Deployables?

[Fixious]

This can be a touchy subject for some players. Have you thought about having different kinds of deployables in AoT, essentially creating an Engineer or Technician class? These don't necessarily have to deal damage to players.

[JustinPierce]

Definitely have plans for deployable turrets etc.

Some argue that deployables don't require skill and therefor don't belong in a skill based game, but I don't share that absolutist point of view. Unless the game is unbalanced, typical turrets still requires skill to do well -- just not aiming skill. If someone is no good at aiming but the game offers another way of playing and helping their team, I think that's great and I want to really explore playstyles that allow a variety of players to work together with different skillsets. But like aiming, you want the skill to have a long tail in terms of mastery to keep it interesting -- it can't be as simple as "place turret here to win" -- you want something that players are constantly improving upon.

I understand the difficulty in balancing them, though. Since an AI controlled turret doesn't get better over time like players do, it's common for them to be a lot less useful in high end play where the players have learned how to deal with them. If you balance for high end play, they become overpowered in pubs. That'll be an interesting problem to solve

Deployables that don't do damage are an interesting idea

[atavax]

It doesn't take good aim to hit a stationary deployable. Which means a deployable not only removes the need for the deployer to aim, but robs the enemy of the need to aim as well. Pick a random high aim weapon, if you are poor at it, you're going to take just as long to destroy a turret then if you are good with it. I think a better method is having a weapon that is quite forgiving because that removes the stationary, boring target of a deployable. You are only aiming at the individual, which means you're aiming at moving targets which should get harder to hit over time. This also removes the problem of the turret becoming less effective in organized play because they are less effective because coordinated teams can easily take out deployables together. While a player with a gun that requires less aim is going to be mobile and coordinate with his team, so shouldn't be less effective.

With all this being said, i don't think its a good idea to design FPS in a way where some people don't need to aim. Most people will feel cheated if they die to someone that isn't aiming. If i am landing my shots better then someone else, i expect to win the engagement. Also, at higher levels no one wants to play the role that requires no aim, not because its weak, but because its boring, they play FPS to aim, its the defining skill of the genre. In TF2 the medic is the strongest class in competitive, but you had the best NA medic move down to intermediate to play scout instead, because medic is boring because it required little aim. Designing it so someone doesn't benefit from good aim in FPS is like designing it so someone doesn't benefit from high APM in starcraft.

It is better in my opinion to just have weapons that utilize different types of aiming. You need different skills to land an airshot with a solider, to be effective with stickbombs as a demo, to land meatshots with a scout in tf2.

[JustinPierce]

Most people will feel cheated if they die to someone that isn't aiming. If i am landing my shots better then someone else, i expect to win the engagement.

But this isn't a duel -- this is team CTF. Turrets are less about damage and more about zoning.

I agree TF2 medic is boring, but that's got nothing to do with turrets. TF2 engineer is not boring -- you don't drop the turrets and then sit there -- you're working with your turrets to control space, you're maintaining your turrets as the enemy tries to break through your defenses, etc.

If you're talking about dealing damage -- not zoning, like turrets -- then I agree that there's probably not a good way to cater to non-aiming skills. But AoT is going to be about more than dealing damage. There'll be defense and various support roles where players can benefit the team in ways besides directly damaging enemies -- this is where non-aiming skills can be explored.

It is better in my opinion to just have weapons that utilize different types of aiming. You need different skills to land an airshot with a solider, to be effective with stickbombs as a demo, to land meatshots with a scout in tf2.

[vornskr]

Also, at higher levels no one wants to play the role that requires no aim, not because its weak, but because its boring, they play FPS to aim, its the defining skill of the genre.

Meh. I'm definitely not the ordinary FPS player, but aiming is the least interesting aspect of FPS's for me. I enjoy CTF for the motion & coordination with teammates; aiming is an essential feature of combat, but it's that the main point of a game I'm not interested.

[JustinPierce]

A simple example of a non-aiming skill is flag capping. It's not boring, it's definitely skill based, can be a major help to your team, but has almost nothing to do with aiming. Adding flag capping to a game doesn't dumb it down or make it less about skill, but it does add more variety.

[Fixious]

I'm fine with being a turret guy. We've been having Tribes 1 base (vanilla) PUGs recently, and I'm usually the guy in charge of keeping the base up and running, deploying defensive turrets, and providing my team with deployable inventory stations. There are key places to plant turrets on certain maps, so it does take some knowledge of base design and what-not. The first 10 or so minutes will give you a rough idea of what I have to deal with. Just constant repair, deploy, repair, deploy. Once inside is sorta secure I can then focus on outside assets. Got off to a slow start which didn't help but we won.

As for non-lethal deployables, there are a plethora of ideas out there. Inventory stations where you can change your loadout without respawning, jump/boost pads, heal pads....the list goes on. Could be cool to have a generator of sorts that controls gravity. For those indoor sections you could have a device that once destroyed turns off gravity, which (imo) would be a disadvantage for that team.

[MKULTRA]

deployables should have a focus on enhancing and disrupting player movement.

instead of turrets that apply damage I'd like to see things like kinetic turrets that knock players off course or grappler mines that could tether it's target until the mine is destroyed.

gravity mines that create an intense gravity well to be used either offensively or defensively. I imagine using these like a space craft uses an planet for a gravity assist sling shot. These mines could perhaps be toggled from pull to push and act as a bumper of sorts.

Standard defensive turrets often become nothing but a chore for both sides and balancing them for all levels of play can be trivial.

Above all else I'm in the category of people who want most if not all incoming damage to be directly from enemy players.

[atavax]

i am not against the existence of skills other then aiming. I am against combat being designed around players that would not be performing better if they aimed better. The winner of a fps match shouldn't always be the team with the best aim, just like the winner of a SC or SC2 game isn't always the guy with the highest actions per minute, but that doesn't mean blizzard would be ok with adding in a race that has zero benefit from the player having an apm above 10. Yes, there is more to FPS and combat and objective based modes then aiming, but that doesn't justify eliminating the need to aim for some players.

tf2 engineer is frequently boring. I would say infinitely more boring then medic and the most boring class in TF2. Build nest, position self out of LoS of enemies and with back to wall and in position to repair sg, lmb sg all day long, react if spy tries to sap, but if other team is coordinated and attacks sg at same time as sap, you have zero chance of saving it. If the rest of the spy's team doesn't help, usually pretty easy to keep it up.

[PrettzL]

The winner of a fps match shouldn't always be the team with the best aim,

For sure. Aim being king is an absolute perspective that brings FPS games down to a very basic level where A-D spam (dancing mid-fight) and hiding behind cover after getting shot once is the mentality that wins. (The two lowest "high" skill ceiling skills to learn)

In FPS team games the team that wins is the team that works together to complete objectives, not the team with better aim- ever. In games where the team with better aim wins over a coordinated team the game is broken at it's core mechanics.

[JustinPierce]

Thought I'd share some interesting turrets from other games:

TF2's engineer has an alt where you can take control of the turret and aim it manually

From Overwatch, Symmetra can place a few tiny turrets on walls

[Lemuel]

jump/boost pads

This idea I love, particularly in a game with such a heavy movement focus. The gravity well thing, too. Anything that allows the player to deploy something and gain movement options from it sounds like something I'd want to see

[MKULTRA]

From Overwatch, Symmetra can place a few tiny turrets on walls

I like the idea of a teleporter more than the turrets. A cool idea would to alloy a player to carry momentum through the teleport. kinda like how momentum works in the portal series.

[JustinPierce]

I like the idea of a teleporter more than the turrets. A cool idea would to alloy a player to carry momentum through the teleport. kinda like how momentum works in the portal series.

I think Legions had something similar.

(expand and check out the warp core)

Weapons Tribes As stated before, the Disc Launcher / Spinfusor from Tribes is great, but really any weapon that is projectile based with similar speed and damage can provide the same type of satisfaction. Leading a target and landing those MA's is a great feeling. The Mortar. I'm not really sure how or even if this type of weapon can fit into Telos, since it seems we're mainly dealing with smaller enclosed maps. The areas where you're out in the open and zero G, I can't really see a Mor…

And in general, my philosophy isn't so much "which option is best" -- I'm a fan of variety, so I'm interested in exploring many of these options at the same time.

[Fixious]

Worth noting that it might be fairly hard to introduce complex items like deployables into a game that's intended to be quite simple at its core. When you look at earlier Tribes games at launch they all had somewhat complex bases with tight corridors and rooms that protected generators and inventory stations. While fun with larger teams (10v10+), as the playerbase died that kind of gameplay wasn't really attractive anymore, thus LT was born which stripped away everything to its bare bones and focused on fast movement and flag-play. And it worked.

Then you look at Legions, which was very simple from the get-go and stayed that way for years. Then the developers decided more depth was needed and attempted to add an entire Engineer system, with deployables, generators, etc. However since the game wasn't built around this from the beginning it ultimately failed. It slowed down gameplay way too much, and there weren't any maps that really suited it properly. Legions had no real bases to support that kind of stuff, either. It was LT from the very beginning, and adding complexity only made things worse.

This isn't to say they can't work in AoT. But if 5v5 will be the max, you can't really have too much complexity or else gameplay could slow to a crawl. Right now everything is fairly fast-paced and generally fun. This is entirely outside the realm of whether deps are skill-based or not. If they hurt gameplay it's better off removing them.

[JustinPierce]

Yeah I'm a big fan of base CTF in Tribes. I actually had generators in a much older prototype -- for larger games, having a base with multiple things to defend/attack can be really fun. But when I started designing AoT I decided on 5v5, so generators had to go since I didn't want half the team constantly tied up on defense. Base assets can definitely add too much complexity in that it spreads the players too thin and becomes too restrictive, but I don't think that's necessarily true for deployables.

To some degree, I think deployables are perhaps essential for any game with an objective to defend. If nothing else, to give defenders something to do during downtime. But it will also open up flexibility in terms of team composition. If a defender with deployables can do the job of 2 defenders, that frees up the second defender to do something else. And I personally think it just makes defense a hell of a lot more interesting. Having a variety of deployables in AoT won't mean the map is littered with all sorts of garbage to tip toe around -- it means there'll be more than one way to defend your flag or play support.

And I wouldn't describe my vision for AoT as being simple at its core. The meta is simple now, but it will expand. The player limit and loadout limits mean you aren't dealing with the entire meta at any given time -- it will be like a MOBA in that each match involves a fraction of the game's entire meta, but as a result each match can feel different and you'll adapt to the match's particular meta. Imagine a MOBA with only like 3 heroes to pick from -- that's essentially the current state of AoT relative to the vision. I just want to get this early meta reasonably solid before expanding it.

I think part of the reason other FPS games struggle with this stuff is because they're trying to balance for a range of player counts. Imagine if they had to balance MOBAs for 64 player games even though comp play was still 5v5. It'd totally break the game (or require severe compromise and simplification). I think being able to design AoT exclusively for 5v5 will open the door to more fine tuned meta. I'm really trying to offer a new kind of FPS experience.

But step one is create a solid foundation to build on.

[Fixious]

Yeah, your 64 player MOBA issue sadly existed in T:A comp in a way. They stripped out so many things HI-Rez put in there for the larger pub games. Bans on certain weapons and base assets, disabling generator auto repair, etc. It's another thing that can make transitioning into comp play from pub play harder, which I know is something you're trying to avoid.

Speaking of objectives, that room between the first two flags looks like a prime location for something to fight over. The control towers from Tribes came to mind.

[DrunkenJedi]

To be honest I don't like unmanned turrets. At all.

I have no problem with a turret they get into and fire from but an automated turret like the ones the TCN places in Tribes: Ascend? Please god no.

Other deployables aren't so bad, provided they are implemented in a tasteful way

[atavax]

To make it clear, if i haven't already, the problem I have is the concept of creating roles where there is no need to aim even at a high level. I like the concept of adding more to a role then simply using a weapon, of applying moba like abilities for example, that demand more of individual players then simply using a gun well. A deployable could fit that quite easily.

I think there are a lot of weaknesses to the traditional ctf mode. Defending and doing nothing isn't fun and if you add deployables, the busy work of setting up deployables isn't what a traditional fps player would be consider fun. In pubs, where the majority of people are idiots it can be difficult to coordinate your team to both defend their flag and attack the enemy flag. Not to mention spectating being a near impossible feat if half a team is playing defensively and doing complex, unpredictable things, while at the same time the other half is playing offensively and doing complex, unpredictable things, and the other team is doing the same, thats at least 4 complex unpredictable things each involving multiple players, each happening at the same time, all very important to the outcome of the game, seems like it would be near impossible to spectate and follow.

I think a singular objective is ideal in that it is simple for strangers to all work together towards the single objective and it is easier to spectate and follow. In most traditional sports, there is a single objective, a ball of some kind. I think the objective moving is one of the things critical to the success of the ball. How the game changes if the ball is close to a goal helps create climaxes. The 3 singular, mobile objectives for fps i'm aware of is some modes of ctf, a ball which is like a flag, but you can pass and maybe shoot it, and i guess i could call it mobile capture points, like the push carts in tf2. I think the objective being greatly effected by netcode, like projectiles are, would be poor design, so i'm generally against a ball objective in fps. But i think either of the other two could work great. If designed with avoiding classic pitfalls like stalemates.

[PrettzL]

In pubs, where the majority of people are idiots it can be difficult to coordinate your team to both defend their flag and attack the enemy flag.

Pubs with game sizes that are large, 7+ players per team, I could agree with this. But this is 5 a side, each player will have a major impact on the match.

pitfalls like stalemates.

What's so bad about standoffs and stalemates? That's a sign that there's a good defense going and that the attacking team needs to change their strategy up in order to succeed.

Not to mention spectating being a near impossible

Spectating a match should be a long term concern for sure, if a match cannot be focused on by one person who's talking the play by plays of the match it's not ever going to be interesting to watch for an audience. (That's a big thing for eSports, but that'll take care of itself in time.) Like @atavax said, singular focus promotes ebb and flow of a match.

If there's a line of scrimmage easily defined it makes for a more cohesive team effort- and even if a team isn't coordinated they can at least contribute- and if they perceive where their team is failing and opt to bolster and contribute (rather than frag) their team will succeed even more. These are the kind of situations that need incentives that are difficult to nail down in team oriented FPS games.