Elephant is straight up unfair

[AlanDawn]

From just not telling the player there are bombs until 30 seconds from detonation, to the laser-accurate enemies, to the fact that they start shooting hostages almost immediately, getting A or S rank is ridiculous.

Just as a test, because this is the only mission I have struggled to get an A minimum on, after about a dozen attempts, I enabled godmode and turned off traps, put on a shotgun and battering ram, and bull-rushed the map, ignoring civvies, ignoring the bombs, just wasting the enemies as fast as humanly possible.

On several runs, even while cheating it is literally not possible to succeed. The perps will execute hostages faster than you can physically reach them even if you are straight up invulnerable to bullets and can run to them.

The only chance you have to win is getting good RNG, which is just bad game design. The fact that it was - on several attempts - impossible while cheating makes it unfair. The only way I can see anyone reliably beating the level every time is by co-oping with real humans so you can divide and conquer, and even then the timing is dicey.

For reference, in 10 experiments with godmode, hostages were executed after only 90 seconds in 4 attempts, and in 5 more attempts they were executed before 240 seconds. Meaning you have to kill every perp in under 2 minutes to reliably beat the level. It takes a full minute to walk from one end of the level to the other.

[SaLaĐiN]

Main entrance. Took me 3 or 4 tries. Rush the suspects, always the same hall, locations.

[AlanDawn]

Originally posted by SaLaDiN:

Main entrance. Took me 3 or 4 tries. Rush the suspects, always the same hall, locations.

Right but when the enemy can tank 5 shotgun shells to the chest at point blank range, while 1 or 2 9mm rounds can kill you, charging the stairs as fast as possible isn't such an easy thing to do.

That's another thing I learned by messing with cheats - hitboxes in this game make NO sense. I unloaded half a dozen slugs into one guy and he didn't even flinch, I shot another guy one time with a 1911 and killed him instantly.

[kage74]

Absolutely! Unless you're playing with a whole team of human players and each person takes a part of the school to clear. AI teammates just are not fast enough. It takes the AIs way too long to stack up, breach and clear.

Even when you split your teams (team red takes one classroom, team blue takes another and you take a third) by the time they breach, enter and clear each classroom, then rejoin you and move to the next area the shooters have already executed a hostage or two.

[Friedrich Bär]

ignore civilians and bombs, get an smg with hollow points, stab vest or light armor, full auto their legs, don't even secure any evidence / arrest (dead) hostiles, profit

Originally posted by AlanDawn:

It takes a full minute to walk from one end of the level to the other.

if you're wearing heavy armor sure in which case you shouldnt to begin with

[AlanDawn]

Originally posted by Friedrich Bär:

ignore civilians and bombs, get an smg with hollow points, stab vest or light armor, full auto their legs, don't even secure any evidence / arrest (dead) hostiles, profit

Originally posted by AlanDawn:

It takes a full minute to walk from one end of the level to the other.

if you're wearing heavy armor sure in which case you shouldnt to begin with

I was using the stab vest and god mode, you literally cannot move any faster than I was moving unless you use a mod to enable sprinting.

[Friedrich Bär]

Originally posted by AlanDawn:

Originally posted by Friedrich Bär:

ignore civilians and bombs, get an smg with hollow points, stab vest or light armor, full auto their legs, don't even secure any evidence / arrest (dead) hostiles, profit

if you're wearing heavy armor sure in which case you shouldnt to begin with

I was using the stab vest and god mode, you literally cannot move any faster than I was moving unless you use a mod to enable sprinting.

It just took me 3 tries to get an A+, without mods nor cheats
1st attempt i cleared the left side poorly and left one suspect that ended up shooting a civ
2nd attempt i got shot through a wall in the library room, mistake on my part
3rd attempt finished in 8min because of civilians bug when you tell them to go outside

[AlanDawn]

Originally posted by Friedrich Bär:

Originally posted by AlanDawn:

I was using the stab vest and god mode, you literally cannot move any faster than I was moving unless you use a mod to enable sprinting.

It just took me 3 tries to get an A+, without mods nor cheats
1st attempt i cleared the left side poorly and left one suspect that ended up shooting a civ
2nd attempt i got shot through a wall in the library room, mistake on my part
3rd attempt finished in 8min because of civilians bug when you tell them to go outside

Yes, you got good RNG that time.

[Phoneend]

its that not hard, rifles to get thou their body Armour, and be quick, 4 people searching made it easy, hell even done it alone, the old map with the delta forces were are

[Friedrich Bär]

Originally posted by AlanDawn:

Originally posted by Friedrich Bär:

It just took me 3 tries to get an A+, without mods nor cheats
1st attempt i cleared the left side poorly and left one suspect that ended up shooting a civ
2nd attempt i got shot through a wall in the library room, mistake on my part
3rd attempt finished in 8min because of civilians bug when you tell them to go outside

Yes, you got good RNG that time.

the only "good rng" is if they don't ambush you at certain spots, which case you'll learn by trying over and over
it literally took me about 10 runs to finish this one because i abhor the beanbag shotgun for doing a S rank for this one with all of their gas masks, all of my previous runs ended because, once again, i didnt properly clear the left side, they get a jump on me or simply because i hate the beanbag shotgun
the video is being processed if you need proof; i could have shaved 2mins in that run if i didn't forget where the second bomb was
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLRm0TfyREs

[Citizen Kane]

This mission singlehandedly ruins the game. Not even kidding. You're rewarded for going methodical for the entire game and as soon as you get to this mission, it's pure rushdown. Time pressure is one thing but having hostages executed on an RNG timer is trash.

This is extremely evident on singleplayer because splitting up bots isn't remotely comparable to a multiplayer team all acting autonomously at speed. Run the thing over a dozen times with bots and it's awful clearing 80% of the level and getting both bombs only to have the last suspect execute 3-4 hostages in a row because he was off running through the level while I had to complete every other objective.

Surely there's an easy patch to just ensure they won't start executing people in the first minute. It's awful and feels incredibly cheap.

[Major Fret]

All VOID had to do was remove rankings from the Active Shooter mode. Trying to make something that is supposed to be both unpredictable yet requires enough consistency to earn a perfect rank is insanity.

Of course, it's not like VOID had 3 years to test this very game mode out....

Also, adding a ten minute bomb threat scavenger hunt in a level that has 2-3 minutes of action is a baffling decision.

[ElSamu19]

it's def doable, i did eventually get an S without mods but yeah it did require getting lucky with the suspect spawns, basically needing them all to spawn close to you. Idk how true it is but it feels like there's a timer for the suspects before they start executing civilians despite spawning right next to them as well. It's just a mess, I absolutely agree on that...

[Honnes G.]

Elephant is probably the most boring map in the game after lethal obsession. I think the premise would benefit a lot from being more atmospheric/immersive, it just isn't in the current state. You just end up playing it like a CSGO match that takes place in a campus. There's no music which is fine, but there's also no sound either like ambiance, alarms, emergency sirens outside that I remember, various possibilities for ambient civilian sounds.

Not being able to save everybody should be thematically part of the experience, but I feel like they are more separate than together thanks to how it completely clashes with the gameplay design, and as said above the AI doesn't do anything interesting on this map and are always in the same general place. And I find the addition of multilple suspects on this map instead of just one or maybe two, is just cushioning for the lack of interesting things suspects have at their disposal to do in general, so instead of having a dead easy map with one suspect it needs to be ridiculously too much with four.

[Vikes546]

Do yourselves a favor and download a few mods :

MW Riot multi-functional Shield (Dark Water Update). It'll save you from getting a massive headache on this level. Among other functions, it's a full length shield, even covering your legs while standing, and if you "run" at low-ready the shield can ram open shut or locked doors (including double-doors if you hit the right spot) and shield-bash non-squad NPCs.
If you *REALLY* want to non-lethal your way through this mission, that should work just fine.
Then all you have to do is low-ready "run" around the map until you find one of the 4 shooters and shield-bash them in the face a few times. Give your element a similar loadout and tell them to deploy shields at the start of the run and have them follow you. You'll have to re-issue the command several times to get them to redeploy the shields because the idiots put them away to cuff civies or shooters.

If you're still having a hard time even with the shield-bashing non-lethal approach get :
No Mercy for Terrorists - Relaxed ROE (Scoring system) - allows you to rightfully kill "suspects" without impacting your final score. The ROE in the game is idiot at the best of times, but there's no way in hell an actual SWAT team would waste their time or risk their lives and the lives of innocents trying to talk down these guys with compliance yells as they move from room to room killing students and with a 10 minute bomb timer hanging over their heads. My preferred method is using the shield mentioned above with a .357 revolver and a laser dot. Run around at low-ready, ramming open doors and running over NPCs if they get in your way, and then mag (or in this case, cylinder) dump any of the shooters in the face if you spot them.

Either way, I suggest leaving the bombs until all 4 shooters are neutralized so they don't go off Susan while she's hiding in the ladies room or something.

If you don't want to use them afterwards, just remove them.

[Falx]

Yeap, wasn't a fan of this mission at all. The lack of information in the briefing, the very high expectations in the mission, the many rooms to check, many civilians, hostages, bombs and you don't know you're on a timer until its too late.
What's the point in the shooters taking hostages that they're threatening to kill if they don't tell anyone they have them? That's not a deterrence at all.