For me, and my friends whom I introduced to the original NS and eventually NS2, we simply don't find NS2 to be as much fun as NS1. We believe a lot of what made the original NS fun is missing or not well executed in NS2 (freedom to build anywhere, gorge builder, aliens not having a com, map design (high ceilings), etc.).
This is another reason why the game is stale and uninteresting after a brief period, especially if you've played ns1.
What I blame for this is what I call the UWE Holy Trinity that will never be changed: Powernodes-Alien Commander-Infestation. Each of these three have created so many problems in the game and have literally destroyed variety and the possibility for interesting decisions.
Can't put pg's in cool spots
Can't put alien structures on different planes
Can't build beyond the confines of infestation
Loving dat cyst fps lag
Can't have meaningful decisions about structure killing when there's a big red button in the room.
Can't relocate
Can't create love shacks
Can't have multilevel map design without 3 km ramps for cysts.
Can't lift block with chamber
Can't have lifts
Loving dem 3 x fades and 2 x lerk life form explosions
Thou shalt experience this game in the same manner each and every time. Literally everything is so god damn restrictive and repetitive thanks to the above.
Why spend years balancing a game and then make a new one but throw previous balance and design decisions out the window. Ns1 could have been built upon where new mechanics were introduced gradually (if you want infestation do it so it doesn't stuff everything else up) instead of throwing a whole bunch of completely different mechanics into a similar game and then 6 months down the track revert back to what worked in ns1 (bt mod).
There are loads of different aspects that you can pick and compare against other popular games e.g. dota2/lol are not simple games and the learning curve is insane, but it's free 2 play with achievements and backed by a lot of marketing and great performance - basically any PC can run it.
I would say good performance, marketing, achievements and free 2 play are all common factors of successful PC games. NS2 is a good game, but it has none of these.
The problem is that introducing free2play would probably push away core followers because it's not a traditional FPS monetisation method and it would require a lot of work to get right, also NS2 (potential) is maybe too small for it to work.
I would really like to see basic achievements and cosmetic unlocks. Maybe some gun skins, icon next to name in scoreboard, maybe basic in-game player profile with achievement icons (like on the forum). Relatively simple things that don't harm gameplay but encourage people to keep playing and work towards a goal.
Can't put pg's in cool spots
Can't put alien structures on different planes
Can't build beyond the confines of infestation
Loving dat cyst fps lag
Can't have meaningful decisions about structure killing when there's a big red button in the room.
Can't relocate
Can't create love shacks
Can't have multilevel map design without 3 km ramps for cysts.
Can't lift block with chamber
Can't have lifts
Loving dem 3 x fades and 2 x lerk life form explosions
Let me guess. It wasn't just nostalgia that caused you to create a list populated solely by things that were in NS1 but aren't in NS2?
1. Performance
2. NS2 isn't polished enough to be truly popular.
3. Marketing is inherently limited (but I think UWE did very good considering their possibilities), and word of mouth is limited because of 1. and 2.
UWE can do modjam and create 3 nifty mods ... yet they cant even scrounge together a decent tutorial system.... am i missing something ? Do they still think those half assed tutorial videos are good enough ?
Achievements/levels/ranking ... its quite doable without interfering with the game ... we do have a readyroom which can essentially isolate the game from achievement rewards should the devs make it possible.
im interested to see how 'sabot' is implemented, i hope that means we get official stats ? ns2stats is ok but its not on every server and sometimes its down.
Also, i think you need to rethink rookie servers, they should really only allow low level players, more often than not vets will engage in 'clubbing baby seals for fun'. Rookie servers should be a place where new players (who have learnt the basics from the 'hopefully new tutorial system *cough*') learn the team aspect of the game without much pressure. Alot of us vets have forgotten ... but we were once noobs too, back in NS1 when it first came out, everybody was a noob, those first couple weeks were the most fun. I can only imagine how frustrating and annoying it is to play against highly skilled players who have been playing for months/years before you have even learnt the basics, let alone experienced how fun a good game is, its no wonder new players throw in the towel, they have only experienced frustrations and dont see a reason to stick around. We know this because the same thing happened in NS1, as the community got good at the game, new players found it difficult to find fun in the game due to dieing all the time.
As far as performance has improved, it is obviously putting off players whose pcs that cannot run it well as they get a bad impression of the game. Realistically is it an issue that can be fixed any time soon? Right now the LUAJIT thing is a maybe and might not pay off big in the way that will allow people with bad performance to play.
There was always a concurrent range of 1.5k-2k range of players who played for but the count is now around 1kish. It is probably because of the usual reasons people move on from every game. They are either bored, frustrated or do not find the game fun anymore and moved on to something else. NS2 just happens to magnify some of these points due to the nature of the game which gives frustrating experiences such as stacking or having trouble learning the game. In my case I still play but definitely not as much. The game is not boring it just became not very enjoyable for me over time due to changing mechanics that made playing feel more like a chore.
I just think that too much time went into trying to make the game look great and sound cool. Exos are just gimmicky robots that make weak players feel awesome. Infestation and Powergrids sound great on paper and add atmosphere but are surplus to requirements - the game runs perfectly fine without both - and bring with them a whole bunch of flaws (which I don't want to go into here).
Art assets dominate the screen and make it difficult to see things (see: celerity blur, minimap fade, jetpack smoke, alienvision opacity, exo scanlines, nanoshield pulse, gorge goo, umbra opacity, fade blink, alien colour scheme, emergency lighting etc. etc.). When it all comes together, I just feel like i'm fighting the designers, not the opponent.
Meanwhile, animations still need a huge amount of work, fps is still shoddy and movement needs overhauling (I mean, the j-etttp-p-packa-ck... stuttering... is it actually intended?!).
That said, I have great hopes for the mod Sewlek is working on.
Balancing a game like ns2 for 6v6 play as well as 12v12 play is going to be a hard task. One way to alleviate this in the short term, is like Koruyo said, make a matchmaking system. Corroborate with ns2stats, take into account each players ELO rating to make teams, and go go. That means servers need to get ns2stats, everyone.
I think a big turn off of the game for some people is the fault of commanders, as well as the imbalance of player skill I alluded to earlier. But lets focus on commanders. In the community there are a lot of guys out there who are terrible commanders, who yell constantly at their team and have no idea what they're doing.
Balancing a game like ns2 for 6v6 play as well as 12v12 play is going to be a hard task. One way to alleviate this in the short term, is like Koruyo said, make a matchmaking system. Corroborate with ns2stats, take into account each players ELO rating to make teams, and go go. That means servers need to get ns2stats, everyone.
I think a big turn off of the game for some people is the fault of commanders, as well as the imbalance of player skill I alluded to earlier. But lets focus on commanders. In the community there are a lot of guys out there who are terrible commanders, who yell constantly at their team and have no idea what they're doing.
Commanding is a really awful part of the game for general pub players, you basically can't learn it anywhere and you can't be good without first being bad.
For me, and my friends whom I introduced to the original NS and eventually NS2, we simply don't find NS2 to be as much fun as NS1. We believe a lot of what made the original NS fun is missing or not well executed in NS2 (freedom to build anywhere, gorge builder, aliens not having a com, map design (high ceilings), etc.).
This is another reason why the game is stale and uninteresting after a brief period, especially if you've played ns1.
What I blame for this is what I call the UWE Holy Trinity that will never be changed: Powernodes-Alien Commander-Infestation. Each of these three have created so many problems in the game and have literally destroyed variety and the possibility for interesting decisions.
Can't put pg's in cool spots
Can't put alien structures on different planes
Can't build beyond the confines of infestation
Loving dat cyst fps lag
Can't have meaningful decisions about structure killing when there's a big red button in the room.
Can't relocate
Can't create love shacks
Can't have multilevel map design without 3 km ramps for cysts.
Can't lift block with chamber
Can't have lifts
Loving dem 3 x fades and 2 x lerk life form explosions
Thou shalt experience this game in the same manner each and every time. Literally everything is so god damn restrictive and repetitive thanks to the above.
You also have to gloss over the L4D1 to L4D2 fiasco a bit (like if UWE said it was dropping all support for NS2 to work on NS3 which is basically just NS2 v2.0 that you get to pay for again!)
I thought they stopped developing NS1 in any shape and/or form to make NS2, essentially NS1 rebooted, but you now have to pay for, on a more unstable engine, with unstable net code, and a lower playerbase at its height than NS1 ever had.
NS2 was UWE's money maker, after this release, it will be very hard to get non-hardcore forum goers to mass buy a new product from them purely on the poor handling of the development and the engine.
I base success on concurrent players, averaging 1k a day is not success in my eyes. Although we live in a world of money, as profit is oxygen, the dev. team did good to get the money they did for this game. The amount of units sold per playerbase to me, on a digital only sale base comes across that the product is of poor quality.
You also have to gloss over the L4D1 to L4D2 fiasco a bit (like if UWE said it was dropping all support for NS2 to work on NS3 which is basically just NS2 v2.0 that you get to pay for again!)
I thought they stopped developing NS1 in any shape and/or form to make NS2, essentially NS1 rebooted, but you now have to pay for, on a more unstable engine, with unstable net code, and a lower playerbase at its height than NS1 ever had.
NS2 was UWE's money maker, after this release, it will be very hard to get non-hardcore forum goers to mass buy a new product from them purely on the poor handling of the development and the engine.
I base success on concurrent players, averaging 1k a day is not success in my eyes. Although we live in a world of money, as profit is oxygen, the dev. team did good to get the money they did for this game. The amount of units sold per playerbase to me, on a digital only sale base comes across that the product is of poor quality.
For shame UWE. You have created a massive money maker and are now living out your days doing absolutely nothing in your gold plated yachts.
Not enough depth? I'm not sure whether to tag you as a troll or just disagree.
I think the relevant measure is depth over complexity. NS2 is very complex (lots of rules, lots of exceptions) with relatively high depth. NS1 was simpler (less rules, and very consistent, eg: 3 hives, three abilities, three chambers, three upgrades, three upgrade tiers) with more or about the same depth. Some games like say Bridge Builder have very few rules (around three), so are very simple and easy to understand, but still have a lot of depth, thanks to the combinatorial explosion their simple rules allow.
NS2 is alright but not amazing on the depth side and not very good on the complexity one.
im interested to see how 'sabot' is implemented, i hope that means we get official stats ? ns2stats is ok but its not on every server and sometimes its down.
wrote:
AFAIK, matchmaking is not coming. That was what Flayra told us in Cologne, at least.
quote from Fana ( Source, you might have to scroll down a bit )
1) Auto Graphic System Config. This Automatically changes graphic settings to the minimum requirements based on the equipment of the users PC.
2) Ranking system (or medals, achievements, etc) People go nuts over achievements and rankings, trust me
3) More videos that involves cinematic with actual story.
4) Do not do any expensive advertisement, it won't help the company at the moment until issues above are improved
Also just want to put in the fact that the community in this game is pretty cool. That's a huge plus for the playerbase, except for the douchbags like sewlek.
Thanks everyone for the comments. There seems to be a good consensus of 4 or 5 major things that are could be affecting NS2 popularity. Obviously some of these are not in our control beyond suggestions to UWE (i.e. Performance, Matchmaking, etc.). It seems that several suggestions on these topics have quite a bit of interest in many players (for example I would love to see matchmaking happen). Seeing as this is not really in the suggestion thread maybe those players that are really interested in certain topics such as matchmaking could start a more specific thread on that specific topic in the suggestion thread. That way we could have more controlled conversation about these different ideas (of course, some of these ideas could have already been stated as suggestions, like I said I'm not really a frequent to these forums). It has appeared to me that UWE is very geared towards pleasing their players, and I think if we can have meaningful, troll-free conversations about these things that we think will help the game, maybe we can help the devs. Then again, I'm not sure how often the devs actually visit the forums.
In addition I think there are some ways we could perhaps help directly. A couple people mentioned advertising better as players to encourage others to buy (and hopefully to teach them to play). Also, another big suggestion I saw that I liked was the single-player offline tutorial type idea. I've seen a lot of different tutorials such as the ones directly on NS2 as well as others in steam works, and I feel that there are enough players with this kind of experience, as well as moding and mapping, to perhaps get an idea of a better tutorial that could perhaps be pitched to the devs.
I dunno, these are just ideas. With me neither being big into the competitive side, or the modding/mapping, or even the forums for that matter, I honestly don't know how much of a help I would be in doing some of these ideas. I'm hoping that maybe others with more expertise and weight in the community could perhaps run with some of these ideas. I'm not saying that any of my ideas or others ideas will necessarily work, but I think we might be able to help a lot with the popularity of NS2.
You are deluding yourself if you believe the main reason more people don't play is because of performance. Sure in your little circle of competitive players that may be a big issue, but for casuals, which are the mainstay of any game, it is not the biggest issue.
Performance affects your success in the game (it also affects how frustrated you get, getting killed by a skulk you had no hope of tracking). Your success (and lack of frustration) leads to having fun in a game, win or lose.
Casuals also tend to have shittier computers.
Performance absolutely affects the casual experience.
Laughable to say casuals don't care about performance. I see performance brought up on this forum a lot and people get so tetchy about it, it's like a taboo thing, you can't mention the elephant in the room. For shame!
And performance massively affects everyone. No one has fun when their bullets don't register, they can't move fluidly, the screen stutters. Once you play a game with at least 100+ FPS then go to a game which would struggle to hold the frame rate a console displays, you notice.
Unfortunately, NS2 is sort of inherently going to be kind of a "niche interest" game. It's too complex, has far too much depth, and features such a steep learning curve that it is difficult for any new player to become acclimated in it. So many of today's gamers play games like COD and Battlefield because they don't want to deal with that complexity. They want an easy way to have fun for a couple of hours shooting other people, they don't want to have to work for that. Those kind of popular military shooters provide people with the ability to instantly jump in and dominate, without needing to learn about what each building does, how to effectively move with fade, what the commander can do to help out the team, etc.
In other words, NS2 is a game that caters exclusively to hardcore fans of online gaming, the ones who won't shy away from a little depth and the ones who are really looking to dedicate lots of time to learning and improving.
I will say, though, that UWE could potentially help increase the user base if they did a better job of having a tutorial or guide to help new users learn the ropes. The videos that are included to teach new players about the game are, in my opinion, not all that helpful. An offline mode with bots is probably unrealistic, but I do think it would be in UWE's best interests to include a hands-on tutorial mode that more effectively introduces players to the game. That would probably make the learning curve a little less intimidating and ensure that more people stick around to really discover what makes NS2 great.
Rubbish.
It has fairly poor performance, both in terms of framerate and connections, public games are usually nigh unplayable due to stacking/lack of command competence, and the game itself is punishingly unpleasant to new players, possibly only outmatched by a large portion of the community itself.
I don't at all buy that argument, it's basically like saying 'the game is just to cool for people to handle' which is nonsense. It's absolute snobbery, it has sod all to do with the game being 'designed' for your superior 'hardcore' gamers. It's just rough as hell and the only people who will put up with it are people who are particularly devoted to the genre.
Planetside 2 runs about equally as bad as NS2 does on the CPU side and they have lots more players, although the combat is much long range and with tanks you can easily play at 20fps.
You don't have to pay for planetside 2.
It's not a very good game but it's free, so people will play it. I've played planetside 2, I didn't like it much, but I played it because, frankly, it costs nothing and was sufficiently different to take up an afternoon.
Too many hackers/aimbotters. No point in playing if cheaters are running around.
I find it dissapointing that a significant number of people had issues with hackers in servers but I also find it strange. Out of the 500+ hours of playing this game i've only had about 3 instances of actually seeing a hacker as far as i remember. I don't honestly think it is that bad and I think the community/devs are doing a good job with it.
Comments
This is another reason why the game is stale and uninteresting after a brief period, especially if you've played ns1.
What I blame for this is what I call the UWE Holy Trinity that will never be changed: Powernodes-Alien Commander-Infestation. Each of these three have created so many problems in the game and have literally destroyed variety and the possibility for interesting decisions.
Can't put pg's in cool spots
Can't put alien structures on different planes
Can't build beyond the confines of infestation
Loving dat cyst fps lag
Can't have meaningful decisions about structure killing when there's a big red button in the room.
Can't relocate
Can't create love shacks
Can't have multilevel map design without 3 km ramps for cysts.
Can't lift block with chamber
Can't have lifts
Loving dem 3 x fades and 2 x lerk life form explosions
Thou shalt experience this game in the same manner each and every time. Literally everything is so god damn restrictive and repetitive thanks to the above.
Why spend years balancing a game and then make a new one but throw previous balance and design decisions out the window. Ns1 could have been built upon where new mechanics were introduced gradually (if you want infestation do it so it doesn't stuff everything else up) instead of throwing a whole bunch of completely different mechanics into a similar game and then 6 months down the track revert back to what worked in ns1 (bt mod).
I would say good performance, marketing, achievements and free 2 play are all common factors of successful PC games. NS2 is a good game, but it has none of these.
The problem is that introducing free2play would probably push away core followers because it's not a traditional FPS monetisation method and it would require a lot of work to get right, also NS2 (potential) is maybe too small for it to work.
I would really like to see basic achievements and cosmetic unlocks. Maybe some gun skins, icon next to name in scoreboard, maybe basic in-game player profile with achievement icons (like on the forum). Relatively simple things that don't harm gameplay but encourage people to keep playing and work towards a goal.
Let me guess. It wasn't just nostalgia that caused you to create a list populated solely by things that were in NS1 but aren't in NS2?
No, it wasn't.
2. NS2 isn't polished enough to be truly popular.
3. Marketing is inherently limited (but I think UWE did very good considering their possibilities), and word of mouth is limited because of 1. and 2.
Achievements/levels/ranking ... its quite doable without interfering with the game ... we do have a readyroom which can essentially isolate the game from achievement rewards should the devs make it possible.
im interested to see how 'sabot' is implemented, i hope that means we get official stats ? ns2stats is ok but its not on every server and sometimes its down.
Also, i think you need to rethink rookie servers, they should really only allow low level players, more often than not vets will engage in 'clubbing baby seals for fun'. Rookie servers should be a place where new players (who have learnt the basics from the 'hopefully new tutorial system *cough*') learn the team aspect of the game without much pressure. Alot of us vets have forgotten ... but we were once noobs too, back in NS1 when it first came out, everybody was a noob, those first couple weeks were the most fun. I can only imagine how frustrating and annoying it is to play against highly skilled players who have been playing for months/years before you have even learnt the basics, let alone experienced how fun a good game is, its no wonder new players throw in the towel, they have only experienced frustrations and dont see a reason to stick around. We know this because the same thing happened in NS1, as the community got good at the game, new players found it difficult to find fun in the game due to dieing all the time.
well thats my opinion at least :P
Care to elaborate?
Basically everything that was in NS1 but isn't in NS2, or wasn't in NS1 but is in NS2.
That's typically how it goes with these types.
Art assets dominate the screen and make it difficult to see things (see: celerity blur, minimap fade, jetpack smoke, alienvision opacity, exo scanlines, nanoshield pulse, gorge goo, umbra opacity, fade blink, alien colour scheme, emergency lighting etc. etc.). When it all comes together, I just feel like i'm fighting the designers, not the opponent.
Meanwhile, animations still need a huge amount of work, fps is still shoddy and movement needs overhauling (I mean, the j-etttp-p-packa-ck... stuttering... is it actually intended?!).
That said, I have great hopes for the mod Sewlek is working on.
I think a big turn off of the game for some people is the fault of commanders, as well as the imbalance of player skill I alluded to earlier. But lets focus on commanders. In the community there are a lot of guys out there who are terrible commanders, who yell constantly at their team and have no idea what they're doing.
Commanding is a really awful part of the game for general pub players, you basically can't learn it anywhere and you can't be good without first being bad.
Really do agree with all of this.
I thought they stopped developing NS1 in any shape and/or form to make NS2, essentially NS1 rebooted, but you now have to pay for, on a more unstable engine, with unstable net code, and a lower playerbase at its height than NS1 ever had.
NS2 was UWE's money maker, after this release, it will be very hard to get non-hardcore forum goers to mass buy a new product from them purely on the poor handling of the development and the engine.
I base success on concurrent players, averaging 1k a day is not success in my eyes. Although we live in a world of money, as profit is oxygen, the dev. team did good to get the money they did for this game. The amount of units sold per playerbase to me, on a digital only sale base comes across that the product is of poor quality.
For shame UWE. You have created a massive money maker and are now living out your days doing absolutely nothing in your gold plated yachts.
For shame.
I think the relevant measure is depth over complexity. NS2 is very complex (lots of rules, lots of exceptions) with relatively high depth. NS1 was simpler (less rules, and very consistent, eg: 3 hives, three abilities, three chambers, three upgrades, three upgrade tiers) with more or about the same depth. Some games like say Bridge Builder have very few rules (around three), so are very simple and easy to understand, but still have a lot of depth, thanks to the combinatorial explosion their simple rules allow.
NS2 is alright but not amazing on the depth side and not very good on the complexity one.
Some people (now I know this might sound crazy) play games to have fun, and for a challenge, not just to see a high number in the top corner
1) Auto Graphic System Config. This Automatically changes graphic settings to the minimum requirements based on the equipment of the users PC.
2) Ranking system (or medals, achievements, etc) People go nuts over achievements and rankings, trust me
3) More videos that involves cinematic with actual story.
4) Do not do any expensive advertisement, it won't help the company at the moment until issues above are improved
Also just want to put in the fact that the community in this game is pretty cool. That's a huge plus for the playerbase, except for the douchbags like sewlek.
In addition I think there are some ways we could perhaps help directly. A couple people mentioned advertising better as players to encourage others to buy (and hopefully to teach them to play). Also, another big suggestion I saw that I liked was the single-player offline tutorial type idea. I've seen a lot of different tutorials such as the ones directly on NS2 as well as others in steam works, and I feel that there are enough players with this kind of experience, as well as moding and mapping, to perhaps get an idea of a better tutorial that could perhaps be pitched to the devs.
I dunno, these are just ideas. With me neither being big into the competitive side, or the modding/mapping, or even the forums for that matter, I honestly don't know how much of a help I would be in doing some of these ideas. I'm hoping that maybe others with more expertise and weight in the community could perhaps run with some of these ideas. I'm not saying that any of my ideas or others ideas will necessarily work, but I think we might be able to help a lot with the popularity of NS2.
Performance affects your success in the game (it also affects how frustrated you get, getting killed by a skulk you had no hope of tracking). Your success (and lack of frustration) leads to having fun in a game, win or lose.
Casuals also tend to have shittier computers.
Performance absolutely affects the casual experience.
Rubbish.
It has fairly poor performance, both in terms of framerate and connections, public games are usually nigh unplayable due to stacking/lack of command competence, and the game itself is punishingly unpleasant to new players, possibly only outmatched by a large portion of the community itself.
I don't at all buy that argument, it's basically like saying 'the game is just to cool for people to handle' which is nonsense. It's absolute snobbery, it has sod all to do with the game being 'designed' for your superior 'hardcore' gamers. It's just rough as hell and the only people who will put up with it are people who are particularly devoted to the genre.
You don't have to pay for planetside 2.
It's not a very good game but it's free, so people will play it. I've played planetside 2, I didn't like it much, but I played it because, frankly, it costs nothing and was sufficiently different to take up an afternoon.
I find it dissapointing that a significant number of people had issues with hackers in servers but I also find it strange. Out of the 500+ hours of playing this game i've only had about 3 instances of actually seeing a hacker as far as i remember. I don't honestly think it is that bad and I think the community/devs are doing a good job with it.