Raid Quit

Raiding is a popular type of game mechanic coming from MMO-type games. The first time I heard about a game having a raid mode was in World of Warcraft. The concept is that you and a group of friends would invest the time to get the required gear and strategize how to tackle certain situations is riveting when done right. You would spend hours and hours in a game building up your character, slowly getting better gear and weapons, eventually reaching a point that you would be strong enough to deal enough damage to enemies and not get killed by their attacks. Raid modes have a tendency to focus on the preparation stages and lesser emphasis on execution. And while some games have done a great job balancing both, there are times when this isn’t the case and playing the game becomes insufferable.


Resident Evil: Revelations’s Raid Mode, a game that I’m trying to platinum at the moment, is where I feel they didn’t get that equation quite right. As an action game, I felt that they should have allowed players with enough skill to tackle the mode with ease if they were good enough. But even if you were good enough, you are ham-stringed by the lack of ammo. Therefore, forcing you to find better weapons and gear that would do enough damage so that you could conserve ammo which is an idea inherent in raiding. There are some caveats to this though which I will explain later.

Comparing that to Destiny, which is basically a glorified raid mode. Being an action game and not an MMO, focuses on the gameplay or skill side of the raid equation. The shooting feels good and if you were skilled enough could tackle any situation if you were patient enough. If a developer wanted to make sure you had the right gear, they imposed a time limit instead. By defeating the enemy within an allotted time meant you had gear powerful enough to damage the enemy quickly.

However, because of the survival horror inclination or copying MMO raids wholesale, Resident Evil: Revelations focuses more on the preparation stage with limitations to your gear and level so that it would make the game more difficult and challenging. They designed the bonuses to pay out more if you limit yourself to their recommended level and weapons. The level requirements are not necessary to progress but they are necessary to get bonuses for better gear and weapons. So to me, all it does is just requiring you to have knowledge of 61 different raids and punishes the player for progressing further than he or she should whereas in other games, they would scale down the damage but you didn’t feel hampered by having to change all your gear to get it within the level requirements.

A lack of information about the game is also another issue, unlike a MMO where you have many websites set up with information about what gear you should aim for and where to get them. Resident Evil: Revelations, especially solo, tends to force players to use specific weapons against enemies. Forcing the player to go grind for those weapons which are random drops but without having an alternate way of getting these weapons like how other MMOs would reward players through daily quests to get them or find another partner to help minimize these grievances.

Even with all this, I will still go back and complete the raid mode just to get the platinum trophy. However, understanding the way the game is set up and the lack of good solid information regarding weapons doesn’t mean it feels any less frustrating when it comes to a mode designed to suck a lot of your time with random store items and loot drops. But the bright spot is, they’ve made changes to the Raid Mode in Resident Evil: Revelations 2 to be less stringent about their bonuses and level restrictions.

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