I also bought this in the $3 sale and have been playing for the past couple of weeks, just reached World Tier 2. For the first 15-20 hours I was pretty enraptured by the world, It's absurdly well detailed for its scope, the engine is a technical marvel. No clue how they could've achieved all of it, they must have an army of absolutely top tier scene dressers just for the clutter. It helps that I'm fairly familiar with parts of DC, particularly the National Mall, so it created some awesome immersion. The desolate feel is definitely intentional, but I wouldn't say it "improves" very much as the game goes on.
Enemy patrols seem to spawn in predictable locations, but they have some dynamism, it's cool to see civilians and enemies fighting without your involvement, or more rarely two enemy factions, but there doesn't seem to be much point to engaging in these yourself. Civilians will travel through the world to bring resources back to their encampments, but there's no reward for accompanying them that I know of, it's strange that element is there but the game doesn't seem to do anything with it. Side objectives (the question mark missions, not the actual side missions) are there, but at this point I ignore them entirely, I got tired of approaching them to find yet another propaganda speaker I'd have to fight three waves of enemies to protect. The control points are a lot better, some of them have genuinely impressive level design, but there are so many that even they get pretty tired. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the level design in main missions in general, at least for the first half of the campaign.
I do think that the gear system is completely screwed in the endgame. The vast majority of gear I pick up is either complete trash or only worth keeping to "recalibrate" something from it onto something I actually want to use. There's no way to keep what I want to recalibrate organized except marking a piece of equipment as "I want to recalibrate this," and recalibration can only be done at the White House for god knows what reason. I don't want to have to fast travel back every time I get something worth recalibrating from, and I'm not very invested in making sure my gear is at its very best anyway since I still have a ways to go before hitting the cap, so most loot just becomes an amorphous jumble of perks that I may or may not want to put onto the gear I actually use. My actual playstyle hasn't changed significantly for like half the game at this point. I'm curious what the endgame that has kept people going is, and how far from it I am now.
Stick around for March 3rd:
- Loot 2.0 will make it very obvious which gear is rolled well via little indicator bars under rolls, and you can save high stats to re-calibrate infinite times. Looks like you can store that stat out in the open world, but not 100% on that.
- Endgame will add seasons that have specific missions, activities, challenges, progressions system etc. that will reward you for playing the game normally or turning on modifiers for difficulty or how the game works, all of which you can switch on/off at any time.
- For the first time, doing harder content will actually have a higher chance to drop better gear. So finally there's that non random, constant progression.
- There'll be a near-infinite SHD level system, allowing you to eke out extra 10-20% stats in a number of offensive, defensive areas, regardless of what gear you are wearing.
- Oh, it'll also allow you to get to level 40.
- The playstyle mostly comes into play in World Tier 5 endgame, as its the first time you aren't quickly ditching gear for better stuff before making a full, synergistic build. Only at that point are the bonuses strong enough to really build into things like Seeker mines or snipers or up close assault riflin'. That too will change come March 3rd. The devs have talked about opening up the roles a lot more, healers, DPS, tanks, etc. and have teased changes to the way everything works, from shields to heals to talents, so here's hoping.
That said, before March 3rd, most of the endgame involves:
- doing the raid
- getting all of the blueprints from level 4 checkpoints
- exotic farming
- weekly heroic missions for named items and such
- targeted loot to try and eke out extra % points in the builds etc.
All that to say, looks like a lot of your complaints will be righted next Tuesday. Though I guess depending how Seasons actually play out, you might still feel done with the game post World Tier 5.
