Operation Scarlet Spear – A Simple Event With An Awful Grind

After a promise of “early March”, Operation Scarlet Spear has arrived, alongside a bunch of other changes. The other changes are numerous, mostly bug fixes, as well as a Nova skin and some augments. But the Operation is… something else. And not in a good way.

For starters, it’s buggy.

This is basically guaranteed for every new event that comes out these days. Scarlet Spear is no different. It’s full of crashes. Okay, sure, a lot of this is being fixed as we go along, but it’s a pain in the ass.

Between people crashing and the bugs, not much is going on. A lot of the crashes have been fixed but there’s still edge cases. There’s also the fact that matchmaking is weird. Flotillas fill up fast and you can only match-make inside these flotillas. Inviting people can be a pain as well since you have to be on the same ships.

And then sometimes you end up unable to do anything. Simply because you get no kill codes.

It’s also grindy.

Like, really grindy.

Sure, there’s a lot of cool rewards available but you need to grind out a lot of missions. The earth missions give less credits than the space missions. But the earth missions are far easier. It’s an awkward choice. You can argue that this event is supposed to last over a month, but it still feels like an awful grind. It’s a lot of work doing these missions. And they’re weirdly not endless either. You can’t really just jump in and murder, you have to coordinate.

You can get other bonuses as well, but these are not at all obvious. And are still kinda low. Okay, if you drive away some murexes, you can get a bonus of 2000 credits, but you need 5 Murexes (or about 10 hours of work) to get enough to get one weapon.

That’s assuming you don’t get screwed over and don’t get any kill codes for an entire mission. And thus get no rewards.

It’s kinda interesting.

The idea of working with a random squad on the ground while you are in a railjack is pretty cool though. Sure, most of the oplink stuff is mostly automatic, but the little extras do bring it together. You’re all on a relay, helping each other. You get little messages when someone gets your kill code or a care package.

The missions are also cool-looking. The massive sentient monsters look awesome. The Sentient ships look awesome. The art in general is awesome. The operation may not be that cool but it FEELS cool.

But it’s also nothing that special.

At the end of the day, this operation is a bunch of random mobile defense missions. It’s an interesting twist on mobile defense. That’s about it.

Okay, sure, you have a lot of things going on in the background. You’re all connected to each other. There’s a mutual cause. But it’s still just a variation of what we already have. And all the stuff about being connected could… just not be there. It’s all just fluff. And, outside of the Op Link, there’s nothing new either.

And to make matters worse, none of this feels any good. It all feels unpolished and pretty… mediocre. We waited a long time for this operation, but it just doesn’t seem worth it at the end of the day.

Actually, I’m just going to be frank here. This operation is shit. We waited fucking months for pretty much nothing.