Tome/Rift #1 coming to an end, how are people feeling about it?
Ok so with one week left in tome one and rift one, I want to get an idea of where people are sitting around the whole concept.
Here are some of my biggest impressions and suggestions for improvements so far;
Completion Time
First off, the overall time to complete 70 tiers of the rift. It has honestly felt too long. I've played a solid amount these past few months, and I'm only closing up tier 70 today, I've played nearly every single day to claim the survivor and killer XP bonuses. Keep in mind, this comes with the caveat that this first rift counted 1-2 weeks of XP progress before it started, so this would mean I'd just be finishing in the final days.
The devs estimate of 1 hour per day, 70 total, is completely off base. In the past 2 weeks alone I've clocked 30 hours: https://i.imgur.com/urNNCLI.png and this has been my lowest amount due to finishing the challenges quickly and not being very motivated to play. I'm AT LEAST at double their estimate, or more. Some comments from the devs have suggested that they only use that estimate to refer to time spent within a match, and that's blatantly obfuscating the fact that we spend a colossal amount of game time to reach 70 hours of being in matches.
I really hope that the next rift respects player time more accurately, ideally by rewarding fragments for 600-700XP rather than 800. A 10 minute match should reward a shard, rather than requiring either a long drawn out match, or more matches. Requiring 12+ matches, including daily bonuses, for a single tier is far too grindy.
Challenge Rewards
Continuing with the theme of completion time, it needs to be addressed that the rewards for challenges are pitiful. The different levels of challenges include harder and harder challenges, however we are still rewarded the same as those in level 1. A killer who succeeds "Sacrifice all 4 survivors in the basement in one match" receives the same fragment reward as those who complete "Kick the same generator twice in one match." It's laughable. It's a really basic concept of rewards in games that something harder should be worth more of a reward.
At the very least, each level should scale. Rather than splitting the rewards between "basic" and "master" at 3/5 shards, why not increase per level, 3/4/5/6 fragments per challenge?
Also it should be noted that level 1 in tome 1 actually has the most fragments total, completing level 4 is actually the lowest shard yield by a fair margin. This was even true when considering the leaked challenges that were all master challenges in level 4, due simply to the small number of them. Yes, you made a pretty eye, but it feels far worse in comparison to the rest of the tome.
The CHallenges
There's been such a mixed bag with so many issues in these challenges, and it's been discussed to death so let's just highlight some of the basic points;
Negatives
- Challenges that rely on the enemy team's mistakes suck.
- Challenges that can be saboutaged by DCing or just standing in one spot on the map teabagging suck.
- Challenges that promote one survivor hiding all game in case they get hooked a single time suck.
- Long grindy challenges (25 unhooks, 200,000 bloodpoints when bonuses are not counted, lots of gens) are not fun, and are not challenging, and contribute nothing of value except from stalling us getting to good challenges.
- Repeating the same challenges multiple times in the first rift (basement hooks, unhooks) both encourage the same boring and bad playstyles consistently through the duration, and show a complete lack of ideas when tome 1 didn't even manage unique challenges.
Positives
- Challenges requiring different perks are fun, and more interesting. It gives us a reason to shake things up and not use the default meta builds which is more fun for the other team as well.
- Challenges based around the tome theme characters are fun, but could use some variation. Claudette got the same challenge twice, and Trapper got the same challenge 4 times with increasing numbers.
Suggestions
- Something akin to a survivor adept would be good without being too hard.
- Something like "Kill X survivors using Trapper and his unique perks" not in a single match would be interesting.
- More variation. "Cleanse a Hex" was never done for example. I get that it's Claudette themed so Claudette = altruism but EVERY challenge felt like unhooking or healing. It doesn't feel good to open the new list of challenges and see the same batch as last time with slightly higher numbers. (Looking at you levels 2 and 3.)
Charms
In a similar vein to the challenges, it's a let down that there is so little inspiration amongst the charms when we're at the point where ideas should be brimming and limited so you have stuff for the future.
The biggest issue most players have is the recolours. 5 of the same leaf icon on wood, and 5 of the same Trapper mask icon on wood. The differences between versions 1-4 are so miniscule that they are unnoticeable unless you are using multiple (why!?) and there is no distinct progression from worse to better. You cannot tell which is supposed to be the one you get when you buy the rift, and which is the reward for 50+ tiers of work. Yes, I'll give a pass on the red ones, but seriously, these are weak.
Love the emblem charms, can't wait to have a full set.
PERK CHARMS - There's so much opportunity here. For the same effort as the awful recolours, we COULD have had Empathy/Botany Knowledge/Self Care and Brutal Strength/Agitation/Unnerving Presence charms that both allow us interesting choices of showing off our perks, and also suits the tome more thematically than "leaf." Instead, we got Empathy and Feng's Technician? We're going to slowly move through characters for tomes so why not set the mark now that we'll unlock teachable charms at a rate where we won't need to play until 3020 to unlock them.
Small changes I'd love to see;
- Raise the number of charms from 3 to 4. We could then eventually show our perk build with 4 charms, or show all 4 emblems. 4 is more represented in the game than 3.
- Remove the limitations of "survivor charm" or "killer charm." So what if I want a bear trap hanging off Quentin? When I get Pig charms I'm going to want them on everyone. Why would this ever hurt anyone to allow?
Other Cosmetics
I'd say it was a fair balance of recolours and new sets. Definitely some nice stuff in there.
Big drawbacks; the Hag and Huntress sets are incomplete, and don't match with the recolours already in the store.
The Collection
The lore was excellent. The exception was the really poor pacing of the narrator. Please read with punctuation, this isn't a race, we want lore not onebigsentencejammedtogetherwithnobreakshemovesthroughthedeathanddecayofthevoid.
The animations were still as cool as they were in the Halloween event. Minor disappointment that the "Revelations" collection didn't have anything.
The free track
Ok, we get it, you want people to fork out cash for the rift, but the rewards on the free track are tragic.
9 charms, event currency we'd get by playing before the rift anyway, and 6 random cosmetics from different sets.
I know I'm not going to convince anybody that there should be more than 15 rewards for the free track so at the very least, just make those 6 cosmetics be 2 full sets, like the Claudette and Trapper ones. If someone is actually playing the game enough to hit level 63-70 without paying, they're a dedicated player that deserves a bit more respect than they're getting.
Last note about the time span
If the requirements to hit 70 are not improved by either less XP required or better fragment rewards, there's going to be 0 downtime from one tome to the next, as they basically launch and end on the mid-chapter patch. That is going to be a LOT of player burnout if everyone constantly feels on the clock to get these completed. In the long run, this will harm the playerbase numbers more than it helps if QoL changes are not made.
So that's my take on the whole thing, how's everyone else feeling?
Comments
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Rift felt like a beta pass way to many filler things
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I feel like it was very lackluster and very inconsistent, and the challenges were just impossible or simply annoying and could easily be failed based on several situations that commonly occur. Overall it was decent, but I didn't even complete it because I don't have that much time to play the game and I'm definitely not wasting my money to do so, and I probably won't waste my money on the next one.
For killer they really need to consider just telling you to do x thing based on the killers you own, because that would at least allow for more variety in the challenges, rather than the way it is now which forces generic, unimaginative and repeated "challenges" like do 15 gens, which isn't challenging at all, or do 4 gens with x perk, which is just plain irritating.
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It felt way too grindy to me. I like what they are going for, but I have roughly 300 hours in DBD since the Rift went live and I am still not at Tier 70.
I am very glad I did not buy the pass.
Note: the 300 hours includes queue times. Not pure gameplay, however, the time investment stands.
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Definitely feel you there. The 70 hour estimate is a tiny fraction of the amount of time you actually have to spend to progress in the rift.
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It took me 42 matches to complete the challenge that required me to unhook someone during EGC. In that same match I unhook 3 survivors due to all of us being overtly altruistic, which fit the lore for claudette, who is overly altruistic. 42 matches seems extreme, but it fits for claudettes character, and the lore being described. Most of the missed opportunities for me had to do with other people bailing during EGC, pansies. Basically though, I learned that the conditions that allow you to rescue two people during EGC is just as likely as your chance to rescue one person. It all requires existing survivors to be overtly altruistic.
I still think the challenges are too easy, but I also think they don't reward enough, either.
None of the killer challenges took me more than 2-3 trials, except for the interrupt ones. Those ones are obnoxious - on your screen you can grab a survivor but for some reason the game 'corrects itself' and the survivor escapes. Followed by them running from one safe loop to another.
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Way too grindy with cosmetics that I personally didn't think were that great. Still didn't buy it though, I completed it due to my serious addiction playing a lot and I think that's the key thing here. This isn't the only game most people play. It's easy to experience burnout in the middle of it meaning that if you decided to buy the pass at the start you most likely lost money. So on top of it not being worth in my opinion due to the stuff you get, it is also very time consuming when you might just want to play something else.
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I have to agree, 70 hours is definitely far off, and I'll likely have to spend Auric Cells to catch up.
Therefore, I'm going to suggest some things to bring the Rift to par:
- Completing Daily Rituals award Rift Fragments.
- Offerings that double XP.
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42 matches I did it in my first game majority I did in my first game only a few took longer
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I just don’t like the missions which forced you to do something you won’t in normal circumstances, such as I won’t intentionally hook survivor in the basement when there is hook around
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I don't think challenges like that are bad.
I think they're bad when they require a HUGE amount of hooks so you're forced to play basement-gamer to get them done.
That's compounded by the fact that those challenges appear early in the challenge web, or with only simple challenges before them. Setups like that cause seemingly every killer to be playing in the basement every match for a solid week or two. It isn't fun for anybody.
It also gets worse when people finally finish doing stuff like that and then the next level comes out with 2 more basement-hooking challenges.
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Totally agree, it needs some fine tuning to be a better experience. Currently there design is less challenge and more like Chores.
These challenges don't mesh with normal gameplay for the most part, especially when its clear that the other player's are doing them and can be prevented from being completed intentionally by the other player's.
You didn't mention it but i really hope they never do the chest related challenges ever again, the amount of dc's or throw's that challenge caused was terrible. There should never be a challenge asking a player out of the 4 to acquire all of 1 resource type in a single match, it's just not easily doable without being in a full party swf.
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I got lucky on the chest ones with good teammates that listened in the pregame chat.
I agree though, some felt like they were just there to keep us busy, collecting bloodpoints, emblems, gens etc. There's no challenge involved, just time pumped in.
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Surprisingly, i did more than i thought initially.
I just wanted more to do, and the challenges provided that, but i then wanted to unlock more stuff.
Not just unlocking for the sake of getting it all btw, there's specific things that i want on there that i got now.
Idk, i never felt bored, and no one ever screwed me over or something for the challenges.
I had pretty much an entertaining time like usual, but with more to do and more to get, so i'd say it's a nice addition.
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I just don't like that I am still not at 70 even though all challenges are done. I would like to see more challenges or drop the tiers to maybe 60.
It didn't feel like a grind when I was doing challenges, but now it does since it takes about 10 or so matches to do one tier.
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Im tier 67. I will definitely get to 68 just for the laat 50 cells back. I may try for 70 but doubt ill play enough to grind it out.
I play solo on xbox and guess i was lucky as the challenges being complained about i was able to get easily, the dark sense and chest ones. The egc took me awhile as everyone who got hooked during end game were dead on hook or, no one would open the gates preferring to 99 them. I did derank for the flashlight challenge. I suck i know.
I farmed the trap challenges as i can't stand playing trapper. Im just not good. Managed to get my 5 hooks in basement with huntress of all people. On lerys. It was my last challenge and never thought I wpuld get it.
All in all the bloodpoints were a welcome bonus, especially for newer players. I figured out i need about 3 million more to max out my p1 huntress. Kinda insane to be honest.
What i would like to see is if you dc after completing a challenge then you don't get credit for that challenge. Yes unforseen circumstances may screw some people over but it shouldnt be too common.
Also as for challenges, the grind to 70 makes sense why we could only progress one challenge at a time. Its not designed to finish every challenge in 1 go and doing so leaves you with more of a grind at the end. However, instead of fun designs that are supposed to mimic the bloodwebs, id rather it be a circle with master challenges in a smaller circle inside. This way we can choose where we start our journey and possibly mitigate the chances of the entire player base working on the same things.
I loved not being forced to buy the pass at the start. I didn't know where i would end up so didnt really want to waste the money.
I definitely would love more perk challenges as using a perk you never used before sometimes reveals a hidden gem. (Empathy)
Final thought, as a first attempt i thought the system was good. I can overlook its flaws. I just hope they make the good parts better, or at least not screw them up, and change the bad parts.
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Level 69...3/4 to 70...all challenges tier 1-4 done...only liked a small handful of the unlockables. The lore parts were interesting but of no value. The charms were total pants.
Won't be buying Premium again. Spent all my cells on skin parts.
The main reason is the amount of time it takes to go through the Tome. You feel obliged to play it if you pay for the pass. I just can't be bothered.
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Good overall assessment. I agree with a lot of it ^^
I am close to tier 70 and I have played on average 5 hours during the week and 5 hours on weekends. Last weekend I played 6 hours in a single day which really helped me to reach the finish line, but that is not normal for me.
I remember buying a few tiers because I had some cells to burn (I think 400).
All in all I feel it is a bit too much for the average player (assuming most of us work, have school, have families/friends, and responsibilities).
I think 50 tiers would be nice.
As for the challenges I would like to see less stuff that makes me play a certain way... the basement challenges for example. No killer wants to be 'that guy' and the basement ones really force you to play like a jerk.
I do love challenges that are tied to characters and certain perks. Those are a lot of fun! Really enjoyed the Trapper ones. I never really gave that killer a shot and now I love playing him!
My biggest gripe would be this:
PLEASE, let us activate 1 challenge as a survivor, and 1 as killer.
Very annoying to switch between roles AND have to go into archives to switch challenges.
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I ended up playing so much because I wanted to finish the pass that I haven't played DbD since I finished it. I'm so burned out on the game. The 70 hour estimate is far from possible. I hope they'll increase the exp or do something to make it require less time, cause I was so burned out on the game by lvl 55, but I was determined to finish it and it was all I thought about, when not playing the game. I have the rift completed alongside all challenges.
The challenges were okay for me, I'm fine with some of them have been horrible or straight up annoying. It was the devs first time creating challenges and I believe that they've learned what the community likes and where to place challenges (like no longer putting grind challenges as the first one for survivor). Hopefully they'll never repeat the original EGC challenge and the current 4k in basement challenge.
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Like I'll finally do some of it now that I dont feel obligated to pay out the rest of the rift that's for some ungodly reason tied to it.
Like I can enjoy it for what it is. Lore and extra objectives.
Not the only thing to focus on and only way to get past the paywall.
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I like that they added these tomes, but i have some points to criticise
- Way to little time for most people. If you are not playing this game a lot, there is 0% chance you will finish all of it.
- Some challanges are way to easy, some are way to hard. Compare the "Do 2 generators" and the "Finish 4 Gens in one trial". This point...
- ... leads me to the benefits. Harder challanges do not feel more rewarding then easy challanges.
Those are my main complains, i guess most people feel similar to me and i hope devs learn from that. Anyway, good job so far :)
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I got burned out of dbd before I could even reach half of the rift.
I never thought that could happen, I used to be almost addicted to this game. I haven't played it in weeks now.
It's just too grindy for me.
The challenges were ok for the most part. But some of them were too situational for me.
I am just glad I didn't bought the pass, I am only a little sad that I won't get the arcade charm now.
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That's outright false.
Tomes DO NOT GO AWAY. EVERYONE will be able to finish it.
Challenges are challenges. Something extra to do for a small bonus. Not something you HAVE to do ASAP or you miss out on XYZ reward.
Tying it to the RIFT is causing all this nonsense.
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What do you mean? Rift is closing in 8 days it says... you might get those challanges, but you wont get the awards of the current rift, right?
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Challenges were the only entertaining part of the rift. Cosmetics were interesting but honestly most of the were dull re-skins.
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The rift rewards will be gone. But you can outright buy up to those. Which is the point of a battlepass.
Hell, they even said SOME of the rift items will be purchasable in the future. Another odd decision....
The tomes will never leave.
Which is why I said tying it into the rift was horrible. People make such a deal about the challenges being....challenging, because they do t want to pay for more crap.
The tome should have been JUST the lore rewards and cosmetics in the time itself.
I refuse to pay for the rift even though I'm a good way through it, simply because they decided to put a themed event outfit behind the paywall.
Nurses halloween outfit being the only one locked is asinine.
However, you COULD argue we should just earn more rift points per match, and then playing to unlock would actually feel like it instead of feeling forced to grind out challenges, then have people complain about the difficulty/sweatiness of it all.
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The little gear charm looks good on my waist. Overall the big problem I had with it is the challenges often seemed to be too similar too close together. Like having to do 4 flashlight blinds, then the very next challenge was doing a flashlight save. Or the healing ones where you had 2-3 healing challenges right after another. They need to mix those up more.
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You don't get credit for tasks if you DC, at least not on PS4.
Rift rewards were kind of disappointing, not a huge cosmetics fan here, so I just played for the other rift rewards. I did get to 70 awhile ago. But I started out aiming to get 20 levels per chapter, so finishing out the last chapter took no time at all.
I enjoy having extra tasks to do, but a lot of these tasks sucked. I probably queued up to a dozen farming games to finish quite a few of them (as a Survivor and Killer). I never would have gotten the flashlight save, 4 gens completed, and a few others. Still never got the kill all 4 Survivors on basement hook. It's just really scummy gameplay that I just don't want to take part in so I haven't tried that hard. I'm not that good at killer either.
I listened to early Archives, and legitimately haven't listened to any since coming across a bug in them, I don't even read the character summaries, so why should I care about this.
Not sure how many hours I played, but counting long lobby times, it's way over 70.
Not sure I will buy the next Rift Pass, even though I have the Cells in reserve. I likely will not play as much next time. Having a few holiday breaks in there really helped grind this time.
I have two friends that don't play nearly as much as me, and neither is close at all in finishing the Tome or Rift. This concept is great if you play only this game, but that really limits your audience. I love this game, so I'm here until the devs do something to truly destroy the game
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The grind is diffidently NOT for the average player as the devs said, I play this game about 2-8 hours a day and am at lvl 66. I think the main problem is that the amount of fragments per lvl which is 10 and the fact that you don't always earn a fragment every game means you need to play about 12-14 games for a single lvl which is a big grind for the average player especially considering how long waiting for a match can take. When I finished all the challenges I was at lvl 60 which means I still needed to play 100+ games to reach lvl 70.
I think if they made dailys give us 3 fragments It would be complete-able by the average player and reduce the grind which is what is needed because as it is now there is no way someone who plays only 2 hours a day can complete it.
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I just don't want any challenges that have adverse effects on game play. There were a lot of matches where people were basically throwing the game to go for challenges. We need more like the ones where you need a certain amount of iridescent emblems, blood points gained, etc.
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The grind for the rift is just ridiculous. It takes about 12 games for a single tier. That's 840 games. Assuming 15 minutes between wait time and the game itself that's 210 hours. Even if the devs 70 hour claim was only in game time. That's still not going to happen.
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The fact that most of the cosmetics will get added to the store is going to make me not buy the next one. The cosmetics from this rift aren't that great and I won't use almost any of them over existing cosmetics. The only thing that would make them cool is the exclusiveness. Without that they are just mediocre cosmetics that I won't use much. The value isn't there for me.
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I think the cosmetics are pretty meh too, but I guess see some value if I am getting 1000 auric cells right back.
Hoping the next rift won't be so much of a grind though.
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For me, the challenges affected the gameplay too much and killed a lot of fun. Too often, random teammates were throwing the game.
Because of the challenges (and the queue times) I ended up playing DbD a lot less than I usually do. I'm around level 60 and I'm not sure whether I will be playing DbD the next week. I haven't bought the Rift pass and I don't plan to buy the next one, either (since I'm probably going to play even less if the challenges of Tome 2 are going to be of the same kind like Tome 1).
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Honestly, I liked the grinding ones more because at least I could do them. I've got one left, the Dark Senses "Master Challenge" for tier 4.
I've been at this for I don't know how long and I've finished 3 of the required 4 generators in so many games. At least one of them I said beforehand I was working on the challenge only for two other survivors to sit on a 2-slot generator as I stood next to them basically begging to get the 4th I needed. They knew, they sat on it anyway.
So I either need to get completely incompetent teammates who don't do generators or I need people who will be nice enough to leave it with 1% left so I can finish it off. This has become extremely frustrating and the fact that it's the only one I need just rubs salt in the wound. I could be done! But... I have to play around teammates. (Sure I could do SWF, but I'd need to convince several other people to play because currently only one friend also plays and she's still too new to help me herd three other cats.)
With things like flashlight blinds or just healing two hundred health states... Okay, sure. Just keep plugging with normal gameplay and you'll get it. This Dark Senses is frustrating because if I miss one gen I've gotta be hyper vigilant to find others working on generators and hope that the killer doesn't find me while I'm running around aimlessly.
It's...
I think the idea of challenges is nice as a concept, but I agree with some of the other comments above. Having to change up how I play and focus on gimmicks rather than 'winning' isn't fun, and it's just making me want to turn the game off. Especially when I can be sabotaged by disconnects, jerk teammates, or just a long run of especially bad luck. And it doesn't feel satisfying to get a challenge done by luck! Planning out the 2 sacrifices with NOED during EGC and having someone break all the totems, only to still somehow get it because... wait what? The perk wasn't active?! I didn't feel accomplished, I felt like the game's code had just taken pity on me. It doesn't feel like I earned the blind a killer carrying a survivor because... two people disconnected and he gave it to me since I was already injured anyway. It's pity, not accomplishment.
All for... a dangly thing I actively don't want to wear because half of them are super bright and make me more visible in the fog.
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Several users in this thread made good suggestions to adding shards to daily, double rift xp offerings, more unique perk combos and less toxic challenges that alter game play. The grind is too much for not a high enough rewards or rewards 1000 shards for spending a 1000 shards, recolored charms, incomplete outfits are not going to sell future passes. BHVR really needs to rethink this.
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I know the feeling, I'm pretty put off playing until the next one drops now that this one's done.
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Yea with how much of a grind it is and the cosmetics not being exclusive I won't be buying it again. Especially with how boring and irrelevant the charms are
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It's definitely a shame that such a huge percentage were just recolours. And recolours of a completely irrelevant symbol too.
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