The upgrade system in this game feels like a missed opportunity

So I'm making my way through the gear mod progression, but I can't help but feel like they missed a lot of obvious potential upgrades that would really benefit the game?

Like, wingsuit speed, gun damage, damage resistance, armor on vehicles, vehicle speed, guns on vehicles, gun rate of fire, gun range, grapple range, grapple speed, gun accuracy, gun recoil, etc

And some that would be harder to implement, but that could be really fun, like gun elemental damage -- fire, ice, and electricity for instance -- wingsuit rockets, and parachute rockets (like in JC2)

It just kinda bums me out. The only upgrades you can get for a boat are nitrous and jump. That's it. In a game that has a stupid amount of content, it could be really fun trying to get all the upgrades, and at the end of everything be close to invisible, saints row style.

Thoughts?

The upgrades are pretty boring. Wouldn't mind a car editor too. Oh well.

Yeah the upgrades are lame. They feel like they were tailored to a more grounded game. Who cares about nitrous most of the time? Who cares about making a boat hop? Aiming down the sights is an upgrade? The game in general feels like they just didn't go far enough with the craziness. I mean they could have put together different types of things to blow up, like actual buildings. They could have upgrades like infinite rocket ammo, infinite grenades, shoot rockets from wingsuit, explosive tethers. It just feels like they copy and pasted a lot of the world and then just went with the most basic upgrade system possible. The game is still lots of fun, but it could have been a lot crazier and a lot better. I'm certainly addicted to clearing the map, and it has had its insane moments, but I'm kinda burning out on the game after clearing the first zone.

It honestly feels like they created a very solid base framework for a game, then had no clue whatsoever what kind of content to create that would actually make it a good game. You're right in that so many of the upgrades feel just kind of lame. Like why is "zooming in" a freakin' upgrade? Why lock them all behind challenge missions, the aspect of open-world games that people tend to hate the most. And if you're going to make me play a million challenges and earn gears, you could at least let me pick my upgrades, right?

I dislike the destruction challenges but think the rest are fun to okay. Seems like all the destruction ones hang on whether you want to grind it to find the specific method/gimmick that makes it at all possible to get 5 gears. Seems like it to me that you either get 1 gear or 5.

Honestly you could have just said "This game feels like a missed opportunity"

You're right though, there's no decent progression system at all.

I'm still butt-hurt over the critical reception of Mad Max but I sincerely feel that that is the better Avalanche game.

agree, kept waiting for that crazy Saints Row esque final upgrade that would just be ridiculous and sadly they just don't exist. at least they made them all obtainable without having to 5 star (gear) all the challenge modes to get them. i think the real heartbreaker for me resides in that once you take over an outpost/town/base all the really fun stuff to blow up is gone for good. There needs to be a reset outposts button like in far cry so i can go back through once i've completed them.

They did miss some opportunities, but the bigger problem is how you have to grind these to get upgrades that should be default. They aren't very good, and you should expect Jeff to rip the required missions apart during the GOTY deliberations: I expect he is even more disappointed than I am. I actually liked carving a swath through the collectibles in the first game because the freedom of movement is the best part.

This is kind of exactly what I feared: a game that builds on the missed opportunities of Just Cause 2 in only the most basic ways possible. And just like JC2, it sounds like a lot of the game is spent saying, "Well, this is good but it could be way better."

This game should have been Just Cause 2, and JC3 should be something far, far crazier.

Man...i bought this game at launch, super excited for it, but I don't think I've put more then 5 hours into it...and I'm not yearning to go back to it. The upgrade system is a major reason as to why, it's a bummer all the stuff is locked behind the open world challenges, and the chaos system feels pointless this time around. Makes me sad, cause traversing and messing around in the world seems amazing, but it doesn't have a good enough "carrot on a stick" to get me to want to keep playing.

the upgrades in this game are bad and the ways you unlock them are worse

i finished the entire game with weak tethers because i didn't want to go out and scour the locations for the side activities that unlock them

@oldmanlight: Once you beat the game, you can reset any outpost from the map screen. Or so the game told me when I finished, because after the credits rolled, I popped the disc out and traded it in.

After doing about twenty challenge missions and deciding they were for the birds, I finished the game pretty much up like that. It isn't really that difficult of a game, so for anyone who wants to just blow some stuff up and see the story through to the end, just know you can beat it fairly easily without any upgrades.

What that says about said upgrades...

@honkalot: I beat most of the destruction challenges by finding a helicopter somewhere around the base and just wrecking everything. I wonder if they made it that way intentionally?

@mchampton: Cool - I should really try that instead.