Strike Team missions - Interview with Mike Gamble

which you do not know because playing those missions coop might yield unique gear for all you know. And Bioware is remaining silent in the matter. Rule of thumb is "if a company keeps strangely quiet about something then in all likely hood the answer is gonna piss off people"...so until Bioware explains it I am gonna prepare for the worst.

If the extent is just less money and resources, I don't see the problem, to be honest.

that is a big if

Not necessarily.

From what I garnered from the article you can choose to either load up into a mission by yourself, playing as one of the MP kits instead of Ryder, or you can opt to bring over other players and get some extra rewards. The fact that the author of the piece brings up inviting human allies into the match right after mentioning that you could load it up and play solo seems to indicate (to me at least) that your solo players will still have access AI controlled squad mates of some sort.  

That being said, I would prefer a dedicated Q&A session in regards to this mechanic though. So much guesswork and theory crafting going on; it would be nice to have a dev come in and specifically layout what is and isn't part of this feature.



On a side note, I do like that BioWare is attempting to intertwine a meta-narative into the Strike Team Missions, I hated how divorced everything was, narratively speaking, from the DAMP and MEMP to a lesser extent (ignoring the vanilla end game requirement of course). Plus it would be nice to actually see someone other than our human protagonist doing something to advance the plot forward or achieve some goal in the Helius Cluster. I fully intend to pick an alien for every one of these missions, at least that way (in my very small and inconsequential way) I can narratively have someone other than special snowflake humanity doing something productive.

The extra rewards bit is what some of us aren't happy about. I should not be given lesser rewards for doing something solo (with AI squadmates) than someone else who prefers to go in with a squad controlled by other players.



Yes, more info is very much needed.



I'm not terribly keen about that, frankly. ME3MP was nice for people who simply enjoyed combat for hours on end, and didn't much care about narrative structure. You weren't playing Shepard in MP, and I found it easy enough to headcanon that we were securing areas (after Shepard had initially cleared them). Reaper invasion, galaxy at war - it's pretty easy to headcanon that there's a lot of other fighting going on all over the galaxy.

Of course, it's also true that I've never played MP outside the context of an ME3 run. I have to wonder how these narrative / story bits will feel to those who are not engaging SP.

Exclusive gear for SP I am very against.

More exp/credits, I'm not.

I do question the likely requirement of being on the Internet to even go 'single player' in Strike Missions.

I really disliked the Skyhold unlocks for MP in DAI. But if Strike Mission 'events'/updates just go 'hey do a Strike Mission here' (even solo), or certain challenges once CAN solo even if with difficulty, for rewards, I'm okay with it.

Anything *needing* to group to reward in SP, I'm very much against. But I can bend when it just comes to the 'play solo but online' aspect, personally.

No, it really isn't. 

Playing the same mission solo (w/ AI squadmates) should be treated no differently from playing it with other players controlling the squadmates. These are simply different ways to accomplish the same thing.

If I buy this game, I expect a complete SP game experience. I'll happily buy DLC and sometimes item packs if the content is of interest to me. But paying for a subscription to XboxLive or PlaystationPlus to play MP I don't want to play just so I can have a complete SP experience is unacceptable.



I'm okay with that as long as I can go online without having to buy a subscription.

Thanks. I just have to make a note of it on my calendar so I don't forget to do it. That would be embarrassing.

I don't know why so many are inclining towards MP giving gear for SP.

I get it, its an idea. But Bioware has said nothing of the sort.

They've also said MP is not affecting the story. The MP is a 'metanarrative' aka another sort of deal that Ryder is not directly involved with.

Hold them to their statements, sure, but I just felt like making this clear.

But I suppose until Bioware does their full on spotlight on MP, we won't 'know'.

Probably right.  I was thinking you could also solo operations but received better rewards with a group.  Don't actually know since I never felt the game was good enough to buy the subscription...yay, now I can do 50% more grinding.

Hopefully you can fully bump up the difficulty when soloing as if there were 4 players. Do they not realise how popular that feature was in ME3? It would be a big design omission if they missed that.

Of course, Hackett doesn't mention that he only sends four redshirts to defend it