Speaking from recent experience 3 games I was really looking forward to; Destiny, Defiance and Titanfall. Titanfall was probably the easiest to get everything unlocked much to my dismay.. Probably a week to 2 weeks. Destiny and Defiance... I ran both with the same group of friends and after about a month playing each our character progression had ended. All 3 games we lost interest in pretty soon after our progression ended. Not to say other factors didn't come into play. All said its been disappointing to see how character progression in many games is devolving. Let's not forget there's no need to roll alts in EC when playing for your favorite faction/subfaction because you can do it all on one character. That's a big minus as far as replayability. What's left is character progression. If character/class progression has a meager 50 hour lifespan those of us who enjoy playing one character, one class for one faction/subfaction.... This will not go over well with long time MMO players. MMO players tend to stick with a game they love for years. Shrug it off and say it's not important. If you want to keep those players in the community it's sure as heck does matter. If you think the shooter crowd is going to hang with our game for the long haul, see how that train of thought works out when the next COD or Battlefield rolls out after EC goes live.
It'll be interesting to see what the player driven campaigns will bring to the table. I personally view unlocking things as playing the game to play the game. e.g. the only reason I'd play super smash bros single player is to unlock the other characters. 50 hours per class isn't intolerable for me. Since the game will be on Steam, there will also be Steam achievements.
My expectations for this game are so unbelievably low that I'll be surprised if they disappoint me. I expect nothing less than Planetside 2 tier grinding.
One Class will take around 50 hours to unlock its Skill Tree. But you then have at least 3 other Classes to fully unlock. So that's at around 200 hours for one Character. But then you have 3 other Factions to alt on. So that's around 800 hours to unlock all the skills in the game. Here's the video of the devs talking more in depth on the Skill Progression: (starts around 2:06) There is some talk by the devs here about unlocking "flavor" Skills in Sub-Faction Skill Trees, so maybe that will make it take longer to unlock everything on 1 Character. I'm interested to know if we are actually going to be "locked into" our choice of Sub-Faction? Or will we be able to switch between them while we play? I know lore wise it would make zero sense to be able to switch Sub-Factions.... But I personally agree with you, that around 200 hours is way to short a time to be able to unlock everything on one character. I personally think it should be somewhere around 1000 hours per character instead, meaning 200 hours per Class. So hopefully we can persuade the devs to make Skill Progression take longer.
but thats limiting as your said to 3 classes where there can be more off the bat so that would expand time. tho making it more time will lead to the grind problem that some peoplee cannot stand, yet idk why they play mmos then
I don't think it'll be too much of a grind in the sense that it's going to be mindless. If you play the game more, you're going to unlock things on the way, if you don't play then you won't unlock anything. There will probably be things that you need to specifically aim for like getting 50 headshots through a wall from 200m away or something crazy for a skin, but that'll be optional fun stuff for the more hardcore player that you don't NEED to complete. It comes down to: Do you like EC enough to play it for weeks/months/years? The grind will come naturally with playtime and playtime will come with how much you want to play the game for the game itself, not the unlocks. It's not like an MMO (WoW, GW) where you CAN'T do a dungeon or zone or something without being level 50, just jump in and play, level and get cool shit. I could be wrong on the dungeons though, maybe they will have level requirements on the PVP 'nid areas??
Well, personally i'm not gonna be playing EC for the sake of unlocking stuff but i do enjoy the sense of reward it gives you. But i think Korel got it right up there, for those mmo players that can't enjoy a game without constantly unlocking something there will still be tons of playtime given the number of characters and classes, plus the fact that more will be added post-release.
