Has DE mentioned anything else they are going to do with OpLink? Anyone else excited for it's potential?

[(NSW)JigsJosh]

Ever since the OpLink reveal (at last years TennoCon I believe) I felt like the potential for it was insane. It was also really cool to see it in action in Scarlet Spear. I really wanna see DE do more with it though. I feel like it breaks the four person squad barrier and it feels more like I'm working with everyone, which made Scarlet Spear feel more like a war. Add it to any mission and it makes the mission feel more like a war and less like just squad espionage (although espionage is also good).

I haven't watched any streams lately however, has anyone in DE said anything about doing anything new with the OpLink? I was hoping to be able to do something like in the reveal where "Fish Team" destroyed the Grineer beacon to help the squad in space.

[Voltage]

OpLink is inherently flawed as a squad on one objective waiting on another squad for a completely different objective to be completed so squad 1 can continue their mission is horrible gameplay, especially with how much DE pushes solo and public squads. If this game was centered around premade squads, I could see this having potential and be fun to optimize. However, with the type of player that DE caters towards, this will never really be a successful mechanic.

This mechanic also creates a divide as players will want to go towards the more efficient objective. This is why Scarlet Spear had an oversaturated amount of space squads in relays and frequent issues with kill codes due to excess space squads compared to ground (not talking about bugged kill codes here). This is because Space was objectively easier, required less efficient gear, and was better for points per time spent compared to ground. If you have a difference in effort with similar rewards, nobody will care to do more work for the same stuff as the other team.

[_Anise_]

I am not sure how to be excited about a gear wheel item that is throw on the ground in a fire and forget kind of way, though that maybe just from experience in scarlet spear.

maybe if it did something like call in airstrikes, call in healing/shield supportor anything useful maybe be excited about it

[Syln]

At this rate : an orbiter decoration ;3

[Marine027]

vor 1 Minute schrieb Syln:

At this rate : an orbiter decoration ;3

Sad but true.

[Marine027]

vor 14 Stunden schrieb (NSW)JigsJosh:

I felt like the potential for it was insane.

And this is the main problem for every game today, you expect potential, not a finished product. I hate to be that guy but if people really think after several years of DE repeating the same mistakes and ignoring or forgetting such things yet still hope for more, you life in an dream bubble.

They introduce things, halfbaked release it, then surprised it not works as they hoped and drop it and never mention it again or taking years to be reworked. And no, several hotfixes after release in a few weeks not counts, because those are normal and part of there job, not a service they need to be praised for.

I mean even story wise DE admitted in an older Devstream they literally forgotten the allignement system they had in Second Dream and War Within. This is how DE works, jump from one thing to the next like some child distracted by some new shiny toy.

Don't get me wrong, i admire that they try a lot but they lack focus and never stay long on a project, this is actually worse then a big company pulling a team forceful from a game to another project.

[bad4youLT]

28 minutes ago, Voltage said:

OpLink is inherently flawed as a squad on one objective waiting on another squad for a completely different objective to be completed so squad 1 can continue their mission is horrible gameplay, especially with how much DE pushes solo and public squads. If this game was centered around premade squads, I could see this having potential and be fun to optimize. However, with the type of player that DE caters towards, this will never really be a successful mechanic.

This mechanic also creates a divide as players will want to go towards the more efficient objective. This is why Scarlet Spear had an oversaturated amount of space squads in relays and frequent issues with kill codes due to excess space squads compared to ground (not talking about bugged kill codes here). This is because Space was objectively easier, required less efficient gear, and was better for points per time spent compared to ground. If you have a difference in effort with similar rewards, nobody will care to do more work for the same stuff as the other team.

Posible solution - OpLink beeing optional extra objective that provides extra rewards or increased chance for rare rewards .

[(PSN)Darkrya]

I see the potential in it the same way you do.

Right now there hasn't been any talk of it as a future mechanic, all we know is that its used in Scarlet Spear, which they said would come back next year, so it implies they are working on it in some form.

I think Squad Link needs more time in the oven as a system, as Scarlet Spear showed the limitations it had coding wise, and gameplay wise.

And with the outbreak, and next generation consoles on them, I don't know if it's on the backburner with other Systems of its kind like, Cross-Link, or the Command intrinsic.

 

[AlphaPHENIX]

If we spitballing ideas on what to do with it, I guess:

Team A finds a bing chungus loot deposit out on the open world, and I mean BIG Chungus loot, too big to be aquired by the usual ''pick it up and finish the mission'' method. Team A puts down an oplink to a call landing craft to extract and send it to a refinement crew. Defense starts > defence ends. Less damage to objective = more loot

Team B, refinement, gets the deposit on their Railjack (Lower floor on of the Forge or ''finger'' room? Wherever it doesn't get in the way.) and can start refining it with the Omni Tool and/or Mining Laser, for more loot if they are good at the mini-game, or finish the mission and have it done automatically with average results.

Both teams get a cut once refinment is done. Team A should probably get them through inbox messages like Invasion rewards, to avoid losses.

PS: Should probably have this tied to a Railjack version of Survival, so you can do multiple deposits in one go. Like regular survival, but an oplinked squad provides the rotation rewards, in addition to maybe some of the usual rotation rewards. And hey, maybe if it's worth it enough, people will care about Railjack again.

[DrivaMain]

57 minutes ago, bad4youLT said:

Posible solution - OpLink beeing optional extra objective that provides extra rewards or increased chance for rare rewards .

I believe this is the route once they managed to connect OpLink into the main game.

Scarlet Spear was a huge mess. This shows that mandatory OpLinks as a gameplay addition failed. Players doesn’t always care about others they only care about the rewards.

[(PSN)robotwars7]

if Squad Link does make a return, it won't be in the same form as it was in Scarlet Spear. the probalem with the mandatory link was that everything depended on one team, Ground Team, and if they weren't running efficiently it would slow things down for the Murex Team. ther are other wyas it could be implemented though.

- on a normal mission, a Railjack can provide a permanent security override/alarms disabled for the rest of the mission, and the ground squad could destroy a fleet of parked fighters, making a railjack mission easier for a Space Squad.

- on Open Worlds Railjacks could provide artillery support while a ground team is doing a bounty. in return, ground teams could disable force field generators on a Galleon (the idea being that it would have a shield that needs to be disabled before you can board it, but this could be done by either crew to ensure the mission can always progress, it would just be much faster if a ground squad does it for you, and they'd get extra rewards.

- and for something special: players on Lua or in the Void/Deimos could come across intel that reveals the location of a hidden Orokin vault in Veil Proxima, and submit it for all railjack players to run that Vault mission; you could also extract and then run it yourself with your Railjack! the same would be true the other way around: Railjack crews could find Vault Co-Ordinates in the Derelicts of Veil Proxima and allow a ground team the chance to find it for themselves. of course, sending these co-ordinates gets you some extra rewards as well.

it's totally possible for a system like this to make Railjack and ground teams actively want to help each other, even if it's just for the sake of rewards. it would also mean nobody gets left out, whether you prefer the Ship, open world, or regular missions. 

[(NSW)JigsJosh]

2 hours ago, Voltage said:

OpLink is inherently flawed as a squad on one objective waiting on another squad for a completely different objective to be completed so squad 1 can continue their mission is horrible gameplay, especially with how much DE pushes solo and public squads. If this game was centered around premade squads, I could see this having potential and be fun to optimize. However, with the type of player that DE caters towards, this will never really be a successful mechanic.

The execution was a bit shoddy I'll agree. I think it really comes down to the game design. If they were more integral with it or more organized and did things such as premade squads like you said the execution would be a hundred times better.

[EmberStar]

If it was anything like what they showed at 2019 Tennocon?  It could be interesting.  As presented in Scarlet Spear?  It's completely pointless and an utter waste of dev resources.  You're not "working with" anyone to do anything.  Ground team just does the mission, over and over, without any real interaction with Space Team or even any real need for Space Teams to exist.  (At least not in terms of completing the ground objectives.)  Meanwhile Space Team was stuck waiting for the ground team codes to be randomly handed out by... some algorithm, I guess.  On such a huge delay that the team it came from could have finished, disbanded, switched o Space Team and end up with members getting their OWN CODES.  The only part where Space Team was even relevant was that they had to chase away the 100 Sentient ships or NO ONE got rewards, so that was fun.

Meanwhile Scarlet Spear itself was, in my opinion, quite poorly designed.  Aside from Oplink being broken for the first few days, there was the whole glaring issue that if you left your assigned flotilla for any reason, you probably wouldn't get rewards.  So doing anything meant being stuck in the Flotilla until the timer ran out.  If you logged in with half an hour to play at the start of the cycle?  Too bad, sucked to be you.

[Murox]

I could see them using it for the Lone Tenno Operative + Survival teams, or something.

[0_The_F00l]

DE polishing a mechanic that has potential but was flawed at launch ? What blasphemy!

There will only ever be half baked fully forgotten concepts introduced ,

cause fixing any old things is just not worth the effort ,

Better to attract more new players that quit in the first few hours cause they cant understand most of the stuff that's happening.

[Serafim_94]

There was never any potential in it. Right back at tennocon it looked horrible. Remember Scarlet spear, with RJ crews yelling their lungs out because there were no codes? That's the extent of "potential" oplink has.

[SneakyErvin]

If they rework OpLink to be a bonus and not something mandatory it would be a great addition to the game. It was horrible in SS since if there was no progress on earth the process stopped in space. Space should have been balanced around a completion time that didnt require OpLink, then the OpLink feature should have sped that process up instead of requiring it.

All that would have been needed was to add an acceptable progress rate, then each OpLink would just add a small piece of progress to that. Say a Murex hack ticked for 0.5% per second, that would require 200 seconds in order to complete it, each OpLink would add a flat 10% to the progress i.e shave off 20 seconds of hack time.

[khazlol]

oplink will be a thing when railjack is properly integrated

[HoustonDragon]

15 hours ago, (NSW)JigsJosh said:

Ever since the OpLink reveal (at last years TennoCon I believe) I felt like the potential for it was insane. It was also really cool to see it in action in Scarlet Spear. I really wanna see DE do more with it though. I feel like it breaks the four person squad barrier and it feels more like I'm working with everyone, which made Scarlet Spear feel more like a war. Add it to any mission and it makes the mission feel more like a war and less like just squad espionage (although espionage is also good).

I haven't watched any streams lately however, has anyone in DE said anything about doing anything new with the OpLink? I was hoping to be able to do something like in the reveal where "Fish Team" destroyed the Grineer beacon to help the squad in space.

I really liked the concept they had with the original Tennocon reveal, and enjoyed Scarlet Spear overall. Problem was when there was either no space or ground teams running concurrently, and everyone ended up standing around waiting to be able to proceed with their missions. THAT was seriously annoying and broke gameplay immersion.

 

There should be something that after a certain period of time, the NPCs/AI will just go ahead and take over to "run" whatever the OpLink is waiting for. The fire/forget aspect was also a little underwhelming, maybe add hacking to be able to deploy it? I would have liked to have power canisters like with Excavation to be able to recharge/repair them also, since the AoE damage would eventually overwhelm otherwise.

[JackHargreav]

Potential? What potential? Oplink was the most annoying thing by far. It did nothing but delayed the mission. It was either buggy or unusable because no one was doing the objective.

[IIDMOII]

Nope. 

[MouadSaqui]

Excited ? hell yeah... I can't wait to stack up some arcanes energize, tons of free plat 

[32768]

21 hours ago, Voltage said:

OpLink is inherently flawed as a squad on one objective waiting on another squad for a completely different objective to be completed so squad 1 can continue their mission is horrible gameplay, especially with how much DE pushes solo and public squads. If this game was centered around premade squads, I could see this having potential and be fun to optimize. However, with the type of player that DE caters towards, this will never really be a successful mechanic.

This mechanic also creates a divide as players will want to go towards the more efficient objective. This is why Scarlet Spear had an oversaturated amount of space squads in relays and frequent issues with kill codes due to excess space squads compared to ground (not talking about bugged kill codes here). This is because Space was objectively easier, required less efficient gear, and was better for points per time spent compared to ground. If you have a difference in effort with similar rewards, nobody will care to do more work for the same stuff as the other team.

This isn't a flaw of Squad Link, but how DE has implemented Scarlet Spear. I still don't understand why they made it that way and did not introduce loot sharing across teams. If teams would share reward that is awarded for completing the mission the choice of where to go wouldn't exist. But "challenging equals annoying", so there you go, you can either get more point for AFKing with Limbo, or you can play fast-paced ground mission, but you will get less points. Oh, and of course, even if you play with the same squad, you all can get different amount of points because of bugs.

It's just poor implementation, not a fault of Squad Link. But i wonder if DE understand that, or backlash like this drives DE away from implementing more Squad Link missions.

You know, they implemented something poorly and peeps don't want to play it, if peeps don't want to play it, then DE isn't going to develop anything new with it.

[32768]

18 hours ago, EmberStar said:

Meanwhile Space Team was stuck waiting for the ground team codes to be randomly handed out by... some algorithm, I guess.

IIRC, the way it worked, there was a queue of kill codes, ground teams supplied codes on the one end of the queue, railjack teams consumed codes from the other end.

It's a many-to-many relationship, there are many ground teams feeding many railjack teams. This is why you could get your own code, just send one and be quick enough to get in space and retrieve your own code before someone else consume it.

This is actually one good thing that DE did in that event: it's doesn't matter if you are paired with good or bad ground team, you will get the code if anyone would supply it, so your railjack mission has smaller chance to get stuck, if for instance, your ground team quits. Of course codes got stuck because of bugs, who would have thought this might happen.

They should have called it OpHub instead of OpLink. This is some sort of miscommunication on their end.

[(PSN)Shelneroth]

Spy vaults have a stupid set up from the story perspective of defending data. Cameras pointing away from doors, lasers moving to leave openings, that sort of stuff. This led me to think op-link could be used to address this. Spy missions could be linked to mobile defense missions. Each vault would start in a much harder configuration. Completing the corrosponding mobile defense objective would switch that vault to it's usual configuration. Both teams get both missions rewards probably. You can still complete a spy mission without a op-link, it's just harder. Sadly I can't think of any other mission pairs this would work for. Survival plus a corrosponding scavenger mission is an obvious one but that scavenger mission isn't currently a thing. The whole system also brings extra problems that probably are not worth the effort. Trolls slacking off in MD. MD team just being slow. Doing a "solo" spy probably feels like a punishment. If "solo" gives better rewards to not feel like a punishment why bother op-linking.