Musings on basic character development issues

(tokamak) #181

Wait, you buy the universal abillity, then where do you think it needs to be placed?

(Mad Hatter) #182

I don’t know what you mean by “placed.” Last I saw and heard, there was merely an ability section, where you chose which skills you wanted to take into battle with you out of the ones you’ve purchased. The list is split into 5 sections, one for each class, and one for universal skills.

Nowhere did I see anyone having to select which class they wanted to attach their universal abilities to.

(H0RSE) #183

[QUOTE=SockDog;273508]SD are putting in stuff to appeal to a different market, you admit as much above. How does that not make it a hurdle? Just because you enjoy jumping over hurdles doesn’t make them something else and doesn’t mean everyone should enjoy jumping over them. Ultimately it’s something put in your way that you have to navigate to play the core game.
[/QUOTE]

My point was, that there is no hurdle, just something that differs from what you would like.

(Maawdawg) #184

If you have abilities chosen for two classes you can use those when you play those respective classes. you won’t have any “special” abilities across your classes you don’t spec into though. You don’t get to pick skills to fill out your slots for all the classes so you have a powerful version of every class.

If I choose the skills for armor piercing rounds on my soldier and speed buffs on my medic I can use those when I play as them but when I switch to the engineer he doesn’t have any perks because I didn’t give them to him before the game. You just have open action slots on your UI and d-pad. You can still do the general stuff a that class would do you just are the “vanilla” version of the classes you haven’t spec’d into so you don’t have any enhanced abilities. General skills that are not passive will appear in the UI as selectable for any class you play, but when i played and had all engineer skills I didn’t have any selectables mapped to my d-pad on my other classes at all. I just had the core abilities that were activated with the action button.

You will never be a master of all classes one one character as the game is currently designed.

I only got a little time with the game and with the amount I was trying to take in I could have percieved some things wrong but I am pretty sure I am right on this stuff. Until we get our hands on the full game and get to see how these ideas work out and end up balancing much of this info and speculation is really is boiling down to what is shown in this video.


lots of back and forth with not a lot of production or hard info. :smiley:
(Senethro) #185

So universal abilities still have to be chosen for particular classes and will not be active in other classes?

(Herandar) #186

Who said that? That doesn’t make sense.

(elevator13) #187

If I read the last page right, there’s going to be a cap on each set? So I can’t do something like put 7 ability points into Engineer?

(Mad Hatter) #188

You can buy all of them you want, but I believe you can only have 5 of them “set” at a time, from what I’m hearing.

(elevator13) #189

I know about the 3-active ability limit, but the tree cap is news to me. If this is true, it’s definitely going to hurt specialist characters who want to rank up more than one ability within a class

(Weeohhweeohh) #190

I don’t believe so. It would make sense that universal abilities persist no matter what class you choose.

side note: I don’t think any of the universal abilities will be “active” abilities. They are most likely all gonna be passives.

(SockDog) #191

When that difference is largely a marketing gimmick then yes I consider it more a hurdle than an evolution in the gameplay. SD may convince me otherwise, I’m eager to see if they do.

(Bridger) #192

Yes those are my options if the game ships as has been described. You have not yet provided an argument as to why this would be a good thing.

You truly expect to never be on the losing side in any game?

Straw man. I truely never expect to be on an artificially-disadvantaged side. If our team just isn’t as good as the other team, that’s fine, we lose fair and square. If our team loses because of some X factor completely out of our control, that’s not good game design and I’m going to say so.

The true choice, of course, was in picking your abilities. If YOU CHOOSE to specialize, then you also chose to limit your capabilities with the other classes. You could, alternatively, choose to pick more universal abilities, and not specialize in any class.

So in this situation, we can choose to be an asset to the team (pick only abilities that let you switch to the correct class and help out), or be a selfish douche who only plays one class, or we can give ourselves an artificial handicap. This is you here saying “artificial handicaps! yeah, that’s what we need in games these days! People who get randomly placed into a game that doesn’t need another medic should be punished for it!”

Based on your responses, Bridger, you (specifically) would rather drop from the game so that you can switch from your super-spec’d medic to your super-spec’d engineer, because having to choose between specialization and adaptability is something you feel is ?unfair??

Got it in one!

You want to have the optimal potential at all times. You don’t want to max/min your character within the game’s ruleset, you want to break out of the games limitations entirely.

Lets stop talking about what I want to do and start talking about game design, because that’s the actual argument here. What are the consequences of your (preferred) game design?

  1. People are punished for specialization in a random pub environment sometimes. I think we can all agree that this is bad? If not please explain why.

  2. The games themselves will feel very static because people will pick static roles that seldom change. This will lead to the game growing boring faster due to the lack of more varied strategies.

  3. Players who decide they’ve had enough medic for today and instead want to play covert ops will have to disconnect from the server. This has the negative consequences of a) possibly losing the spot if it is a popular server and b) possibly winding up on the opposite team as their friends.

  4. I was going to try to put some kind of advantages to your design but I honestly cannot think of any nor find any in your posts. Can you enlighten me? What benefits can be derived from preventing players from being flexible?

“Because it gives the decisions more weight” is not an acceptable answer. The decisions you make already have weight. When you spec a character this way, he’s good at run and gun. When you spec him that way he’s a good sniper. When you spec him this other way, he’s really tough to kill, etc. These are all consequences of how you might outfit you’re character. The permanence of the decision does in fact add more weight, but more weighty decisions are not always desirable. Often, however, you are making these choices blind. You have no idea what the map will be and you have no idea what your team is going to be composed of. The result is that you make decisions more weighty and then give less information with which to make said decision. Maybe on a bigger open map I want to play with this spec because it helps my ranged shooting, but in a closer, tight map I want my run and gun spec. Your design says "dur hur, you better guess right then! Everyone knows you shouldn’t always be allowed to make your weighty decisions based on relevant information!

(tokamak) #193

[QUOTE=Mad Hatter;273520]I don’t know what you mean by “placed.” Last I saw and heard, there was merely an ability section, where you chose which skills you wanted to take into battle with you out of the ones you’ve purchased. The list is split into 5 sections, one for each class, and one for universal skills.

Nowhere did I see anyone having to select which class they wanted to attach their universal abilities to.[/QUOTE]

I might be mistaken but from a balance point of view that sounds really stupid, it would mean the universal abilities stacked with the class abilities which in turn means that there’s no reason not to take universal abilities which defeats the point.

(PariahDog) #194

[QUOTE=Exedore;273265]I honestly don’t see a whole lot of people respeccing at level 20, as there aren’t many abilities that are Rank 5 and they’re class-specific, so one would have a good idea of what class(es) that character is tailored towards. If the player thinks a radical change is necessary, there’s a fairly radical penalty.

Most of the experimentation will happen at the mid and lower levels, where a lost level can be made up very quickly.

Unfortunate clarifications of some old information: [ul]
[li]You can maintain up to 10 characters, not 16.
[/li][li]You unfortunately cannot transfer XP between characters. It’s something we wanted to do, but was ultimately a casualty of getting the game finished for May.
[/li][/ul][/QUOTE]

Still want to know if one can “cheat the system” with the 24 hour skill trial period.

(Bridger) #195

[QUOTE=Maawdawg;273550]If you have abilities chosen for two classes you can use those when you play those respective classes. you won’t have any “special” abilities across your classes you don’t spec into though. You don’t get to pick skills to fill out your slots for all the classes so you have a powerful version of every class.

If I choose the skills for armor piercing rounds on my soldier and speed buffs on my medic I can use those when I play as them but when I switch to the engineer he doesn’t have any perks because I didn’t give them to him before the game. You just have open action slots on your UI and d-pad. You can still do the general stuff a that class would do you just are the “vanilla” version of the classes you haven’t spec’d into so you don’t have any enhanced abilities. General skills that are not passive will appear in the UI as selectable for any class you play, but when i played and had all engineer skills I didn’t have any selectables mapped to my d-pad on my other classes at all. I just had the core abilities that were activated with the action button.

You will never be a master of all classes one one character as the game is currently designed.

I only got a little time with the game and with the amount I was trying to take in I could have percieved some things wrong but I am pretty sure I am right on this stuff. Until we get our hands on the full game and get to see how these ideas work out and end up balancing much of this info and speculation is really is boiling down to what is shown in this video.


lots of back and forth with not a lot of production or hard info. :D[/QUOTE]

This is better, as at least you can have more than one viable class/method switch available beforehand, but players still need to be able to adapt to the map/enemy/team. We will want to do that. Forcing us to disconnect (and/or drop levels and/or level up separate characters) to do it is going to be very frustrating. Responding intelligently to the situation with the right equipment/abilities/classes is a valued part of any team based shooter. Doing the best with what you’ve got gets old quickly.

(Bridger) #196

He posted later in the thread saying there is no such thing as a 24 hour skill trial period. Once you click the button you have to suck up a level loss to respec.

(PariahDog) #197

Damn. Who knows maybe the if it follows other SD games maybe the mod community can “fix” some of these complaints.

(DarkangelUK) #198

That’s not fixing, that’s catering to a demand. Please don’t confuse something that’s not liked with something that’s broken.

(Bridger) #199

If the game design results in boring stale gameplay due to low viability it is broken and can be fixed. That has nothing to do with value or catering to a demand. That being said, I’m gonig to have to wait and see if that happens with brink. I have high hopes - SD did great work on the previous games, and everything else I’ve seen gives me a good feeling. I’m sure they’ll get this right, even if it takes a patch later to fix it.

(DarkangelUK) #200

Nothing that you’ve mentioned affects the core gameplay, therefore if it’s boring then that’s yourself creating that mindset. It’s a class-based, objective-based team fps and absolutely none of the action or core gameplay is affected by whether you can change body type or abilities. The only thing that’s going to affect how boring or exciting the game is, is the way YOU choose to play it.