How do you feel about these changes, personally? As our official KF Marathon ambassador the people need to know.
This is going to be a wall of text for a pretty simple question. I tend to over explain because I feel like I'm one of three people actually playing this game who also has experience with other extraction shooters. Sorry if this is a bit much.
tl;dr: The free kits are both good and bad for the game, I think they make the PvP feel pointless and the loot less exciting.
One of the worst parts of a game like Tarkov is how much time you spend outside the match. You can easily waste 30 minute sorganizaing your stash, getting a load out, or waiting on a team mate to finish up what ever they are doing. In games like Tarkov or Marathon, you can die in 60 seconds into a raid and then spend another 30 minutes getting back into another. Imagine if an arena shooter had a 30 minute respawn timer, imagine if that same arena shooter had cheaters every match. It's a terrible feeling.
Most of t he time you're running kits you could easily buy from the vendor and so you can always replace them when you lose them, but losing them still feels bad anyway. There's some psychological aspect to it. Even when the gear is disposable, dying still sucks. So people start avoiding PvP altogether, or they just stop playing.
That issue exists in Tarkov too, but Marathon takes it a step further because avoiding PvP is basically impossible. In Tarkov, you can slip away from spawn, hide in a bush, loot quietly , or focus on PvE while the early fighting dies down. The first 5 to 10 minutes are usually the most dangerous. Marathon's map design, movement speed, and sound traps will not allow for this kind of playstyle.
The free kits solve part of the problem. They reduce downtime and eliminate a lot of the gear fear, which sounds like a good thing. I was thinking about how the game might work better if you had a baseline loadout that you could could gradually improve through unlocks. If you die, you're just back to your baseline. This is basically what's already happening anyway, it's just reframed differently.
The real issue is how Marathon Handles loot and progression.
In Tarkov, there are hotspot POIs where high value loot will spawn. Confident/Experienced players will gravitate toward these areas, which indirectly leaves other parts of the map safe for newer players. As a bonus, if enough time passes and if your a bit sneaky you can scavenge the remains of the players who lost the gun fight. I digress, the point is there is always loot on the map that is'nt locked behind doors, bosses, or events.
Marathon does not work like that.
In Marathon, most meaningful loot comes from PvP, locked rooms, or in-game events.
When everyone spawns with the exact same an infinitely replaceable free kit, PvP stops feeling rewarding. It starts feeling more like a chore or a grief.
Imagine spending five minutes waiting for your squad to ready up, sitting in queue for another three minutes, and then running into another team 60 seconds into the raid.
If you win, your only reward is getting to continue the match. There's very little to gain from killing those players. But if you lose, it's straight back to the stash and another 8 minute wait. It becomes a high stakes fight with no reward.
Also: What the fuck is the point of the rook now? I spent 150 hours grinding this guy up so I could have a runner with an infinite green kit. The catch is this runner had to 1v3 other teams or make shakey alliances with other rook players.
If you can just load in with gear better than what the rook has and also have a team... whats the point?
Anyways....
While this was true in the previous free kit mode, there was some still extraction shooter charm to it. Being completely broke and ungeared means almost everything had value. The worst weapons suddenly feel great, finding them feels rewarding. Part of what makes extraction shooters fun is improvising, using the shit you find in a raid, and slowly building yourself back up. Ideally you leave the raid with a kit you can bring into the next one. Every team you encounter becomes a loot pinata, they will have something you are looking for.
While the gear in these new kits isn't anything to write home about, they closely match what I was aquiring over the course of a raid and leaving with. This small joy has been totally robbed from me. I now spawn with what I had previously worked hard for.
Any ways, The rest of the loot on map is heavily conditional. Some rewards require keys or consumables you can't even bring into the raid with the free kits, so these are no longer an option, while others are tied to in raid events.
The event rewards usually don't feel great either. There often isn't enough loot for the whole squad, so it turns into awkward horse trading over who gets what. Most of the time, the rewards are just a weapon and maybe a few progression items for vendor unlocks.
And some of those unlock requirements are absurd right now. You don't need one or two rare items, you need seven or more. So finding a single rare crafting item at the end of a difficult event doesnt exactly feel exciting. There is gear in the game that can multiple the amount of rare loot you extract with, but you are unlikely to find it in a run like this.
What made raids exciting before was the combination of PvP, the loot reward of having killed players, and the gear fear itself. Ideally you would load into a map, wipe other squads, take their shit, hit the locked rooms for even more stuff, and then maybe do the in raid events as a bonus.
A lot of the time you had to convince people to do the events because compared to PvP they just felt secondary.
A problem with these free kits is that were late wipe now and the low tier gear cant compete with the teams I'm consistently matching into. I'm stuck in this weird spot where the free kit mode is more fun to play, but the gear I extract with is pointless because I cant use it in future runs.
I could return to regular matches, but they are just a bit too high stakes for me at this juncture. More high stakes than anything I've ever done in Tarkov. I don't want to sweat my balls off
for a chance at a piece of gear that would only contribute towards my progression. I'm missing out on the entire loop of the game thanks to these kits, but the do have me coming back to the game i suppose. The alternative is I just stop playing.