Most important issues
Posted: 24 Jul 2013, 00:08
Good evening,
id like to adress the main issues about what needs to be done with this game. First of all i want to say that you should stay true to the basic idea behind your game, its awesome and i waited a very long time for a shooter like this, which is the first who focuses on playerskill through avoiding any differences in weapons, charakters, equippment or progress, featuring avoidable projectiles - never ever give that up. There were many things that were good from the very beginning, but even when i bought the game during the first hours it was available in closed beta some of those issues i will adress now caught my attention, now still in the game. But lets stop here and get straightforward to them.
1. The first point is about how duels actually work here. Though i bought and played this game for combat, i find myself playing very rarely. You will hardly miss that it often comes to close range where players randomly move left and right while shooting also randomly at the opponent since you cant know where he will be.
This gets boring and frustrating, since you dont feel like it matters much what you do, sometimes win, sometimes loss but always doing the same. There is no reason for your win or loss than luck, its most important that you have this. If you loose, you should be able to conclude: "I did -that- wrong, thats why i lost." Not: "I did everything right, just had bad luck this time." Note that there is no coded luck in this game, but fights result in feeling so through the movements players do.
And there is the problem. Players are able to change there direction so extremly fast that its nearly ridiculous. this results in them moving closer together, which itself results in the whole problem here. Close combat should be deadly and slowing down the acceleration just right enough, which is what i suggest to fix it, will feature that. That being said, mid/longrange combat is fine.
2. Second issue is the energy key, which is heavily overloaded with sprint, jump, hook, slide, and other actions. While most actions are ok to be put together, imho its really necessary to unbind sprint from them, being able to sprint without the need of jump. That of course makes jumps kinda useless since they make you vulnerable, so most will stop using them. We need do give jump a true purpose other than beeing just an indicator to sprint, which feels very enforced and thus odd, unnatural. That guides us directly to the third issue:
3. Jump has the big drawback of leaving you very vulnerable for projectiles, but it also is the biggest fun to fight jumping targets because of the same reason - you can calculate not just guess where your enemy will be and land a
deserved not random (!) hit, which is most satisfying. Imho the jump needs to get a real purpose, also this game needs a interesting mechanic thats hard to master - normally you do nothing but run arround and shoot. I suggest implementing a usefull rocketjump, not exaggerated as in many games but decent while still noticeable. The actual one is so weak is not worth the projectile/looking down, the new one should be it.
The first issue is probably most important, the other ones require a more heavy change in mechanics and are not that important (still i think they would improve the game noticeable). Im also quite sure these changes will make the game more popular. I wont adress this another time, now lets see what people think about it.
id like to adress the main issues about what needs to be done with this game. First of all i want to say that you should stay true to the basic idea behind your game, its awesome and i waited a very long time for a shooter like this, which is the first who focuses on playerskill through avoiding any differences in weapons, charakters, equippment or progress, featuring avoidable projectiles - never ever give that up. There were many things that were good from the very beginning, but even when i bought the game during the first hours it was available in closed beta some of those issues i will adress now caught my attention, now still in the game. But lets stop here and get straightforward to them.
1. The first point is about how duels actually work here. Though i bought and played this game for combat, i find myself playing very rarely. You will hardly miss that it often comes to close range where players randomly move left and right while shooting also randomly at the opponent since you cant know where he will be.
This gets boring and frustrating, since you dont feel like it matters much what you do, sometimes win, sometimes loss but always doing the same. There is no reason for your win or loss than luck, its most important that you have this. If you loose, you should be able to conclude: "I did -that- wrong, thats why i lost." Not: "I did everything right, just had bad luck this time." Note that there is no coded luck in this game, but fights result in feeling so through the movements players do.
And there is the problem. Players are able to change there direction so extremly fast that its nearly ridiculous. this results in them moving closer together, which itself results in the whole problem here. Close combat should be deadly and slowing down the acceleration just right enough, which is what i suggest to fix it, will feature that. That being said, mid/longrange combat is fine.
2. Second issue is the energy key, which is heavily overloaded with sprint, jump, hook, slide, and other actions. While most actions are ok to be put together, imho its really necessary to unbind sprint from them, being able to sprint without the need of jump. That of course makes jumps kinda useless since they make you vulnerable, so most will stop using them. We need do give jump a true purpose other than beeing just an indicator to sprint, which feels very enforced and thus odd, unnatural. That guides us directly to the third issue:
3. Jump has the big drawback of leaving you very vulnerable for projectiles, but it also is the biggest fun to fight jumping targets because of the same reason - you can calculate not just guess where your enemy will be and land a
deserved not random (!) hit, which is most satisfying. Imho the jump needs to get a real purpose, also this game needs a interesting mechanic thats hard to master - normally you do nothing but run arround and shoot. I suggest implementing a usefull rocketjump, not exaggerated as in many games but decent while still noticeable. The actual one is so weak is not worth the projectile/looking down, the new one should be it.
The first issue is probably most important, the other ones require a more heavy change in mechanics and are not that important (still i think they would improve the game noticeable). Im also quite sure these changes will make the game more popular. I wont adress this another time, now lets see what people think about it.
