MaceMadunusus's Roadmap to the Future

[MaceMadunusus]

I still don't think it's worth the effort, even if the effort is really small. I've never seen anyone productively use "attack here" or "defend here" ping in any game that has them, even in ranked play in far more competitive games than MB2. It adds needless visual clutter to both the game's visuals and the hero's ability list. If you just want to make it a rebel flavored tracking dart to get balance symmetry without exact symmetry, that's fine I guess. I'd still personally cut the whole paint the map idea.

There's probably other things you can do to encourage it as well, since I wanted to do score additions, but for example if say someone attacked a target there would be say a 5% buff in damage on that target, be it some kind of morale boost or however you want to justify it. I dont think it will add too much clutter though. And maybe that is your experience, but I've seen it used productively a lot.

But when more than half of your new class ideas are "better to try and come up with something else" it makes it read less like a future roadmap and more like an excuse to leak old dev plans. You have some great ideas here, like late-joining and crosshair customization, buried under outdated plans and half-cooked ideas.

That is worded more like you came in with preconceived perspective. When you're designing a game, not everything is set in stone even when you're in the process of implementing it. Especially so when it isn't your focus and its years away. Sometimes you have to start somewhere, even if its not a fully formed idea. Because for the idea to be fully realized, you need to kinda actually get it in the game. Everything I have designed and implemented in MB2 required significant changes just about every time it hit testing or public. There are classes we started with a basic idea, tested it, and it didnt work and needed to go back to the drawing board. It happens, but its always a starting point for someone to move from and try.

Take the vehicle update I want to do for example, I have several key things I want to do as a part of that update (such as giving the user the ability to fire turrets independently of the direction of the flight vehicles without requiring passengers, like a battleship), but at the same time without digging into the actual code there is only so much guessing of what is even possible or not possible to do within the scope of the engine. So more or less things might get added when the implementation process gets started.

I said class-stacking. A geonosian ability that only gives benefits to other geonosians would encourage very uninteresting and annoying team compositions.

You did, and to a degree it does, but it is heavily dependent on how the ability ends up, where the class fits into the game, what the counters are, etc. You're making a massive assumption, that could also go the other way. Even with such an ability, the other things that are a part of that class just make it a side pick-up rather than a main pickup, because if you compose a large part of the team with it, it fails because it lacks coverage from other areas.

 

[Menagalix]

When you're designing a game, not everything is set in stone even when you're in the process of implementing it.

I'm a professional game developer and I completely understand that concepts are never perfect. I'm not expecting your ideas to be set in stone, all I'm expecting is any idea, at all. A roadmap is for future ideas that might work. Old ideas that didn't work is literally the opposite of that, and belongs in a game postmortem, last week I wrote a postmortem for a game project I'm working on, and the purpose of the document is to analyze things that didn't work as hoped.

Putting mini postmortems in a roadmap can work if they serve a purpose like explaining a rework or an ongoing problem. But, what are you trying to say when you bring up the trivia that Sonic Detonators were originally for Spy? Is your point that we need something like a Sonic Detonator because Spy's original design revolved around it? Or are you saying the opposite and claiming that we need to avoid something like Sonic Detonator because other classes already have it.

It makes your writing seem completely aimless. Like when you said you were going to list unique aspects that we could reuse and revisit from the Dark Tropper. The first thing you list is jetpacks, which is not unique. The third thing you list is shotguns which is something you don't want to revisit due to performance reasons. The last thing in your list isn't an idea, but a statement that the class isn't unique enough. Literally only one item in your list belongs in your list. The Phase idea.

 

[MaceMadunusus]

Old ideas that didn't work is literally the opposite of that,

98% of what is in the roadmap hasn't been coded or tried, and the things that are are things that worked, and the last little bit are things that didn't quite work but not completely bad and needed a redo - and I put that redo idea in the document. Why did you make the assumption that I put in a bunch of old ideas that didn't work?

Is your point that we need something like a Sonic Detonator because Spy's original design revolved around it?

Closer to this, but not because it revolved around it. Just needs a new tool to replace the one it lost

The first thing you list is jetpacks, which is not unique. The third thing you list is shotguns which is something you don't want to revisit due to performance reasons. The last thing in your list isn't an idea, but a statement that the class isn't unique enough. Literally only one item in your list belongs in your list. The Phase idea.

You're being so oddly picky and choosy to try and prove a point, that makes me doubt your earlier statements on game design. Because for one, its clear you didn't read. Dark Trooper for one gets jumpjet which while yes its a "jetpack" has different handling compared to the mandalorian jetpack. Which makes its movement capabilities more unique. Is everything in game design going to be a completely unique idea? or are there going to be variations of certain ideas for a class that have their own twists on it. Is every blaster weapon going to be completely unique? Fuck no, most of the time its value variations on the core mechanic. Pretty much every game functions that way. However, that doesn't mean I want to see e-11 clones on each class kinda thing.

And yeah, anyone of reasonable intelligence can tell the difference between something that has a full design document, something that has some ideas that have been thought about clearly, and some spitball ideas that the person thinks is cool. It is not like I spent a year writing this thinking of every avenue. It was something I told the team I would do when I left, and I finally got the time/motivation to write things down and did it in a few days after work where I intentionally left some details out of the document as I felt they were extraneous for the sake of this specific document, as the dev team can look up the main larger one in the dev section for example. It feels disingenuous to say "It makes your writing seem completely aimless" for including some spit ball ideas as well as full-fledged ones.

 

[Jay Brando]

A third is the addition of Whistling bird. Whistling bird + wrist laser + EE3 burst combos were SUPER strong when testing in beta especially against saberists that were caught off guard that we had to add a few minor delays to reduce its effectiveness. I shudder to think what that wombo combo would be like with old EE-3s sniper mode.

Sorry to resurrect this thread with toxicity but whistling birds fucking suck. So many things in this game have been changed due to "ohhhh there's no muh counterplay!", while whistling birds exist still as this cringe disney idea that often feels so silly to play against.

I really wish that the EE3 was modeled after the halo 3 battle rifle. I've said it before but the 3-round burst of the current EE3 is just the most limp-dicked burst from a gun that I've ever seen.

I'll say again that my dream when I heard rumors of a 3-round burst on the EE3 was that the old primary fire of EE3 stayed (no matter how aids and cancer and innacurate the bloom effect was), and that the secondary fire became a fast/satisfying 3-round burst mode akin to the halo 3 BR. So again sry for the rudeness but holy fuck I needed to type that again

 

[Crusader]

unless the whistling bird delay got removed, it would probably take longer to kill someone using them as opposed to just shooting them

the whole orders thing on hero sounds weird. youre paying points for something that can be handled by a microphone, or voice command. the only thing you're left with then is a potential dmg buff on the target or wallhack.

if its 5% dmg increase then im personally not bothering cycling through the 50 additional class specials of attack, defend, fall back, come here and stand behind this rock big lad, etc to use it. the time spent shooting or just concentrating on one thing will far out-weigh this and net me the kill quicker

if its a point and click infinite resource instantly applied wallhack then its op

im not a game designer, but i am the author of the highly acclaimed guide to how mb2 actually plays: So how has the game actually changed?

ill preface the following by saying i dont mind the whole respawn thing on rally with the buff, its pretty neat. but when im looking at this on the hero in conjunction with the whole revive thing and thematically (themes--that design philosophy that crept out of nowhere which means hero cant have sniper now or whatever), for a hero, its pretty bleak. why does the class' defining abilities only come to fruition when the criteria of their, or their team dying is met. not to mention, to maximise the proposed current use of rally and revive you've got to:
a) keep alive to pump out more roided up cannon fodder
b) be sufficiently far away such that if you do die, you're in a safe place for when you flat-line and require your minion to perform cpr on you
c) have a dedicated crony around you 24/7 for the sole purpose of picking you up who would also have to be sufficiently far away from the action

honestly, fives would love this class, but i dont think its capturing the image of a hero. its the opening scene from enemy at the gates or some stuffy, selfish, cowardly officer.

in terms of gameplay and class image, i think hero would be better served by not having its abilities or perks necessitate the deaths of their teammates or themselves. you could make the ability rally, rally and give it an active component in the form of a temporary buff for players who were stood in a small area around the hero i.e, movement speed, decaying shield, knock-down immunity, etc. currently reb is either wook goes in or arc spams pulses to start sth. pulse arc or caster wook is like 0.00001% of the population, so this seldom happens. if you want hero to be leading the pack, then by rights it needs something to initiate that. i would much prefer this to revive. a heroic last stand makes more sense than running with your tail between your legs.