u/DJnoiseredux

I keep seeing these posts about how there’s too many people, servers are crowded, etc…

The game is limited to 16 players per faction, per server. That’s 48 people on a really massive map.

If more people are playing, they don’t add more people to each server, they open more servers.

Tier 3 areas do get hit more often, so often they will be picked over, but honestly I have really good luck in tiger bay. The UN hq, refugee camp, and municipal building have more gear than the mall does, just about, and it’s guarded by flip flops.

Honestly, it’s so easy to get geared there, my favourite play now is to go in with just a 1911 and a backpack. Usually I’m heavy even before I get to the mall.

As someone who lives close to portage: seriously do we need the loud mufflers? Do you really need to advertise your poor financial decisions so loudly?

So my whole squad (4 1,000+ hour GZW players) just picked up Red River Incursion and it’s starting to feel like we’ve just switched, that’s our game now. I was not expecting any game to dethrone the game that’s been my main game for 1.5 years now.

But as I’ve been playing it, I just keep noticing features that I prefer over GZW, and I think most of them are only possible or at least work a lot easier because of one fundamental difference: you and your squad have the world to yourself.

So here are some of those features:
- you can fine tune the AI to set your desired challenge level. In GZW right now the AI just feel like shooting range targets that have the ability to shoot back, and not with very good aim. In RRI, they move, they push you hard, and they don’t always spawn in the same locations, so you have to watch every corner, not just the ones where you’ve learned AI spawn around. In a shared server, the AI have to be tuned to the lowest common denominator and right now it feels like the crowd that complain about “guys in flip flops shooting me at 300 meters through a wall” when really they just blunder through an area without properly clearing it have had their way and the AI are just pathetically inept.

- when you decide to go on a raid, you just load in to the map at that location. No 3 minute helicopter ride followed by a five minute walk. In a shared server, it would be unfair/unrealistic to allow people to just teleport to midnight sapphire.

- when you load in to a map, it is guaranteed to be fully stocked with AI and loot. In GZW, it’s always a crap shoot whether there will actually be any enemies and any rewards after you spend 5-10 minutes just getting to where you planned to go

- loot level gets scaled to character level. So as you keep playing, you find better and better stuff. In GZW, you can start as a level 1 character and jump on a helicopter to Fort Narith and instantly get gear that makes anything you can currently buy from vendors totally obsolete. And once you get a few top tier guns, then you just start stockpiling more of them, there’s no real progression left after from watching your bankroll grow. In a shared server, the loot has to be the same for everyone so it kind of makes this unavoidable. And this really makes the task system and vendor progression matter a lot less because you can just get tier 3 gear by going to tier 3 areas. Which also makes most of the map kind of pointless. Once you have LZs for them, MS, FN and TB are the only places it makes sense to go, unless you just want a change of scenery from those three areas, or are tired of going there only to find them picked clean.

- you can play if servers are down

- you don’t need player factions. You can join a squad with any friends who own the game.

- you can choose whether to start a raid in night time or daytime.

- you can have random spawn locations for the beginning of your raid. In GZW I was pretty much always going to the same 1 or 2 LZs for each major POI.

I realize this would represent a massive shift for GZW and Madfinger games. But, while spearhead was a tremendous upgrade for GZW, it seems RRI also just made a massive leap forwards and the basic architecture just allows for more rewarding gameplay in a number of key ways that I don’t see that further tweaks to ballistics or AI or task systems would be enough to draw me back to regular play at this point. If there are others also checking RRI out at this point, and having a similar experience, I suspect GZW might lose a significant chunk of its PVE focused player base.

I was a hardcore GZW player and to be honest I’m really surprised that another game has won me over so hard so quickly. I just hope GZW is paying attention to what RRI gets right and seriously considers whether the persistent shared open world model is what they really need to be basing their game on.