A Proliferation of Panic


Mister Rik

 

Posted

Maybe it's my imagination, but since i23 dropped it seems as though the numbers of "panicked civilians" in mission maps have increased dramatically. They're so thick that just trying to navigate the map feels like playing pachinko. I've had a few occasions where I couldn't even get up/down a flight of stairs because the civilians were so thick. And in one unfortunate scenario, these civilians effectively killed my brute. I'd entered a small room, only to find it completely packed with civilians, and just beyond these civilians, just out of melee range, was a pack of gun-toting, ranged-attacking villians. And before I could do anything, some of the civilians got between me and the door — and of course, they wouldn't run out of the room, they just bounced between me and the doorframe — effectively creating a "fish in a barrel" situation where the villains leisurely gunned me down while I stood there helplessly, unable to either reach the villains or escape the room.

Probably not related, but while doing a villain mission that involved infiltrating an Arachnos base and stealing something or other, I found the Arachnos base full of panicked civilians. This was an actual Arachnos base, with the red and black and mesh walls, not some other type of map that happened to be full of Arachnos. The civilians weren't unusually numerous, but I thought their presence was really odd. There was nothing in the mission text to suggest why these civilians might be there.

On the upside, I rescued a hostage yesterday and he surprised me by actually running toward the exit instead of charging off deeper into the map...

Is this one of those things like the "run away mechanic" that goes in cycles where everybody thinks it's happening more often, and then it stops happening so often, and then the next patch everybody thinks it's happening again?