I haven’t written about GTFO since *checks notes* November. That was around the time that Rundown 4 came out and we rejoiced with the addition of difficulty tiers for each mission. I even went as far as to say we might make it to the bottom this time.

That did not happen.

We did make it farther than the last few rundowns ending up in Tier C. Every mission on this tier features some sort of boss creature at the end. We just weren’t prepared for that. We had a few runs that got us to the boss chamber but we never could quite finish the missions off on any difficulty. At least we got to see them!

As a group, we saw our most improvement in this rundown. We learned how to clear rooms quickly without waking them up which lead to shorter runs. A shorter run makes things more enjoyable as we got to the fun part of alarm doors quicker. Don’t get me wrong, it still took us at least an hour and a half to clear a mission but we got it down from 2 hours. We also dropped the Bio Tracker in favor of an extra turret. While it’s helpful to get a rough estimate of how many sleepers are in a room or where a scout is, we found the extra firepower more helpful.

Last night, we did some practice runs on harder missions in preparation for the next rundown. Greg and I got pretty far in C2 “Pabulum” with just the two of us. We made it all the way to the boss door but weren’t preprepared for an alarm on the door.

We did a few more runs of other missions but took them way less seriously. It gave us the opportunity to try out some weapons we hadn’t used all rundown. For the majority of this rundown, I’ve been using the Assult Rifle and combat shotgun and didn’t really try any of the other weapons. It turns out, the Hel Revolver was really fun to use last night. I’ll definitely do some early experimentation with all the weapons in Rundown 5 this time around.

This is one of the more intriguing notes about the upcoming rundown:

System Updates – This is a major feature that we’ve been working hard on. A lot of progress has been made and so far is coming along well. The goal with this feature is to give you more reasons to play, and change up the gameplay a bit, even if when you die!

I’m interested to see what additional reasons they’ll be adding to play even when you die. My guess is some sort of cosmetics. I’ll suffer through just about anything to get a cool hat or weapon skin….But there’s also the bit about changing up the gameplay. I have no thoughts on what this could mean but if I’ve learned anything from GTFO it’s that things can always get more difficult….

Rundown 5 releases April 29th. I’ll let you know how it goes!