Oh hai! So, you’ve not heard much from me since Badman announced that I’m on the project again a while back… but let’s remedy that, shall we?
One of the first things we did early in the year was to sit down with Nexon and revisit our vision for the game. We all agreed on a set of philosophical pillars that we’ll be adhering to , and these pillars will guide all of our decisions going forward. Since coming on to the project as Lead Designer, I’ve gone through every single game system to figure out what does and doesn’t match our pillars, and adjust things if necessary.
This is why you’ve seen some of the changes you’ve seen recently, and in this post, I’ll try to walk you through our reasoning and also give you an idea of what to expect in the future. Let’s dive right in.
GAME MODES
The big goal here is to ensure that our game modes are unique to the game and really suit what it does best.
Our broad vision is to make a competitive team and objective based shooter with 5 vs 5 Stopwatch as our main “Ranked” mode. To help get us there, we’ve reduced variability (such as different spawn wave times per primary objective segment) wherever possible to make it consistent across all maps. This ties in directly with where we’re headed with our on-going matchmaking and lobby work; we expect this to be the heart of the game long-term, and so it has been our first priority.
Objective mode will eventually be expanded to be a more flexible mode that can support 5 to 8 players on a team, and deal with players leaving and joining mid-match. After that, Execution mode will be going under the microscope as well.
Many of you have already left your feedback on Stopwatch in the Focus Testing thread. Please keep that coming, and do share any thoughts you have on the other game modes too.
OBJECTIVES
Objectives and how players interact with them is a key part of how our game plays, and our first round of tweaks for this made it into builds recently, removing stacking and diminishing returns from most objective types.
The reasoning behind this is fairly simple: we want to reward working together as a team to achieve the objective, rather than everybody trying to lemming rush it all at once. The tweaked system better protects the role of objective specialists now that all Mercs can affect any objective, with the most proficient Merc automatically taking charge. This also helps create a more tactically predictable experience for Stopwatch.
In addition, we’re going to simplify our objectives mechanically and make them more intuitive, so matches will hopefully come down more to the movement, shooting and teamwork between the players in them.
MOVEMENT & SHOOTING
A key component of our vision for the gameplay is that wherever possible the game should have a high ceiling for mastery, and movement’s no exception.
We’ve historically had movement differentiators for our games (think ramp-jumping, SMART, and the like) and this has always been part of our DNA as a studio. We felt like we were missing a trick without having something similar this time around, which is why we’ve looked at movement as a whole and added a couple of things like wall-jumping and the upcoming long-jumping. These features are very much work-in-progress and we’ll adjust them based on your feedback.
In addition, we’ve continuously tweaked our shooting mechanics to suit both these movement changes, the data we gather from the live environment, and of course your comments. This is probably the area of the game that has seen the least amount of sweeping change, just because we first wanted to make a push on improving the feedback you get when damaging opponents and when you are being damaged. Our first stab at this is now live and we’ll continue to tweak it.
Rest assured, we have a lot of discussions about TTK here just like you all do in the forums, but we felt that clearer hit feedback was needed before we can really start getting into the nitty gritty on that.
MERC ABILITIES
We’ve been reviewing Merc abilities with the goal of adding mastery to each of the signature abilities. Some of that work is now starting to come through in the builds that are being released. Examples are bonuses for hitting players directly with med and ammo packs thrown by Sawbonez and Skyhammer for an extra boost and a bit of XP.
There’s a fairly large backlog of improvements still to come here, so you can expect them to continue to roll in for a good while.
UI
UI is something that we consider of critical importance, and there are a lot of improvements to come in this area. Our current focus internally is on getting a wireframe structure for the entire front-end in, but you can expect significant overhauls to the HUD as well.
We’re also working on a better experience for new users coming into the game. Our goal is to teach them all of the basic mechanics, including movement and shooting, identifying and completing objectives, and working as a team, all wrapped up in a fun experience befitting our game world. Once that’s in, we expect new players to have a much easier time finding their feet in multiplayer – until then, please continue to take it easy on them while they learn the ropes.
MAPS
The state of the maps is a hot topic both internally and within the community. Our initial set of maps by necessity were constructed on constantly shifting ground, with gameplay changing and evolving pretty significantly throughout all of development. It’s why one of our priorities has been to define our direction better and commit us to it – it’s going to let us build better maps in the future and help us improve the ones we’ve already got.
We’ve also been looking at how we build maps internally to better take advantage of the fact that we’ve got all of you available to try stuff out.
We’re now focusing on block-out or “grey-box” maps, allowing us to iterate on them very quickly as we improve our game modes, movement and objective systems. Once the team’s happy that they’re playing great, we’ll be releasing them to a limited public test group to collect feedback and keep improving them in that environment until we’re confident that they’re at the high standard that we’re aiming for. Only then will we integrate our art assets to make sure they look as good as they play. Our initial maps using this approach are Dockyard (formerly Battersea) and Dome (formerly Map_06).
We’ll also only have a limited number of maps live at any given time, and the ones that are offline (normally the least popular) will be undergoing internal art and design passes to improve their quality.
THE MAKING MONEY PART
With the core game taking shape, we’ve been having a lot of conversations about business model and monetisation. We obviously can’t get away with everything just being free, but everyone - both here and at Nexon - agrees that we want to stay as far away from Pay-2-Win as possible. It’s not the right approach for the kind of game we’re making, and we’d much rather have a balanced playing field that keeps players happy, than trying to extort money at every opportunity.
Once we’ve worked out what we’re going to be selling and how, we’ll be sharing that with you. Stay tuned!
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
The final big focus for us as of late has been everything that happens outside of the moment to moment gameplay experience: how you’re rewarded for your performance in a match, goals to achieve outside of the core game, customisation for characters and weapons, meaningful progression, and the like. The strength of the core game is what will bring people to it, but everything that we put around it is what will make players feel invested and keep them coming back.
We’re not quite ready to talk specifics about this yet, but our goal is still to make something that is both compelling and fair.
Semper fudge. :magicpony:
Let alone that a less proficient merc suddenly gets interrupted by one with a higher proficiency as soon as he starts on working on it. Isn’t that a lot more confusing?
I don’t worry at all.