Community Question: Create a Class

(badman) #1

Community, all of Splash Damage’s games have featured character classes of some sort. Be it Medics that keep people alive, Engineers throwing turrets and mines everywhere, Field Ops calling in artillery strikes, or Operatives disguising themselves as the enemy, there’s a combat role for a multitude of play styles.

So is there room for anything else? That’s the topic of this week’s Community Question, where you have free reign to invent a few classes of your own:

If you could add a character class/combat role, what would it be?

Keep in mind what they might bring to the battlefield and what play styles they’d be suitable for. We look forward to your replies!

(YouAreGood) #2

I’d prefer enhancing the classical 5. Restoring some of the forgotten abilities from the ancient times… of Wolf:ET, like shooting when in disguise until noticed, land mines(2 types of mines shall do the job, why not? Spotting them would be useful again, stoping on them would be the chance in the critical situation… that was fun) and so on… but not too far.

Where I see the place for more new possibilities is the map: side objectives, terrain shape, buildings, bridges, water pomps. :slight_smile:

Want some more? How about new ways of doing things that would require more than one class cooperating on them. Just not to get artificial here… For example a flyer drone might have a thirdEye on it… or maybe it’s a bit too broad cooperation… I hope you get the idea - mechanics instead of “3 engineers inside Trojan and its HP += 150”.

In other words - Keep it simple, and keep maps being the right place to use a good bunch of different tactics… the more possibilities, the more creativity is welcome, the longer we will see something new in your product - the better fun will be! :slight_smile:

(tokamak) #3

Field ops needs to be redefined as a class that supports the efficacy of the rest of the team. I wrote a large post on this a while ago. In ETQW the Field Ops is too much about gigantic fireworks and not enough about being the backbone of the team. I’m blacking out on what my old ideas were, I’ll have to look back in what I said back then.

(.Chris.) #4

After playing NS2 be interesting to see how a commander would work in an ET style game.

(tokamak) #5

The elements sound amazing. But it would be even better if we could find a way where everyone could contribute to the overall plan and infrastructure of the team. If next to the usual unlock trees we can also have a ‘meta’ tree per player where they can contribute resources and building space and whatever to the player(s) in charge of the organisation then there’s a lot of flexibility between a unified team and a bunch of individualist. No wrong or right way.

This is what happens in Dawn of War2:

You can capture energy points across the map. The energy points themselves don’t do a lot once captured. However, you can chose to buy generators for these points so they start generating energy which allows you to buy the more interesting toys. The thing is, the energy generated is shared among the entire team. Good practice is to keep things fair and let everyone chip in their share of resources so everyone invests the same from the generated energy.

However, that’s just an ideal setting. In a team of 3 players, not everyone always has the means to provide for the rest. A player that just suffered a horrible loss, or a player that needs to focus on a crucial fight in the map would better spent his resources on keeping his army strong rather than investing for a long term technology development.

This means that within the entire team, all players constantly have to keep an eye on each other’s priorities. Last match I took a defending role, my army remained intact and I didn’t have to invest in replenishing the squad’s numbers. This allowed me to spent my resources on the energy generation, that way I indirectly contributed to the rest of my team who now had a whole lot more resources and means to take a more offending role.

A similar thing could be done with a shooter. And having a class specialised in directing these resource streams would be awesome. More players could meddle into this, if you make them pay their own resources for whatever decisions they take there wouldn’t be a lot of conflict in leadership. People who care about this layer of strategy can be a shareholder while a player who just wants to focus on fighting or doing objectives can invest in just himself.

(Rex) #6

I would just keep the 5 classes as they were perfect in ETQW. I mean I wouldn’t mind some minor changes within the classes itself, but no need to go for 6 or 4 classes.

(BioSnark) #7

Some class(es) not shared on both teams. Like what? Couple examples not meant to be taken as a whole:

[ul]
[li]Melee focused soldier versus standard heavy weapons.[/li][li]Wall climbing snipernoobs versus jetpack* snipernoobs.[/li][li]Commander on one faction.[/li][li]Field Ops offensive support versus Smoke, Riot Shield or similar defensive support.[/li][/ul]

*Seeing as this is a game, not real life, a jet pack should be something that fires one up and forward very forcefully and for a very short time.

(tokamak) #8

Tactical smoke strikes, white phosphorus strikes, move supply crate drop to field ops. Decoy vehicles and deployables, decoy fire (like in CS GO but bigger) and a way to influence the team top-down (as in hierarchy not as in RTS mode).

A ‘top-down’ move could be selecting a player on the map and giving him a temporarily an increase in the buffs given to him. So that way a medic health pack doesn’t heal 100% but but 120% increasing his max hp once. All kinds of things that make an important player stand out and make it easier for the rest of the team to support him with their own stuff.

@Biosnark, yes bring asymmetry back.

(EnderWiggin.DA.) #9

The 5-Star General Class. Does **** all for everybody else but drinks cognac and bangs nurses whenever he can.
Supply Sergeant. Sits on a big cache of weapons and ammo but doesn’t want to give it out because then he’d have to request more and the equipment might get broken. And who wants to do that…

But seriously.
-If you add a commander make sure a bad commander can’t screw the game up for everyone else. Personally I think this is a **** game mechanic except for clan play.
-The question I would be asking is how to make “hacking” for the covert ops class more fun. And less of a zerg rush. Maybe this should be asked for engineers building stuff (ie bridges) too.

Yay, Friday night.

(YouAreGood) #10

If you add the commander, make sure to get new audience :D.

Don’t get me wrong - I want a shooter game. I don’t want Everything-In-One game, where instead of ETQW style of fast, VOIP-based, shared and dynamic management, where everyone is welcome to contribute, we would get some ancient idea of one commander… I totally don’t get why ppl shall HAVE to take part in someone else’s idea if they just don’t believe it.

I would not play that game. Simple as that.

(Humate) #11

Cool question badman :wink:

I would say the fieldops needs a bit of fine tuning for indoor play.

Biosnark mentioned a GDF version of a tac shield in another thread, that protects against explosions/spam only.
However I would also give it a health bonus ability on revives - if the fieldops lays a tac shield on a incapped team-mate, instead of a half revive they receive a regenerated 3/4 revive. Think of it like a nurse role /cough

Another approach - the engie, medic and fieldops work together to create an indoor medcrate in a modular fashion.
Medic drops crate supplies, which then allows the engie to build a medic crate. Fieldops drops crate supplies, which then allows the engie to upgrade the existing medic crate with ammo (and vice-versa). Since the balancer in etqw is green smoke which tells the enemy whats up, have the crate shown clearly on the mini-map instead (until destroyed). I would also take away the ability to regen nades from it… This spices up the engies role on attack indoors, which usually only amounts to laying offensive mines that have no impact.

Teams have to decide, whether or not a static resource which frees up a medic to be more combat focused, is more important than running an extra medic.

(tokamak) #12

That’s why authority of the team needs to be merit based. Not one commander, but people chosing to invest their hard earned resources into having a say in the broader outline of the team’s strategy.

(Rex) #13

Some people played too much NS2 here… :rolleyes:

(.Chris.) #14

How dare they play a new game and get inspiration!!!

(BioSnark) #15

Natural Selection 1 had only the Human team with a commander. The alien team relied on individual resource management and individual build choices. Natural Selection 2, of course, gives both teams commanders, team resources and individual resources.

and other people have nothing to add.

(tangoliber) #16

I’ve said this before, but I hope that you guys sell packaged variants of characters rather than letting us customize our own loadouts. Customization removes the key thing that makes classes feel unique…the combination of strengths and weaknesses. Such as the classic engineer who gets turrets, but is stuck with a shotgun. With Brink style customization, you end up with everyone using the same couple of weapons, and some of the more interesting abilities aren’t used because they get replaced by more boring, efficient abilities.

You can give the four or five basic classes for free. Then sell variants of those classes. So, Medic is free… but Poison Medic, or Tech Medic can be bought, which will give you an alternate way to play the game. Same character system as MOBAs I guess. Variants would have their own skin, their own weapons, and their own abilities. For instance, a Tech Medic might be a heavy with a chain gun and a field regen unit. A Speed Medic might be a light with an SMG and a Lazarus grenade.

And my advice…don’t even offer people a chance to earn variants for XP. They will just complain about the grind. Make the 4-5 basic classes slightly more competitive than all the rest (variants are for style and variety)…and then offer a discount system. The more characters you buy, the cheaper they get. They start at 7-8 dollars per character and slowly move down in price with each one you buy. That way, early adopters won’t be afraid of seeing characters discounted later down the road.

(YouAreGood) #17

[QUOTE=BioSnark;408113]
and other people have nothing to add.[/QUOTE]

Nevertheless we all are flaming, like it would be important, whether or not Rad Soldiers for PC will have a commander class. :slight_smile:

Let’s take it easy, idea is super-cool, as fun as ultra-realistic village simulation, it just does not fit “The Unannounced”, maybe it is the title…

Yet why don’t you guys describe the idea in detail, so we can pick what both sides want from the game, not necessarily inside the commander class. Don’t forget it’s enough to ask a teammate for something - the teammate will either like the idea and will do it, or won’t find it good and will not. Isn’t that totally natural? We have been playing like that all these years, especially with deployables, med-crates, airstrikes, team members allocation in space, class structure of the team. Moving it all away from simple “do that” into the sea of communication between ppl builds the ETQW deepness. Loses nothing, and making game more interesting… It may get one nervous, but still - shooting at idle bots stands as an opposite… The game must be challenging. No difficulty leads to no satisfaction.

To clarify - all the things, that can be achieved with the commander class, in terms of how the gameplay changes on one players decision, are available without the class “commander”. Therefore unless we want to force ppl to certain decisions, normally they would make themselves, we totally don’t need the commander. And whats the point - if your idea seems good to ppl who are capable of realizing it - they will do it. Where is the problem?

So, what things you guys would like this “commander” class to be able to do? Set turrets? Place med-crates? Just to know what exactly we are talking about.

And have a good day!

(MoonOnAStick) #18

Field hospital surgeon. Remain at the spawn playing a succession of mini-games including: mixing dry Martinis, driving golf balls, perving at nurses and removing body parts Operation style.

All of this.

Thanks for the reminder, must get back to that. Not sure you need a dedicated commander in ET though.

(Rex) #19

There is also a commander in BF2, but it doesn’t fit in the ET universe.

(tokamak) #20

Yes, and what I’m saying is that it should be all individual resources, but people can then chose to use those resources for team wide stuff distributed through commander type roles. That way people can pay commander type roles while those who aren’t interested can invest more into their own character.