Not related to Ellie's "Death Wish +" mod from ~2016.
A more challenging and unique way of playing your favorite difficulty.
This mod can be played with anyone: only host needs to have it installed.
Gameplay changes summarized:
Enemies can now cuff you during interactions
Assault waves last longer, but also have longer breaks.
Enemies are harder to intimidate, they respawn quicker, and their overall variety was enriched.
If mods had anthems, i would use this one.
Detailed descriptions for all changes
Police assaults.
While playing on 'Death Wish +' your assault duration will ALWAYS be the same, regardless of downs/players in custody, lasting 330-370 seconds. 'Fade' period of the assault (when no new enemies spawn in, and current enemies are falling back) will always have max duration of about 1 minute, to compensate for longer assault waves. Anticipation phase will also never be skipped.
Enemy respawn speed.
Delays in between each squad's spawns are reduced. In vanilla this value is ~5 seconds.
While playing Death Wish +, minimum delay is set to 4. It also changes based on the chosen difficulty in DW+ options menu, and can go as low as 0.5 seconds.
Enemy variety.
Normal units:
Some enemies that are rarely or never used in vanilla PD2 (such as grey swats with UMP smg's, or hostage rescue teams) are brought back. Units from lower difficulties, like blue SWAT's from Normal, and green FBI's from Overkill are also present.
Specials:
Green bulldozer (and his alternatives for other factions) was replaced by a Medic bulldozer.
Marshal squads spawn earlier and more often.
New "Death Squad" was added. This squad consists of 1 Winter's Shields and FIELD SNIPERS. This squad is rare, especially on lower difficulties, but is a big threat both up close and far away.
Note: field snipers, unlike marshal marksmen, will try to come as close to you as possible.
Harder enemy intimidations.
Enemy intimidations are harder to achieve. Enemies with more armor/health are harder to intimidate, and normal 'every day' cops can be intimidated easily.
Getting enemies to less then 40% hp will make ALL intimidations much easier, as well as catching enemies during a reload or while they are incapacitated.
Cuffing on interactions.
Works exactly as presented in the GIF above. Any interaction can be interrupted by any enemy. To get rid of cuffs, you need to either wait for a minute to uncuff yourself, or one of your teammates needs to come and rescue you. Inspire does not get you uncuffed.
In-depth explanation:
When you start any interaction area around you gets scanned for a nearby cop (~7m radius). If such cop exists, he will be chosen to come to you and arrest you, as soon as he reaches your position.
On top of that, there is a hidden aggressive cuffing mechanic that allows for any other cop to cuff you(so not just the one that was chosen when you start the interaction). This mechanic checks if you have a cop close enough to your location (~1m radius around you), and if so, you will be cuffed automatically. This mechanic starts working 1 second after you start the interaction, BUT if your interaction is a player revive, it will be delayed, and only activate after 3 seconds(so at least basic inspire is needed to play on most DW+ difficulties).
All cuffing mechanics work on other (human) players as well, exactly the same way.
Hostage Control (Optional feature)
Fully intimidated cops count as a hostage for this mechanic.
Keeping/killing hostages will affect gameplay in various ways, details in the table bellow:
| Hostages killed/kept | Penalty | Bonus |
|---|---|---|
| 1 through 8 | Each hostage affects enemy respawn delay up to max total of 50% (at 8 hostage kills), special spawn chances up to max total of 25%, and max amount of cops on the map, up to max total of 30% | Same things as in penalty, but with positive values. Also with at least 1 hostage you get longer assault breaks |
| 6 | Cloaker starts teleporting to players prioritizing those with higher amount of hostage kills, he respawns every 50-130 seconds | - |
| 8 | Cloaker now respawns every 30-80 seconds | - |
| 9 | New enemy joins to prevent any more slaughter | - |
Minor gameplay adjustment
After all players were downed, game will end in roughly 32 seconds instead of 10 (stockholm syndrome/leech buff pretty much, affects all difficulties)
Gameplay customization
Spoiler!
You can customize some things in DW+'s mod settings:
Visual
- All minigun dozers can be replaced with Zeal counterparts for the american faction
- Marshal uniforms can be changed to black/green/black+green for the american faction
Gameplay
- You can change how many cops should be killed for assault to end
- You can select one of four difficulty pre-sets, stats for them are in the table below
Difficulty pre-sets
S - Shields
M - Medics
T - Tasers
D - Dozers
C - Cloakers
| Difficulty | Special limits | Max amount of cops on the map | Respawn delay | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanilla PD2 DW | S - 4, M - 3, T - 3, D - 2, C - 2 | 54-72 (can fluctuate) | ~5 sec. | PD2 as it is |
| DW+ classic | S - 5, M - 5, T - 6, D - 4, C - 3 | 50 (static*) | 4 sec. | Classic. Recommended for trying the mod |
| DW++ | S - 5, M - 5, T - 6, D - 5, C - 3 | 64 (static*) | 3 sec. | Slightly bumped up version of DW+ |
| Insanity | S - 6, M - 5, T - 7, D - 6, C - 4 | 80 (static*) | 1.75 sec. | Shotgunners are more common, DS equivalent |
| Suicidal | S - 7, M - 6, T - 8, D - 7, C - 5 | 120 (static*) | 0.25 sec. | ... |
* This means that it doesn't matter how many players you have/how often they go down, max possible amount of cops on the map is always this value. As for how often this value can be reached - it all really depends on how fast you can kill your opposition.
Additional information/other players
Since you can host public games with this mod, a few things were added:
- Every person who joins your lobby, will get a welcome message when they join, to let them know what this mod does (only on DW difficulty).
- While hosting a game with this mod, your lobby will have "Death Wish +" (amount of +'s depends on your mod difficulty) set as it's name, if you selected a contract on Death Wish difficulty. This can be disabled, but you should only do so, if you have other mods that change your lobby name.
- Chat commands can be used for quick ammo/med bag requests. Other commands can also be used by players who join your lobby to get more info on this mod.
- When player joins your lobby, you can get information in chat on their skill point amount, used perk deck, their PD2 playtime (if possible) and infamy level. You can choose which ones to enable in settings.
- When a heist ends, statistics of your choice (like kill/death ratio, headshots etc.) can be printed in chat (Host only).
How these messages look in game:
Spoiler!
Welcome message for players who join your lobby: (picture is outdated, but you can still understand how it would look)
Messages bellow can be disabled
Player's stats:
Stats in chat after heist is over:
Note: This mod is balanced around having 4 players in your team - if you play solo, you will get same amount of spawns as in co-op and you might be overwhelmed quickly, so i would recommend against turning bots off.
No Mercy Heist Adjustments
Spawns on this map are inconsistent, due to randomization of spawn points, sometimes all of them can open at the start, and sometimes the opposite can happen. To avoid this issue, first 2 assault waves will be skipped in a quick and 'theatrical' way, after which the chaos of Death Wish + shall begin. How it will go down:
- Alarm goes off, first responders are coming in
- After the wait first 2 assaults begin
- Anticipation and build (starting) assault phases will be completely skipped
- Waves themselves are short, about 40 seconds each
- Break in-between those waves will be extremely short
- Enemies will be limited to grey/green/blue light swats and occasional tazers/shields/medics, with other special units never appearing
- After second assault is over, a chat message and a voice line from Bain will play notifying everyone of the new assault beginning in full force
- With wave 3, DW+ chaos begins (note: wave 3 has no smoke/flash grenades to make it a bit less annoying, but on wave 4 they make their reappearance, so be warned)
Due to these changes it is recommended to play this heist in loud from the start, otherwise it may be quite boring.
Custom Heists Support
Some custom heists have their own sets of enemy spawn groups, which causes DW+ to break. You will notice this issue quickly, because no enemies will spawn in, other then single cloakers and marshals, or you may just crash. DW+ will try to fix custom heists, but it's not guaranteed to happen automatically, so I will have to manually add support for custom heists affected by this problem to fix them. If you have played on a custom heist and noticed this issue, please report it in the comments with a link for that heist.
Currently supported custom heists (that were broken prior to manual updates):
Other mods compatibility:
Spoiler!
- NGBTO (newbies go back to overkill) is not compatible with DW+ as of patch 2.5, use TDLQ's Lobby Settings as an alternative.
- DW+ will conflict with any mod that changes enemy spawns. Most likely they will be ignored and DW+ will take priority.
- Any mods that add chat commands will conflict with DW+.
- DW+ should have no problems with mods that affect enemy ai and how cops think. You can try using those at your own risk. One thing i know for sure is that LIES is more prone to crashes with DW+, compared to FSS, so if you want to speed up bot's reaction time i'd recommend FSS
BeardLib is used for auto-updates. After installing a new version, you should restart your game in case there are some major changes. If you want to check patch notes you can check changelog on this page.
The earliest (like 4 months before upload) version of DW+ was a heavily modified version of Rokk's IREnFIST, which after a lot of adjustments and additions came to be what DW+ is now. So please give it a try, if you enjoy certain parts of DW+ that were taken from IREnFIST, like cuffs on interactions (non-aggressive version), if you want to play with new mechanics in a more light and closer to vanilla-like experience. P.S. This mod wasn't updated in over a year, so beware - bugs are probably present.
My personal additional mod recommendations:
Spoiler!
- DayNight Changes reborn by test1 - refreshes how your game looks significantly by changing environments
- Immortal Dominated cops - may prevent frustrations when playing with randoms, but can also cause inconvenience while playing with hostage control enabled
- Gilza or any other weapon/skill rebalancing mod to keep gameplay fresh. I use Gilza because it's what i would prefer (since i made it) because it gives more weapons a figting chance. Also includes a new melee focused perk deck
- Full Speed Swarm by TdlQ - will make all bots react and perform actions quicker. You can also use it for a slight performance boost during loud gameplay, if you set everything in FSS to lowest settings. Or you can combine it's max settings with higher DW+ difficulties to create a truly chaotic (masochist approved) experience
- Lobby settings by TdlQ - saves lobby settings properly and allows you to limit players who can join your lobby based on their infamy/playtime but unlike NGBTO will do all these checks while players are connecting, so they wont be kicked after joining, but rather declined on the Crime.net screen
- Hostage Escort Tweaks by EdisLeado - old but gold. Lets you get 3 hostage followers that are much faster. Really useful with new Hostage Control mechanic. Personal note: this mod has a welcome message just like DW+ which will make reading them kinda annoying for new players/randoms, so i'd recommend turning it off in HET, since connected player's can't get any benefit from this mod unless they have it installed as well. In hostageescorttweaks.lua remove line that starts like this:
Hooks:Add("NetworkManagerOnPeerAdded", "NetworkManagerOnPeerAdded_HET", function(peer, peer_id)and everything after it.
