Why NS2 isn't for everyone.
Fat_Man_Little_Coat
Join Date: 2003-12-02 Member: 23857Members
Join Date: 2003-12-02 Member: 23857Members
Natural Selection 2 is the first pure multiplayer to come out in a long time.
Most players today have been conditioned to not even know what multiplayer games are.
What they're really playing is basically single player games, next to other people on line, playing same single player game. Basically single player competitive. They come to think that multiplayer games are this bastard notion, while perhaps technically correct, its pretty much off center to what multiplayer should be.
When the new players of the general populace join, its a ghostland. How many times have you played on a rookie filled server where NO one talks through the entire game. And not just through the mic, but the typed chat as well.
I'd imagine that if you're going to play a game with 10-15 other people that is team based the idea of some form of communication would be necessary. How odd would it be to play competitive sport (board games, football, soccer etc) other game with other people where no one communicates for the entire game? Yet this notion is accepted among modern competitive gamers. Thats how conditioned they are to this shit notion.
Retention for this game will always be low. We try to educate new players, we get our patience tested and in the end the result is a middling amount of people who will play this game after the sales regardless of our efforts.
So, maybe we've been looking at it the wrong way. Maybe the problem has always been an image one. We're attracting the wrong customers to our community.
Rather than focus on the quantity issue its really been a quality one all along. Here we are, trying to sell a product to people who don't appreciate it and are ignorant of the simple beauty of it.
This a real multiplayer game. Probably one of the few out there put out by damn passionate people, who are not corporate minded.
We don't want to appeal to everyone, because everyone has been taught the wrong thing about what multiplayer games are.
We want the people who enjoy hard, tactical action oriented team based gameplay. Thats it. We want people who want to feel like they're playing with actual people, who will talk to you, watch your back, give you role and a goal, and you will be willing to suck because you know that it will end up with a +1 in the win column not just for you, but the whole team you're playing with.
There are millions and millions of computer gamers out there. There has to be hundreds of thousands that want a true multiplayer FPS experience that know nothing about this game. Hell, even people out there who reviewed this game says it has a steep learning curve, which it does, but thats largely because people have been so poorly trained about how to play with other people as a team.
When you get new players on a server tell them the truth. You don't know how to play this game because you probably haven't played a real multiplayer in your life.
You've been playing an easy reward, no skill competitve single play FPS thats been sold to you by the Activision or EA your whole life.
If you want to play this game, you don't have to be a great twitch shooter. You don't need mad fade skills. You need to know how to communicate. Ask for help, use common sense, and most of all, always remember:
NS2 is a true multiplayer. You play as a team, so play as a team. Simple as that.
Comments
It's funny to me when other games try to have "team" modes, it basically comes down to which team has the better players, not which team can work together the most effectively. The ultimate oxymoron here is "team deathmatch", what the hell is that? It's just regular deathmatch where you only shoot some people but not others, and you've got a 50/50 shot of being in the group that scores the most points.
I also noticed my posts are getting more and more spammy. I should watch out.
Hah, your team can communicate as much as one can, and still get wiped by the one player who's at the top of the skill ladder.
You need to be good at twitch shooting, and have mad fade skills if you want to be considered a good player. NS2 is more skill based than teambased, as one or two better players on a team can shut down the entire team by themselves.
Don't get me wrong knowing how to be a good teammate is important and will benefit your gameplay as a whole, but in the end it comes down to player performance to win a match.
Did you even read his post? Yes there are other games out there that support "multiple players", but it's not really "multiplayer" in the sense that the gameplay is radically different from singleplayer with bots. I used to play CoD4 a few years back... what a damn waste of time looking back. All I ever did was run around, kill, get killed, respawn. There was no objective to be had, just run around some more, get more kills, oh that guy's on my "team", can't kill him!
As well as what you said here: Not to talk poorly about the game I dearly love, but that is a flaw with the game design, imo.
No matter the complexity, the onus is on the design of the game to intuitively (or in any communicative way) teach the player how to play.
It's best when learning how to play is intuitive, obviously, or comes as a natural evolution from playing - like learning how to position oneself as a marine so as to maximize distance and minimize risk.
What's funny is.. once you design a game to adequately teach a player the basics and/or how to progress (skill curve) ... you then no longer need to target a niche crowd and can appeal to the masses.
I would have agreed with you more if you said that the typical "Excessively rewarding" mechanics used in games today (hello, unlocks) have conditioned gamers to deal poorly with losing or having to learn in general.
We have also had 2-3 people come to the forums about the game, which must be like 1% of them at most, that are becoming passionate. I have hope yet.
I think it would be near impossible to have NS2 be as intuitive as, say, TF2. There are a lot more layers to every engagement, and the pace of those engagements is so fast by comparison that making the game inherently intuitive (imo) is almost impossible (to much to learn, not enough time per fight to learn any of it). I cant really say I see a problem with the game design in that regard.
Implementation on the other hand, I can say could have used some work. I know its been said about a million times, but a scripted "single player" "campaign" would have done wonders to overall player skill and possibly retention if it played through an entire 15 min round complete with early, mid. and late game tech.
Unfortunately I am unable to find the video, but there was a single player mission-style tutorial in NS1 that introduced you (Greenie) to the concepts of building, the capabilities of each lifeform, and how phase gates and siege cannons worked, and im sure I would've learned NS1 a lot faster if I had played that before my first game.
Of course, I know its far too late for anything as grand as this to actually happen, but I don't UWE did anything wrong in their design, so much as their implementation of the game.
How about a manual like the good old days? Am I flogging a dead (Iron)horse? Feed back on what I have done so far have been really positive (on REDDIT, STEAM, and here). Though the audience numbers may not be high (or people just look and don't bother replying).
Those with a niche product.
I've been playing games for some 20 years soon and can get myself start with almost any game within a few hours. I enjoy anything from Quake deathmatch and dueling to Brood War and Chess and usually have tremendous fun working myself into new games. I know NS1 inside out too. And yet NS2 learning process made me feel confused and lost in many ways. I can't even imagine how confused I'd be without a vast gaming background and NS1 familiarity.
A lot of the issues come from the engine being a bit different than many others and there's probably a limited set of options to make things better once the decisions are locked in. That's unfortunate, but probably something that was somewhat bound to happen. Another set of issues comes from the way NS2 has been changing so much. Things have been shaken up so many times that a lot of the intuitive hints and patterns have been lost in the process and the whole design sometimes hasn't really adapted to the new systems. These issues are something that can still be tackled by the community dev team and should also be more easily remedied in future UWE projects.
As an example of broken patterns, we can pick the map specific spawn system. Some maps have random spawns, others have somewhat fixed spawns. I know Veil has the NS1 spawns because I've played the original and seen the NS2 adaptation discussion. Meanwhile someone not familiar with NS1 is probably going to be totally lost on why maps work they way they do. Combine this with dynamic infestation and changing lighting and it's very hard to get of a grasp of where you're located on a map and where the danger is supposed to be. In general, the whole game is filled with 'you just sort of have to know these' kind of things. Obviously with time and trial and error you can learn a lot of these details, but they are not much fun learning and make it hard to apply your existing knowledge to anything else in the game. Shortly put, this kind of learning isn't very rewarding or fun.
Another biggie is the feedback. As an example we can take the damage feedback. As far as I remember, there's no differentiation in feedback between getting a stubbed toe and being hit by a truck. Sometimes you're just being chipped with little and damage and sometimes you're taking huge blows and there's nothing else to tell you the difference except your dropping HP count in the corner of your screen. In recent threads there has been talk of pain sounds when a lot of damage is dealt quickly. This is a good example of a small change making a world of difference for the feel of things when you're trying to find the essential things in the middle a chaotic fight.
The two examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The confusion and difficulty of finding the essential information are very common themes in the NS2 learning process. Often I knew things were there somewhere, but I just couldn't find the information because it's either hidden somewhere or being drowned out by less imporant bits of information. Far too often learning NS2 felt like work rather than a wonderful new world of possibilities. This doesn't happen for example with Dota 2, which - as far as I can tell - is quite a bit more complex, merciless and situational game with its 100+ heroes, 140ish items, feeding mechanics, unforgiving 5-players-a-team role system and countless weird interactions.
Please be aware of this when you're looking at NS2 and wondering why some people don't stick around. Let's learn from all this and do better in whatever we'll be working on the future.
Just read the first part of your manual, and its shaping up awesome! It will absolutely help retain players, especially if it is included in the main menu
NS2 is not far from this but the advertising and marketing for this (while I understand is quite limited) isn't really hitting the same mark. The trailers for each content patch show very slow gameplay...relatively speaking. Honestly, you might be better off just throwing some recorded competitive or high-skilled PoV games in and showing people how fast and challenging this game is and marketing that this game is hard and teamwork is priority. You might get less people interested but the people that are interested are more likely to stick around. Remember that unless you're a big name in the business like Blizzard or Valve, making a relatively hardcore game and not marketing to a hardcore audience misses the mark. Casuals don't want to play because they get crushed and people that would otherwise give the game a try don't.
When people see this game on the steam store, whether its normal price or humble bundle crazy prices, the game is not properly represented by whats indicated in the store page, coverage or any trailer out there. This game is extremely hard, up there with the greats of FPS like Quake and it should be treated as such.
I guess this is just one of many opinions as to why NS2 didn't really catch on with the general market.
back to topic, this thead has a lot of different oppinions. while i disagree with certain stuff here and there, most seem to have a valid point.
but in the end, isn't a lot of all this just mostly speculation? problem is, it's very hard to get feedback from people who quit the game for good. unless they came across some fundamental flaw for some reason, most people won't bother posting on the forums. yes, occasionally there is a screenfilling ranting-post but those still seem rather rare compared to the amount of people who actually bought this game.
i also have my doubt that (semi-)professional reviewers represent the quitting players too well: i remember mostly positive articles and ns2 also has 80 metascore on steam which is quite a good score i'd say.
so the only thing i can think of right now is steam-reviews (people don't have to bother posting new ones, they can point out if a review has been helpful or not) so maybe we should look into that a bit (especially the negative ones).
personal stories of oneself or buddies help too, ofc, but it's a minority and probably not representing the quitters too well.
if anyone has more ideas on how to actually get a decent amount of hands-on feedback, please post it. e.g. i don't use social networks nor read reddit and stuff like that, what are the oppinions there? are there any other popular sites which list or even sell ns2 that allow easy feedback?
You made me curious, so I went a looked at a few (hundred) Steam reviews and only found 2 that would not reccomend this game. The main reasons for both of those two reviews is our old friend performance and overall attitude of the existing community (we are all "A-Holes", apperantly).
Almost all of them say that it is very hard to learn, but well worth it.
i should probably mention that i took myself ~30 mins time on an otherwise empty server to teach him the mechanics and other basics and i mentored him most of the time we were playing on populated servers.
here is the only point he brought up (it's just one single oppinion, but at least it's fresh):
-"annoying jumping around of the aliens", he had to increase his mouse sensitivity higher than he's used to; he's aware that speed is essential for aliens but hitting is really hard if the enemy is "jumping around you 360°"
he also told me why he thinks others might be quitting (so that's guessing, but as said he has a fresh impression):
-setting might not appeal to everyone
-more complex than e.g. other shooters; tactical games are harder to learn and some might not have the time or ambition for that
as for positive: he liked being treated "normally" even when recognized as a newbie e.g. not being specificially targeted for easy kills. but i have to add that we played mostly chaotic matches that day (those that drag out long for some reason and people don't surrender at the end), guess due to recent sale. i'll ask for more feedback in a week or something when he's encountered a wider variety of servers, players and game situations.
one thing i learned for myself: if people don't communicate or refuse to go commander, it might be due to them having private (teamspeak/skype) conversations. i also used ingame voice, but it seemed inappropriate to share my personal advice for him to the rest of the server all the time, especially when it's all in german.
other than that, there are 4-packs available which means when you encounter a pack of rookies on a server (i've seen people who obviously belonged together regarding their nicks) they could also have private teamspeak/skype conferences running to share their experiences and initial emotions. i know that this is also just speculation. but as OP pointed out, by far not every game comes with vivit ingame voice conversations, so some players might be used to run their private conversations in the background.
Also, there are TONS of multiplayer-only games, so your first sentence is also false.
one thing a review also pointed out is how unforgiving the game can be: a small mistake by a player or especially the commander can determine the outcome even early on. i think he's got a point. which is a shame, because in the earlier stages of development, any outcome still seemed possible no matter how one sided a game was. it's still possible to swing a game around, but much more rare. so what happened to that?
"HAH!" says x360NOSCOPEAWPKINGx - "Obviously these ns2 nubs have never heard of ME. I'll show those scrubs how you play a computer game!" - *proceeds to buy game*
Hell, you could put together a short clip of somebody playing for the first time, dying over and over again, swearing his ass off repeatedly - *dies to a parasite* "WHAT THE FU-" *abruptly cuts to title image* "Natural Selection 2 - adapt, evolve and overcome, or die trying".
I'm not saying that this way is necessarily better than the current method, but I do think it would be an interesting approach.
guy A - performance (performance is better than before, but I know his rig it still wouldn't work)
guy B - can't start the game and don't want to ask tech support
guy C - game is too hardcore I just want to play casual
guy D - looks fun but I want to focus more on LoL
guy E - I like the RTS part of the game but I suck to much in FPS to have a great time
hope that gave some insight
I just went down the reviews on the steam page, didn't filter or anything.
Targeting a niche crowd, exclusively, would not allow this to happen.
They knew this - like any business knows this.
See: Farmville vs Shootmania (sales and player counts.)
Who the hell said anything about exclusively.
srsly? Farmville and Shootmania....
R U HAVING A GIGGLE
Because it's for people who understand and enjoy both "rushy" RTS like supcom/ta/starcraft (competitive, not tower defense or noob single player on easy), and oldskool twitch arena shooters a la quake/unreal.
Meanwhile those people who are already very very few also have to have patience for stackage, patience for dealing with worse dicks, patience for dealing with better dicks, patience for the noobs, patience for terrible commanders, patience for people who don't understand the game, and patience for playing out games that begin already lost.
That's why it isn't for everyone.
Was that rhetorical or Sarcastic or something other than serious?
Are you telling me I'm going to get rich by innovating another $2 chocolate bar? As opposed to, say, a real time in flight finite element analysis module for experimental aircraft?
Yea, I'm confused about that too. Sarcasm iron?