Escape needs refinement

Gears 5
#1

Though I pretty much enjoy this gamemode, I’d like to share my feedback on the map builder and some escape details.

There are only three bosses in map builder
Matriarch, Carrier and Snatcher should also be in the map builder. And why aren’t there any drones with lancers?

No modifiable mutators in map builder
I think that standard mutators have become boring for many people and that’s why custom hives aren’t popular/interesting

No rewards for custom hives
Almost no one plays others’ custom hives because they receive nothing for completing it. How about a system that calculates xp rewards that depend on the amount of placed enemies, ammo, weapons and difficulty the hive was completed on?

Thumbnails are too dark
There’s a big difference between TC hives’ thumbnail, which are bright and colorful, and community hives’ thumbnails, which always lack light

Lightning options don’t work properly (or do they?)
That’s probably common knowledge, but you can change the lightning of a tile. However, “Dim” and “Off” options look almost the same. First I thought “Dim” would make the hive look much, much darker, though turns out I was wrong.

Weapon lockers are not placed properly
Sometimes after putting a locker in a saferoom it appears on a table which makes it unreachable so you can’t restore ammo.

In some cases reinforcement rooms are getting locked by a door, even though you didn’t place it in a builder
Imagine you’ve just finished building a hive and you expect enemies to appear from a reinforcement room during a play-through , but somehow they’re locked behind a door. That makes you sad so you give up building hives and get yourself a drink.

Chapter budget is too small
TC creates hives with long hallways and large areas which we are not able to build in a map editor. Why put such a restriction of “1000/chapter”? It’s just not enough sometimes. Let it be 1500, for example.

Enemies can’t slide down
They just stand in front of a slide and wait for you to seal the hive

Marcus is useless in Escape
As well as in Horde

You can’t host a game to get some help with the hive you haven’t played through
Which means you should do all hives solo or with the help of friends

Stump doesn’t stop shooting
It just shoots endlessly and all you can do is distract him for a few seconds with a flash/shock grenade

You aren’t able to place enemies on a helicopter pad
TC is, though

Well, that’s all the feedback I’ve come up at the moment. I’m sure that Escape is not the top priority for developers right now but I think some bugs I mentioned above should be fixed some day.

2 Likes
#2

Fairly certain this was done on purpose to prevent easy XP and skill farming by players just making hives consisting of a starting and ending tile that did not involve fighting any enemies.

This is something I’ve been wondering as well. TC has all these special/unique modifiers available to them and have gotten a bit more creative with them in Operation 2, but players are still stuck with the same old ones that are repeated throughout all hives. If they were even just adjusted based on what is in the hive, it’d be better, but full customization on what you want the hive experience to be like with what modifiers would be even better. May be added as a functionality later, seeing as currently it says the Escape map builder is still in “ beta”.

This is annoying. I’ve run into this as well, but a way to get rid of it was to manually change the door by using the “Portals” section and not walling the nest/spawner off. I’ve also had doors randomly disappear or not appear in places where I had put one.

I’ve seen Grenadiers come down a slide after me so I’m not entirely sure what you’re on about here.

This was done on purpose, because according to the lead multiplayer designer(nodezero/Ryan Cleven by name), the overheat cycle on Stumps in Horde/Escape would apparently have made it too easy to kill them. I asked him myself and that was the answer. So they just fire nearly endlessly with only short breaks in their firing. I’d suggest throwing Incendiary grenades at them as well. I feel like people underestimate their effectiveness against an enemy that is not moving around at all, and what they can do on a direct hit. They also go quite well with Lizzie’s Stim skill.

3 Likes
#3
  1. Three will be no rewards for custom hives, it would be too abused to get medals, totems, challenges. For me there should be at least experience for your level.
  2. I can partially agree with bosses, but snatcher and carrier are to big for escape. They will probably glitch out very easily on most of tiles. TC should let Matriarch be avaible as boss. But there is still a chance that she will glitch out.
  3. Choosing which mutator can be used probably will be added in future.
  4. Budget is made to does not let player to put on one chapter too much stuff, which would bug out, crash game, be reason of massive drop of performance. I can respect that. TC makes their hives bigger cause they are able to compile it into game and prevent most of those nad things that happens when you run out of RAM memory.
  5. Personally I didn’t met that reinforcement room was closed by a door by default, maybe the new ones?
  6. As for enemies on helipad, TC has greater abilities while building hives, just to prevent game glitching out, memory overload, drop of performance. For me its good, because I dont meet any critical errors while doing hives, and TC secures themselves from accusations of another bugged thing they’ve added to game.
  7. Don’t underestimate the power of Marcus and Claw. Its super effective player couple of times on master on clock and he can down elite drone rfster than Mac.

For me TC should revert the AI changes to get melee characters not unbelivable risky to use than they are now.

2 Likes
#4

Only when his ultimate is active, right? Mac has a bleeding card so he doesn’t have to wait until his ultimate is ready, which makes him more effective in most cases

#5

I did not check down times but i think its quite similar to mac boltok with bleeding. I will check that later.

#6

Most people don’t know this, even seasoned escapers, but stumps are basically helpless up close. Lahni/emile can just rush them, if they get close- just melee to death. Viable option for other characters as well.

Just clear other enemies then rush stump to melee range, very easy, agree with the rest!

1 Like
#7

The Thing is that marcus has last ditch, meaning 85% more damage, so potentially as fast or faster even without ult. Just need gooood aim. :smiley:

#8

They mentioned on last stream that they will full-scale review the ai since people said it was off.

#9

Thanks, i haven’t got much time to watch dev streams as it starts very late night ( 1 am ) and I get up very early in the morning.

#10

Seeing as you’re mentioning this, I think it would also be helpful to point out that if line of sight is broken for long enough with no target for the Stump to shoot at, it will usually relocate to get an angle, which is a decent window of opportunity to shoot at it or move closer(I don’t have much faith in anyone’s chances of attempting to close in through a withering hail of Tri-Shot fire). Flashbang stun also appears to cause them to move around, though I do not know why.

#11

The thing I hate about escape is no one is actually playing escape. There’s plenty of players “doing” escape but they arent playing. They’re just hauling ■■■ to the exit hoping they dont get downed on the way. I know it’s faster but it’s not fun. It’s like the arcade room for horde. It’s the safest room in the game but it’s very boring. TC needs to put in literally obstacles to make speed running less viable.

#12

Well any character with a taunt, flash/shock/ or mac with shield, etc can distract for the run in. Running in with the fire-stream on you almost never works, though, if you can time the over-heat, there is a slight window. I have managed it a few times, but it takes precise timing.

If in venom as lahni she can literally just rush in with the stream on her.

Good thing about emile is he can rush the stump outside venom, even if the room has enemies, and drop the shield while bleeding it!

#13

Depends on the map and difficulty. Running only works up to a point. Even the Surge since the last change only really works up to about Insane difficulty (and even now with the changed AI behaviours it’s much harder) - higher difficulties mean that the number of times you fail will increase so much that the time spent is not worth it.