By now people are hardly touching ETA except for unlocks and completion’s sake. It’s the only “new” thing we get, other than FCs, until Freelance comes. Giving permanent ETs isn’t going to change that at all. Those who continue to play ETA regularly and aren’t upset about it’s limits are those who enjoy playing with the complications, so releasing them in regular format will have traffic from those who hate ETA, and ETA will have traffic from those who think vanilla ETs are boring, on top of those who play it for the unlocks and completion status. So I don’t really see any issue with providing plain ETs, or at least ETA with a toggle on/off option for the complications. If ETs can be remade in the Arcade format, then they can be remade plain.
Personally, I want them so that I can not only play them when I want and without restrictions beyond those that were originally built into them, but so I can choose what order I want to play them in.
I find myself (re)playing the ETA quite often. It’s one of the few live game features that has vr support, and feels punishing enough to lose, but can still be replayed if you fail. It lets me play in a rather risky playstyle of using no legal items, and no suppressed weapons. Makes it a bit challenging when your main distraction method is a loud gunshot.
Not really. The poll that has sparked this discussion shows that 46% of people are replaying the Arcade in some way (whether it be specific contracts or just any contracts) so this is a bit of an exaggeration.
You seem to have missed my point though, adding “Peacock style ETs” isn’t going to result in any long term use - as indicated by Special Assignments being shunned by most people - and would eventually be mostly forgotten about. As the SAs are just permanent ETs - it is logical to compare the overall use of the SAs to a hypothetical permanent ET setup.
It would be interesting to ask those that voted “No, I don’t replay ETAs at all (if it’s done, it stays done)” how often they play the Special Assignments. I suspect it would lean extremely heavily into “never/extremely rarely” territory which just proves the point of why regular ETs wouldn’t happen vs the current Arcade setup where just under half of people are still replaying it in some way.
Personally speaking, the only reason I sometimes go back to that mode is because there’s really nothing else that is worth it this last year. The special assignments came out with new locations, in the middle of the peak post-launch months of season 2, 3 years ago, so of course they’re going to get less attention then the arcade, because the only other things we’re getting with the trials are the occasional challenge, repeated elusive targets and featured contracts, just slim over the dark years of 2018 and 2020’s roadmap contents.
Plus (at least for me), I’m not going back into these trials thinking “Oh boy! This complication really shook things up! Let’s do it again!” and happily reseting the trial and having to play targets I have no interest in, which I fail because I’m rushing through them and have to wait half-a-day to rush through them AGAIN just to get one chance to do a kill method that will possibly void 5-stars just because IOI think by lowering the number we get after beating the mission counts as the “ultimate elusive target challenge”. People want to play these elusive targets because they are the closest thing to original content we’ve gotten this year besides Ambrose, even when they’re not original in the first place, and the whole system is designed to make you not want to do them again. The system of the arcade is still based on high stakes, which completely contradicts what most people want when they replay these trials, to mess around and try new things casually. Resetting in itself goes against these stakes, and overall the escalation system as a whole is flawed. We still are forced to play them in a specific order, with no way of going back, we can’t save, and we can’t view leaderboards of any other level than the last other than resetting the whole thing again.
I assure you that if they made all the currently available elusive targets permanent, and slowly added the remaining ones over time and kept the unlocks, the number of players replaying the mode would stay the same, probably increase.
And? So what? Every game eventually gets forgotten and not played anymore. It’s not about long-term use, it’s about all content for this game being available at all times, period. I want the ETs available at all times, and I am not alone in this. That’s enough. It’s not like IOI is making their money off ETA or non-replayable ETs, so why not throw it in.
Quite often, personally. For me, the main reason I don’t often (if ever) replay the Elusive Target Arcade contracts is the fail-ability of them. If I want to play around with them, and end up messing up, I don’t want to wait 12 more hours to try again. The special assignments (Bitter Pill especially - I really like that one) I tend to play over and over because if I mess up and want to just start over, it doesn’t matter whether I’ve passed some “no restart” point or not.
I don’t actually care much about the complications one way or another usually (now that they’re optional). You all know I don’t really care too much about stars or final ranks. I just want to have fun playing. Waiting 12 hours to restart isn’t fun.
Honestly Heisenberg, I think it absolutely is.
A regular, sustained player base ? In a live service game ? In the current trend of the video game industry ? It’s invaluable.
There is a reason the Year Two announcement started with the CEO enthusiastically announcing 50 million players.
Game Pass contract negotiation, future live service projects, licencing / product placement in Project 007, investors,… It could be useful.
The ETA is a good way to do that. Arguably better compared to a full release of ETs, even if it were dripped along the roadmaps for the full year.
And there, right there, is arguably the source of every issue that has plagued this game from day one, and the reason this discussion is happening at all.
Well, yeah. The live service model is the only reason Elusive Targets exist. They’ve previously said they only came up with the concept of ETs once they decided to go for a live service model. Without it, there wouldn’t be a discussion about making something that doesn’t exist permanent in the game.
Sure they would, they would have made them permanent fixtures in the first place, rather than the gimmick of only here for a limited time, which got real tiring real quick. How people view the Special Assignments, that’s how we would have gotten these if it hadn’t been live. They’d have had to change the names, yeah, but no reason to not have them.
Well no, because the whole Elusive Target concept was only created because they had already decided to go with the live service model. Without it, there is no guarantees they ever would’ve come up with the idea to add short bonus missions with very little changes to the locations.
To me the entire ET concept completely contradicts the spirit of the game which is its sandbox aspect. I played this game for five years not because of the thrill of having one shot at the next ET, but because still after all this time I am discovering new ways to kill my targets. Because whenever I fail, I will do better in my next attempt. ETA is a step in the right direction, but it’s far from perfect because it still punishes you for failing and decides for you the complication you must follow to get SA. I think IOI created the ETA mode because it was an easy way for them to add something new without spending too much resources. I hope that Freelancer will give us back the freedom of planning and executing our missions with a new strategic layer on top of them.
You can still get a Silent Assassin ranking without following the complication in the Arcade. You’re just capped at a maximum of four stars because you won’t have the star for completing all the objectives.
I will say that as of late, it just feels like they’re selecting three ETs at random and them shoving in a random complication without thinking about it too much to create the contracts.
The original Arcade contracts feel like they had more thought put into them and they looked at how a lot of players had previously played them and then grouped them together that way and then inserted complications to rule out that popular method, forcing people to find a new way of doing it and not relying on the “go to” method. Things like the controversial “hide all bodies” to rule out the disco ball kill on The Liability or just using the propane on The Ascensionist, or limiting The Blackhat to one pacification and so on.
But lately with contracts like an explosion kill on The Stowaway where that is a fairly common kill method, just feels like absolutely no effort was put into making them. Not to mention using combinations of targets and complications that we’ve already had before…
The Thespians each had the ‘Collect (Extra Item)’ requirement. USB, guest list, voice recorder…
The Illusory were the pairs where you had to kill the correct target…
But yeah. Some of them could be random… I just kinda wish they’d respin their ET wheel whenever they land on one we’ve already had 12 times.
Then there’s the kill methods. Then (whichever kill method) can be applied to more of the same pairings we’ve already had. Which really has made the whole thing cluttered with the same targets. Most of them are always killed the same way anyway, making the repeats completely redundant.
Edit: I’m positive we haven’t had ‘The Angel of Death’ again. She only appeared once and that was with the ‘Hide All Bodies or Else!’ complication. No poison or accident kills required (where you could just leave her body as is)… “Requirements” do stink sometimes, especially when they limit your options and stifle creativity. That adds risk without an equivalent reward. Or, I suppose the reward is that you get to progress.
Then again, she has all those side’ler bodyguards that will even follow her into a bathroom and admire how she throws up.
I definitely don’t agree that the actual grouping of targets is random. Since they started making batches made from all 3 games, there has been some thematic or small gameplay cohesion to the selection.
The complication and kill condition is a bit random but there is only so much of those to pick. And they’re less interesting without the escalation aspect of the early ones.
There’s quite a few H1 ETs that do the same (although it could’ve been sorted in one of the last two patches since I checked this) - The Pharmacist and The Bad Boy also have the same problem. I’m pretty certain there were others too, I just don’t recall who they were.
Given these were made when the only emetic item was the syringe, most of the targets that would’ve been deemed highly unlikely to ever be emetic’d just have their guards follow them in rather than waiting outside.
