Hello, Secret Worlders!
Now we have the Season 2 announcement, looking at the Reveal video, I started thinking about something I quite often muse about.
First things first, I am NOT suggesting a change of existing zones. I am suggesting an optional, scaled experience of all zones as a choice/instance.
We all know the zones are tuned around a certain IP and the character power scales way, way more than zone difficulty can keep up. Basically, when the Tower was reworked and added to SWL, any and all of the players who were interested in the Elite ladder climb were already past the point where the enemies would prove to be any challenge.
I fear that this will be the case for the upcoming content, also.
Of course, this is not a bad thing in itself. Basically, you cannot scale the story content designed for solo to keep escalating in difficulty as that would alienate the casual player and this game is AMAZING for the casual player.
However, without pumping out group content, keeping the Elite ladder climbers interested becomes a problem as well.
So, my suggestion is, applying the Solo Scenario formula to zones as different instances. Maybe not a full E1-E10 ladder but an E1-E5-E10 scaled version of zones would be amazing for the high IP players.
In all honesty, aside from maybe some more shards, not much balancing to the rewards would be necessary either. Iām pretty sure people would go for the challenge itself - and obviously some other incentive like shards, some extra mof or greater chance at better drops would be good but I seriously doubt they are necessary.
This has the advantage of keeping people entertained with maybe not challenging but at LEAST non-trivial content in the open world and requiring no new assets or writing.
I know this is not a new idea but I wanted to revisit this with the S2 on the horizon and hear your opinions about this.
Also, I know you can go ahead and say āget an altā but truth be told, with the game not being very alt friendly, I doubt most of us would be interested in levelling an alt, redo story, delete alt, go at it again, etc. Iād much rather go back to Kingsmouth with Shivvies and get stomped by a firefighter all over again <3
What do you think? Would you have alternative methods to deal with the character scaling and making the huge existing content reusable?
EDIT: Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about buffing mobs at existing zones. I am talking about some sort of an instancing system where you select your difficulty and whenever you port to a zone, it is a scaled instance.
It is like The Divisionās World Scaling. Of course, meeting up on someone would put you in their instance which would not be scaled, for instance. Or when you group if any of the members do not meet the requirements, your grouping attempt would not go through, etc.
Cheers!