What Works

• Fair fights – You simply do not have to worry about running into other teams that are more well geared to the point where you have little chance of winning, if they even have a bit of skill. Worst case, someone has a green gun or shield instead of white starter ones, but even then, it’s tactics and skill and teamwork, if you can manage that, which will win the day, and that feeling of being “behind” doesn’t really matter.
• No mismatched teammates – This solves the problem of you, say, going in with a good kit in fill mode, and it ends up both your teammates have decided it's free kit time, putting you at a disadvantage if another team has gone all-out. Everyone has to be on the same page.
• Contracts – This is a great time to get contracts done, as survival in Dire Marsh is much more likely when there are no longer people attempting (and often succeeding) to snipe you across the map every match. I’ve gotten a few contracts finished almost immediately that were previously taking me a dozen runs to almost finish.
• Materials farming – Same deal here. If you’re less likely to die to a better-geared team, this is a great time to farm up whatever you need from the map for your upgrades, given that extraction, if you don’t get greedy, is much more likely.
• Low stakes – It’s like being an entire team of Rooks, except combat encounters are easier. If you die, who cares? You literally cannot load in with valuable gear so almost every time you’re losing little more than those aforementioned materials, or the occasional blue piece of gear.

What Doesn’t Work

• Pointless player drop loot – If you’re getting in a fight and you wipe another team, it’s no longer an exciting moment to rifle through their bags for treasures. There’s probably an 80% chance that most of their inventory is still filled with sponsor kit stuff, which obviously makes sense. But it’s a bit lame.
• Boring map gear – One thing that is very not battle royale-like here is that upgrades of gear as you play are small to non-existent. Other BR games you’ll start finding blues and purples and yellows as you play and kill other players, but that literally can’t happen here because you can’t make this easier mode a crazy loot farm, and this is not a BR game. So your “upgrades” as you play are often at best greens, which is rather dull.
• Little progress for some – This doesn’t offer much for veteran players. They often don’t need the materials; they’re not going to find any gear they care about. They’re mostly playing for the love of the game, as it were, but they’re not getting much out of it. Ironically, this is a type of mode that many higher skill players are interested in…if it were implemented in ranked for a more even playing field and the removal of some of the most annoying gear in the game that no one is ever going to bring in or find here. But that’s not what this test is about.
• Healing – This is an issue, and it feels like you almost have to bring a Triage most of the time. You cannot bring in extra heals, and you are simply not going to find many as you play. And you won’t find any good ones on dead players either. It’s easy to even just have the UESC drain your heals and health, making some fights insta-death if you can’t avoid them or heal up afterward. Hence, Triage.

I find all this rather contradictory, as the mode exists within extraction shooter constraints, but erases core concepts of an extraction shooter, like risk/reward kits for uneven fights, or finding and extracting good loot, which here is loot that you cannot bring into this mode and have to use somewhere else. If you love this mode, it feels like in general, you don’t really want to be playing an extraction shooter in the first place. And that’s…pretty much true of me, and perhaps why I’m enjoying this so much. It’s a strange situation.

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