Remove the Orochi Tower

You already removed AEGIS, which was a great move as it was one of the most horrible and stupid mechanism I’ve ever seen in any game, now can you please remove this ridiculous Orochi Tower ?
Or at least make it optional, so we don’t have to suffer through those endless boring repetitive floors to get to South Africa ?
I still have one floor to complete and I just wanna shoot myself :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

The only pleasure I find in it is that every time I complete one of those floors (which are all exactly the same : get colored keycards, kill the boss, rince and repeat), I’m giving the finger to Joel Bylos and say “screw you and your stupid pretentious designs, one less floor to complete !”

I’m a big fan of this game, been here since TSW Beta, but I could really do without this ridiculous waste of time…

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I doubt a complete removal would be impossible, due to it being the conclusion to Tokyo.
The floors could be removed but it would be at cost of a lot of lore in form of memo/pcs/tablets. While the floors get old fast they are rich in story if you look around a little.

The problem with the tower in its current form is that some genius decided to make us climb every single floor to get to the top in SWL, whereas the TSW version of the mission simply had you go through three random floors and that was it.

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Well, to be honest, at this point I don’t even care about lore, side missions, achievements or anything, I just wanna get out of this f**ing tower as fast as I can and never hear about it ever again (and that’s coming from a Lore-freak like me, who even at one point started working on The Secret Lore website, so I guess that shows how much they screwed up with this disastrous Tower).

I want the name of whoever came up with this brilliant idea so I can go and ruin his Twitter timeline :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

I think it was in response to ppl not liking the randomness of the Keys, when trying to get the achivo. Also unpopular opinion, i think the aegis mechanics were brillant if a little clumsily executed.

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I’m of two minds about the Orochi Tower as presented in SWL. While it certainly overstays its welcome when playing through all the floors in a row, I feel it was designed as such because if it retained the TSW model of just three random floors, the majority of players who only go through content once would never see most of the floors, and there’s plenty of story bits that are important to events that have or will occurred, and the random floors would also mean they wouldn’t get a coherent story on the one time they did play through it, unless it was modified where you got a random set of three related floors - except that then you run into the problem where not every company had a beta floor.

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While I think the Tower can’t really get removed, I do think it is one of the weaker leveldesigns in the game. The cookiecutter block design isn’t doing the Tower any favors, same as it doesn’t do SA any favors or the inner city of tokyo.
I really hope they level up there experience and expertise in that area. Cause I think beautiful areas like the Tokyo lair show that they still can do really pretty designs even past TSW.

I don’t agree. I went through the tower several times in TSW, whereas I’ve only done it once in SWL. The original was more fun and encouraged repeated runs, while I never felt the need to do that in the relaunch.

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It’s a poor design choice unless they wanted to ensure the player goes through the entire tower. The issue with randomness could have been resolved more elegantly via the cleared floors being taken out of the key pool until the achievement is completed (after which point all floors become available again). That could have been a middle ground between players who just want to be done and gone, and the players who want to see all the floors without random repeats. What we got was a shift from one extreme to the other.

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I never made it to the Tower in TSW (here’s one vote for “AEGIS may have been an interesting idea, but the implementation was piss-poor, needlessly annoying and off-putting”), and tbh, what I heard about the tower was also off-putting by way of “total RNG achievements and lore, seriously!?”

The problem is, SWL’s “climb everything” version of the tower is just as off-putting. What is supposed to build to the season 1 climax is a rather anticlimactic 24 floor grind. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it for months. (It’s not like I was expecting Funcom to deliver season 2 any time soon; New Dawn came months earlier than I expected.)

I think a better implementation would’ve been a TSW-style random run as part of the initial story playthrough (thus preserving a sense of urgency while building to the season climax), and unlocking the separate SWL missions afterwards to let people finish lore/achievements at their leisure.

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Im fairly sure they also made the comment, that they wanted to make it feel like you were making your way through many floors. Cant remember the source off the top of my head, but possibly a dev stream, from around the time where tower was released

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What part of my post don’t you agree with?

This bit…

I think if there are only three floors like in TSW, players are more likely to repeat the tower to see the ones they’ve missed, while they’re more likely to get burned out and not repeat it when they have to do all 21.

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There’s a difference between making you feel like you’re slogging along (tending to corn) and actually spending hours crawling through 21 supernatural, but extremely same-y office floors.

Sure not saying it aint long winded =P

Just feels odd to want to remove further old content when just a month or so ago people were clamoring to put old stuff back in.

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That tower is the single most tedious bit of story content in the entire game. And unlike all of the other missing PvE content, it’s not optional. You have to complete it to progress.

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I said the players who only play through the content once wouldn’t see all the floors.

Which is true. And saying “what about the people who would run through it multiple times to see the other floors” doesn’t contradict it, as those would not be players who only play through the content once.

In TSW the sameness of each floor was offset by the randomn selection of floors for each run. In SWL that fig leaf of randomness is gone and so the repetition is laid bare, much to the detriment of the zone. I agree, it honestly just feels like a chore to climb it now.

Now that it has been out for nine months and is no longer the final story content, I feel like there should be two changes made to the Tower:

  1. A skip mechanic of some kind should be added to the Tower. It is not like this is without precident - Tokyo was gated behind running many scenarios in TSW, until eventually the cost was toned down to a single piece of currency. People running the Tower now should be able to skip 50% or more of it, and then come back later to enjoy the juicy lore content and achievements at their leisure.

  2. Container keys should be added to the side missions in the Tower to bring rewards up to par with the rest of Tokyo. As it stands the Tower has many disadvantages over other story zone content: the repetitive floor layouts make the missions visually uninteresting for repeats, each mission requires numerous loading screens to complete, and the rewards are worse than Kaidan proper because there are no keys.