Aw man this is upsetting. I wish this could just be a toggle in the options menu. It’s been posted already, but for a choice that seems to be in service of making the game more accessible, it actually ends up making it even more difficult to play. Lining up some shots is way more finicky than it used to be (i.e. You have to aim first and quickly switch shoulder, and then make aiming corrections). Sightlines often become obscured. At the extremes, some ‘advanced’ techniques aren’t possible anymore. Depending on the player, this seemingly unimportant feature can have a pretty big impact on gameplay. So overall, we end up losing some player choice in a game that’s all about player choice. I know it’s hard to make games, and I don’t want to sound disrespectful towards iO, who have made many of my favorite games of all time. I know you’re all hard at work fixing bugs and working on new projects, but there has to be a relatively simple way to make everyone happy in regards to this issue.
I have a feeling they’re going to offer a toggle solution at some point, since they left the issue open rather than doubling-down on “we felt this decision was to preserve the artistic integrity and framing of each map, while causing less confusion to our players”.
hopefully it’s sooner rather than later
Also they forgot to remove The Briefcase challenge in Miami, despite moving the reward to the mastery track.
If you forgot what that challenge is, the description says “Beat Miami to unlock the briefcase”.
While not the same kind of issue, there’s also “The Delgado Larceny” escalation retaining the “complete the final level as Silent Assassin” challenge – that usually isn’t featured in escalations – which is how you’d originally have unlocked the El Matador.
Gotta say, I’m a bit sad they moved many of the escalation-specific rewards (and Bonus Mission rewards) into different (longer) challenge tracks. That was the whole appeal of some of those missions – being a tailored experience around a certain themed item – but now if someone wants that El Matador or Iconator explosive, they’ve got to play tons of Featured/Escalations instead.
It’s nice to have some reward and incentive to play FCs now, but some of those items felt better suited to those specific unlock paths.
(Maybe IO realised not many people knew about those unlockable items, being buried under menus of escalations and such…?)
The problem is we have 19 sniper rifles, most of which are ineffective reskins of one of the guns we unlocked four years ago, with a handful that I might use, and only one that’s excellent and best able to get the job done, the Sieger Ghost. It has been the go-to sniper rifle for the past four years now. I love the Ghost, but I’d like to have a valid reason for choosing the other guns too.
We have the Leviathan, which is still an inferior rifle, and the one that came with the Proloff Parable, which is a reskin of the Ghost themed around a specific starting suit. Even then, that still makes three rifles I’d use out of 19 total, with no sensible reason I’d use the other two. That’s really bad. The Sieger Advanced plays music, but that doesn’t affect gameplay. The Tuatara is cool looking and has a briefcase animation, but I wouldn’t use it for a serious session. The ones I stated stand out to me. The rest, well, Io is making them all the same, void of unique properties or exciting perks that alter gameplay and encourage replayability, but significantly worse than the one sniper people use all the time. This is not balance.
The goal should not be to make the rifles weaker and worse, but to make them stronger and more appealing to bring into the mission. We could have a sniper rifle that fires a single electric charge at puddles for electrocution kills, a rifle that fires shockwave round, a sniper that penetrates one to two walls, as a compromise between eliminating exploits and not alienating players. How about a tranquilizer sniper rifle? There are so many cool ideas here. Instead, they have another reskin waiting for us.
When the electrocution phone was in the game, we already had a reasonable variety of gadgets, each having a unique function (except for the reskins of lockpicks and scramblers). They were all overshadowed because it had zero flaws. Its removal made sense for 3, because it distracted from items that were already helpful and good, though I still believe keeping in the game and making it so you could only kill someone standing in a puddle with the phone would’ve been a better way of handling the situation. Yeah, it would do the same thing as the emp device then, but it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve gotten an unlock that functions almost identically to another.
Wallbangs require some skill to pull off, and, as someone who tried them with the Lancer and couldn’t comprehend them back in 2016, I still can’t even now, they’re not like the electro-phone. To get SA with them appears impossible to a player like me, who’s good at the game, but not GuLe, Kotti, or CJ good. The Druzhina wasn’t a perfect item or a go-to rifle for anyone and wallbangs aren’t as easy as dropping the electrocution phone in front of someone and pulling the trigger, so I’d say it was more balanced than the electro-phone in an unofficial sense. Coming from someone who hasn’t used the rifle since 2018, it was harder to aim than other snipers because the scope was very shaky, and it was still relatively shaky after a patch that improved its steadiness from what I can recollect (I may be mistaken here).
I’m not a speedrunner. All I’m saying is there should be a legitimate, in-game justification for using the other sniper rifles people put in the time to unlock, sometimes twice, over the span of five years. This, at least to me, made this sniper rifle one to pay attention to and play with. Now, I have no reason to bother with it.
I get their priority is to fix the game, I do, but I’ve always wondered why they never apply their time to taking care of the really shitty bugs everybody openly hates and that make people quit the game first, before zeroing in on the ones people are gleaning some entertainment from like a bug-fixing torpedo. I’ve seen this happen for three different games, and it’s only pissing people off and steering them away from the game I hope succeeds in the end. It’s great when horrible bugs/broken mechanics are targeted at long last, but it rarely happens as history has proven to me.
Most of the time, I’ve witnessed this long-running pattern where the cool, actually intriguing exploits are destined to go the moment they’re reported, and the bad bugs are repaired months or years later. It’s in that frequency that I sometimes feel like they’re sabotaging their own game, unintentionally killing it by working on the wrong glitches first, and the lack of communication doesn’t improve my opinion. That frustrates me as someone who, regardless of what you might have assumed, sees the games’ inherent greatness and would like more people to get into this master-crafted series of games. Even if I’m not great at showing my love for the games most of the time, usually complaining about something it has or hasn’t done, I love it more than any other video game.
Don’t get me wrong, I too appreciate the work they’ve put into the game, the patches, the content (though I’m not impressed by every piece of content), all of it. It’s pleasing to see them building this game continuously over time, not giving up on it, and always adding things to it/taking away bugs even if I feel it’s sometimes to the game’s detriment. If I didn’t feel this way, I wouldn’t be here, writing this and actively booting up the game day in and day out. I complain about things I’m passionate about.
It just gets very tiring and frustrating to see this happening again, after a first, second, and now a third WoA game. When much of it appears preventable from what we’ve been told and led to assume. The game has these big issues that serve only to drive potential newcomers away from this great series, but the first order of business is to realign the minimap with its border? Just…come on, you know?
Poor choice of words, I’ll admit, but I can’t say I exactly look forward to them at times, namely when some nice gameplay mechanic is affected negatively and we’re stuck waiting seven months for another patch.
I agree. There’s no reason for that, and I’d be totally fine with it going through one wall. I just hate to see yet another sniper rifle follow the path of the Lancer and completely lose all its appeal.
I don’t think wanting your unlocks to matter more justifies a rifle that completely breaks the game in every way. Also there are 20 sniper rifles that are basically useless because they need to offer unlocks for the people really into unlocks. If they didn’t feel the need to do that there would likely just be a loud one that penetrates and a quiet one that does not.
What are these massive bugs that you think are making people quit the game? 99% of my playtime I can’t say I’m really encountering anything, and the really bad ones off the top of my head like shooting sedated targets are pretty niche and not something most players would encounter.
Anyway, like I said elsewhere I would absolutely assume priorities have a lot to do with how easy things are to fix. The sniper rifle issue was surely a simple “put it back to normal gameplay mode” switch. The sedation kills likely are intertwined with how SA works with sedation in general and a lot more tricky. I doubt IOI are arbitrarily ignoring certain bugs for the fun of it.
Talking of sniper rifles, is there any real reason to even choose weak options like the Druzhina 34 standard version? Does it even have a zoom function?
I’d recommend looking at this thread, some sniper rifles do have different properties. So yeah, some are just objectively inferior, same as with all unlocks
Style points.
The patch fixed my Chongqing location discovery bug, so that’s nice!
It’s not a bug, It’s a feature. I know this is a copypasta joke but It’s genuinely not a bug.
Just got a 500mb patch for the PS4 version. 
.
I think your mistaking the starting ammo for magazine size.
Oh… I don’t use PSVR… I still waiting for Mission Story Trophies Patch!
Big brother and its live services are watching you 
We got this roadmap on the 4th. Can we expect the march one around then too?
Magazine size is how much shots you have before having to reload (6 in this case). The starting ammo is how much ammo you have in reserve after taking it out of the briefcase for the first time (this is what changed from 30 to 12).
Thanks for clarifying