I’ve been waiting for any updates on whether the developers would patch multiplayer and its associated rewards, and we finally got one.
While it’s nice that certain Covenant items can now be obtained from enemies, I don’t think the current changes are sufficiently rewarding, and they’re actually more likely to cause people to burn out while playing the game. So let’s break it down.
Covenant Rewards
Now, let’s assume you’re not familiar with Lords of the Fallen’s Covenant. It’s divided into three dominant factions, each with a Shrine where players can turn in Covenant items for rewards. Most rewards are cosmetic in nature, such as a Tinct or Shader, or a specific set of armor.
For each Shrine, purchasing all Cosmetic Tincts costs 1,000 Lords of the Fallen Vigor, while purchasing Armor Tincts costs 1,600 Vigor, for a total of 2,600 Vigor.
Now here’s the fun part. Each activity’s rewards are weighted differently, so for every kill of a specific enemy, you’ll get 3 Plucked Eyeballs for Shrine of the Putrid Mother.
When you go online, these enemies will appear randomly and a Red Lantern will appear in the world. If you soulflay a Red Lantern, a red trail of butterflies will appear, leading you to an enemy that killed another player in another world. Only these enemies are buffed compared to normal enemies, having about twice the normal health and defense.
In order to get all the rewards of Putrid Mother Covenant, players need to kill 867 empowered enemies. It’s a bit much, but it’s doable, at least on paper.
Problems
The problem with this system is that it depends on the spawning of these enemies in the first place. Because it’s randomized, you can’t effectively actively farm these Covenant items. It felt bad, like a drag.
So now, with the latest update, if you kill each faction’s elite, they can drop 2 related Covenant rewards. This is great, but the drop rate for the rewards is still frustratingly low.
We guarantee even though elite enemies to drop Covenant items, you still need to kill at least 1,300 enemies to get all of Shrines associated rewards.
However, based on my limited anecdotal experience, you’ll probably need to kill at least 3-4 elites on average to get Covenant reward. So even if we conservatively say you get rewards for every 2-4 enemies, you’d need to kill 2,600-5,200 elites to get all the rewards.
If that doesn’t sound bad enough, I think it’s important to reiterate that these are elite enemies. So they’re harder to deal with than your regular enemies.
And there are only a handful of these enemies in any given area, so if you’re actively trying to farm them, you’ll need to constantly reset the area. This means you’ll be spending a lot of time running between enemies.
To ensure that enemies drop items at an optimal rate, players also need to use items that increase the drop rate. Therefore, players will also need to spend a lot of time and resources returning to Skyrest Bridge to purchase more Rabbit’s Feet and Vestige Moths so that they can reset the area without having to run back to Lantern.
Of course, every time you reset a zone, you’ll need to reapply your buffs. So I think it really becomes a tedious thing that ends up sucking all the fun out of the game.
Improvements
So how do we solve this problem? Thankfully, the developers seem to be open to player feedback, and there are plenty of ways to tweak it.
Adjust Rewards
First, perhaps the most boring way to solve these problems is to adjust the rewards available to us. I know that in Oceanic region, players get 150 Plucked Eyeballs per Red Lantern, which might be a bit too much.
The second thing developers can do is adjust the frequency with which rewards are earned, such as making enemies guaranteed to drop Covenant items. But it’s a little boring and I think there’s more that could be done.
Improve Boss Mode
In co-op multiplayer games, when players help other players defeat a boss, they can earn 15 Pilfered Coins, but only if they defeat the boss.
There are 38 bosses in the game, and assuming NPC boss battles count towards the total, you can fight 37 bosses for each new game cycle. So you can earn 555 Pilfered Coins by going out of your way to help someone complete the game.
Assuming you actually kill 37 bosses per run, you’d need to help someone complete the game 4.7 times to get all Shrine of Orius rewards. Or in other words, you need to kill 147 bosses in total.
So it might be nice if there is a Boss Rush mode or something that helps players get all the kills.
But in reality, there’s a pretty enormous gap between most boss encounters. So if someone just wants to get Shrine reward, this gives them a tremendous incentive to disconnect from the console when they’re not far away from fighting a boss.
This could actually dis-incentivize players from the cooperative experience, especially if they can now more reliably farm Pilfered Coins on their own.
However, if every enemy in the host world dropped one Pilfered Coin, and elites dropped 2 or 3 Pilfered Coins, this would give players more incentive to help each other. And this will be a viable way for people to farm Deralium Chunk to fully upgrade their weapons.
Quality Of Life Fixes
Now, in addition to rewards, more quality of life fixes are needed to make the multiplayer experience smoother.
Foremost, being able to launch multiplayer games only from the Lantern or Vestige site is absolutely terrible, especially when they were removed in New Game+.
It effectively limits how far I’m willing to go in a given area, since there’s a chance I’ll be instantly disconnected from the host and have to run all the way back to Lantern to get in line.
Last but not least, stores should not have limited stock of Eyes of Vengeance or Charred Fingers.
Controlling these quality-of-life features feels arbitrary, and some players feel the need to ask to visit vendors in other players’ worlds so they can restock items. Limiting them doesn’t make the game better, so they should change it.
Final Thoughts
As I said before, though, I appreciate the changes to multiplayer rewards and it’s a step in the right direction. But I do think they need to go further. Because I think the current solution runs the risk of burning out players, and I think there’s a lot of potential for them to do better with what they have.
Obviously, my solution is not the only one. If you have any ideas on how to improve multiplayer, please feel free to share them with us.
