from your first, gosh, ten hours of play? And that’s kind of by design, just how in X-com, for your first ten missions, you might think you’re only playing a game about guys trying to level up to laser rifles.
Also, it’s not just a shooter. It’s one of those games where if a mission goes well, you might never even get into combat. And who wants to play that kind of game? But neither is it always a sneaker, because sometimes you’re weapons hot from the get-go, just gunning for monsters. It’s the really weird hybrid that apparently no one but me wanted!
I played Rainbow 6:Raven Shield in a clan for a good few years…got me through my first divorce from talking to those guys online.
I am tired of full on shooters and those first levels seem to be just do the mission and get out with lots of gun play…but it was fun and hearing you can actually finish a level without any combat makes me want to get in there again!
For me, it holds up fantastically solo and with other people. The difficulty scales as you’d expect, of course, and it adjusts the randomized objectives to the number of players. As I mentioned, this is just a more sophisticated version of the terrorist hunt mode from the earlier Rainbow Six games. And just like you could play through those levels as a lone wolf operative, you can do the same here.
And to give you an indication of how well it works solo, one thing I haven’t tried yet is jumping in with a random group. And that’s because when my friends have been available to join me, I’ve been perfectly happy just messing around single player. Because unlike games like Back 4 Blood, World War Z, or Aliens: Fireteam Elite, the solo experience doesn’t feel compromised, and you can tell it was designed this way because you don’t have to abide some dumbass bot where your friends should be.
Also, because the roster management is unique to each player, that fundamental part of the game feels very single-player, with each player managing his own set of characters. I can do that with or without my friends, and with more leveled-up characters available to me, it gives us more options for the kinds of “parties” we put together to do this missions. So, naturally, even playing single-player feels like it’s productive for later multiplayer sessions.
This thread has made me buy this. Some of the R6 titles (Raven’s Shield!) were just the best co-op experiences around. I hope you guys are right and this really captures that feel… some of the missions we lost were as exciting memories as those we won.
