Drop-In / Drop-Out gameplay

From a recent interview it was made clear that they intend the missions in the game to be wholly multiplayer.. you can choose to play them “alone” with Ai squad mates you have to instruct or with a team of players. However the item that caught my interest was that they want team mates to be able to drop-in or drop-out of missions, either taking over an active Ai or, when dropping out, their Avatar reverts to Ai control.

What are your feelings on this? Who might it work?

My impression is mixed, whilst the idea seems appealing from an individual players point of view … especially if you have a life outside gaming … I can see it might prove very frustrating for mission leaders to have to keep swapping from relying on a player to control an Avatar and having to manually issue orders and relying on a (potentially) sketchy Ai.

My hope is that missions will be lockable by the mission creator to some form to help combat this, but I can only see that working to EXCLUDE players rather than locking players into a mission for example. Might you be able to “pause” a mission part way through and re-match make or send invites to your friend list on the fly? That’s one possible solution but it seems ... to me … a detriment to flow of gameplay and perhaps not an option they want to go with.

I think this will be a good thing.  From what I've heard, the AI is supposed to be solid and thus the sketch would be minimized.   That's yet to be seen, but I'm optimistic.  

Really though, there's a couple reasons why I think this will be good:

1.) We all hate when we're running a heroic mission, a hard weekly HVT or an incursion and someone drops from the group and now you're down a player.  In this case, the AI would pick up.  Yeah they're not necessarily as effective as a player that communicates, but a 4th body to draw fire can be helpful.  Also, we don't know how they'll scale missions, will it be one difficulty with AI and one for PCs or will they scale the same based on the number of operators (PC or AI). 

2.) Say you have a group with a standing start time of 10pm.  And like me, you have a child that refuses to go to bed until like 10:30, 11:00, midnight...  The three other players in the group could start at 10pm and you could jump on once your crib midget hits the bricks.  Players could also jump back in after getting dropped (like in #1).  

To be honest, I think the AI would be like The Division JTF. They will be just there and basically useless cannon fodder without the ability to revive someone.

What I'm scared of is that they'll be abused to have some cash involved.

Example:

- 3 Days Bronze Team Pack (not so idiot AI): $5

- 5 Days Silver Team Pack (somewhat less idiot AI): $15

- 7 Days Gold Team Pack (less idiot AI): $25

- 3 Days Platinum Team Pack (strong AI): $45

Interesting thought there @supercat

Where's my Ubisoft Award 2016?

Minor update to this - apparently you can get rid of the Ai entirely .... just play with a friend. 

Unless the info coming from Ubisoft is confused (i.e. one person saying one thing and another saying something completely counter to that...not like that ever happens of course), Ai will ONLY  be in your team to make a team of four FOR SOLO PLAY. 

If you team up with one or more friends, that's your team, that's it. Also you are not "tethered" and each player in a team is free to roam and do as they please and don't have to take part in the mission at all. 

However, no idea how accurate this is as this puts a complete spanner in the works of "drop-in-drop-out" gameplay! If there's no Ai to take over, how does a player "drop-in"?

My suspicion is that one of these statements from Ubisoft is completely incorrect. Which one though is anyones guess. 

quinch1199 said:

My suspicion is that one of these statements from Ubisoft is completely incorrect. Which one though is anyones guess. 

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Im guessing that this is a case of the same kind is misinfo we occasionally get with the Division.  The community guys are told one thing or think one thing and they tell the community that.  Then the devs working on the game do more or less and say something different than what was originally communicated (can you say ninja nerfs).

Anyone signed up for beta?

I applied but I haven't heard if I've gotten in or not. 

DeadSockPuppet said:

I applied but I haven't heard if I've gotten in or not. 

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I'm the same. As soon as I got the email I signed up... at the moment this looks like the "beta access" will actually just be a free demo. Just like pretty much all "beta access" from recent titles. Sure a small amount of bug fixing and server load testing goes on but generally all it is is an excuse to drum up interest, get YouTube and media coverage.