First of all, can I say "ouch" at 5:48 to 5:51 (or so). FACE STOMP
Secondly, incoming wall of text:
Looks great. [carriage return!]
I only wish there could be more actual player vs. player fighting. Fighting against npcs is predictable, mindless killing. Giving them more health is just frustrating.
I think the problem here is that without different opponent behaviour (note: I'm not talking about tactics here, although it would usually be the same thing) the different
tactics of the AI (which stems from the combine player's commands, obviously) are lost in a sea of monotony.
ie the shoot 'n' slaughter is still boring, no matter how you switch it up. I personally think that the first step would be tweaking the AI, which would probably be for the best as the default AI behaviour wouldn't be optimised in combination with the combine player's instructions anyways.
After playing tons of hours of co-op on HL2DM and Obsidian Conflict, I'm pretty certain the culprit behind monotonous gameplay is linear objectives. When you make a group of players go in the same direction, fighting the same enemies, they all just become a group shooting in a straight line, barely remembering any objective other than 'follow everybody else'. If you split players up, however, they think and fight by themselves, which makes things more interesting.
Linear objectives turn it more into "ZERG RUSH!" quite often, with the way it's implemented in HL2 co-op etc, and delinearising would help change that and as a result make it more inherently
fun, as it would promote player decision making (meaningful decision = good), but that doesn't magically solve the issue of monotonous gameplay.
Personally, I think we need to step away from the single-player pistol/smg/shotgun/rocket/1HKO wep weapons system, as it was designed to slowly introduce you to weapons, and slowly gain power, with an assumption that you will always live to use everything you have (in SP games, you reload with the same weapons, and hve the same opportunity to use them in the same situations, but in MP you respawn).
The massive number of HL2DM mods have all shown me that copying HL2's weapons and putting them in a multiplayer environment was NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. more below.
At the very least, players should feel like they're important, for reasons other than stealing an occasional kill from another person.[carriage return!]
I've played way too many mods where gameplay feels uninvolved, so hopefully you guys are doing a good job with this and my remarks are irrelevant.
True. I think the solution here though is just to not have one single straight bottlenecks, and instead have multiple paths along the way (which is a given, take any TF2 map, or any of the overwatch maps either) and then encourage use of tactics, not just ZERG RUSH!!1!!1! Of course, multiple objectives isn't a bad way of achieving this.
Now, for my own wall of text:
First of all, I agree with moose's last line (in above quote), and I personally recommend using
iterative design (valve uses it, explanation of what it is
here). Let's face it, theory isn't practice, and some of the stuff you think will be a problem just isn't the case in practice.
Second of all, I think you should heavily revamp the weapons system. As mentioned above, the weapons aren't particularly balanced (if you can switch fast enough, you can unload shotgun ammo, then SMG ammo, then pistol ammo, before having to reload). There are several thing I recommend doing:
- First, I think you should limit the number of weapons held at a time to maybe 3 slots + class/melee slot, MAX. It encourages meaningful decision making, limits spam, limits the amount of inventory you have to keep track of (in single-player, it doesn't change after you die, it's just sent back maybe 2 minutes to your last save, whereas in multiplayer you respawn with different weapons entirely, and pick up stuff on the go all over again, and faster), and besides, you already have half the system in place (a "drop weapon" button, just change it to class weapon, and then have a "press use to pick up weapon").
- Then, I'd set the class weapons to also be the melee weapon (so the medkit would be in one hand, crowbar in the other, mouse1 to kill, mouse2 to heal, whereas for the crowbar+shield, just remove the normal crowbar and have the shield+crowbar in it's place)
- Change the weapons to be more equal, so the pistol isn't completely inferior to the SMG (for example), and so they are all generally more different for eachother, and useful in different ways.
Also, (I know several other people have complained about this, and I can understand why) the enemies all have too much individual HP. It's really annoying to not have any input when you empty a shotgun shot into a combine's head at point blank and not have anything happen. So I reccomend this:
- Increase the number of enemies spawned, per enemy spawn
- Decrease each enemy's hp
- Decrease the damage each enemy does
Now people get to see the results of that entire SMG clip they emptied!
Also, for ow_breach (most recent map I played), I've noticed that the "gather explosive cannister" is kinda clunky/laggy, when you actually carry them. Why not just set it as a viewmodel, L4D style? It's basically the same thing.
That's about it, and I get the feeling that my "HL2 weps arent too balanced for SP" comment will be the most controversial, so can I just ask, WHY keep the HL2 default weapons? Not only are they unbalanced in general for multiplayer, but they're also entirely unoriginal. The only reason I could think of is story and "realism", and the story can easily be fixed with "different weapons back then" or something, and the realism doesn't really apply in sci-fi, and can easily be fixed with a plausible technobabble explanation.
Also, I took a while to do my research and type this, so it might not have a reply to the most recent comments.