Weapons/Movement
The Basics
I love the gunplay. In all honesty, there are people way more passionate about the intricate details and balance of the primary/secondary weapons, I’m happy with where they are going. The pistols are wicked fun. Movement is within my reals of fun and acceptable. Seeing some more trick jumpy bits wouldn’t be bad, though I haven’t got into it yet. Something does feel claustrophobic up close, it could be that I’ve been playing Tribes: Ascend a lot recently.
[Knives (also notes on inventory)
There definitely needs to be a slight Rate of Stab drop. And on a successful stab, the delay could stand to be significantly longer. The reason here is going for a stab should be a chance to kill if the other player is below 60% health. Getting a successful stab on a player that doesn’t kill them should be effective as stabbing a bear. They have a gun, you didn’t do enough damage, you should either switch to your primary/sidearm, or back off. Having time to stab again without the opponent having time to respond feels cheap and challengeless, because it only involves “RUN AT THEM”.
I was immediately turned off by the knife button. While I do keep my knife bound to E, it doesn’t attack for me. It feels clumsy and awkward with the fast paced nature of the game. To really hit well with the knife with the high speed strafing in Dirty Bomb, you have to do more timing than switch weapon, and immediately stab. I think the “knife button” is trying to do what Quick Inventory already does. Same with the ability button. The only reason to make a “knife” or “grenade” button if they are aren’t in your weapon bank.
I honestly feel that the game ever doing an action that “mouse1” covers is really redundant. The purpose of hotkeys in PC gaming is to reduce mouse movement. It is never difficult to click. I feel what’s trying to happen with the auto-do-stuff buttons is make up for the somewhat clumsy numeric bind system if your character has a ton of “stuff”.
There is a ton of rethinking that can be done about arranging the default binds or commands-to-button interaction more new-player-friendly, but think of it like this: an automatic car doesn’t “shift for you”, it has an automatic clutch. We shouldn’t be focused on adding keybinds to “do things for you”, like having Q press 6 and Mouse1, we should be focused how a proper “quick-swap” button and inventory bank behave. Games with melee, grenade, and ability/pack buttons typically don’t have those things in the weapon bank as well, that’s why they get buttons to switch-use-switch.
All in all, if you’re not careful you create an effortless system, not an efficient one.
On an upside, binding “next weapon” to Q using weapons only has worked perfectly for quick-switch. From any item it takes me to primary, and to pistol after that.
Grenades
I can’t really say how I feel about grenades. They seem pretty unfinished. And very, very heavy. I absolutely loved them in Wolf and Quake Wars, and I imagine they have some ideas already, but here are mine:
[ul]
[li]Pulse! The best part of Splash Damage grenades is the 5 second crosshair pulse and “click-click-clank-clunk-BOOM” sound.
[/li][li]An optional countdown ring around the reticle wouldn’t bother me.
[/li][li]Characters calling out “Grenade!” or a placeholder grenade-throw-sound would be nice. Grenades are an area-danger weapon, a visual indicator is hardly useful…
[/li][li]In fact, get rid of the HUD indicator. Add a glow to the grenade for visibility if need be. The grenades aren’t powerful enough, and don’t spend enough time pointlessly laying around on the ground for them to be announced via 2D icon. The HUD never really needs to display information that’s available for half a second.
[/li][/ul]
HUD, and Map System
HUD
Generally I like the layout, it’s minimalist and square. The first thing I have to ask is what in the world is with all the post-processing when you bring the scoreboard up?! Anyway, here goes:
Next to the map, in the top left, or in the objective feed, I think there is definitely a call for the status/time frame of explosive charges. When I was playing the trainyard level, I had trouble keeping tabs on how much time I had to defuse the C4 when I wasn’t looking at it. And when I’m working on flanking an enemy, that’s not always the case. Unless the top bar fills up as a charge gets closer? I don’t remember, partially because of things that make the health bar hard to deal with too. Right off the bat, I felt the cooldown counters are perfect. The ammo counter is succinct and easy to follow. But the health display definitely needs work. It’s hard to tell when you’re in “danger” simply because it’s not ideal to check how full your health bar is, but to recognize when it changes.
Possible ideas? Yellow-to-Red behind the blue bar. Or perhaps giving the black box behind the ammo/grenade counter a green/yellow/red hue depending on how low you are. Just anything for something to train our peripheral vision to train on. No one needs a screen-wide warning, and gamers like myself tune out blood-splatter or red-glow as danger signs… simply because “blood splatter” isn’t a definable thing like “HEALTH BAR RED”.
In general I feel like the HUD has a lot of icons to work with at any given time, a lot of them really similar. There is still a lot of open space to work with, and more importantly the mini-map utilization.
Mini-Map
The mini-map in Quake Wars had excellent functionality, but that also had much to do with the spotting feature. It would be nice to see a host of things on the mini-map for reference, partially to take some burden off the HUD, partially to give a sense of the battle at large.
The heartbeat sensor of the covert ops could give off a radar effect, or even just an effective outline for your team to see. This would drastically change its usefulness. Not just to see the effective range, but to know there are NO enemies in a given area can be just as useful as knowing where one is. Also if the effect was increased, the wall-hack HUD markers could be obsolete.
Turrets and their coverage area would help you understand your passive defense coverage.
Zooming in and out would be wonderful if it gave you more info about your friendlies, and the objectives. Though it would be important to make the map not too power. I’m not sure how it works now, but choosing if enemies show up when they are in sight, when they fire, when they are spotted, how they act under radar etc… is really important to the balance of the map.
Communication
Built in VOIP would be great. I heard it’s down the line. It’d absolutely need to show who’s talking, and their icon on the HUD deserves a radio signal.
A letter based v-say system would be awesome, the quick conversational and contextual stuff that was available in Quake Wars was great. I’d love to see the communication system evolve as the game does, but I think that it’s one thing that can definitely receive some modernizing.
Oh there’s more… that’s it for now…
Except for map flow could be made better with more iconic chokepoints, there is a lot of crazy multi-story alley-way fights, but a lack of open areas with planned approach. Quake Wars was nail-biting from the get go, but much of that may have had to do with presentation and polish.
Oh, I was hoping I could get my name updated to aCutePuppy…