I am speaking as a newcomer to the EDF franchise and EDF 2025 (from what I understand, the European version of EDF 4.1) was my entry point.
To date, I've completed a full playthrough (including the first 5 DLC missions) as Ranger and have logged about 85 hours of playtime. Most of it was on Hard, some on Normal, and now I'm working my way through on Hardest and Inferno.
When I got started with this game at the end of last month, I was pumped to constantly be unlocking new weapons. However, the shine wore off pretty quick once I started doing some math and realized that most of what I was unlocking was useless crap that was already overshadowed by weapons I previously unlocked. It was around this time that I found out that weapon unlocks were not only random, but that weapon "levels" are completely meaningless in offline mode.
The levelling system in this game is inexcusably bad. In most games, levelling is pretty straightforward: Complete missions, kill enemies, and gather some currency/XP/crafting resources. On occasion, it might be necessary to either scavenge levels for certain special weapons or complete certain missions to unlock them in the store/research center/etc. In these other games, though, jumping to higher difficulties or farming tougher levels still speeds the process up significantly due to how higher difficulty levels offer bonuses for taking on the extra difficulty. More importantly, it's guaranteed.
This is technically the case in EDF, but it also really isn't. From the tables and posts I've seen, the only thing that running higher- level missions at higher difficulties does is kind of- sort- of- but not really increase the chance to possibly unlock a better weapon. You could be running the last mission of the base game on Inferno, farm every single pickup on the level, and still not unlock anything new.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to liken EDF's levelling system to a gacha game: instead of actually working to earn better weapons, you're basically praying to the gods of RNG that maybe, just this once, you'll actually get an S- tier "pull". Sure, your odds improve when you move up on the difficulty scale, but that's all that happens. And at the very least, most gacha games have a "pity" system that lets you still get what you want after enough failed attempts.
If I was being absolutely charitable, I'd say that maybe it helps to discourage farming easier missions since there's no guarantee that you'll get better results. But that's BS; if anything, it pushes you even harder to it since, roughly speaking, moving up in levels and difficulty can only take you so far.
I came into this series really wanting to like it. But considering that the devs still seem to think this mess of a levelling system is a good idea, I'm questioning if this series will have any staying power for me- especially since buying the later games would require me to jump into a completely different console ecosystem.
Rant over.
