3rd race
c0ke
Join Date: 2004-07-02 Member: 29676Members
Join Date: 2004-07-02 Member: 29676Members
Comments
Maybe in an add on, but Blizzard is already sharpening the knives.
2 balanced races are better than 3 not so balanced.. because 3 distinctive races are freaking hard to balance.
I think the frontiermen and the kharaa were already hard to balance in NS1
^ ^ ^
Starcraft, the "most balanced game", took five YEARS of constant see-saw patching to get where it's at. It's not an issue of Blizzard being good, it's just an issue of investing enough time to get there by attrition. And some could say even today that it's still not completely balanced, it's just in a state where what *is* balanced is good enough for the pros. When's the last time you saw anyone build Protoss Scouts?
Starcraft has unified resoucre model, NS2 probably doesn't.
Starcraft isn't as clearly melee vs ranged as NS is.
Starcraft's relation to player effort is somewhat easier to approach since it's 1 vs 1 mostly.
In SC none of the races is hit and run as much as NS aliens are almost forced to be due to the nature of FPS games. Starcraft's most famous hit and run unit, mutalisk, has been notoriously difficult to balance and still has some imbalances in every matchup (Practically all ZvZ matchup strategies aim for mutalisks for example).
Further on Starcraft stays balanced through active map development. For example the Korean leagues introduced some nearly anti-zerg map pools after both the major tournaments finished in Zerg vs Zerg finals last season. A 3D FPS game can't rely that much constant flow of new maps due to the massive effort of creating one, not to speak of renewing the whole map pool consistently. I'd like to see NS2 balanced partitially through active mapping support, but in no way it's as effective as it would be in RTS games.
The two distinct teams are a major selling point for NS: imbalance is what makes the game interesting.
There was an interesting post on the Wolfire Blog actually, all about <a href="http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/06/imbalanced-fights/" target="_blank">"Imbalanced Fights"</a> and why they're interesting. For example one of my favourite multiplayer games is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W37HjHfXJuA" target="_blank">"Aliens versus Predator 2"</a>.
Is it balanced? Not really (especially Predator shoulder-cannons). Is it fun? Hell yes! This is because in some circumstances you have an advantage - in others a disadvantage: the key is to create that advantage, and this involves a far more elaborate strategy that the standard FPS "shoot anything that moves" approach. And if you die - you don't feel so bad: there's no dishonour in being gunned down when you have no gun - nor is there dishonour in losing a fistfight with a guy with foot-long claws. It's not really possible to know who is better because the playing-field is uneven, and this means you focus on having fun rather than bragging-rights.
So yeah - imbalance is good!
Since we already have a Marine-type faction and a Alien/Zerg/Tyranid-type race, it would be cool to have some kind of really high-tech Protoss/Predator-type race with energy weapons, bionics and psychic powers. Sadly that's not going to happen, except in an expansion, or mod perhaps :-P
Most often too much imbalance just wrecks the advantages of assymmetry and hurts the gameplay in general. In NS 1.04 the hive structure was different. Hives were far bigger importance and aliens couldn't get anything bigger than lerk without the 2nd hive. This caused big imbalance, which made the games quite repetetive when played with players capable of understanding the game mechanics. Every good marine team would deny aliens the 2nd hive and tech up to heavily imbalanced jetpacks. At that point the game is repetetive and the viable strategies are limited.
It's not impossible to reach good enough balance with assymmetric teams: For example NS as it is in 6vs6 play is balanced enough. The overall win ratio is probably slightly alien biased when you account all skill levels, but every widely played offers both teams reasonable chances of winning and the team in advantage is decided as much by map as it is by game design itself. I don't like the bias and importance of gameplay details here and there, but in general level the balance is more than sufficient right now.
i currently have the feeling not much is changing<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Don't say that... There are changes, but just a little :-)
You have never bothed paying attention to NS1, or any game have you? you probably just go in and shoot things without actually looking at the game. You probly don't even understand how the game works. There is no possible way to add in a 3rd race, unless the maps were going to be 3 times bigger to make up for the space that the added race would have. then need to add in all the benifits and disadvantages it would have. then picking it's background, what it looks like, fitting it into the story and game play some how. I mean, really... The games you see with 3 races, Starcraft and AvP Had them set before the games even came out. Hell, AvP had books on it, and on each of the races before the games. You can't just... Oh, a high tech alien race is cool lets add it in!.... Also, even if they could. What would they have? The only thing I could think of, is having much much bigger maps, then 4 teams, 2 aliens 2 marines in a free for all between them, Different factions in the races fighting eachother for whatever is on the map, Resources or an item, or control over a room. Whatever. But not whole new race.
Whoa! Why are we hurling accusations!?
While I agree that there's absolutely no way a third race could be added, it's got nothing to do with map sizes (you don't have to have all three teams playing at once) and nothing at all to do with backstory and quirks. You can come up with a decent game backstory in an afternoon or two, especially if your setting is (let's be honest here) pretty standard sci-fi fare.
No, what makes it impossible is the amount of work that would have to go into creating assets, writing code, and balancing the damn thing. Design is such a tiny part of making a game: if making a cool game was just about having a good idea we'd be swimming in them. Anyone reading this probably has their idea of what would make the perfect game, but have they made it? No - and it's not because the idea isn't good, it's because an idea on it's own is worthless.
It's that whole inspiration/perspiration thing.
Makes no sense in the untold story of NS.
I would encourage more "species" of Kharaa and a wider marine Arsenal. But not a third race...
I expect NS2 to be similar to NS1 just much prettier and awesome.