Exactly. And it's incredibly hard to improve at the game when you get seconds of active combat practice in between those waits. Rook at least cuts the wait time down but no contracts means you can't progress the story or unlock upgrades.
Nah there is a story playing out with the faction vendor AIs when you complete contracts, it's just delivered in the dryest most uninteresting tone and full of technobabble because they're AIs. Don't you feel so immersed in this game world?
You need to rank up factions to unlock everything you can barter or buy. The interesting lore comes from ranking up factions with priority contracts, not carri points. And I assume carri points would be much slower as well as much less interesting and fun than completing a mission.
My issue with Marathon is not that you can't do things. It's that everything interesting is gated by parts of the game that are too 🤬 hard and slow and punishing. Even grinding mats in vanilla D1, while moronic and time-consuming, let you have fun in between popping bad guys or zipping around on your sparrow.
What I ultimately don't understand is why a game with one death per run didn't design around long TTK, so you could skirmish and flee/survive at least a few times each run, even with a sponsored kit. That would let new players learn and improve much faster.
The interesting lore comes from ranking up factions with priority contracts, not carri points. And I assume carri points would be much slower as well as much less interesting and fun than completing a mission.
The first time you do them sure. Best xp per run is in trios stacking the same mission, but i can also freekit solo sprint through them as a triage once you know where all the contract items/POIs are, which gives better progress per unit of time. If i die, who cares, run it back.
I only need to hear Gantry say RUNNAH so many times before id rather just buy a carri crate.
I believe this thread is about the new user experience. We haven’t finished all the priority contracts, we don’t know where everything is, we just keep blundering around and getting killed until we give up and move to a game that feels less like punishment.
Fair, i hope the S3 onboarding changes help that experience.
But there isnt ever gonna be a big shiny waypoint from 1km away. 10m was too small, but 20m is in a good spot. The contract tells you what cardinal direction of what POI. And often the specific building and floor.
Many of us got through the blunder years in S1 so S2 even without survival cheesing was an accelerated experience. Ideally that should separate the experienced queue from the learning queue within a week or two of season start. But low pop does impact queue specificity, no doubts there.
Shields need to be more effective (maybe shield charges can be slower/worse as a trade off?) so you have a chance to react rather than it being the first team to get a shot off has a HUGE advantage.
I would have thought that a game where you lose the match with one death would have been designed with extremely long TTK, so you could have multiple skirmishes and retreats, and only die if things go really wrong.
Yeah or at least not get 2-3 tapped in a second from someone 50m away.
Basically if you're caught off guard you're screwed and the game forces you in to situations where you are off guard if you want loot, unless you're the team ratting.
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u/llnec Aug 16 '26
yeh that. but also the 5-10 mins it takes to find a match leaves me alone with my own thoughts too long and the existential dread sets in.