You know what, I feel like we missed out on an opportunity with the loading screen hints/tips
Idleray
Join Date: 2012-10-04 Member: 161464Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-10-04 Member: 161464Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Because it's a fking huge-arse long wait for people with average machines, and even for people with good rigs it takes about 30 sec-2 minutes.
That's enough time to display 3-4 tips. There should be like a button to press to scroll to the next tip. There should be diagrams of things like tech trees or combat situations to act in tandem with the hints/tips, rather than pretty but ultimately unhelpful pictures of the map you're going to.
The tips currently in the game are woefully short and uninformative, and I could easily come up with like 100 tips that will get new players off to a good start without having to go to the bother of asking other players and risking trolley/obnoxious responses.
Things like what you should do as a marine: positioning yourself adequately far from teammates so you don't get in each others way, making Harvester destruction a high priority, using burst fire, spreading out during the early game, mine placement, strafing and jumping to avoid skulks rather than backpedalling, etc.
Things you should know as aliens: that res node harrassment beats taking on marines any day, that fades should try and blink upwards momentarily to throw off aim, that lerks should try and fly erratically up and down to avoid fire.
This would have done at least something to overcome the fact that there is no tutorial. And I don't just mean obvious hints like "you can pick up your teammates weapons/ you can hold shift to sneak up on rines" either.
That's enough time to display 3-4 tips. There should be like a button to press to scroll to the next tip. There should be diagrams of things like tech trees or combat situations to act in tandem with the hints/tips, rather than pretty but ultimately unhelpful pictures of the map you're going to.
The tips currently in the game are woefully short and uninformative, and I could easily come up with like 100 tips that will get new players off to a good start without having to go to the bother of asking other players and risking trolley/obnoxious responses.
Things like what you should do as a marine: positioning yourself adequately far from teammates so you don't get in each others way, making Harvester destruction a high priority, using burst fire, spreading out during the early game, mine placement, strafing and jumping to avoid skulks rather than backpedalling, etc.
Things you should know as aliens: that res node harrassment beats taking on marines any day, that fades should try and blink upwards momentarily to throw off aim, that lerks should try and fly erratically up and down to avoid fire.
This would have done at least something to overcome the fact that there is no tutorial. And I don't just mean obvious hints like "you can pick up your teammates weapons/ you can hold shift to sneak up on rines" either.
Comments
A 'community tips' box I think would be a great and easy, inexpensive way to educate players. I was actually going to make a thread about this idea last night, but I got really, really high.
But yeah, NS2 should be more proud of it's community and the untiring willingness of vets to help rookies learn the basics of this very complicated game. If we could get real tips from real people, it'd do exactly that.
All it takes is for a dev to post a thread in the forums like 'community tips here plox' and then everyone posts things they'd love to have been told as a new player. We take the best 100(/lots) of these tips, we put them into a little box that you can scroll through on the loading screen, and give credit to the community member that made the post.
Seriously this would help new players 10000x more than obtrusive and patronising tutorials. And would be way cheap and easy to implement. Did I mention easy? Or cheap? Hey hey hey
(Going through the audio commentary sections of Valve games to find out what careful design decisions went into things like accessibility can be very enlightening.)
OGOD yes, if NS2 had something like that, mmmmm imagine all the tasty informations
Sadly I sometimes think they don't nearly put as much thought in such things as Valve.
(Granted, Valve is kinda bigger as UWE, but I think you know what I mean)