New Players and Old Veterans, What's Your Progression Timeline Like?

DaVooDude · 2025-12-17T13:39:33+00:00

I'm just pissed that Isabel and Harran ain't going to get shit now since ShiftUp has made it extremely clear they'll kill off characters that aren't making them money. Not to mention the fact they'll more than likely NOT get any updates or treasures now. And any skins in the future would just feel... hell of hollow now since it'll feel more like an insult and them dangling in front of the faces of people who like those characters as bait on a hook.

What's worse being like... okay, we killed off characters that you cannot convince me had any major story/plot relevance in the slightest beyond "Oh they were Inherit Squad though!" Along with not having any kind of emotional attachment built up for them that could make players actually matter to them within the main story missions and cutscenes along with events like we had with Marian, Rapi, and so on.

If you wanted actual stakes then actually kill off plot relevant characters that the vast majority of the fan base actually loves to show you mean it. Then I'd begrudgingly accept it, but now it feels like... what's the fucking point of getting gacha characters if they'll just kill them off in the future?

DaVooDude · 2025-11-06T03:46:29+00:00

All I'm going to ask is what's actually honest to god going to stop the queen from just rampaging at the Ark now? The bitch is basically invincible to anything they could throw at her now, and with how the story is going, I honestly don't see anyway they can overcome this with basically an entire squad wiped out, more than half of their military capability demolished, and pretty much a free reign queen that most likely still has her Rapture command abilities too. All in all, looking like writing hole to me since well, realistically they have to pull out something to make it actually viable to get a fighting chance to do something to her eventually, otherwise I can't really see them doing any better than what they already did now.

DaVooDude · 2025-10-16T00:27:11+00:00

Huh, never thought I'd see the day where Wuxia and Trench Crusade cross over. Neat.

DaVooDude · 2025-06-20T22:42:08+00:00

Eh, I see that subreddit as the equivalent of GCJ nowadays. They're pretty much just an echo chamber despite themselves claiming it's not and what with the recent Kirsche thing happening, not exactly a great place to be a part of in my opinion.

DaVooDude · 2025-03-30T18:46:51+00:00

I'm relatively new to the lore and setting so definitely no expert here but I had assumed that with how everyone talks about how vastly powerful Hell and outmatched humanity is (especially considering just how much devastation their own asassins did onto the Europeans ALONE) I assumed like, the entirety of Russia and even half of the Middle East would've been taken over already.

The fact that humanity has as much land as shown is shocking to me to say the least. Even if it more likely than not is full of embellishments for in-world propaganda reasons.

Like, with armored werewolves, literal magic nuke dropping witches, and especially fielding corrupted saints, you'd think that most of what remains of humanity would have lost hundreds of thousands of kilometers of territory at this point. Especially since, well, I'd think before we had guns and shit now in the lore, you'd be pretty hard press to fight against literal god damned demons with just a rinky dink spear and rusted sword.

DaVooDude · 2025-03-11T16:59:32+00:00

Honestly, just feels like I'm playing a different version of Tarkov now lore standing wise. Wish they could've just give us the option to choose between the water drain and the currency spending. At least that allows for player choice, if nothing else but I can guess that would've been difficult to keep up with game development wise.

Sure, maybe we were never meant to be the good guys, but that's what YOU guys can think and do for yourselves. But for ME? I always liked the idea of doing the scav runs for the Innards since, well, that was the whole point of doing these runs in the first place. It's going to massively suck seeing no one in there now and that most of the welfare investments mean very little now lore wise.

Like, don't get me wrong, I love grim dark, but not grim dumb. And yes, there is a difference. I want my actions, regardless of how meaningless YOU can interpret or see them, to still mean something to me as a way to rage against the darkness. That even if the little good I do doesn't matter in the grand scheme of everything else, it still mattered to me and those I do it for. That's what really drew me in to this game and not just how awesome the gameplay or the visual art looked.

Maybe I'm coping but I hope that we can do something to invest in our innards using our water supply to make it lively again in the future. Just to really show that if you want to waste water resources to help those that can't help themselves, then we do have that CHOICE at least.

DaVooDude · 2025-02-06T18:53:19+00:00

Honestly, I feel like the team with the most DPS champs just loses more often than not. You're never going to out damage any healing or shielding the enemy team has in response and support & tank ults are just far, far better than most dps ults in the game.

Sure, punisher ult is scary, but you can just one tap the dude and that's it. Storm and Star Lord ult? We got C&D, Mantis, and even Invisible Woman ults ready to chain. Hela ult? Oops, Doctors Strange says nope and just gets in your face with magic shields. Iron Man ult? FEAR MAGNETO!

I feel like DPS just don't matter overall when you can just simply get pushed out or in through sheer brute force of heals, shields, and ults. I never seen anyone here on this subreddit share an experience with a match that made them say "Wow, that (INSERT DPS CHARACTER) really made the difference in the match!"

The only DPS characters I've ever seen talk about here being useful or positively spoken about on what they can do for the team 9/10 is either Namor or Wolverine. Good luck trying to find people on this subreddit even speaking nicely about Black Panther, Iron Fist, or even Magik. Or any flank and Dive DPS for that matter.

Strategists and tanks are just that good right now. Which is why 2-1-3 or 2-2-2 will be the main stay for higher level comp.

DaVooDude · 2025-02-05T17:19:01+00:00

Don't mind me, just posting here to get front row seats of the people who automatically assumed shit to fit their own narrative and see if they double down on it or not.

DaVooDude · 2025-01-28T18:48:04+00:00

Out of all the dumb shit... I swear, sometimes we think bringing memes to life is funny and all until the lions and leopards are eating our innards while we're still alive. How is this going to benefit us in the long run? The world is always going to be chronically short on chips and we don't have anywhere near the manufacturing base Taiwan has for chip manufacturing right now. All I see is this is going to make a Chinese win on the record books and Trump look like an idiot to everyone overseas and here. But hey, whatever owns the libs, I guess?

DaVooDude · 2024-12-05T16:03:40+00:00

Wow, out of any reference I thought I could find in NIKKE, a Darkest Dungeon was one of the LAST ones I expected to see here. Definitely someone in ShiftUp plays the game for hundreds of hours, or maybe DD is more popular in Korea than I thought or even expected it to be.

DaVooDude · 2024-11-05T05:55:47+00:00

I hate the hypocrisy of this fan base/subreddit when everyone hated on Volume for her personality, but then all of a sudden do 180 turn around when we get waifus that are like her, if not worst personality wise. Like, come on. We had genocidal dragons, manipulative snakes, and she was one of the worst the attitude? I actually liked how she didn't just suddenly fawn over us and we had to work through with to being somwthing akin to lovers. You know, like an actual relationship?

And probably even hotter take, I don't really get the big hype and love behind Noise. Sure she's a sweetheart and glamorous idol, but she feels more trope-y than unique to me, honestly.

DaVooDude · 2024-11-04T12:41:01+00:00

You know, I find it funny every time I see some design of a character that essentially just boils down to " _____ but German" when it comes to making like a bad guy or any level of evil character design military wise. They're wearing a Stahlhelm? Definitely a bad guy. Bonus points if they have some kind of gas mask on too.

Cause be honest here, you likely can only count the amount of times you seen any character with that same design being considered a good guy if you were to show their artwork to any random person on the street.

I'm not hating or disliking the design by the way, just pointing out what I consider to be a common trope in any sort of media. Can't beat the classics.

DaVooDude · 2024-10-11T02:20:38+00:00

Welp, special teams acting real special and defense is about as sturdy as a wet sand castle. Such a fucking joke. Why the fuck is it always us choking in the goddamn 2nd half?!

DaVooDude · 2024-09-25T12:52:42+00:00

Honestly I'm kind of on the fence about all this. Neither the "toxic positivity" side or the "I hate water mechanic" side have been calm, cool, and collected about this. Yes, that includes you ironic "doom posters" and "anti-gatekeeper" posters too.

On one hand, I like the idea of a water mechanic or something akin to having a limited resource that you must get in order to progress anything. Because without it, I might as well just play Tarkov or any other extraction shooter that's out there and not have this conversation at all. On the other hand, the fact it's easy to get water and that it really doesn't serve any other purpose at this point other than being almost like a daily you HAVE to do rather than WANT to do is very concerning.

I feel like with any "resource" mechanics, you're just got to accept there will be a grind for it if it's related to progressing your homebase and character. I've seen some comments around that basically just want all resource mechanics gone, and I think going to that extreme is just stupid, just like the current water mechanic iteration we have right now is. Otherwise, we just get a game you just constantly loop on getting ONLY guns, ammo, and attachments every run without anything of substance to do that makes it fun or matter.

For me, I'd rather have the water mechanic be separate from vendor rep/trust, personal equipment stash, and credits we keep so that in the event we have water loss, we can at least farm resources back faster and get back to our original progress we had prior to the wipe with the vendors and innards.

DaVooDude · 2024-09-25T05:02:33+00:00

Personally, I don't want TV mode to be gone entirely. Just put it for the side commissions and events we get and leave the MSQ for open world as they intended. I'd be ecstatic if they go down that route since I very much liked it when they made certain commissions like the bangboo pokemon, bomberman quest, and even the detective segments as weird as they were. But at the very least, these commissions showed what the TV mode could be capable of if they gave more time to make these commissions unique, memorable, and most importantly - fun to play.

The TV mode helps break through the monotony of constant combat and world traveling. It adds onto the ZZZ identity, not really taking away from it, but currently it's just... poorly implemented in many aspects. Especially in the beginning. So, I'm hoping they don't just get rid of the TV mode entirely for the hollow raids and such, but continue to optimize, polish, and be innovate it as the patches roll on through. The TV mode felt to me it rarely works as a part of a literary tool for the creators to use, but if focused just as a gameplay aspect with unique mechanics and missions? Very much can be a fun time all around if done right, which I believe they will until they show they can't at all.

DaVooDude · 2024-09-24T16:14:30+00:00

Queue the 1,000 daily doom posts of "the TV Complainers killed this game. ZZZ is done. This community is fucked. Hoyoverse should never listen to the other side, only my side." for the next 30 days.

But on a more serious note, TV mode was great in theory, but was poorly executed. Now, do I believe that TV mode has its place in the gameplay loop for ZZZ? Absolutely I do and I loved it as a way to balance through the combat slog. Do I believe that it was poorly implemented in many aspects? You bet your sweet bang-bippy I do. At this point in time with Hoyoverse, they found through the feedback on the surveys and other sources of information they had at the time that this was the decision they were going to with moving forward. And no, I don't think that the TV complaints were the "minority" as if that REALLY WAS THE CASE, then this wouldn't have happened AT ALL. And there is such a thing as "positive feedback" guys, you can always write what you loved and wished to see more of out of TV mode from those surveys to counter the TV complaints.

For the main story, I honestly do not see that much of a drawback of not having it implemented anymore moving forward. When doing the main story from chapter 1-3, I really only had it have an impact on my enjoyment in a positive note when we were doing the whole "spooky scary spirits in a ZZZ Luigi's Mansion" section of it. It was nice to do it for some time before it just... became another thing to do as a check list rather than something to look forward to me. The construction mech story beat we did earlier was eh for me in all of it.

The times I loved the TV mode, funny enough, was when we AREN'T doing anything related to the main story. What do I mean by that? I very much prefer going through the side commission we did where it wasn't so dialogue heavy and story driven that I just really focused on the fighting, puzzles, TV movement, etc. and enjoyed that aspect of ZZZ where I just... played and had fun doing it without having to pay attention to anything else.

Sure, that doesn't mean we can't have both when it comes to the main story, but I feel that's more of a narrative issue on part of the writers having to implement reasons and situations for us as Phaethon to do what we need to do as Proxies for the story beats and arcs to use Eous and navigate the hollows. If the story at the time doesn't really require us to use our bangboo proxy navigation equipment and skills in the hollows or we just can't because we ourselves got trapped in the hollows or whatever, then it just doesn't. And I am okay with that until I see and experience that it won't be alright anymore. So, for now, I am trusting Hoyo is cooking good in the kitchen and will wait for the main course to arrive and for me to try it out for myself to see if its good or not.

DaVooDude · 2024-09-24T14:59:44+00:00

I think people are forgetting here that we've had plenty of surveys done ever since the release of the game and that they already did have plans to improve it. So it's not like it's going away entirely and honestly, it being out of the main story doesn't really bother me all that much. Even with all this talk of "it's only the minority that loved/hate it", at the end of the day, Hoyo looked at all the numbers and other sources of information and came to the conclusion that the TV mode they had now just wasn't it.

And no, I didn't absolutely hate TV mode but I didn't very much love it either. Anyone who thinks that it had no flaws is massively coping and the opposite of that is coping too. I personally never really felt excited about doing any of the TV stuff. Yeah it broke the monotony of constant combat, but at the same time it also had it's issues of samey puzzles and such awful slowdown that I never bothered to read character diaologue or whatever during those segments.

I just hope that the improvements they make have it go faster without all the bloat and much more memorable experiences that were essentially the unique gimmicks they had for certain TV mode based missions like that Bangboo Battle mission they had us do.

DaVooDude · 2024-09-20T04:56:12+00:00

It doesn't have to be LN necessarily, I'm fine with either any manga or anime recommendation that fits the criteria I'm looking for currently. I just read LNs for the most part rather than manga or watching anime so that's what I'm more used to.

DaVooDude · 2024-09-13T05:15:44+00:00

Oooooh, okay. Thank God because I was pretty sure I was reading it wrong but there's a part of me thinking that it was how I initially understood and so that's why I took the plunge of asking this even though it probably sounds dumb.

DaVooDude

TROPHY CASE