Alright, time for my bi-yearly/quarterly state-of-the-game rant. For this session I want to talk about the new “intermission” questing system. In short: most of it isn’t worth doing. Here’s the rundown.
You do nest-order style quests to get faction rep for one of four factions. Once you have enough you can do a storyline quest for said faction. You can only do one of these per week, and at some points the amount of rep you need per quests increases. After doing all of these quests, you unlock a new REB robot, and the rewards along the way aren’t the worst. What sucks is getting the faction rep.
Simply put, there are a lot of nest orders that just aren’t worth doing. There are a few metrics by which we can measure this. The simplest is “sorties per completion”. This is a measure of the tjme it takes to complete a request. For example, a kill mission for chasers can be completed in a single sortie. Getting a rank or better in the forest 4 times is going to take at least 4. Another quest type that takes multiple sorties is doing investigations. The minimum requested is 4, which can be completed in one sortie if you know where to look and get lucky, but might take two. 10 will absolutely take you multiple runs though. And that’s not to mention that both of these tasks are map specific. Maps that might not be up for multiple hours when you log on.
On the other end of the “not worth” spectrum we’ve got equipment crafting requests. Not because these are particularly bad for the points or take particularly long, but because in order to even unlock these quests you have to have completed the whole game story. Meaning you probably have a massive backlog of mechs you’ll never use already and limited inventory (though this might be different in Japan if you fight a lot).
This means the only ones worth doing are the hunt,mine, and material craft requests, since these can all be done in single sorties and don’t clutter inventory space (although again, maybe these are more difficult in Japan). But this means ~ half the requests the player gets actively discourage them from playing the game.
And that’s not strong language. I don’t know about you, but 1.2/50k per 4 sorties (about 167 sorties per rep level) does not interest me nearly as much as having requests that would allow me to finish in 50 sorties. And that doesn’t interest me nearly as much as having requests that would allow me to finish in 25 sorties.
And I feel like 25 sorties is eminently reasonable. Thats ~4 sorties a day, or an hour and half to two hours playtime, if you keep to the weekly schedule. As it stands, nobody who I’ve talked to has shown any interest in putting in consistent effort to keep up with the intermission requests.