Giant Yellow Circles Suck

[JBS_1]

I just recently came back from a five year break and have been playing through what I've missed (it's a lot).  While I've enjoyed some stuff, there is one thing that is killing my desire to continue playing: the giant yellow circles.  Where you do a mission and instead of the radar giving you a marker for your objective you get this big honkin' yellow circle and it's suddenly a scavenger hunt.  This sucks for a number of reasons:
1) If this is your first time playing the mission you have no clue what you're looking for.  Find three grineer caches!  Ok...but what do they look like?  Or better yet, go find this probe that's colored like a rock and half buried inside a bush (that was my first encounter with this mission type).

2) Walking a grid is boring, and it's often not feasible due to enemy fire.  Even if you take the time to kill everything in the vicinity they'll just respawn shortly.

3) Objectives don't show up even if you have loot radar equipped.  I thought for sure this would be the answer: come prepared and be rewarded.  Nope.

4) If you wander around for long enough the game takes pity on you and will shrink the circle.  This is a nice feature, but still a big fat waste of time.  This should start happening almost immediately, not 5+ minutes on.

5) Codex scanner rarely helps even though the objectives are often scannable objects.  I got into my archwing with the scanner to get a better view of the area and still couldn't find what I was looking for.  So, just like loot radar not working, coming in prepared doesn't seem to help.

 

So I'll close with a question: am I missing something obvious that makes these missions tolerable?  Because if I'm not, and the game is playing as intended, then...hooboy, this is some baaaaaad game design.  Spending 5-10 minutes hunting for some random item is NOT FUN and it is a big fat waste of my time.  And if I want to advance my standing in the syndicates so I can see all the content then these types of missions are basically unavoidable.

[taiiat]

there's secrets to these Tasks that make them much simpler, but yeah the game doesn't tell you about them.

• for the Drone to Hack, it's always literally at the exact center of the Circle. why is there a Circle at all then? don't look at me.
• the Caches are always in an Equilateral Triangle from each other at the edges of the Circle.
  • also, as the timer ticks, it will shrink the search zone for you automatically to help, for what it's worth. oh you already saw that. yeah you're right, it should start shrinking slowly instantly.

[Uhkretor]

24 minutes ago, JBS_1 said:

if I want to advance my standing in the syndicates so I can see all the content then

Go fish and go mine. Then contribute what you fished (note that I didn't include what you mined) and head for the next one.

[(NSW)Greybones]

I think we can agree that it's subjective. Personally I enjoy the easter egg hunts that some games have; I agree though that it's weird that the drone has a circle when it's always in the center (wouldn't mind it being mixed up a bit)

[dwqrf]

il y a 32 minutes, JBS_1 a dit :

3) Objectives don't show up even if you have loot radar equipped.  I thought for sure this would be the answer: come prepared and be rewarded.  Nope.

4) If you wander around for long enough the game takes pity on you and will shrink the circle.  This is a nice feature, but still a big fat waste of time.  This should start happening almost immediately, not 5+ minutes on.

Caches are shown by loot detection. You may be mistaken because the usual feeling of loot detection in map isn't the same as in open world, because the mini map zoom isn't the same.

In my memory, the circle start shrinking after you found two caches, helping you out for the third.

[JBS_1]

33 minutes ago, dwqrf said:

Caches are shown by loot detection. You may be mistaken because the usual feeling of loot detection in map isn't the same as in open world, because the mini map zoom isn't the same.

In my memory, the circle start shrinking after you found two caches, helping you out for the third.

Not in my experience.  I've cleared entire circles of markers, going back and forth multiple times to make sure I didn't miss anything.  And when I've found a cache by shear luck and checked the map there was no marker (edit: yes, I checked before opening it).  I figured out the scale difference pretty quickly, that's not it (plus I've been using both Loot Detector and Thief's Wit).

[Yuzuki-Prime]

7 hours ago, JBS_1 said:

Find three grineer caches!  Ok...but what do they look like?

Bruh, couldn't agree more. I absolutely loathe doing bounties in the open world, in particular the hidden cache bounties on Venus and Earth.

On Deimos it gets even more annoying because the enemies match the environment pretty well, and there is so much clutter in the world that timed killing missions I have failed simply because I can't make out the enemies within all the visual noise.

Really, I would put open world bounties somewhere at the bottom of "fun" for in game activities, just above Archwing, just below Defense missions on the Corpus ship.
imo; fishing is fine for standing, but (especially on Earth) tracking wild life is faster if you have a stealth frame like Loki or (preferably) Ivara. Just stealth around the map tranq'ing wild life. in about 15 - 20 minutes you'll max out standing for the day (depending on spawns and/or your Mastery Rank). Grab a cup of coffee and take your time with it.