Entry Point has had several apparent endings so far.
These were the Epilogue, the Freelance Heists, and the Sunset cutscene.
When each of these updates came out, it truly felt like it was the end of EP.
It appeared that Cishshato was done updating the game,
and that it was doomed to die off and become irrelevant.
Indeed, the idea of Entry Point dying is something that has been in the community's conscience for
well over a year now, with many people arguing that the game was
dying or that it was already dead. But that's not exactly true.
The issue with this mindset is that games don't easily fall off to zero players,
even if there's no updates. Rather, they decline slowly
until they reach a plateau. At this stage, the game still gets new
players, though not as many as before. Whether the player base remains steady or
continues to decline depends on the game's replay value.
Games with lots of replay value can easily maintain a decent following because players
keep coming back and replaying the game. However, games with low replay value tend to lose
players faster, and eventually the number of new players won't be enough to offset the losses.
I would say that Entry Point is somewhere in the middle when it comes to replay value.
Leveling up your characters takes a while, and there's a bunch of different challenges you can
do, but there just aren't that many missions and eventually you run out of new things to do.
However, the Daily Challenges are a major gamechanger.
I'm calling this update the forever update because it's going to keep going every single day.
This is possible because Cishshato doesn't have to get on every day to
create the next day's challenge. Rather, the entire update has
already been scripted. Each mission has a list of
different modifiers that can be enabled, which are already fully functional.
These fit into two categories: stealth and loud, though there might be a few that work for both.
Some modifiers are unique to certain missions, while others may appear
in several or all missions. Anyway, the daily challenges
are handled by an algorithm. Every day, the algorithm chooses a mission,
decides whether it should be loud or stealth, and uses a random number generator to pick
three different modifiers. There's so many different possible
combinations that the game is realistically never going to run out of unique challenges.
The genius of this update is that this process continues automatically, producing
an endless flow of updates without Cishshato having to manually implement any of them.
For every four daily challenges you beat, you receive a random paint,
which is essentially a weapon skin. These paints are divided into several tiers,
and each tier has one paint for every weapon. Once you unlock all the paints in the first tier,
you move on to the second tier, and so on. After beating my fourth challenge, I got the Cyan
Wave paint for the S97, which looks really cool and even affects the laser color.
Thus, not only are the daily challenges interesting, but the paints are an incentive
to complete them consistently. Unlike the challenges themselves,
the paints are finite and they do have to be manually created by Cishshato.
I'm not sure if the game will run out of paints eventually,
or if Cishshato will add more later on. Regardless, this update is still really
clever and it was a much-needed change. These challenges have been a lot of fun, and I
look forward to continuing these livestreams. Anyway, I'll see you guys next time.