Tell me about the 'good old days'
meatmachine
South England Join Date: 2013-01-06 Member: 177858Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Supporter
South England Join Date: 2013-01-06 Member: 177858Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Supporter
Hi guys. MeatMachine here.
All around the forum I see vets praising the days of NS1 and referencing gameplay elements & mechanics that just sound awesome and interesting.
If one were to only pay attention to this kind of comment it would be hard not to justify reintroducing all these mechanics/ making a mod that fits them in with NS2.
Some of the mechanics I love the sound of, like the way in which a single resflow is used for each team having a different 'social structure' rather than having pres/tres and 2 comms; heavy armour and the HMG sound like much more fitting gameplay elements than exosuits, as do the alien upgrade paths (the echoes of this unfortunately lost with the biomass system).
I love this game and always have- unfortunately for me back in 'the day' my PC sucked ass so I only ever got to play a little bit of NS1 round a friends house before it died. I know NS2 classic mod existed, but the graphics were just kinda painful. If a mod existed that was essentially NS2 classic with NS2 graphics/ models etc, I'd definitely play it.
But was it all REALLY peaches and cream? As awesome as it sounds, I find it hard to believe it was without its own issues and I have a level of trust that presumes the developers would have made all these changes for the better.
This might be opening a can of worms, but I'd love to hear about what was wrong with NS1, to really give some perspective on why certain changes were made and achieve a deeper level of understanding of the game.
Aliens not spending res on hives, comms not dropping weapons?
Please, sell NS2 back to me.
All around the forum I see vets praising the days of NS1 and referencing gameplay elements & mechanics that just sound awesome and interesting.
If one were to only pay attention to this kind of comment it would be hard not to justify reintroducing all these mechanics/ making a mod that fits them in with NS2.
Some of the mechanics I love the sound of, like the way in which a single resflow is used for each team having a different 'social structure' rather than having pres/tres and 2 comms; heavy armour and the HMG sound like much more fitting gameplay elements than exosuits, as do the alien upgrade paths (the echoes of this unfortunately lost with the biomass system).
I love this game and always have- unfortunately for me back in 'the day' my PC sucked ass so I only ever got to play a little bit of NS1 round a friends house before it died. I know NS2 classic mod existed, but the graphics were just kinda painful. If a mod existed that was essentially NS2 classic with NS2 graphics/ models etc, I'd definitely play it.
But was it all REALLY peaches and cream? As awesome as it sounds, I find it hard to believe it was without its own issues and I have a level of trust that presumes the developers would have made all these changes for the better.
This might be opening a can of worms, but I'd love to hear about what was wrong with NS1, to really give some perspective on why certain changes were made and achieve a deeper level of understanding of the game.
Aliens not spending res on hives, comms not dropping weapons?
Please, sell NS2 back to me.
Comments
I crashed whenever I used the Fade ability to "fly", 2nd attack? Don't even remember the name :P So I just played Lerk and Onos a lot.
At the end of ns1, only the unfriendly and insulting players were left -> bye bye ns1
Everything else was perfect and made me play it longer then any other game in 22 years.
ITS A GOOD THING WE FIXED ALL THAT IN NS2 RIGHT?!?!?
Well in NS2, I think on paper they tried at least to address some of the issues. The alien commander idea was supposed to make teamwork on aliens easier and the p-res idea meant to make you less reliant on your commander dropping weapons when needed, as well as address the scaling issue with larger population servers (for example with 12 field marines, your commander can't afford to drop 7 sgs on the same amount of RTs as a 6v6 game where u might only need to drop 2-3).
I still absolutely hated from the beginning the idea of power nodes/cysting, and I don't think that was done to address any specific problem in NS1 gameplay, but to distinguish NS2 on its own, as a "hey look what this engine can do its cool" sort of thing. I don't think they realized how stale and limiting it made the gameplay until it was too late (or maybe they did and didn't care because it was a flagship selling point of their engine). Anyways, if you watch some of the early videos of NS2 development, the game is so vastly different now and you can see the overall game direction has been all over the place.
I may be crazy, but I think NS2 with the Spark engine could have been a damn good single player game. The dynamic infestation, the lighting, the artwork. Make it a slow moving immersive shooter and I am all in. Hell even something like L4D where you have to move across the map in a group building power nodes and de-infesting the place where special enemies like lerks or fade may attack you. And instead of your character yelling "TANK INCOMING", it's an Onos. (only your marine says "OOOOONNNNNOOOOSSS" in WasabiOne's voice :P). That woulda sold some copies man!
A fast moving, twitch shooting multiplayer e-sport this game is not, not ever on this engine sadly. Sorry to digress.
Which is a good design goal to have, communicating clearly with the players on the ground.
IMO, it would have been a useful and benign mechanic if it was automatic and purely thematic, as originally shown.
Actually I think it could be with some tweaks to the engine and netcode. And you know what? We have a group of highly talented and dedicated people working on just these things.
Remember that most computer games that you may be referring to today, were created AFTER this time.
The learning curve is the big one. Lets face it, without an extensive ammount of time being put in to campaign-esq training mission, its always gonna be hard (props to the one creating guides to alleviate this problem a bit)
MAYBE somethins bad from NS1:
The unlimited fields of turrets with electrified factories? (pplayed a round on ecplise with a turret farm from marine start to maint hive )
That last gorge who wasted everyones time by putting a gorgefort in a vent once the game was over and making the marines track him down (I put this as a maybe since the gorge MIGHT be able to get a hive dropped
Marines relocating to a double res, then getting surrounded-creating a never ending turtle due to RFK for marines (they never ran out of money)
**p.s. RFK worked out well as a positive reinforcement of not dying on aliens >.>
I agree with a few of these points but not this entire line. NS1 existed in a very different time for online gaming. Most of the offerings were twitch shooters or RTS games. These days I am hard pressed to even think of many games that still offer that type of gameplay. TF2 and CS:GO? And they are pretty slow compared to Tribes, Quake, UT, etc. Maybe you could include Battlefield 4 and CoD but those aren't really twitch at all. I come back to NS2 time and time again because it is one of the very few games that still carry some of the elements of twitchy, arena-style games. I have no problem with gaming today but you only need to pop into any TF2 server to see that even in FPS games the new gaming generation is more about sandbox-style fun than constant arena combat (which I prefer). You'd never see a conga line in UT2K4
But we have still people here in germany who thinks: "The GDR wasn't such a bad thing after all."
It seems people tend to forget the annyoing things after a while.
NS1 was a good game for sure but it was not the Ubergame some people mentioned here in the forum in many threads.
NS2 is better for the most part. Some differences with NS1:
1) In NS1, the main battle was preventing aliens from finishing the second hive (and getting significantly boosted abilities once it did like leap and bilebomb). The 3rd hive was pretty much a game ender for marines. Xeno, webs, charge, etc... went up with the third hive.
2) No alien commander. The skill of the gorges could make or break a game. They were responsible for dropping the upgrade chambers and hives. Many hero gorges perished spitting the building second hive so the team can transport over to defend it. Other aliens could also use the +use key to activate the transport. Aliens used movement chambers, or another hive itself to transport over when the building hive was under attack. Gorge tunnels in NS2 are a more intuitive mechanic than what NS1 did, although.
3) NS2 actually has an alien commander. After countless games of NS1, it was a bit tiring to play too many games where everybody is silent and not taking charge of leading the team. The alien comm formalized that leadership role. I think it adds a good amount of depth to the game, and more of the RTS element to the alien side that was previously the domain of just the marines in NS1.
4) Skulk movement is lot better and more intuitive than the old bunnyhopping in NS1. It achieves essentially the same effect, but is much easier to learn.
5) Fades were the dominant force on the alien team, and often the linchpin of alien victory. Games were won or lost on the death of a fade, especially one that could get kills. NS2 is much more forgiving in this regard. Fades don't have metabolize and focus anymore, so they're significantly weaker than the NS1 fade. Vortex and stab are of minimal usefulness.
6) Heavies were more useful in NS1 since they were basically still a marine with lots of armor. Heavy trains could just weld each other in combat, making them more self sufficient. Exo's in the their current state in NS2 are a liability, and need rebalanced/reworked again. In NS1 I always felt that either tech path (JP or heavy train) were viable. I don't feel that way in NS2 when JPs have a much higher probability of being useful than Exos.
7) Onos got stomp with the second hive IIRC, which made them the perfect counter to heavy trains. Devour was fun to use on heavies or random single marines around the map, but not fun for the marines stuck in the belly. Exo's are really a counter to anything due to their weakness and reliance on others to weld.
ONE thing that is horrendous in NS1:
Some part of the weapon pickup system. But it sill is better than the NS2 one.
The bad thing is that if you are with your rifle and there is a shotgun on the floor and you walk on it, you pick it up automatically.
When you are in a fight and you pick up an empty shotgun, it is quite... infuriating.
Apart from this one, I really don't see anything yet.
* I found the very asymetric system of aliens having no commander much superior then having a commander in ns2. However, rookies had a harder time to pick up how to be useful, and it wasnt always clear who was 'field commanding'. From my memory, often the gorge.
* I found the build everywhere, anywhere both sides had a option I heavily lack in ns2. A source of pure frustration and utmost joy. Anyone remember redroom? It also promoted more teamplay as marines needed each other early on to reach vents, and a gorge needed skulks to reach the same location often.
* Heavy armour seemed far superior to exo in terms of usability. Cheaper, could phasegate, could weld, could basicly do anything but fly.
* I loved that structures were integrated in ns1. You didnt have a crag and a shell. It was the same bloody thing.
* Elevators, water etc.
* Ns2 however has always nice things. Balance & features? Remember ns1 went up to.. version 3? 3.1? Something along those lines, before they finally got the big problems out in terms of balance.
* Blink? buggy joke in many cases in ns1.
* ns1 was slower! Much of it. (and 3.0 was pretty balanced in pub). I had matches where you could play for 4hours in the same match. People would leave, later rejoin after a few hours and be in the same match. May sound fun, and it was, but the time investment for it was complete nuts. RTs did not repay themselves for what, a full minute minimum? Resticks where slow.
* No teamscaling in ns1, in terms of res. Your RTs produced x res in total which got split into the entire team. Had more players? Live with it, your lifeforms would be delayed.
* resource for kills. Aka 'make the good player even more OP, for when you finally kill him/her the player can refade'.
I am also convinced more bad bad stuff is in ns1, but its been over 10 years.. so forgive me for not remembering.
Also, a lot of the basic things and the basic feel of the game were so brilliant and precise that even the less enjoyable stuff still felt good and worthwile. It didn't matter you didn't get big guns every round because the basic marine setup was such a satisfying combination of possibilities. The game was brutal. There's some pretty obscure stuff in there, especially in the movement system and settings.
The res model is a weird one. I think it's a sizeable miracle that the res model worked so well in NS1. In theory, there's no way it should work across different game sizes and skill levels. Yet, somehow it stays somewhat acceptable all the way from 6v6 to 16v16 and low skill to high levels of play. There are a lot of seemingly random things in the melee vs ranged mechanics, learning curves, tech trees and such and somehow they all blend together so that things stay surprisingly balanced considering how much of a mess the whole thing is.
Strategically the game was pretty predictable. However, once again the strong basic stuff allowed you to do a lot of nice variation inside the rigid strategical structure and things stayed fresh surprisingly well.
When it comes down to NS1, I don't think looking at the features is going to explain the thing particularly well. What made it such a beautiful game is how everything played together as a whole. Rather than having separate feature here and there, the gameplay was a constant flow of little things interacting together and situations developing in beautifully dynamic ways. Because so many things interacted so well, you often felt like you had a dozen ways to approach something and you just needed to find the combinations you preferred rather than the game shaping your approach into something predefined.
I've been becoming more conscious about game designs for the last 10 years or so and I don't think I've still seen anything that quite rivals NS1 in how well the whole thing works together in some really weird, but elegant ways.
The movement mechanic in NS1 were supposedly less well documented and less "official" than NS2. Bunnyhopping and air control are not engine bugs, they live in the mod code, but most developers don't touch that so much when they make a mod and this resulted in most quake engine games, including HL, TFC, CS, S&I, NS and many others ending up with spectacularly smooth and precise movement as well as a bunch of undocumented "features"/"bugs" like bunnyhopping, strafing into walls to gain speed, strafe jumping to do a quick dodge etc.
TFC kinda left bunnyhopping alone (introduced a speed cap of 1.7x run speed and penalized exceeding it), CS slows you down when jumping excessively, S&I embraced bunnyhopping and NS kind of went inbetween, allowing and making bunnyhopping easier for aliens and penalizing marines (except when going up ramps and some other places). Bunnyhopping was something that sent some people into a frothing rage of madness and others liked. It was replaced in NS2 with wall jumping for skulks, which is still an undocumented "feature" (speed gain from repeated wall jumping is no more obvious than bunny jumping and there were tonnes of guides for bunnyhopping). Wall jumping was meant to tick all the same boxes as bunnyhopping, while being a "feature" instead of a "bug".
But it doesn't really do the same thing; bunnyhopping was faster than wall jumping, but maximum speed was coupled to being predictable. You could only turn in smooth arcs or you would lose speed. You could dodge a bit by varying big and small arcs, but you really couldn't turn fast and unpredictably unless you traded off a LOT of speed for unpredictability. Shooting bunnyhopping skulks just charging towards you was almost as easy as shooting skulks running in a straight line across the floor. Use in combat was limited to getting away, catching people unaware/distracted/reloading.
Gorges got belly slide instead. Which is probably a better fit.
Fades after many iterations are quite alike NS1, but with more mouse lag and no metabolize. The early fade concepts for NS2 experimented with instant blink that teleported you across the room. This was in early versions of NS1, but it got you stuck in gratings and didn't really work very well. It didn't work very well in NS2 either, especially not when it automatically turned you toward nearby marines (but didn't turn you if they were slightly farther away).
The flame thrower was planned for NS1. But Flayra could not do a "volumetric" flame thrower and make it not look like ass (see TFC for definition of look like ass).
Dynamic infestation was another one of those "wouldn't it be cool if" things. To justify having it in, you had to find some reason for it to be there and we eventually ended up with what we have today after experimenting with various implementations. In NS1 you were stuck with hive locations permanently infested, marine spawn permantly clean and well lit. Marines could build a base anywhere, even in the middle of the hive, but aliens had to build hives at "tech points", because that's where the infestation was. This lead to marines being able to pull off comebacks which some considered cheap (sneaky PG in some dark corner near the hive, beacon, get shotguns, phase trough). But "cheap" comebacks is the things work in NS2 as well (sneaky gorge tunnel, all go through at once and bile their chair and obs before they know what hit them). It has been mitigated somewhat since early NS2 where power nodes were "I-win-buttons".
Dynamic lighting is popular and it's in a lot of games. It has the advantage of not requiring much memory (primarily talking about harddrive space), no precomputation (compiling maps could take days on a slow computer back in the day), WYSIWYG editing and the ability to do effects where lights are switched on and off. The draw back with dynamic lighting is performance (which is OK-ish with deferred rendering and not too many shadows) and that the diffuse lighting doesn't look very convincing without radiosity (even compared to very low res light maps); see for instance mirror's edge for well done light mapping. The draw back with light mapping is that it requires various clever hacks to support dynamic shadows and specular highlights (usually via cube maps). Specular highlights can look amazing, or they can look like someone swabbed the floor with olive oil (see eclipse).
The power nodes and infestation was meant to roughly correspond to areas where marines and aliens respectively control. Where as other unpowered, uninfested rooms; infested, powered rooms and unclaimed rooms were meant to represent various degrees of contested and unclaimed areas. It does a decent job of this, although I find the red lighting rather ugly (but not nearly as bad as green-and-orange alien vision, which was such a huge advantage it was nearly mandatory, and made the entire map an untextured mess).
Half-life could not support complex level geometry. I consider it a sort of a happy accident, but a lot of people don't. If there were more polygons to play with, level designers would have attempted to make the maps "realistic", cluttered messes like NS2; rather than the abstract, clean cut, angular surfaces that suited gameplay and the aesthethic. There is a serious risk of uncanny valley if there are more polygons; enough polygons to make something believable, much higher demands on artist skill, any flaw in animation quality etc. just gets magnified. The aesthetic of NS was lean and mean models, with starkly lit (though made blander for gameplay reasons) rooms with abstract angular features and quite colourful textures with quite bland (blueish white to orangeish white) lighting; where as the aesthetic of NS2 is more bulky space marines, cluttered levels in gunmetal gray with coloured lighting instead of coloured textures (paint will still exist in the future!).
An aesthetic is timeless, where as technical quality is not. A game with a strong aesthetic like doom, NS, zelda wind waker or world of warcraft still looks compelling to those who like it, even when the technical quality is laughable. There are undoubtedly people who prefer the aesthetic of NS2, which is pretty unique, but very different from NS.
The resource model is an attempt to simplify balancing the game, improve scaling across team sizes and decouple individual marines from the commander. Having an alien comm is a logical consequence, but not an unavoidable one (you could allow gorges to tap into the TRES pool for building team structures). In NS1 large games were no more or less unbalanced than they are in NS2, but large games were low tech games with many basic units and few expensive ones. Upgrades benefited all units, but weapons only benefited individual marines, so player numbers tipped the scales in a unified res model.
Marine comm handing out weapons meant that the marine comm could on rare occassions be a douché bag and only hand weapons to friends. It also meant that he could hand weapons to people who were competent.
NS and NS2 are in many ways remarkably similar on paper, but still very different. Minor implementation details matter a lot.
It gave much more flow and power.. but yes, could be abused.
my recollection is hazy now, but these are the things I remember (that I didn't like compared to NS2)
-electrified building were OP. After you electrified a building, no skulk can actually harass. This make taking down res mid game impossible without bile.
-building any building anywhere without power was OP - if you think an armory block was bad, imagine a CC block (though the CC design was better in NS1 - shaped like a cockpit and not a box).
-No alien commander, so you NEED gorges who will drop structures and the hive The res model worked like this: each rt will give you x res per tick, this is added per tick and distributed to all alien players with gorge players getting 4 times as much. So people that went gorge early would get up the res for a hive quickly to drop it or other structures. If they didn't do that, because they are greedy and wanted to go fade early it can really hurt the progress of the alien tech. This needed more coordination and sacrifice compared to NS2, where the commander can make that choice. Some will like it, but I didn't like the NS1 model as you could be playing for a long time and can not possibly get a hive up because people go gorge, leech the res then fade. Leaving your team with no upgrade structures or hive. -hive upgrade is also determined by the first upgrade structure the gorge drops (defense chamber - crag, movement chamber - shift or sensory chamber - shade). In some of the games I played, someone would troll aliens and drop a sensory chamber then f4 and go marines (sensory was like shade, not impossible to play, but hard in pubs).
-Marine side
-marine commander drops weapons, so it both good and bad: On the good side, you can get the weapons composition you want as a commander, but on the bad side, if your squads don't work together, its really frustrating as its YOUR resources that just went down the drain (and you tend to favour the ones that are doing your bidding).
-building CC anywhere gives marines a huge advantage as they can relocated to a dbl res node (nano on Veil), if you relo and it worked you get 2 res at base, if half your marines die on the way, you are screwed.
-no power requirement means you can ninja stuff heaps easier, but aliens get instant teleport to hive under attack via movement chamber and hive
All in all, it was a different game. And I wonder if people are really nostalgic about NS1, so they would like NS2 to be the same game. I don't think you can say NS2 would be better if it did what NS1 did (they are different games).
I don't think OP is the right word (otherwise it would have been abused in comp play). It was certainly annoying in low skilled pub games, but certainly not OP. There were a billion different things you could better spend your res on that would be of far greater benefit than electrifying a res node. It's just like turret farms - sure they were annoying, but at the end of the day, a waste of res if you had a competant team. At the end of the day, res was always better spent on upgrades, weapons, proto, advanced armory.
If anything, if you are against structure blocking, this is a point against ns2 rather than against ns1. In ns1, structure blocking was considered an exploit - a stigma that was sadly not carried over into ns2.
Like the eggs spawning always on the same spot in always the same order?
Really elegant way to egg lock an alien team by ONE marine.
@d0ped0g , prob. true about the electric rt. I only play pub, and late game your skulks basically can't touch the rts to bring down marine res, as spare res can be spent in electrifying and totally stop the Kharaa's ability to res harass with low tier life forms. From memory too, you can build your pg or obs near an rt and have the electric rt zap skulks trying to grind it (and the pg is a platform, not a 1 way exit) - this may have changed in later builds where building had a minimum distance from each other.
I actually don't like building blocking (NS1 or NS2), I think it gives an unfair advantage to marines.
Thank you for perhaps being the only person to date to agree with me about structure walling. I voiced my opinion on this early on as it was being endorsed by casters more and more, but there was a fairly unanimous consensus on the forums that it should be considered 'legit'. The nail on the coffin was when Charlie himself endorsed it in Cologne. I don't think it's necessarily unfair (in ns2 at least), as there's definitely a tradeoff that takes place that you can (and likely will) be punished for.
I just think that the gameplay element of shooting down an onos who can't get to you is fucking stupid - boring for both spectators and players (I can't think of a single thing that's exciting/interesting about it). Yet every time I have seen it happen in a stream, the casters cream their pants and never fail to harp on about the amazing tactical decision that just took place. Thank god it's barely relevant anymore, so it's very rare, but the first Cologne tourney when it was a big part of the metagame was just one gigantic structure-walling circle-jerk. I think the issue with early onos definitely forced the players' hands in that situation, but to hear it so heavily endorsed in the commentary was incredibly disheartening to someone like me who wanted it out of the game completely.
but some of the things i liked about ns1 thats absent from ns2
side loaded rifles, just felt much better
lifts and conveyors that moved gave a better aliens like atmosphere as you waited for the lift etc..
doors seemed to play more of an important role.
welding vents was atmospheric and useful
EXO power armor was really cool and better than EXO ns2armor
gorges built all the structures and could build them anywhere which added alot more replayability and strategies
pause it at 0.39 and see how many names you can spot still in ns2 ^^.
It was NS2 but smoother, funner, faster and more dynamic in competitive. Wasn't that great though... :]
NS1 was surprisingly beautiful... even years after it was still great and with a unique atmosphere. You are the first person I see saying that it had ugly graphics especially when it was released.
(I saw people saying that NS2 had ugly graphics even at release so... I have seen everything now)
Oh, one more thing I missed from the good old days.. Even though Onos using ladders was bad, it did allow a more interesting map design. I missed the old mine shaft with the sewers. Over all, with ladders it allowed more gang ways and such and I feel the maps were generally more varied.
In NS1 aliens were very vulnerable in open spaces, but they still had their main movement abilities available and could react to incoming threats quickly. The aliens were also very good at travelling through any aerial space they found. This allowed very varied room design and also made the rooms to play out in memorable ways.
Map design is much more dictated by the fact that marines can shoot and aliens can't. You have to get the room size just right, make sure there's no overly long line of sights and put convenient cover everywhere, all without turning it alien favored.
By comparison, all that you need to make a skulk able to wall jump is a wall. Most rooms have walls
You're right, though, especially when it comes to detailing. But the underlying mechanics of the game dictate map design much more.
* Clean maps and geometry. A good example of this would be Eclipse in NS1 and NS2. Also stuff hanging from the ceiling in nearly all NS2 maps pisses me off to no end.
* Cluttered screen. NS1 screen/hud was lean and efficient, NS2 begins to be really cluttered. Also NS1 skulks were visible even if the model was smaller, and their top speed was way higher. With NS2 mainly brown background, NS2 mostly brown skulks arent that clear cut.
* Marine comm is not bounded to res all the time. Remember the time when you see 2+ obs in NS1 marine bases? Yeah NS1 scans and beacon cost energy not res. Now if you have 2 RTs as comm you can do nothing.
* Even if NS2 has less troll khamms than NS1 had troll gorges, I still find khamming boring.
* FPS were consistent in NS1, or i don't recall having to actively avoid fights in late game due to terrible fps drops, like i do in NS2 ( and i have a beast PC ).
* NS1 move sets were deeper than NS2. Wall jump? 1 week of practice top. NS1 bunny hop? you would still discover new stuff after 1 year.
They did in 1.04 but it was scrapped in 2.0 last I remember. So after that you couldnt leech anymore.