[QUOTE=tokamak;408636]Yeah I like that. I think that, if the specialisation is possible, that if a medic truly wants to focus on that task he eventually would have to sacrifice his rifle and be limited to a handgun in order to be able to carry really impressive medic tools.
An engineer could go in a similar way. If he has a deployable specialisation then he would need to give up his main weapon as well. In return he could then get a mobile (slow) turret or a predator drone or something. Or what about an operative upgrade that allows him to fire his gun while being disguised with the caveat being that this isn’t a real gun from the get-go. He needs to walk around with a fake weapon for the entire time in order to enjoy being more convincing while disguised. [/quote]
This isn’t sounding much like an FPS any more. Maybe there would be a market for such a game but I’d be disappointed if I bought an SD game and 80% of the classes have little to none shooting capability. Again, sounds like something more suitable to another genre.
And no, I still don’t think specialising classes works. 
I just really like the idea of a large diversity between the lethality of players. It created a wonderful dynamic in WoW pvp. In large fights players had to target the fragile support classes first in order to disintegrate the team’s cohestion. In turn, players were forced to protect the weaker classes so that they could keep benefiting from the substantial support (healing, buffs, debuffs) they offered.
I’d like to see that happen in a shooter. Being a good at dodging and aiming would still be rewarded but on top of that you would also need to know your priorities and put those shooters kills right where they matter the most. I want to see a game move away from the simple mechanic of shooting simply at anything that moves. That’s what made Brink lame, the classes were too similar, not recognisable enough and in that it didn’t matter who got killed first.
as has been mentioned before, this is okay when you’re looking at large groups, often organised achieving (preselected?) objectives. On an 8v8 match those selections you’re talking about are just going to be glaring holes. The two games are not the same, you’re not comparing the limitations fairly. You say you can’t pull elements of emergent gameplay from Minecraft and DayZ into an SD game but you feel confident an MMORPG would lend well. Come on, this is wishful thinking.
This scenario however, is not possible if you allow players to be any role at any time whenever its convenient. If you do that you just lose the diversity completely. A player focuses on support one second but drops it immediately and goes rambo simply because in that situation it’s more convenient. It means that there’s no real advantages or disadvantages to a role anymore, and that’s whats so essential for having different roles.
Unless you change the fundamental rules of the game it just doesn’t work. You’ve got small teams, you’ve got a limited time, you, in all honesty, have a group of gamers that want action.
You’re just painting people into a corner from which they’ll be unwilling to come out. They will stay within the role selected and AVOID situations where they will lose or worse because frustrated at playing where those situations are unavoidable. You’re talking about a game where people find it hard enough already to coordinate between simple classes with the “convenient” ability to change classes. It’s not that I don’t understand what you are getting at, it’s that I don’t believe the outcome will be as you predict. You’re basically falling into the Brink trap of designing something that needs to be played a specific way and people just don’t play like that, the game needs to be robust enough to handle people playing the way they are going to play, elements need to be there to guide and encourage but not punish if you deviate.
It would be random if it is deterministic. But right now it’s simply having the odds for or against you. The more specialistic your build the bigger the advantages and disadvantages. Of course all builds should be balanced of having as much advantages as disadvantages (IE they can have a different polarity between them but they should always be a zero-sum).
If all players are sometimes on the backfoot and sometimes in favour then skill starts to matter even more. It will be the best players that mitigate their disadvantage the best and get the most out of the advantageous situations. Terrible players will be completely useless while having their class out of their depth and whenever they’re in the advantage they may not even recognise it.
Who wants the odds to be against them? It’s one thing to be bested by a player of better skill, because you can learn from that, improve your skill. To have the outcome of a fight be determined by your pre-match selection and X event during the game just sucks. You’re not going to outsmart that situation. Again you’ll avoid it or you’ll die with a bitter taste in your mouth.
Creating more favourable and more unfavourable conditions for a certain specialisation only increases the weight a player’s skill has.
But supposing that there’s a such a thing an adequate preselected loadout is imposing your ideal way of playing on players.
And I’ve already seen it many times in WoW. The objection that WoW is an rpg wouldn’t be valid because in an rpg the differences between classes are much more important than in a shooter.
If you’re accepting there will be favourable situations then you also need to accept there will be unfavourable ones. Again, it’s just down to luck as to where you go. Yes there is some element of this in existing class and weapon selections but then you’re proposing an inability to even change that. Instead of one death you’re saying a game could ultimately rest on whether one teams selection is better than another, again, bye bye any emphasis on the FPS.
And RPG has a totally different pace and goals.
I think Dota has completely random class selection. At least LoL, the original and all other mods and versions I know of have nothing to ‘balance’ the classes amongst teams. In a pub you picked your class without knowing what the team or the opponents had and it really didn’t make or break the match in any way.
I’m pretty ignorant of them so I can’t really argue much more than to say that if the class selection doesn’t need to be balanced then its impact isn’t entirely relevant to the goal of the game. This is why you can have all this stupid stuff in CoD because really there is less reliance on the class/kit of each player to succeed.
