I'm very, very, very cautiously looking forward to this game. I'll have to learn more as more info comes out, but it's on The List.
Shamanic Rhythm said:
Oh dear oh dear, this sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen. Ranged attacks only down players? F2P players only accessing the Ork faction? The dev team visiting 4chan?
4chan is not /b/, nor is it /v/. /tg/ may be a mixed bag often, but I've met an extremely large number of very smart, friendly people there, a number of which I have begun playing regular online tabletop games sessions with. This 4chan, worst site on the internet thing is so 2008 at the absolute maximum.
Actually, 4Chan isn't a bad place to get 40k advice and feedback from. The TG community on 4chan isn't that bad. They've actually got an impressive number of homebrew rules and fan created content for 40k and are responsible for the creation of the Angry, Reasonable, and Pretty Marines. With full fledged Codecies and fan fiction coming out of it. All available here http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Category:Warhammer_40,000
Ah, okay. If there are actually sub communities of legit 40k fans it makes sense. I think what I'm still iffy about is the mandated half-hour of daily contact time they all have to have with 'the internet'. If they're just going out to ask people what they want in the game, that could lead to feature creep and loss of the bigger picture. By all means engage with the player base, but there's a tipping point where you'll start getting unhelpful noise if you cast the net too far.
kouriichi said:
It will probably round out like Guild Wars 2 "Downed" System, where you can still kill a player by putting consistent/burst damage on them while they are down, but it takes far longer then actually walking up and doing an execution. For GW2, its unfeasible during combat to waste all of your DPS trying to finish someone off, which is probably what they're aiming for.
If it's anything like Gears of War where they will just bleed out anyway, it's fine, but if you actually have to melee them to get the kill I can imagine all kinds of frustrations for people who want to play Sniper or Devastator.
el_kabong said:
Although the dev hasn't really done anything worth note, they seem to be approaching this with an elegance to their design that I really enjoy. For example, some people are harping that orks are the only faction that's free-to-play, but the purpose behind this a brilliant example of the pay model supporting game immersion, universe development, and balancing. Orks ARE numerous and unruly. They're not called the Green Tide because they have a few elite units that head into battle. Also, I saw in another interview that they are also giving Orks a buff that make them more powerful the more Orks are around them and are allowing Orks more freedom in team-killing. These types of in-game rules reinforce the established fluff of the 40K universe.
See, already they're somewhat countenancing the idea that F2P players will be less organised and less committed by offering a potential balance solution in the form of buffing the faction as a whole, which is a terrible idea if the outcomes of battles has any strategic impact whatsoever on the overall campaign progress. It might be cool from a lore perspective, but balancing factions based on the pool of player talent is a blunt instrument compared to having a level playing field. As the Ork player base fluctuates, they may suddenly become incredibly gimped or horrendously overpowered, and then small tweaks will unbalance the whole system. Just look at World of Warcraft PvP before Burning Crusade as a example: if either Paladins or Shamans became too unbalanced, the flow on effects would have people complaining about the entire system.
Although the dev hasn't really done anything worth note, they seem to be approaching this with an elegance to their design that I really enjoy. For example, some people are harping that orks are the only faction that's free-to-play, but the purpose behind this a brilliant example of the pay model supporting game immersion, universe development, and balancing. Orks ARE numerous and unruly. They're not called the Green Tide because they have a few elite units that head into battle. Also, I saw in another interview that they are also giving Orks a buff that make them more powerful the more Orks are around them and are allowing Orks more freedom in team-killing. These types of in-game rules reinforce the established fluff of the 40K universe.
See, already they're somewhat countenancing the idea that F2P players will be less organised and less committed by offering a potential balance solution in the form of buffing the faction as a whole, which is a terrible idea if the outcomes of battles has any strategic impact whatsoever on the overall campaign progress. It might be cool from a lore perspective, but balancing factions based on the pool of player talent is a blunt instrument compared to having a level playing field. As the Ork player base fluctuates, they may suddenly become incredibly gimped or horrendously overpowered, and then small tweaks will unbalance the whole system. Just look at World of Warcraft PvP before Burning Crusade as a example: if either Paladins or Shamans became too unbalanced, the flow on effects would have people complaining about the entire system.
The last I heard about this (don't know if it's still true or not), the idea is that the side that's currently winning (which I'm expecting will bounce between Space Marines and Orks, with Eldar and Chaos picking off bits round the edges, if player numbers are anything to go by) is going to be hit the hardest by waves of NPC Tyranids, so there's a built-in balancer that allows the other sides to recapture some ground.
Was very tempted to jump in and buy an Autarch to try this out, but I'm kind of unclear on when this actually becomes playable?
I like the single shard thing. It's nice while playing EVE that you can run into every other person that also plays, not just the people who picked your shard. It's also cool that technology is advancing to where you can get large numbers with a more active control method.
It might be cool from a lore perspective, but balancing factions based on the pool of player talent is a blunt instrument compared to having a level playing field. As the Ork player base fluctuates, they may suddenly become incredibly gimped or horrendously overpowered, and then small tweaks will unbalance the whole system. Just look at World of Warcraft PvP before Burning Crusade as a example: if either Paladins or Shamans became too unbalanced, the flow on effects would have people complaining about the entire system.
Well, a lot smarter people than me have elaborated on why unbalance in a game is actually a positive thing over time:
As far as I'm concerned, imbalance and the shifting meta gives long-term players a lot more benefits. If someone wants a perfectly balanced game, they're welcome to play Paper, Rocks, Scissors.
Yeah, a company that has done nothing of value and a game that is still in pre-production so absolutely nothing to see here.
el_kabong said:
Well, a lot smarter people than me have elaborated on why unbalance in a game is actually a positive thing over time:
As far as I'm concerned, imbalance and the shifting meta gives long-term players a lot more benefits. If someone wants a perfectly balanced game, they're welcome to play Paper, Rocks, Scissors.
I love Extra Credits as much as anyone, but that was actually one of the worst videos they ever made about a topic. Their points about what makes an interesting meta game are fine, but their assumption that it happens as a result of implementing subtle imbalances to the system is just plain wrong. A healthy meta game will also emerge in a game which is perfectly balanced, but has too many potential strategies to easily solve it.
Hell, even Chess isn't technically solved, but the reason the meta-game has become stale there is simply because we've had centuries of people playing it and writing about it at an extremely high level, and it's technically a less complex game than something like Starcraft. Now a perfectly balanced game with the sort of different factors Starcraft has to deal with like two different resource types, three races with completely different units, etc. might not even be possible because of the complexity involved being too much for human designers to ever truly balance, but it doesn't mean that the pursuit of a perfectly balanced Starcraft and the fixing of minor imbalances will lead to a worse game. But I think part of the problem with that video is that they may even be acknowledging that, but are using the term balance when they really mean asymmetry. And the two terms mean extremely different things. And if that's the case, then they've failed to convey their point in a way which uses established gaming terminology used by fans of the genre and is still a failure on their part.
I love Extra Credits as much as anyone, but that was actually one of the worst videos they ever made about a topic. Their points about what makes an interesting meta game are fine, but their assumption that it happens as a result of implementing subtle imbalances to the system is just plain wrong. A healthy meta game will also emerge in a game which is perfectly balanced, but has too many potential strategies to easily solve it.
Hell, even Chess isn't technically solved, but the reason the meta-game has become stale there is simply because we've had centuries of people playing it and writing about it at an extremely high level, and it's technically a less complex game than something like Starcraft. Now a perfectly balanced game with the sort of different factors Starcraft has to deal with like two different resource types, three races with completely different units, etc. might not even be possible because of the complexity involved being too much for human designers to ever truly balance, but it doesn't mean that the pursuit of a perfectly balanced Starcraft and the fixing of minor imbalances will lead to a worse game. But I think part of the problem with that video is that they may even be acknowledging that, but are using the term balance when they really mean asymmetry. And the two terms mean extremely different things. And if that's the case, then they've failed to convey their point in a way which uses established gaming terminology used by fans of the genre and is still a failure on their part.
Well, a lot smarter people than me have elaborated on why unbalance in a game is actually a positive thing over time:
As far as I'm concerned, imbalance and the shifting meta gives long-term players a lot more benefits. If someone wants a perfectly balanced game, they're welcome to play Paper, Rocks, Scissors.
I love Extra Credits as much as anyone, but that was actually one of the worst videos they ever made about a topic. Their points about what makes an interesting meta game are fine, but their assumption that it happens as a result of implementing subtle imbalances to the system is just plain wrong. A healthy meta game will also emerge in a game which is perfectly balanced, but has too many potential strategies to easily solve it.
Hell, even Chess isn't technically solved, but the reason the meta-game has become stale there is simply because we've had centuries of people playing it and writing about it at an extremely high level, and it's technically a less complex game than something like Starcraft. Now a perfectly balanced game with the sort of different factors Starcraft has to deal with like two different resource types, three races with completely different units, etc. might not even be possible because of the complexity involved being too much for human designers to ever truly balance, but it doesn't mean that the pursuit of a perfectly balanced Starcraft and the fixing of minor imbalances will lead to a worse game. But I think part of the problem with that video is that they may even be acknowledging that, but are using the term balance when they really mean asymmetry. And the two terms mean extremely different things. And if that's the case, then they've failed to convey their point in a way which uses established gaming terminology used by fans of the genre and is still a failure on their part.
Yeah, well said. Asymmetry is very distinct from balance, and that's the key issue here. The different factions in this game can have differing abilities and weapons available to them, but those should be tweaked against one another on the assumption that equally skilled players are using them.
Hmm. A planetside-2-esque experience for fourty bucks, where every class is also (for the sake of revivals, anyway) a medic but you can stop people from reviving by charging up and putting the boot in? Actual big battles that might not make the server have the most violent of convulsions? Color me intrigued.
If they can figure out a way to do the melee combat without the end result looking like everyone is shadow-boxing with the lag-ghosts, it would be pretty cool. From the article I'd guess there will be Orks and Space Marines, and judging by the art I would assume the other two sides will be Chaos and Eldar. Not a bad lineup. Still wish that a Techpriest of some description was playable, because those guys are damn cool (although you could practically build a whole faction out of just the Mechanicus, I do recognize that introducing allied sides in a four-way battle royale might skew populations or confuse battle lines).
Also, I applaud the free Orks, because every man, woman, and child has the innate right to WAAAUGHH!
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