I understand this is wrapped in marketing hype but please hear me out…
Mercs allow us to personify a distinct playing style in a contained package that we can continually balance for competitive play. By bundling an ability and combat style into that single package with a distinctive voice and appearance,
Much has been spoken about on these forums when it comes to Merc individuality. Listed multiple times within the Blog post is the word ABILITY. I was personally hoping (as many other people here were also) that we would be seeing Mercs getting additional abilities in future to help define them better. Obviously by the wording in this post and what we are playing now… Revive, Health and Ammo do not come under the definition of abilities.
The reason why this concerns me is actually due to something that has not been confirmed and is not shown in the development… I was hoping in future to see more of a Draft style system in future but with such dull Mercs I doubt that will / should happen now. Due to poor voice acting the majority of the voiced Mercs also have very little in terms of personality. Proxy, Thunder and Stoker seem to be about the only Mercs that stand out in this aspect. The main reason for this in my opinion is the lack of urgency in most of the voices. You could be in the middle of a 5 man team fight with explosions and getting shot multiple times and your character sounds like they are sat down at a bar talking to their mates. Maybe I am being a little harsh but after playing lots of TF2 and left 4 Dead 1/2 the bar for voice acting in a FPS has been risen much higher than we have in Dirty Bomb.
We feel that our Mercs introduce more meaningful choices, a larger variety of play-styles and more character to Dirty Bomb.
If this is the case in future many of us here will be much happier… Right now though the only variety in play style really come down to if you are playing a Medic, Engineer or Other…
The core of each Merc is a special ability shared by no other Merc
Like mentioned above.
As well as specific combat types, movement speeds and health values, each Merc should have their own unique play-style, catering to a wide-range of player preferences.
All of which are basically decided by body type…
As well as covering a diverse-range of ethnicities across hardworking men and women, every Merc also comes with their own distinct look & personality that will become more apparent with the recently added voice audio.
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Meet Dirty Bomb’s Mercenaries (or Mercs for short) - the living, breathing (often bleeding) embodiments of competitive, fun multiplayer gaming. They come from all over the world, from every kind of background, united by an unquenchable thirst for cold hard cash. They’re the very best at what they do, and what they do involves getting gold for shooting lead. They each have a unique trick up their sleeve, a special combat ability that marks them out from the common herd.
The idea of Mercs and their thirst for “Cold Hard Cash” has been mentioned a lot since the announcement of Dirty Bomb… Strange really when you consider that Cash/Money is not mentioned in the game at any point. Now I know this may sound like taking digs for digs sake but right now we are witnessing even LoL totally recreating the lore behind the game. Even switching XP for CASH would make sense I suppose… Watching money stack on money is always fun…
On a more serious note…
The idea of Mercenaries basically makes us the bad guy, no matter how you look at it. I think giving each Merc their own moral compass would help draw people to them in future. I know its late now as the voices have already been recorded but there was a chance to have external factors in their come out in some circumstances. Yes, its pure cheese but it does work. Give each Merc a real reason for being there! When done right people will also select a character based off “who they are” and once that happens there will be no limit on how much money certain people are willing to spend to enhance that Merc.
Mercs should also fill one or more gameplay roles.
One week roles are bad the next they are IN BOLD taking pride and place in the marketing material…
Take Proxy as an example - she’s a fast, close-quarters objective specialist with a defensive ability. She’d be a perfect complement to a team that already consists of Mercs with healing, long range, heavy weapons and munitions support. We want a varied mixture of Mercs to always be more than the sum of their parts.
So one of each class then? or roles should we say?
There is no varied mixture here… The role is the Merc.
We also aim to cater for a large variety of player skills, including different aiming sub-skills such as tracking, twitch, and projectile. On top of that, support skills like multi-tasking & resource management and also situational awareness, smart deployable placement, subterfuge and disrupting the enemy team play important roles in Dirty Bomb. The goal here is to give every player areas to excel in by choosing a Merc that suits their strengths.
Those who cannot press [Left] and [Right] plus [Crouch] need not apply…
Finally, we want to make sure that all of our Mercs are balanced.
When we say balanced, we don’t mean we want Mercs to be equal when it comes to 1-on-1 combat, although we do always want to give every a Merc a fighting chance against another.
So do you want every Merc to have a fighting chance vs each other or not?
The constant balance tweaks towards a everything being balanced apart from Solly that is supposed to be a tiny bit better tells me that you want MOST Mercs to be equal when it comes to 1-on-1 combat. I still do not believe that you really understand just how irrelevant a Merc pick is outside of the 5 classes >.<
Some Mercs will be better at combat, some at supporting, some at soaking up damage etc
Please list the mercs that are good at soaking up damage… lol
I know I should not read so much into marketing bull**** but I cannot help it…
Every single time I read the released info I imagine the game!
It is never the game we are playing… Most of the cool things that are said seem like they are already out of reach. I hope that the game that is delivered is more like what you are mentioning in these blog posts (well in most cases at least).
One of the reasons I decided to make this post was because I honestly worry that sometimes your perspectives (basically living the game) have been twisted to the point you actually believe that is what the game is delivering.