Was looking forward to the announcement for the first batch of character additions, but overall very disappointed. It's feeling more and more like a F2P game riddled with grind for a paltry selection of unlockables to push you towards the real money purchase offerings.
Issues with this new Character Unlock system:
- To start earning progress you have to buy the Token for each character
- Thankfully it uses Scrap instead of Iron, but they said the price might not be that low (100) for future characters
- You can't progress through the Token requirements for multiple characters at the same time
- This not only slows it down times the amount of characters, but leaves gaps between equips of wasted progress
- There is no stat backtracking for the requirements
- Things you did before don't matter
- There are still arbitrary restrictions on which modes apply for challenge completion
- Just like Daily Challenges and Medals nothing is earned in Story, Private Versus or Player Created Escape
- Some of the requirements (ie: As Swarm) also means you can't do it the VS Bot mode
- Likewise there are certain scenarios that cause Challenges completed in a match to not count (ie: Quitting instead of dying and quitting)
- Not all Characters can be used in all modes
- The trend was expected to continue for Swarm characters not being usable in Horde and Escape, so that's okay
- None of the previous arbitrary limitations were fixed, and they added more with COG characters that can't be used in all modes
- Some of the requirements for Characters require you to play specific modes, some of which are modes the unlockable character can't even be used in
- Making you play a Mode you might not want for a reward you can't even use in said mode is pretty out there
- Server Issues persist on a regular basis, most notable affecting progression where nothing is counted
- When progress is not being counted there's no way to know until the Stat screen, including for modes like Horde where it's not unusual to spend 2~3 hours in 1 match
- In the dozen times this has happened this launch they've only partially managed to occasionally backtrack those lost stats to grant them again
- Issues even arose with purchases of the Tokens themselves where it would lock again but take your Scrap
- Somewhat related was the purchase with Iron being unaffected by the fact that you might already have the character (Gilded RAAM)
- More subjective, but none of the Challenges are actually challenging they're just long and grindy
- They don't require any special action that requires skill or creativity, it's all just mindless grind meant to take a lot of time so you give up and opt to buy the character straight up with Iron
- More speculative, but if future Operation Tour of Duty Medal challenge requirements (or just Daily Challenge requirements) ever require you to play any of those locked characters it'll increase the amount of grind per reward
- If they opt to not use any of these Characters in the challenges then it'll always be the same small batch of characters on rotation, which is very doubtful
On top of all of this is them breaking their promise of all characters being earnable for free, since the new batch of Terminator Characters can only be purchased and aren't included in any previous bundles/game editions. At this point we have 4 different Terminator characters but only 1 returning character from Gears 1~3/Judgment (Marcus, and not even with his Classic look) and still have close to a dozen characters from the Gears 5 campaign missing (not to mention all the ones that were in Gears 4, some of which they ported over directly for specific promotions).
