How do you plan to avoid rep grind as a gameplay necessity?asked by Darcnes
TL;DRThe aim is not to avoid grind altogether but to avoid a boring, repetitive one, using planned measures like sandbox play, varied mission solutions, colliding missions, dynamic missions and ally-based reputation.
This is a tricky one, since grind has one heck of a negative connotation (rightfully so in most cases), but I've been wanting to elaborate on this ever since the Reputation video was posted.
The reputation system is built to have very long-term goals, which does mean you will need to play the game for a long time to achieve higher tiers, and that's sort of a grind. We want players to have long-term goals they can work towards.
Our goal thus isn't to avoid any grind, it's to avoid a bad one. What I mean by a bad grind is anything that forces you to do boring, repetitive gameplay. To avoid this in the future (what we have in the game right now is definitely repetitive, we know) we have a few different things planned:
- the various sandbox elements of the game
- allowing different solutions to the same mission
- encouraging more player interactions (both friendly and foe) by having missions collide more
- dynamically created missions that pick from a pool of mission pieces so that even the base mission is different most of the time
- allowing you to build reputation by working for an ally
All of these are intended to make it so that even if you are "grinding" reputation with Organization X for weeks, it should stay interesting and engaging. You would be earning reputation for things you already want to do.