Please design for gameplay, not for flavour

(darthmob) #41

[QUOTE=tokamak;198544]Aimology wasn’t arguing that fun classes are popular, he was saying that classes powerful in combat are popular. All the while support classes can contribute just as much, if not more and can be just as fun, if not more to play with. [/QUOTE]For many people in the end it’s the same thing. When I play a shooter I expect to shoot things. That’s in the nature of the game. If all I want to do is healing then I go play WoW. The problem is when a role not primarily meant for killing is the best at it and you get the dominating rambo medic as in ET.

If I can go kill people and help my team at the same time I’m perfectly happy. We don’t really know any details about the different classes. Some comments hinted at new stuff like buffs and debuffs (eg. engineer increasing the team’s weapon damage) which combined with the character upgrade system may allow different interpretations of the class roles. One player may customize his medic to solely aid the team, another may use it to strengthen himself and similar specialisations may be possible for the other classes.

(Bezzy) #42

[QUOTE=deadlights;198526]Dude, Bezzy and I gotta do battle some time… Unless he uses one of those arcade sticks by MadCatz, they pwn us keyboard users. (PC SFIV of course)

Sorry to get off topic… Carry on.[/QUOTE]

Yeah. I use a 360 controller at work (and that’s what I’m used to) but at home on either PC or 360, I use a tournament edition stick thing, but I’m basically starting from scratch. Totally up for a game. My xbl/gfw username should be around.

I beat Dommafia ages ago, but by now he’ll be wise to my tricks :).

(tokamak) #43

Well then we agree on the main point. Killing should be a specialisation by itself.

I think there are people who would kill to be able to say that line.

(Bezzy) #44

Might be simpler than that, as “closing” for a melee is already highly dependant on player speed (i.e. bodytype), so even more nuances to melee aren’t actually necessary. That’s become the natural counter for lights vs. heavies in playtests recently. Heavies can outgun lights, but lights can close for melee way faster, and we’re trying to balance that just right.

We experimented with things like priorities and counter moves on melee to a degree, but found in the end there’s no need to get super complex on these things. I think it’s Neil who told me about David Sirlin’s talk saying that you only really need 3 degrees of “counter” to cover the full mindgame quotient… or something like that.

Obviously it’s something we’re going to reveal in more detail later so I can’t say anything about it directly, and can only really talk about what direction we’ve come from:

The most important thing to keep in mind is that melee is only a part of the game. It’s far more important that it’s elegant so that it dovetails with all the other combat systems into cohesive whole. Melee combined with the movement, shooting, special abilities, and higher-level tactics give more than enough depth and mind-games on one-on-ones, let alone 8 on 8! Adding more and more doesn’t necessarily make for more depth… adding more might just means there’s more nuances to learn, even though the fundamental game doesn’t change. We want you to indulge in the complexities that simple rules throw up.

And yeah, I love StreetFighter 4. I’m not exactly sure how much that’ll come through in Brink, really: while there’s some fundamental design ideas which can cross genres (wind-up/damaging/wind-down frames, victim recovery frames), Brink is ultimately an FPS, and we have to design on those terms. No SRKs I’m afraid :smiley:

(jazevec) #45

tokamak and especially darthmob have voiced my opinion on class balance, so I don’t have much to add. Even if medic was completely unable to heal himself without help of another medic, it would still be a lot better than smg soldier in W:ET and even ET:QW. Some people forget healing and reviving teammates provides you with living shields and bodyguards, you can stay back and aim for heads without getting shot back.

Medic in W:ET was so powerful not just because of healing, but because some xp awards benefited medic much more than others. One Battle Sense award increased extra health, but only medic was regularly able to raise his health to that level.

aimology:
I can provide you a direct example how maximizing your kills or k/d ratio actually makes you worse. Imagine a covert op (Operative in Brink) who managed to disguise himself as an enemy. He’s free to attack anyone, anywhere unless he does something highly suspicious. So you can attack a closest enemy and kill him, but then you’d be swarmed with others from enemy team. But youl’ll have more kills in a unit of time !
Or you can place yourself among enemy defenders and wait for the right moment. Hit where and when it hurts the most. You can kill an engineer while he’s disarming explosive charge !

I’ve done this more than once. An engineer from my team manages to sneak/bite his way through enemy defences. He promptly dies, two constructors and some others rush towards the explosive. Except I am the second constructor ! I stab technician so he can’t revive, and then stab disarming constructor because he’s too busy and doesn’t know what’s happening around him. What would otherwise be yet another fruitless uncoordinated attack is a death sentence.

So you see, maximizing kill count is sometimes in direct opposition to achieving team goal. Even killing can be done smartly. In many cases killing the most people is not helpful - because they’re about to respawn anyway, because the area is irrelevant to objective, because the guy with explosive escaped. If you down 3 people, it can be worth less than killing 1 medic, or downing someone and finishing him. The medic could make your kill pointless. (assuming other guys are not medics)

(tokamak) #46

K/D ratio is a totally irrelevant factor in a mission oriented game.

(Floris) #47

Because killing enemies does not help at all towards accomplishing the objectives.

(tokamak) #48

Not if nobody does the objective. Besides, the ratio is also about the kills versus your own deaths which makes the whole deal even more irrelevant. If you want to suggest that kills to some extend contribute to winning the game, you should look at kills per minute, not kills per death.

(Floris) #49

Often you are doing the objective by just killing people (on defence when there are no charges plant for example), and the twelve engineer tactic wasn’t always that successful in ET:QW, so even if you have guys doing the objective, you will need additional guys killing other guys.

Considering every time you die your team is at a disadvantage the death aspect plays a very important role as well.

(tokamak) #50

[QUOTE=Florisjuh;198710]Often you are doing the objective by just killing people (on defence when there are no charges plant for example), and the twelve engineer tactic wasn’t always that successful in ET:QW, so even if you have guys doing the objective, you will need additional guys killing other guys.
[/QUOTE]

It’s still the team that completes their objective that wins the match, no the one who got the most kills.

Considering every time you die your team is at a disadvantage the death aspect plays a very important role as well.

Yeah but not the ratio.

(darthmob) #51

[QUOTE=tokamak;198652]K/D ratio is a totally irrelevant factor in a mission oriented game.[/QUOTE]So what? I like to have a positive k/d ratio on my scoreboard because it feels good. It’s still a shooter and killing people is a part of it. You can do a great job as a medic / engineer / whatever and still rack up a lot of kills.

(tokamak) #52

Sure, but that doesn’t take away the fact that it’s completely irrelevant in a mission oriented game.

(Floris) #53

If the situation is to get as much kills (hinders the opponent team most) as possible while getting as less deaths (hinders your team least) as possible, it does surely sound like ratio is important.

(timestart) #54

tokamak, could you try reading the posts you’re quoting instead of immediately typing out some irrelevant reply and sticking to a nonsensical argument?

(tokamak) #55

I think the problem is rather that the discussions are getting drawn out so long that people forget what the real point is about, namely, that K/D somehow matters in this game.

(deadlights) #56

I played PlanetSide a MMOFPS by Sony back in the day, and at the start of the game it was very much about team work. Then soon, as the game got older it became about “kill whoring.” What happened here was good players stopped playing for team goals and started to play for their own good, and the game changed forever…

Now this game had many levels of issues, and you can’t just say kill whores were the main problem. But they WERE a HUGE problem. Then on top of that, the devs added a K/D and kills per minute to the bottom of the screen, and thats all people started playing for. It ruined the origional flavor of the game. Many things also ruined the game, but this helped totally pwn it.

I mean it was fun. But it became the thing people played for and getting XP for the lower players or winning the battle was 2nd.

(darthmob) #57

[QUOTE=deadlights;198734]I played PlanetSide a MMOFPS by Sony back in the day, and at the start of the game it was very much about team work. Then soon, as the game got older it became about “kill whoring.” What happened here was good players stopped playing for team goals and started to play for their own good, and the game changed forever…[/QUOTE]Interestingly enough the same happened with ET. You can hardly find a ETPro server where objectives are enabled or allowed nowadays. I’m not sure if it’s just the way a game evolves over time or something else. For me it ruined public play because it removed one exciting and important aspect of the gameplay.

(Anti) #58

[QUOTE=Bezzy;198556]I think it’s Neil who told me about David Sirlin’s talk saying that you only really need 3 degrees of “counter” to cover the full mindgame quotient… or something like that.
[/QUOTE]

It’s all about the yomi layers!! Not so applicable to shooting it out in most FPS games, although when I read that stuff it did kind of remind we of some exciting 1v1 fights in Call of Duty S&D games, those times when you knew that last guy was just outside your building and that he knew you were in it, real fun double bluff stuff. Nothing more pleasing than faking a bomb plant to con them into revealing their location :smiley:

(deadlights) #59

Yup. We will already have people playing medic doing nothing but killing… We don’t need other classes to join in to try and fix their k/d. I think a k/d in this type of game is irrelevant.