Picking up dead drops from lockers

Instead of buying and receiving a dead drop immediately, players would order a dead drop through the preparation menu and then physically go to a locker in the mission to receive their items, making them immediately usable. The new locker positions would perhaps have to be more accessible than the current ones (i.e. outside of stash rooms). For balancing you would have to play around with the pricing, the locations and whether players know what they’re getting before they open the dead drop or not.

Why?

• It adds a risk-reward element of entering the mission with less equipment than you need, in hopes of getting something good from the locker.

• It would be thematically fitting and contextually funny. Rogue Point is a vigilante organization that acts like SWAT but has to go get their guns from the package locker first.

• It would potentially improve pacing by preventing players from spending multiple minutes in the preparation screen, buying dead drops and selling the resulting items to fund more dead drops.

• It would also improve in-mission pacing by giving players an interesting sub-objective to complete near the start, instead of beginning the mission by immediately sprinting into the nearest door in search of enemies to kill.

• You could play around with the difficulty by having the lockers guarded by stronger and stronger enemies as the campaign progresses.

• Because you can only bring one item per slot home from a mission, it could be a way to prevent players from accumulating too many strong primary weapons without making dead drops prohibitively expensive and/or very likely to just give you junk items like flashbangs and battering rams.

• Instead of the current roundabout way of opening a stash room with phones and getting a free dead drop ticket for later, you could use phones to open additional locker doors. These “phone lockers” (as opposed to player-bought lockers) could be lower quality to compensate the fact that they’re essentially free (only costing phones), but they would give players who are stuck in a bad situation an additional path to get new equipment and potentially clutch the mission.

Why not?

• It would be a lot of work. You would have to re-work how the lockers function entirely, add a new system for retrieving and opening dead drop crates in-mission, add new locker locations to the missions, and completely re-balance the cost progression, phone cost, drop distribution, etc. around the new system.