I’m still playing it. In fact I was playing it pretty much daily until last Friday. I’ve got 8 days 23 hours on my main character, and 1 day 10 hours on a second character I’m leveling up with my brother who only plays infrequently.
Overall I really love it, it’s a great game. I’m on the PS4, though so I’m not affected by hacking. I do have some issues, but you can’t really complain with a game that’s been out less than two months that you’ve put in 250 hours into. Right now, I’ve got a friend I’m coordinating with to run the Incrusion for our weekly reward, and I expect I’ll drop in and out on occasion, just because I enjoy it.
Main issues for me are:
[ul]
[li] I don’t like the level 30 Dark Zone, although I did enjoy the DZ prior to 30. A game in which the attacker has all the advantages and in which groups of four players can gank solo players is not something I want to participate in. There’s really nothing to do to avoid an alpha strike of flash grenade, stun grenade, and incendiary bullets sent in by a team that’s two to four times larger than you, often done while you’re engaged with the NPC enemies. That’s not interesting gameplay. The DZ is still fun to play in on occasion when I’m grouped up with friends, but as a solo experience it sucks.[/li][li] The DZ fund drop rate sucks for anyone who is not running around ganking everyone or in a group that’s capable of Rogue Hunting. At some point they rebalanced DZ funds to make it so all the money is in Rogue play, and now for me as someone who has no desire to go rogue it sucks. At this point I’m DZ50 have not bought anything with DZ funds since DZ30, but still only have half the DZ funds I would need to buy a single DZ50 blueprint.[/li][li] I really like the Challenge Mode missions, but after many, many hours of play, I’m getting tired of running the same ones over, and over again. I’ll definitely be back for more when the May update which promises “More Challenge Missions” drops.[/li][li] The rewards for running Challenge Mode are way too low. At this point, I’ve probably run Challenge Mode missions 50-100 times (quite possibly a lot more than that) and I’ve yet to see a single set piece item drop.[/li][li] I’ve gotten to the point where Phoenix Credits aren’t useful anymore, and since their loot drop rate is so low, the PxC earned was the main reward for running Challenge Mode. I ran it two weekends ago enough to buy the Aug, and the Gunslinger Vest, and an SA-80 blueprint, which is a heck of a lot of Challenge Runs, and no interesting loot ever dropped for me.[/li][li] The Incursion even at Hard Mode is not well setup for PUGs. In particular they need to greatly up the GS minimum. I totally believe an outstanding group of players could finish it at GS 170, maybe even GS 160. But GS 140 is pathetically under geared. I don’t want to be the guy that’s constantly kicking people out of a group for their GS, but the only times I’ve successfully run the Incrusion have been with most of the team in the high 180s to the low 200s and every time I run with people mostly in the 160 range, we wipe. That would be fine, if they added a checkpoint after each bomb dropped, but as it stands now, PUGing the Incursion sucks. It’s totally doable if you’re draconian about kicking people with low GS, but you shouldn’t have to do that. It’s not fair to the low GS players for Massive to put them in a situation where they’re going to get kicked. And it’s not fair for the high GS players to either waste their time running it with a group that has almost no chance of completing it or have to kick people for their GS score. Maybe they could have a minimum PUG GS Score and then a minimum non-PUG GS score. Although I find it hard to believe anyone except the most insanely good players can run it at GS140. I’m sure someone can do it, but the other 99% of the population is being tricked into thinking they should be able to do it and wondering why they keep getting kicked from groups. From what I’ve seen when teamed up with low GS folks, they just can’t bring down the bad guys fast enough.[/li][/ul]
So for me, the core experience is sound. I would probably still be playing daily if the Challenge Modes at least dropped me something interesting every 5-10 runs, but instead with nothing interesting except Phoenix Credits in 50-100+ runs, and having run out of interesting stuff to spend PxC on, they just seem to be excercises in frustration. I still like running them, because the actual gunplay is fun, but they always end in disappointment of yet again not seeing a mythical gear piece which is supposed to be in the loot tables drop. For mostly someone who mostly solos the DZ currently sucks both.
Looking forward to new Challenge Modes, and in particular the June “Underground” update which is PvE for groups of 1-4 sounds like it could be great. And I’m still going to be running the Incursion at least weekly.
