By Mike Stubbs
5 min read
Off the Grid has had an impressive launch thus far, topping the charts and racking up a massive player count. As far as crypto games go, it’s easily the biggest launch to date and has cracked the world of mainstream gaming fans, many of whom don’t even realize there’s blockchain involved. (To be fair, the crypto stuff isn't fully integrated yet.)
But the initial hype of the launch is starting to cool off, leaving Gunzilla Games with its next big challenge: improving and evolving the game so that players stick around. Off the Grid needs to sustain a solid player base and keep improving until it is ready to leave early access, or it could miss its opportunity to be the game that introduces the benefits of blockchain to the gaming world at large.
After putting a good few hours into the game, I noticed a few things that could be improved. If they remain as they are, Off the Grid might struggle to keep a sizable player base and may never reach this level of popularity again. But given that it's early access, the expectation is that improvements are in the cards—and here are five I'd like to see soon.
A screenshot from Off the Grid in early access. Image: Decrypt
This is, without a doubt, the single most annoying thing about Off the Grid right now.
It’s almost impossible to know how much health you have left without looking directly at the tiny health bar in the bottom corner of the screen. The damage indicators don’t do a great job of letting you know you’ve been shot, but they are even worse at showing how much health you have left.
Other games use visual elements like bloodying the edges of the screen or making your view go black and white as you near death. It’s not a complex system, and there are probably better ways of doing it, but Off the Grid’s current approach certainly isn’t it.
This is planned in Off the Grid's roadmap, but if you ask me, it needs to be moved up as the current offering isn’t great. Seemingly, in an attempt to do something different, the map is essentially just a long line... and while that sounds like a fun idea, in reality, it just makes things more annoying.
With the map being so thin, the circles are unlikely to be at either end, so there isn’t much reason to go to the very extremes of the map. The best place to drop is almost always the middle. A map with a more conventional shape would alleviate this issue, and the current layout can be marked down as a fun idea that didn’t quite hit the mark.
Battle royale games should be about thinking on your feet and adapting to your situation, and one of the key areas for that should be the weapons you have to use. But in Off the Grid, it’s so easy to call in a loadout drop that I’m almost never without it, and I’ve tinkered in-game so it boosts my game.
Making them a little harder to get, so that every player past the 5-minute mark doesn’t have their top loadout, would add a lot more variety to Off the Grid and make it more fun. Using the same loadout repeatedly because it’s optimal is getting tiresome, and I’d like more of a reason to loot past the early game other than finding hexes.
The claim that Off the Grid has any kind of player-vs-environment (PvE) component—especially the promised 60-hour narrative campaign—feels disingenuous, considering that you must play player-vs-player (PvP) matches to experience it. I also couldn’t care less about it. That stuff is likely to be fully implemented in the future, but for now, the current implementation isn't helping the experience.
The weird cut scenes that provide some kind of narrative are confusing and boring. When I boot up a game, I want to go and shoot people, not be told some weird story that I ultimately have very little interest in. Keep this in as an optional extra, having them on screens that play around the map—but having to skip them every single game is grinding my gears.
Currently, if I want to sell items on the player-to-player market, I need to pay £10 ($12) a month for the Pro membership, which includes other perks as well. Given the extras of a battle pass or skins, that price isn’t outrageous. But locking the marketplace behind a paywall feels a little unfair.
The much better solution would be to take a cut of every transaction on the marketplace, and then when the GUN token is actually live and can be bought and sold on exchanges, then the team can either burn it or sell it back to players to make money.
Limiting the selling option to players who pay for the subscription will ultimately mean a lack of variety in the marketplace, with a few sellers likely making big bucks. In contrast, most average players just won’t bother.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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