Hi
Is Brink going to have broken handgrenades, like ET:QW ?
Let me explain.
I’m a veteran of FPS games and have played everything made by id and Splash Damage. Q3F and W:ET were my favourite FPS games for a long time. ET:QW failed to attract my attention for long because of various flaws (design, network problems, and curiously choppy performance on 8800 GTS).
What Q3F and W:ET had in common was strong handgrenades. I was never particularly accurate with regular weapons, just enough to hold my ground with 27%, 35% tops with Sten on a good day. However, I easily made up for that with my handgrenade skills. Instead of finger dexterity, Team Fortress style handgrenades reward good timing, stealth, prediction, outsmarting your opponent. Eventually I got used to people complimenting me for my handgrenade skills. Best of all, I had lots of fun using them (and I rarely spammed).
But ET:QW transformed handgrenades from great fun to a chore. I’m ok with somewhat smaller explosion, obnoxious Grenaaade screams etc. That’s not what I mean. I usually played on offence as to have a challenge and actually have to actively do something to win. ET:QW had a lot of things that soaked my handgrenades - mines, turrets, mines, turrets, vehicles. I was almost never free to use my handgrenades in a way that would be fun. Using them against players on foot was too much of a luxury. ET:QW had too few alternatives to nading a turret. The one class with renevable explosives (Covert Op) had grenades which didn’t work against people. Not to say they weren’t the best thing against vehicles…
Mines are also to blame. While new proxy mines were much less artificial mechanics-wise, they became a grenade sponge. Worst of all, for all the artificial mechanics, landmines in W:ET worked. You had a hard counter to mines (covert op), and soft counter (engineer). No random landmine explosions proxies are famous for. No landmines exploding from spam. Much less potential for a bad teammate to turn defensive positions into a deathtrap.
I’d like to hear how Brink is going to implement handgrenades ? Are grenades going to stay about as common as in ET:QW ? What about strenght ? Are there going to be many grenade sponges which make using handgrenades a chore ? (turrets, mines). What about alternative ways to take care of mines and turrets ?
How are you going to deal with grenade spam ? To tell the truth, handgrenade spam was a problem in W:ET sometimes. But I think measures taken against it in ET:QW weren’t particularly good. Grenaaade scream was annoying as hell and didn’t do much to actually stop people from filling tight corridors with them.
I have some other ideas for dealing with grenade spam. As I remember, it was mostly a problem when people would repeatedly throw grenades into a tight bottleneck, forcing potential attackers to either wait, or take some damage attacking, or rush past in a window between grenades (the last made you predictable and an easy prey for enemies behind the corner, especially since you’d probably be the only one doing grenade dash).
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allow grenades to be destroyed with gunfire. It would make them disappear harmlessly. Think about it. 95% of the time grenade spam is a problem people are throwing them untimed, as fast as possible, and they spend a lot of time lying on the ground. A well timed grenade explodes nearly immediately after you see it coming. Well timed grenades won’t be hurt by this change, too small and fast moving to hit. But those lying on the ground would. A typical scenario: newbie starts spamming handgrenades in a corridor. Experienced player notices a pattern, shoots the predictable grenade on the ground and charges the spammer when he’s unprepared, with handgrenade “weapon” out.
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have fewer, stronger grenades. To use W:ET as an example, medic would start with 0, 1 with experience. Soldier has 1, 2 with experience (as opposed to 2,4 !). Engineer would be just like soldier, take rifle grenades if you want more explosions. Basically, cut number of grenades in half.
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