Remove the Orochi Tower

I know some people who would be interested in a “Skip Egypt” option. And a “Skip Solomon Island” option. Probably a “Skip Transylvania” option if it included the Nursery. Definitely a “Skip Tokyo” option. They’d happily pay to skip past everything.

For TSW vets I can certainly understand that desire. For people new to SWL, skipping past the story is pretty much paying not to play the game!

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I am sorry for my poorly worded response, I am not suggesting Funcom put in $10 story skip packs or something of the sort. When I mention paying to skip scenarios I meant that by the end of TSW players could buy the “seal of approval” item from the hacker in Venice for a single black bullion, and never have to step foot in a scenario. I am not suggesting that someone be able to walk into the lobby and go straight to the penthouse without having seen a single floor…but how about being able to buy a boardroom keycard from the cowering secretary after completing two or three chunks of floors?

The clever tricks with the Tower design and limited resources worked wonderfully in TSW, but their flaws are too obvious in SWL. The standardized layout and the bland look fits for an office, sure, but it makes for a monotonous backdrop after 4 floors, let alone 21. The devs balanced that monotony by varying the contents and story of each floor just enough to make them worth visiting again another day. Coupled with the randomness mechanic, and the Tower felt frighting and mysterious even after multiple trips. When you have to consume all the floors at once the minor variations become less noticable and the mechanics of the floors are laid bare; kill the things or solve the puzzles, get the cards. After a few floors the whole thing feels like a traffic jam on the way to a big event.

And that is the crux of my problem with it. The 21 floors are a huge roadblock in the middle of what should be the most exciting part of the game. The Tower starts off strong with the various residents of Kaidan staring up at the Tower as it finally opens–now, the players finally get to confront Orochi. We have an action-packed break-in through the train station. Now we are in the lobby, watching the uneasy truce of the factions. It feels like we have one shot to get to the top and finally find some answers for our burning questions. What is next step in this harrowing tale? A good six-eight hours of killing robots, reading office memos and answering riddles.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Tower, I love the office memos, I love all the lore and the lore implications from it. I get what you are saying about going down the slippery slope for skipping content. That said, I wouldn’t force any player to complete every single mission in a zone before they could move on–yet that is exactly what happens here. We already had solutions for the Tower in TSW. My thought was that we could impliment some of them again.

If this is your question :

Then this is your answer :

Now, I actually thought that I was the only one having a problem with this Tower, but seeing all those posts from you guys, I’m definitively not alone here !

What’s too bad is that, from what you say, there are a lot of important information pieces and Lore scattered everywhere in the Tower, but going through all those floors is such a horrible experience that I don’t even care about that anymore, I just wanna get out of this overboring Tower as soon as possible and be done with it, so because of this poor design I’m probably gonna miss on a lot of interesting things :confused:

The randomness of floors was solved in TSW by the existence of cards which allowed to choose the next floor manually. It made sense for that system to exist in this form as people who needed the achievement of all floors being done could remove the RNG factor.

Also, AEGIS was the best mechanic added in TSW for me, especially in the group content. Kaidan definitely didn’t feel as epic and dramatic when we got to steamroll through mobs in a couple of hits as soon as it got released, compared to the controller switching games and custom builds we had to make back in TSW upon Kaidan release.

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Don’t remove The Tower - It’s integral to the story - John locked Lilith in there for a reason
The tower having all those floors is because - it’s a tower - not bungalow - or a house.
The heights of both flats have 3 floors and a roof and basement - they don’t feel so bad and neither did the tower in TSW - since you only had to do 3 floors. The random aspect was fun enough and you could do the three floors which would count towards dailies and part of your aegis grind.
The tower in SWL - FEELS LIKE A TOWER - but it’s so hideous and extreme - i never want to return to it.

The only solution is to bring it back down to it’s former lvl of 3 random floors before the boardroom and penthouse, which would complete your tower to get wings and head off to south Africa. The optional other floors can be then done at your leisure and add more replayability with the floors you have already done, taken out of the loop - because you wouldn’t be going through the floors you’ve already done out of choice would you.

For those who only play the tower once (and content only once) then it doesn’t matter to them whether it has 1 floor or 21 floors, since they have no interest in anything other than playing it once to get through the content. I would also add to that - that if they play only 3 floors once, then technically they haven’t seen the other floors and they would probably - most likely - still be counted in to that feeling of “playing the other floors once” also, if they were reduced down to just 3 per go.

But no - don’t remove The Tower - Yes it’s tedious as it is now, but so is corn picking and i’d rather do tower than corn any day.
No skipping mechanics. You play or don’t. (the only skipping mechanic there should be is a ticked option in prefs to skip cutscenes you have already seen if repeating a mission)

But do bring back AEGIS i found that to be much fun - it was the way it was introduced that was not fun.
(the slow change of AEGIS types and manual changing - should have been change automatically and instantly)

Everybody is different tho eh :smiley:

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Of course, everybody’s entitled to his opinion, but if enough people say “please change the way this horrible Tower works” then maybe they will make it more fun !

I agree that “remove the Tower” might have been a bit extreme, but it’s such a painful and tedious and unfun experience for me right now that I just wanna blow this f**cking Tower up :stuck_out_tongue:

Now, if we had to go through 3 or 4 floors to be able to continue the story, and choose to visit all the other floors when/if we wanted to, that would be a completely different experience.

I still have 1 last floor to complete, and the worst part is that I can feel that there are some very fun and interesting elements in there, that I could surely have appreciated under different circomstances, but as I’m so fed up with the whole thing I just wanna steamroll through everything as fast as I can and be done with it :confused:

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I have only done the whole tower once in SWL and ofc - it was not by choice.

I have yet to complete it on my alts and i have 7 of them to do lol

Tedious doesn’t somehow cut it.
Laying myself at the tower entrance screaming “LILITH TAKE ME NOW” seems more likely.

To experience the highs one must know the lows. How ironic.
I can’t even say i’d rather pick corn - coz - need to do tower to go pick it lol

Actually, the faked one cost 1,000,000 Pax and never was discounted. Funny thing, I know a fair few people who bought the fake certificate, once they learned who exactly the guy was that rogue coder was working with, that they wished they hadn’t done it. That’s some storytelling there :slight_smile: The real certificate still required stepping into a scenario.

I understand what you’re getting at. It is long and the setting is somewhat repetitive and a lot of missions all in the same place. (However, see the Nursery mission chain and the integrated Last Train to Cairo for something just as long and just as mandatory—both are just a lot more varied.)

When playing through the SWL closed beta, I was disappointed to discover that Issue 6 was made mandatory for completing what was already a tedious and uninspiring main storyline in Egypt. The same disappointment persisted for Issue 7, except it proved tolerable by virtue of Transylvania not being hampered by an excess of missions or a drearily monotonous visual theme that plagues Egypt. Thank the stars Issue 14 remained optional.

I guess I must be the only person who enjoyed the full tower experience (and I’ve done it twice!). Although the layout of every floor is the same, there are different mechanics on how to get through them, different stories on each floor and a decent variation between puzzle floors, story-driven floors and ‘kill everything’ floors. The length of time it took also helped build up the suspense so that when I finally got to the penthouse floor, I felt a lot of anticipation that I was in for something big.

Don’t get me wrong - I can see why many people would find it a bit of a grind, I just wanted to post in defense of the tower. Maybe making one floor of each company optional would be a good compromise? It would instantly reduce the tower’s mandatory length by a third, and you could get a keycard on the first floor of each company that unlocked the other floors of that company, so you have the option to explore the second, or go straight to the third and get the next company’s keycard.

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Given paying not to play is the core of SWL monetization anyways (that’s what cache distillates essentially are), Funcom really should think about showing some business sense and offering “skip content” packages for those who really want them.

“Skip the tower” would probably be a good seller with people not obsessing about lore/achievements, but getting amore interesting play experience than all those floors…

I think they should have made it 3 floors to get the boardroom keycard (I forget which 4 companies have 3 real floors, but one of those, maybe at random) and then have the other 7 companies be optional main missions available in the tower at any point after you’ve gained access to it.

That way the content’s obviously there if you want it, and you still need to do them all to get the Tokyo completionist achievements, but it’s a little less of the “each boss has a keycard to the next minimum-security area” nonsense.

Only if developer’s current priority is to make the game “fun” which apparently is not right now.
(Is the grinding in SWL more “fun” than in TSW?)

Now if you are a producer, a list of pro/con of any action shall be put down before take such action

Keep Orochi Tower As Is
Pro:
1, Make people will spend more time to get wing. → beautiful player play time data for investors
2, Make people have another area to grind main missions → beautiful player play time data for investors
3, Less work more “content” in game. → Resource friendly \o/

Con:
1, Tedious, mandatory missions make player feel less fun if they have more than 1 characters. → there may be complains, but people still do that, it’s not like the tower is reducing population, people will quit, whales stop throwing money, nothing really HURTS.

The same reason, issue 6, issue 7 are mandatory now. It comes from the same philosophy.

Now it’s obvious they will not change anything even when people march towards the Street.

Issues 6 and 7 are proper chains with varied missions, NPC interaction and cutscenes.

The tower climb in its current form is just one long, 8-mission dungeon crawl sandwiched between the assault and the copious amounts of exposition once you finally get to the boardroom and penthouse.

I disagree.

First off, I enjoyed the tower. Yes it was a crawl but it’s not like you had to do all 24 floors (of 100 in the actual tower) at one go. You can take breaks. And considering that people run the same dungeon or raid hundreds of times, I’m not seeing how monotony is an issue.

Secondly: If you think distillates are the same as content, you’re mistaken.
Let’s consider what “skip content” packages would require.

  1. Access to the Agartha portals.
  2. Level boost. Otherwise you would have to grind the zone anyway just to level up.
  3. Item boost. Level 40 going into Besiged farmland is all fine and good but if you’ve got nothing but Head, neck, and belt greens, you’re in trouble. So you need all the items boosted too. Likely a full set of lvl1 blues, QL2.
  4. Your story flags are gonna need to be figured out. You’ll FOREVER lose access to the story missions. And some story missions are required to unlock non-story missions so you’ll need that fixed too.

Then there’s the dreaming interludes. What about them? Would you just skip to that? I’d assume so but it’s just so jarring. The cutscenes would have to be remade to suddenly trigger wherever you were when you activated the pack.

It’s an absolute mess and would be more “Pay to Win” than getting distillates, which you get by doing dungeons/PVP/Scenarios/Raids (you know, the repeat content) and not the actual missions.

I have no issues with the tower. It worked well and while it can be frustrating, it’s no different than going through a whole zone. And hoenstly, if you want to skip content, why do you even play? This is a game about the story, not about endgame. Endgame is pretty weak, all things considered. But the journey to endgame? That’s where this game shines.

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So… how does someone not enjoying the slog of those floors get to the penthouse when they actually have time to play? For the story-focused non-MMO players the relaunch was supposed to bring in, “you can just not continue on with the story” is the royal flush of non-arguments.

Would you care to explain why you’re putting words in my mouth there? I said neither one nor the other.

Whether you can accept it or not, fact is that SWL’s original monetization was almost exclusively about taking shortcuts to endgame (distillates, AP/SP boosts, catalysts, infusers). As such, “skip content” packages would merely be a logical addition to that. (And no, it would not be more “pay to win” than anything else as long as the price is balanced against the rest of the P2W options. Not that any of them are technically P2W, given there’s no meaningful PvP. It’s all pay to progress.)

Oh, and before you get confused about what I’m actually saying again: you’re right the endgame in SWL is rather lackluster and the story before that is the game’s strong point. Unfortunately, that’s a totally different topic than “would skip content packages fit the overall business model”.

One legitimate point you have is that skip content packages would probably be quite a mess to implement. It would’ve been nice if you could have kept from trying to make that point by way of misrepresenting what I said.

Man, in TSW the tower was so much more difficult. I disagree with ya. I like the tower. I miss aegis. I hope they bring Aegis back. I hope they add more floors to the tower. Good luck.

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I never much liked Aegis. In the non-group encounter areas I don’t think it added anything. It was always easy. Sure, you had to switch the color depending on mob, but it was mindless once you were 10.4. The shield went away so quickly.

I’ve completed the tower three times so far. It’s a lot of levels but each group is a main mission and side mission, so if you think about it as just doing your dailies, it’s not that bad.

The original version was disappointing because the idea was that it would be repeatable content with randomness involved so you could keep doing the tower forever and always have more to do. But then it was just a random floor that you could bypass with the keycard. Once it was done once and all achievements done, there wasn’t a reason to go back. The new design doesn’t fix that.

I am opposed to removing the tower though because my name’s in it :smile:

I’m a little sorry the OP feels that the Tower is boring and repetitive. The floorplan is basically the same floor-to-floor but the challenges and traps are unique enough. I was entertained by seeing officeworkers dead in their chairs while coworkers kept mindlessly at their work, the memos, the voiceover announcements, and the occasional sugarcoating spin from the executive suite. The humor set against the horror of experiments gone awry was totally worth the grind.

Because it was a long crawl that took me a week, because I can’t play the game every day, by the time I reached the penthouse I felt as though I’d worked my way to an ultimate supernatural confrontation (which was unexpectedly easy to finish).

I’ve played the game all the way through South Africa on two different characters, which I certainly didn’t have the will to do on TSW because I hated the aegis system too much to persist through Tokyo or even start the Tower.

Of course, I’m glad the Orochi Tower is in the rearview mirror on my two characters. It doesn’t invite me to repeat it a third time. I return to all of the zones occasionally for the atmosphere, but I don’t have any desire to revisit the Tower.

The linear nature of SWL does seem to me to work against its long-term success. If players MUST do the Tower to reach South Africa it could be a showstopper.

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I was never crazy about the tower. However there are a lot of hidden story/lore Easter eggs dotted around in there if that’s your thing. It was a few hours of content, I play this game for the long haul so a few hours is really nothing to me personally but I can see it being a bit more of an issue for a player that plays very casually or doesn’t plan on doing anything beyond the story. But as others have stated where do you draw the line. There’s lots of places people would perhaps like to “skip” but the issues surrounding that is well laid out buy @Samera and really not worth there time for the few people that absolutely cannot bear to spend the few hours needed to get through it.

As for AEGIS I loved AEGIS, the concept was actually very good and could have been much better implemented. there were 2 primary issues;

1.) It put pauses in your combat (switching controllers) anyone here like overheating with elemental? Yeah didn’t think so. Imagine not being able to prevent that.

2.) It was exclusive to one area and obtainable buy a very bottle necked amount of content. Most people either couldn’t get in the groups that were able to easily grind it or simply wern’t endgame focused enough to want to care about it.

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