Had a discussion about this last night since keys often give survivors an undeserved escape. I’d make the following changes:
- Hatch only spawns when 2 survivors are alive, it doesn’t matter how many gens are done.
- Hatch needs to be opened with or without a key and has a similar progression bar to totems - if you stop you need to start again from the beginning.
- Once hatch is closed, it cannot be opened again.
- Pink keys cannot spawn in chests.
- Remove purple keys completely.
- Pink keys let 1 person escape, hatch automatically closes behind them when they escape.
- Green keys open chests quicker and increase your chances of getting an item of green rarity or above.
- Remove the addons for keys that let you keep them if you die or use the key - they are ridiculous.
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I feel like the whole premise of keys is kind of flawed and consequently makes any sort of fix rather nuanced. They’re something which use up your item slot but provide a guaranteed escape (providing you meet the hatch requirements obviously) rather than increasing the odds of it like other items do. To me, this “different style” of item is cool in theory but I think the potential power one item has without having a direct cost or time penalty to use is such a flawed design.
On that note, I think this…
…would be one of the best things they could change. It’s still a bit silly having such a powerful ability rely on the RNG of hatch spawns but I think that change along with some or all of the others you propose would probably be an awful lot better than what we have now. That being said, I’m still not convinced keys should be a thing.
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Personally I’m not really a fan of keys either, to the point that I actually avoid getting them unless they’re in the way of something else I want in the bloodweb. But one thing that I feel is important to consider is that there’s an achievement that you get when all four survivors escape through the hatch. A key change that’s too drastic might make that achievement unobtainable, and while some games have done this in the past, it’s usually kind of a bummer. I’m not sure if achievements or their descriptions can be altered by the developers after they’ve been added, but this might unfortunately be a limit to how much they can change the mechanic, assuming they want it to remain obtainable.
Yeah, I think achievements are a fairly big consideration for this and a few other things, though in this case I’m not too fussed if they had to drastically alter the achievement or even remove it - it’s not like it promotes something that’s “good” for the game anyway. Hopefully they’ll do something about keys before too much longer but we’ve been hoping that for how long now? Yeah… we might be here for a while yet 