An hour of good old fashioned PvP was just what I needed tonight. Too long have I mired in the trenches of development. Too long have I toiled upon the spreadsheet and the beta forum. Too long have I launched the dev client and ticked off tickets. Tonight we dined on carnage! Man what a great time. Many thanks to the dozen or so of you that managed to kill me.
Of course being me, I have a bullet point list, in no particular order, of things that I want to change. I bet it is a bit different than yours but if you have anything to add, please do. I'm not quite as verbose as some so I hope you can see through to the points I'm trying to make. I'll leave the more flowery declarations to my friend Oli. He's much better at that sort of thing anyhoo.
Of course being me, I have a bullet point list, in no particular order, of things that I want to change. I bet it is a bit different than yours but if you have anything to add, please do. I'm not quite as verbose as some so I hope you can see through to the points I'm trying to make. I'll leave the more flowery declarations to my friend Oli. He's much better at that sort of thing anyhoo.
- Air Raid Siren - Less is more. I thought we addressed that but, well, I guess not.
- Show More Friendlies - Killer and Oli are right. I am wrong. We need to show more non mission friendlies if we can. Tonight we must have had half the server running around Canterbury.
- Make Night Better - Actually I wrote this before I played in the night. My anticipation was worse than the reality based on years of night suckage. Still, while night has its place, we need to see what we can do in the new engine.
- EVERY MISSION GETS A MOBILE SPAWN - I don't particularly care how.
- Love the Atmosphere - I really like playing an infantry man slugging around and seeing the air battles overhead, the bombs going off, the tanks firing down range. I think we are really close to "the smell of napalm in the morning". And that just kicks ass.
- BIG FIGHTS ARE COOL - We need to evolve the design to permit more of this action. This includes player management tools.
- KILL MESSAGES ARE COOL - WTF were we thinking...oh yeah, sim. I want more game without losing the sim.
- Squad Invites - These need to be more prominent in the UI and on the squad page.
- Dynamic Missions - My group need to stay together better. Dynamic origins and targets selected by the mission leader live in game. I should be able to change brigades this way without even realizing it.
- Flag Visibility - I want flagpoles and I want them flying high.
- Who Captured - I want recognition in the capture message by squad or player or something.
- Contacts - I was wrong. I want them auto. I want them shared. I want them limited.
- Corpses - Cool but let's show deaths near me on my map. Yeah buddy!
- Strat Map - I want to see more info about a town's facility ownership without zooming in. Either in the right map pane or preferably as icons on the map.
- LMG - The sights can be better.
- Mortars - Close but not perfect. I need a bit more aid in firing. Show me where they land? I dunno about that but give me better map tools for ranging. Maybe a mark where I am aiming.
- AAR - The reserved vehicle thing needs a rework This, like much of this, is already spec'd it just needs time to do and priority. I should see what I have reserved at AAR or I should have to go back to the brief. Eventually, I'd like to be able to respawn without ever leaving the game world and AAR should be my quit history. See: Dynamic Missions (also known as persistent groups).
Posts
12 comments:
Yep, certain was fun as always.
As for your bullit points, some are good ideas, some need implimenting like yesterday, and some others are just plain bad!
The worst of all of the ideas is the kill credits. Whilst you can argue it's cool, and you can already use CS&R to see who you killed, there is a MAJOR issue with it.
e.g. I see a ei running into some bushes a couple of hundred meters from me, and I spray the area with a LMG. Currently, I don't know if I killed him until either I despawn & check stats, or go and find his body.
With the kill credits showing in game, I know 100% for certain if I got him or not. This is VERY VERY bad for game play.
As for some of the other suggestions, here's my 2 cents.
I get the feeling that despite the huge & rich gameworld(map) we have, things are starting to push the fights in to little compact areas, almost like a series of 'shoebox' type game fights.
It almost feels like a shift in the games emphasis, you could amlost say, towards appealing to a different type of gamer.
I get the feeling that many of the changes, and talked about possible ideas for the futre are aimed at appealing more to the 'shoebox' FPS shooter crowd.
Whislt I can totaly understand this from a buisness point of view I feel a step in that direction will take away a lot of what makes the game unique and so good.
Anyway, it's your game and your livelyhood so your are entitled to do whatever you like with the game, and I hope that we are still here in another 7 years discussing the most recent "Kill-a-Rat" comp.
I agree on the kill messages. I sure like the instant feedback but it would give away too much FoW.
there are ways to work around this and still give that accomplishment in game. You can put it in the AAR. I'd like to see the AAR be a complete history of the play session so you don;t have to go to CSR to get that info. Also you could delay it based on any number of factors.
As to the shoe box I don;t really want that but at the same time, I'd like to have more MSP's available as you "capture" ground. The FB to town walt can still be a long one. If you could build an object in the world as a new forward position then you could move uot from there. If it is sasfe the enemy won't destroy it but if you don't really own that ground then it will get destroyed. There are issues with getting it right but I think it would greatly enhance infantry play in the same way that MSPs did. They are just a little too hard to actually get placed. Of course they have the same drawbacks with destruction of down time that was associated with riding on a truck.
>Night
What's "better"? Night needs to be longer for the naval game to work as a sim. Night needs to be configured so that there is no ground visibility from the air in order for supply movement (trains, truck convoys, ships) to work either as a game or a sim. But, game time with no air-to-ground targeting is a marketing non-starter, isn't it?
>Mortars
The easier you make it for players without gametime-developed special skills to use them accurately, the less able you are to make them realistically lethal...unless you limit spawn numbers, or impose ammo limits, or make them two-player-operated-only. I favor the latter from a game/sim perspective, *plus* no simplification of aiming...but obviously the question is marketing-sensitive.
>Who Captured
My hope is that someday the game moves to group capture, not individual. Individual accomplishment-credit is corrosive to team gameplay, and encourages design decisions that result in unrealism.
>Kill Messages
My take is that the best way to implement "sim"-ness in a game is to ask your customer during first contact what kind of game-features they like, and turn on the package of sim-features only for those who identify themselves as having that orientation...with later customer control via settings. That approach should work just fine when the optional features don't really affect game-effectiveness much. It's *good* to have a game that can be enjoyed in a range of ways.
So, delayed kill messages are no problem, as long as they're turned on during initial settings.
>Corpses
Deaths near you on the map? Ummm, what aspect of military-combat reality would that represent? And, it would give a big tactical advantage to those who didn't care about realism.
You can see corpses near you. If proximity-to-platoon-leader/assistant-leader was effectively obligatory and wandering individual soldiers became a thing of the past, you'd know that corpses you saw near you that weren't there a while ago were casualties from your platoon. Wouldn't that be immersive-realism gameplay?
I'm thinking more along the lines of when someone very close to me dies and I would be able to hear their death throes and see their corpes that I get a little skull and crossbones. One of the things that a monitor and an fps viewpoint don;t do well is actually simulate a real world environmental SA. One of the things that becomes very apparent when using a buzzard client is the amount of Keystone Cops that happens in the game world with people being oblivious to things that IRL would be readily apparent. Maps and chat are tools to help overcome this limitation placed on the game world by the monitor and controls.
Along those lines, an idea I've wondered about for a while: as noted, game players tend not to look around realistically. What if the default player POV would automatically, quickly look slightly to one side or the other with an algorithmic periodicity, in order to maintain a realistic almost-all-around SA?
Look-frequency to each side would be dependent on the presence or absence on that side of friendlies/enemies, i.e. if there's nothing to be seen the time increases until the next look to that side, and the inverse.
Automatic glancing around would be suppressed for a while after the player uses the head-swivel/POV controls or rotates his body/changes movement direction, and would be fully suppressed when a weapon is in use...and could be turned off in setup.
A death scream nearby, or a weapon being fired when you aren't in weapon mode, or a movement sound when there's no algorithmic-awareness of a friendly presence to that side, would cause an immediate glance in that direction. Thus there'd be fewer instances of running up behind an oblivious standing infantryman and knifing him, or setting a sapper charge on him.
Ditto for glancing at the source of nearby chat, if the algorithm for positioning could handle the calculations.
It'd be great if such glances were synchronously third-party depicted as head turns, but presumably that's impossible with the current update data rate. But, maybe the default infantry model could run a motion loop with pseudorandom head turns, so that other non-moving infantrymen in your view would be a little less inhumanly rigid.
Of course, the ideal third-party interface would be one in which other infantrymen would be seen to run the automatic-glance algorithm...i.e. if I'm standing among a group of infantrymen who aren't looking at me, and I say something in local chat, or click off the safety on my weapon, they all briefly look at me. That could be a goal for down the road.
It would be an unconventional game visual interface...but I think it would increase both realism and game-effectiveness.
Mortars...solution could be to provide a means by which map markup information can be shared to a specific group of folks within the Mission group.
Two different jump to mind. The first would be to add a Mortar Targeting Icon to the markups, as well as allowing players to markup their own maps for personal use without having to wait for or require ML approval.
Second solution would be to allow players to create Ad-hoc fireteam-sized groups and then allow map-markup information (as well as 'kill' success) to be shared within the group without requiring someone else's approval.
As for LMGs...the 'simple' solution (iffen Jaeger's graphics update allows for it) would be to make the aperature sight and box magazine semi-transparent. The present setup makes the Allied LMGs unrealistically difficult to opperate successfully.
I've always hated night fighting...always! Make it better, I command you.
Mortars are very difficult to aim and I know some of the most successful users have two accounts. One to fire the mortar and the other who spots rounds until the desired area is targeted. A target marker that appeared when you opened the map would be helpful in aiming and still would not guarantee anything was at the aim point to kill.
Night is useful in that is decreases the visibility of vehicles from the air so it is the best time to attack CPs containing or adjacent to airfields. With my CRT monitor I was forced to turn the gamma up very high or bushes were entirely black. I just purchased a LCD monitor and night is darker decreasing the visibility but there is no area too black to see. As an infantryman I like the concealment night provides. What is your objection to the present night?
Hi Gophur,
How do you do ? I hope you're fine.
I can't wait to discover all the huge work you've done for 1.29, as to hear about the expected features for 1.30. The evolution of this project is really something that interests me, and I fully support it.
I have been thinking about a long term strategy plan for WWIIol, and I'm convinced that the introduction of true Artificial Intelligence is something that could open new interesting doors to the Battleground Europe concept.
Maybe you have been told about a few topics where I spoke about such a concept. To resume iy, I found a fantastic new WWII game to illustrate the concept : Just look at this video http://www.warleaders-game.com/trailer3.swf
and imagine that our ingame leaders (our community managers, eventually) could spend their time setting up orders for virtual factions which would automatically try to accomplish the missions, as AI is doing in that game.
And players ? You'll ask. Well, they may either chose to join/support an AI squad as lonewolf, or to set up a 100% player-controled squad to accomplish the same mission with the same freedom they currently have.
So it would guarantee maximal action and immersion, at any given time of the day. How more players join, how less AI units are available. There would also be constant action over the whole frontline between AI units, making air missions useful at any given time, as naval missions.
We could also imagine to have interactive AI officers and soldiers (who speaks to you when you're hurt, when a grenade lands nearby, when an officer request you to accomplish a task, or to whom you could give proximity orders such as "I need ammo", and so on)
Again, it's just a concept, in case China makes you too rich and you would like to launch a second MMO concept =]
BTW, please get an artist have a
look at the explosions in this video. Especially the ones from bombers and artillery : i-m-m-e-r-s-i-v-e ! That's actually what I expected to see after the previous overpass.
Thanks for you time spent to this message. Hugs to KFS1 and DOC.
See you during the next welcome back soldiers !
Zebbeee
PS: other videos are available on youtube, as this 10min ingame footage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHfrAbaOMYs&feature=related
Again, please pay attention to the dynamics of explosions compared to ours. It's maybe maybe more hollywood-like but more stressful.
Thanks Zee. I'll take a look at them. Swamped today getting the Open Test ready for this week.
I agree on the Ai issues. One thing I've always wanted to see was a battle comprised largely with AI and the players playing the heroes or leading those AI. Some games have something similar but none has pulled them together that I've seen.
Sorry I can't try out the 1.29 beta online.
Offline it seemed very nice though, I had excellent performances (yes I'm still running that old laptop with a 64Mb video card and 512ram =] )
I was thinking about that "AI" combats, and it could actually already be added to the game in a very simple way with just some code lines :
When a brigade sets an AO on a town hosting an enemy brigade, as long as it owns the FB there's a "virtual" fight going on between both brigades. As a consequence, both spawnlists will drop with a speed depending of the involved forces (a kind of Risk algorythm).
This would add a new dimension to the game : even if players are not fighting on the field, brigades are losing supply if attacked or if attacking. A town overstocked with 3 brigades will quickly deplete a single enemy brigade, and this could be a preliminary phase to a larger operation involving "real" players later.
On a small scale, players will still fight for the control of FB's during this process. Or HC's will maybe prefer to fallback a brigade and keep a no man's land at the frontline (which is also better during low pop since it balances the game).
This would make the BEGM even more useful to check the frontline from home and would allow a more interactive contribution during low pop.
AO numbers remain limited and AI Brigades doesn't cap towns neither move forward. AI should just help making the game more immersive and alive. This could be the first step.
Maybe KFS1 will find out a way to code such a thing with the existing tools.
Any thoughts about a concept like this ? (Gophur or someone else reading this)
Have a nice week !
Post a Comment