Improving gunplay and late-game
DaanVanYperen
The Netherlands Join Date: 2013-06-16 Member: 185580Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
The Netherlands Join Date: 2013-06-16 Member: 185580Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Hopped into NS2 after a long hiatus, great to see the community is still kicking. 
Poke @BeigeAlert @Vetinari.
Came to some insights after revisiting the game. Might be some food for thought. For context, ran with the SCC for several years, coded some mods, never was a crack shot. I'm obviously a bit out of touch, so take it for the braindump it is. :P
Some opinions:
Is there a way to decouple RTS and FPS aspects in such a way that it still helps the team towards a victory, without hurting gunplay as much? Keep the game fun even if your team is losing? If the game provides no recovery when your team is in a downward spiral (crazy plays aside), is there a way to push that victory screen closer to the moment of winning by momentum?
Some options to consider:
Beyond that:
Braindump Awaayyyyy!
Daan
Poke @BeigeAlert @Vetinari.Came to some insights after revisiting the game. Might be some food for thought. For context, ran with the SCC for several years, coded some mods, never was a crack shot. I'm obviously a bit out of touch, so take it for the braindump it is. :P
Some opinions:
- The RTS snowball hurts gunplay. After a certain point it becomes very hard for a team (or individuals) to meaningfully impact the game.
- Upgrades and marine movement make gunplay feel inconsistent and unpredictable.
- The game is won when your economy outperforms the other sufficiently, but the victory depends on total destruction of the enemy team which can take far too long.
- Flashing hits a teams economy hard, and drives players away from playing the higher lifeforms.
Is there a way to decouple RTS and FPS aspects in such a way that it still helps the team towards a victory, without hurting gunplay as much? Keep the game fun even if your team is losing? If the game provides no recovery when your team is in a downward spiral (crazy plays aside), is there a way to push that victory screen closer to the moment of winning by momentum?
Some options to consider:
- Make it so dominating the map gives your team a respawn edge, but don't skew fights with upgrades beyond giving the players more tactical options.
- Increase respawn times on final hive/control center when the enemy team controls 'enough' hives and has a sufficiently large force near the control point.
- Balance gunplay around a stable baseline; two similarly skilled players with certain gear (lifeform vs kit/exo) should have a predictable chance of putting the other out of commission for a while.
- Clearly communicate enemy upgrades so players can better predict the outcome of a fight based on gear. That marine you murdered with ease at the start of the game may have a giant edge on you X minutes in. If marines have improved armor make them hulking monsters or stealthy ninjas. If they have better weapons make the guns glow and shoot lasers instead of lead.
- Exchange team-wide passive upgrades for counterable tactical ones, so upgrades do not skew EVERY fight and players can adapt to enemy strategy. (for example, a slow hulking armor that counters fades but is weak against skulks, vs light armor that makes you a skulk nightmare but gorge dinner). As a bonus, this makes dealing with one-trick lob sided teams easier.
- Spread the economic cost of higher lifeform death over multiple deaths, in exchange for making them easier to deal with in sufficiently balanced opposition.
Beyond that:
- Invest in making marine movement consistent and intuitive; jumping is especially wonky.
- A timed cooldown carapache skill to deal with bullet walls and long corridors?
- And for fun, exchange easy skulk death for super fast respawns. Cannon fodder!
Braindump Awaayyyyy!
Daan
Comments
I think this is the most valuable insight here. The win condition of NS2 is fundamentally flawed. Having to destroy everything your enemy has to offer is the #1 cause of games that keep dragging on, and it's so basic we completely overlook it most of the time.
NS3 is going to need a different win condition. Preferably something that can easily be conveyed to both teams in the form of a big, flashy timer or progress bar, so you always know exactly how close both teams are to winning. Maybe it's researching some fancy tech. Maybe it's building some expensive upgrade. Maybe it's destroying a thing and the controlling another thing for 5 minutes. Maybe it's even moving a payload.
Have you ever played an RTS game's campaign or a skirmish and it took you twenty minutes to find that last enemy scout unit hiding somewhere on the map until you finally killed it and won?
This is what ns2 is like right now, a lot of the time. Only you're not searching for a unit, but trying to take a room that the entire enemy team is naturally concentrated on. It's artificially increasing the length of matches, and it sucks.
Avoid that in NS3.
This is another big one. A week ago, Zavaro suggested that a potential NS3 should only have one alien lifeform, that is much more customizable than current lifeforms, enabling a "fade build" or a "lerk build" or stuff like that, and that those upgrades should have distinct visual features so you know what you're up against. I think that's an interesting approach and one that could possibly fix this issue. By having some kind of permanent "skill tree" or "upgrade tree" in your evolve menu that allows you to customize your lifeform over the course of a match, using pres, there would be less pressure on you to not die.
Would it make aliens more homogenous? Yes. Would it reduce the skill ceiling? Probably. But are those bad things? Maybe not. The current high risk-high reward gameplay of ns2 clearly isn't working out for the masses.
I don't remember this. I have a feeling this was someone else, but I like the idea nonetheless.
Maybe it wasn't last week, but you definitely said this. And I liked it.
You like it because it's your idea.
I think you'll find vet, that I suggested it
My idea was as you explained it, having things like being bipedal, having wings, a ranged attack, a poisonous attack, wall clinging etc all be part of an upgrade tree system, each upgrade having a visual effect on the starting lifeform, allowing different playstyles to be created and evolved by the individual choosing the upgrade paths... it would fit the NS lore also, because the Kharaa are supposed to evolve rapidly based on circumstances and situation, but we never see the middle ground between a skulk and a lerk/fade/gorge/onos, we only get to see the end transformations... I think the opportunity to play a hybrid could be very fun and interesting to see what others do for their own playstyles.
Barring late-game tech such as Contaminate, 'RTS snowball' and 'longer games' are almost diametrically opposed. You could implement and suggest alternate win conditions, but personally I don't think they would be as fun. Personally, I would like to lessen the snowball effect while using late-game tech such as Contaminate to end games that go on too long.
Yes, there is a solution, and it's a conceptually simple one. Dynamically adjust the res-flow of the winning team based on the variance of RTs controlled. The winning team will still have more resources-per-minute, but it won't be linear. Here's an example graph:
This only kicks in when a team has more RTs than the other.They are still getting more resources-per-minute than the other team, but not as much as before. This means that the snowball effect is lessened slightly, allowing a slightly longer time-frame to comeback from a RT deficiency for the losing team. The dynamic handicap can be easily adjusted to strike the perfect balance between games that last too long, or games that snowball too quickly.
If you disagree that we should not slow down the snowball, you can also speed up the snowball by simply adjusting the dynamic rate in the opposite direction, towards exponential growth (imagine the blue line accelerating above the orange line instead of decaying below it in the graph above). Alternatively you could apply a handicap to the losing team instead of accelerating the winning team.
There are some small tweaks like respawn rate that could improve the end game without changing NS2 significantly. Been loving the bleep out of Subnautica, so hoping this post contributes to NS3 in the future.
It is the respawn mechanic that prevents the snowball to lead to a win. Continuous respawns right where the action is, no travel time. Unfocused teams get focus by default.
As for doomsday weapons, i'm a bit double on those; they do break the deadlock but they feel a lot like Player vs Environment. Crushing the enemy hive personally is a lot of fun. Dropping respawn rate when the enemy is on their last RT would be a simple fix and keep things PvP.
Tuning the resources-per-minute could delay the snowball, hard to predict the side effects.
I don't advocate removing the RTS snowball, just the strong effect it has on gunplay. Snowballing helps break deadlocks. RTS success should still matter, but make it so that lower skilled players can still contribute, when opposing a large disparity between tech levels. Just take the edge off a bit.
As an aside, the evolution suggested by @Kasharic sounds interesting (custom locomotion, weapons, armor, upgrades), it sounds a bit overpowered at first but it really isn't much different from a marine being able to buy a jetpack, a welder, some mines and a GL. Slow moving gorge with tiny butterfly wings and fade scythes dropping from the ceiling on my head? count me in! (poke @Flaterectomy for illustration
Daan
[*] Exchange team-wide passive upgrades for counterable tactical ones, so upgrades do not skew EVERY fight and players can adapt to enemy strategy. (for example, a slow hulking armor that counters fades but is weak against skulks, vs light armor that makes you a skulk nightmare but gorge dinner). As a bonus, this makes dealing with one-trick lob sided teams easier.
I really like this idea on marines. What if each time a marine spawns you can select presets on armor, ammo types, hud stuff? Check it. Marine dies. spawns in and gets to select what armor he wants and can save it to a preset such as:
1.) Advanced armor. Strong against bites but weak against slash/ gore.
2.) Bio armor - Strong against bile and gas, weak against slash. Normal damage on Gore and bites
3.) Heavy armor - strong against all physical attacks, weak against bile and gas.
4.) Scout armor - Light armor but acts like a local Observatory tracking aliens that you can see, also grants faster movement.
Ammo types. Obviously this would be a sweet addition and create variety in the game play
1.) Ice rounds / ray - slower rate of fire but slows aliens down.
- Could also act like the flame thrower and spray ice. Freezes cysts/rts and slows RT points for that node it leads to.
2.) Incendiary rounds - fire effect
3.) Propulsion rounds - Moves YOU or an Enemy away from each other. Causes little damage.
Just ideas but you get my point. Sort of like the alien tech tree but for marines. More individual rather than having to wait for the commanders upgrades.
God dammit!
Maybe we could combine the respawn and resflow ideas and tie respawn rate to RT count.
NS2 has one of the most interesting aimbased shooting experience, IF you are a marine and you enjoy tracking based hitscan. And there actually aren't many of those shooters around, although some have popped up after NS2.
So what I mean by that is, csgo's time-to-kill (ttk) is too low to really reward good tracking aim for example. Moreover NS2 offers fast paced "XYZ" gunplay. It's rare to have shooters where you need to aim vertically to the extend that NS2 forces you to.
NS2 is also very much similar to arena shooters. The main differences is of course that afps generally don't focus on 'objectives', but perhaps an equally important distinction is that NS2 doesn't have many viable projectile weapons.
I believe, if NS2 had projectile weapons, it could've attracted a much bigger crowd by appealing to arena shooter players.
Dirty Bomb is a game that similarly to NS2 has a big emphasis on tracking aim based gunplay, relatively high ttk's etc. - but db intelligently added projectile weapons in the form of grenades and other things. NS2 has grenades as well of course, but they have just always been really wonky and odd.
So what I'd add to a marine arsenal, is better grenades - and something like Quakes plasma/nailgun, so in addition to the great tracking based weapons we already have, you also have to master leading and predicting your shots. I'd also replace railgunexos with rocketlauncherexos (cus fact; railguns are broken in every single MP game they exist in and they need to GO. Shut up @Wob ). I'd also suggest a variety of starter guns. For example in Quake Champions, you can start with either one of the 3 starter guns; machinegun, shotgun or nailgun. And you can pick up upgraded versions of those as items. Put that in NS3!
Aliens need compensation of course, and there's probably a bunch of things you could add, but one major thing to add to the gunplay, is aimbased healing. Oh my goodness, I don't know why it took so long for games to add aimbased healing, cus it is SO fun. Support roles have always been quite boring in shooters, especially if you had good aim. But with aimbased healing, you can actually utilize your skills as a support role. Overwatch has it of course with Anna, but the only other place I've seen it was in Loadout. Give the gorge aimbased healing for gods sake!
TLDR; Aimbased healing for aliens. Much bigger variety of marine guns, in particular projectile based guns.
Actually on this thought why not specialize players? Like choose from classes like in Battlefield or Tf2?
I dont know what the commander would do if comm didnt have to purchase weapons on their side.
I agree. Onos and Exos are too weak to finish a game quickly. The games never going to finish when they keep having to go out of the base to get welded/breathed on and the other side respawn and rearm. Maybe if respawns were turned off when an onos or exo was in the base, it might help games be less of a long bore.
That + fixing the GL's behavior to improve the experience for both teams would go a long way.
What do you suppose is wrong with the GL's mechanics?
Splash damage weapons scale too well on the typical NS2 map, for both sides. Xenocide rush was very popular on Wooza's servers.
-The actual model of the grenade being launched is super small and barely visible, doesn't seem to arc smoothly (visually @ 144hz), and is difficult to track in the air for all parties involved. Outlining the grenades/giving them some kind of a smooth trail effect might help here.
-The collision model for the grenade seems huge.
I hate that! 2/4 shots always bounce off skulks for me. They always seem to hit lerks like homing missiles however. Fades and onos seem fine. Back in NS1 I loved the GL but in NS2 I never pick one up unless we JP hive rush. But to add to this GL's bouncing off skulks primarily happens to me within close quarter combat range. Mid to far seems somewhat fine. I suppose this could be fixed by a very short arming period and a detonate upon hitting anything. Obviously we dont want them blowing up in our face but things like aliens chewing phasegates and a GL should be able to phase in and plant a GL shot in before dying. Typically what happens when you phase in and shoot a gl shot it will bounce off the aliens face and sit at the pg floor for a second or 2 then detonate.
Feature or physics engine quirk? You decide!
Bug. The bounce code is bad. The code doesn't follow any known form of physics and uses tons of magic numbers.