Missions: Impossible?

I've been scrolling through some old newsletters from the game, looking at announcements of features and thinking about how they compare to now. In the Winter 2015 newsletter the first story was about the release of the new missions system, and included this screenshot:

[image: i.ibb.co]

But hey! That screenshot of the mission system from December 2015 looks the same as the mission system as it exists today!

I took a look back at the announcement in the forums, where Chedburn said:

We have five other future agents lined up including an endurance challenge style agent, a courier agent and a weapons specialist. Now that the mission system's core is complete, it will be very easy for us to add new agents and contracts.

We made it a priority to start with randomly generated contracts (rather than fully fledged missions) because we can produce lots of them in a repeatable format which provides infinite gameplay rather than single one-off experiences. That being said - we're very excited about adding actual missions in the future.

So that was the plan, but what happened? Where are the five agents that were lined up? Patch notes for the next few years show bug fixes being made to Duke's missions and minor adjustments to specific named missions - which I assume are the fully-fledged missions that the team were so excited about adding, although I'm sort of uncertain about that due to the relative lack of complexity in these missions compared to even the original missions; IMO they feel like procedurely generated missions, "Attack X, use Y, Duke sent you an item".

In Patches 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66 and 67, Svyatoslav's focus was "Missions rebuild", suggesting there was some trouble with the mission system's core that made it more difficult than expected in 2015 to add new agents and contracts, but that dropped off after Patch 67. The first update from Chedburn about an expansion to missions was posted on 1/12/18, 3 years post-release:

Previously mentioned long-term updates to the Stock Market, Drugs, Travelling and new Mission Agents are still on the road map. These are however substantial updates which require clear windows of development time.

Between release and this update, new mission agents have gone from being "very easy for us" to "substantial updates". What happened to the system that required a full rebuild and turned a simple exercise of adding more NPCs into existing slots, that it became something that would take years of development? Could there have been a project scope creep happening, which the original core code wasn't able to support and required a complete scrapping and restart to deliver?

Either way, after the Winter '18 announcement we returned to bug fixes and minor adjustments. During this time there were occasional focuses from Lana, Pavel and Joe regarding adjustments to mission dialogues, trigger updates and reviews of the reward pool.

And... that's it. Apart from one notice 4 and a half years ago that mission expansions were still on the road map, we've had no statements to indicate that the vision of missions in 2015 are anywhere close to being implemented, but we have a lot of little clues to suggest that the project has not been as simple to implement as it was originally designed to be. What happened in 2018 that made a developer focus for months on rebuilding the system? How did something that was designed to be trivial come to require substantial effort? Has there been any progress as we start to approach the decennary year? Will missions ever get some love? We can only wonder.

+1

Ched say, ched dont.

Well that actually explains as to why there are 5 locked agents, who knows maybe one of the mission agents has to do with the new crimes 2.0 which would explain why it took so long.

Imagine a child whose imagination randomly comes true. Now imagine that child has ADHD. That child is Ched.

Sure, sometimes the stars align and we get the thing he said. But most of the time, we lie awake at night wondering what he meant by "Hard Mode".

This reminds me of this scene from My Cousin Vinny, though the last part hasn't technically happened:

Judge Chamberlain Haller: Mr. Gambini, that is a lucid, well thought-out, intelligent objection.

Vinny Gambini: Thank you.

Judge Chamberlain Haller: Overruled.

In all seriousness though, thanks for the thoughtful, well-researched post. And also, more work on missions please!

Ched: Crimes 2.0 wasn’t a constant focus for 10 years

In other words missions and new agents to be seen some time in the next 2 and a half years, stay patient everyone

We're 2-4 years out, everything in Torn takes at least 10-12 years to develop. See: Crimes 2.0

I think Ched said after crimes2.0 was out the next agent will be out, as the next agent missions have to do with crimes 2.0.

I missed this does anyone have the source?

The issue with adding new agents is that you either have to create a new mission rewards store or overhaul the current store since many people have already finished what's offered in the current store and it becomes a lot less difficult to unlock everything if you have multiple agents and multiple missions to complete each day.

Here's me just thinking I'd not done enough missions to progress because I'm a pleb
[image: media.tenor.com]

this was years ago.

Looks like I don't remember it that well

https://www.torn.com/forums.php#/p=threads&f=1&t=15973100&b=0&a=0&start=0&to=17056842

The second contract agent is all planned out. She's meant to provide all the contracts that are non-attacking and non-courier related. She's an incredibly interesting character and a stark contrast of Duke. The difficulty we had was... When avoiding the crimes system (because of Crimes 2.0), and the drug system (because of Drugs 2.0), and travelling (saved for courier agent), we didn't really have enough interesting / unique tasks to cover 50+ contracts. So we've got a little creative, introducing whole new mechanics into Torn just for her that are being worked on currently. This has moved this agent to a whole new level, far more advanced with loads more content than initially expected. Just as Duke evolved from little mini-project into a saga, so has Amanda.

Well that's interesting. That happened about a year after they were released and it really does sound like the Dev team fell into scope creep because they bottlenecked themselves with the new systems that were planned. I wonder what those new mechanics were, and if the Amanda Project is still alive.

I guess the question that should be asked would be, would people have preferred a crime agent that used Crimes/Drugs 1.0 (and in the end would have provided 7 years of play before having to be disabled/overhauled), or would have preferred no updates for that time?

I always do the missions...95% the same

Missions is just another example of missed opportunities, technically it shouldn't be hard to add more agents and contracts, even if they're variations on the same. There are multiple (established) NPCs with questionable usefulness besides loot already.

This far in into a project/product of torns scale there are few excuses to have inflexible systems that can't be built on or refactored besides having literally too few or frankly incompetent developers - if it's not micromanagement by someone who insists on meddling with every aspect of the code.

Even I as a non-fulltime programmer can come up with multiple architectures and systems where each feature is modular enough to easily add new content.

I hope they have learned from crimes 2.0 and built a more flexible solution where there isn't a spaghetti bowl of ifelse sections to populate the content in the module.

Anyway, idk. I have only been around a year, but still get the feeling of a single dev hacking away in their spare time. -shrug-