Game musings and news
Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2014 3:06 pm
So a friend was over and was showing me Far Cry 3 and it really struck me how much this recent crop of FPS/storyline games have become similar (of course Eidos seems to just make the same game over and over). Differences in combat mechanics aside, you essentially have unlockable areas full of goons to gun down. If your attacks fail, the old tried-and-true of running 100 metres away will bail your ass out and re-set the area. Far Cry 3 also features occasional random events to make the place feel a little more organic: Your allies will sometimes attack a goon area on their own and there are random neutral encounters with your allies, like finding them on the roadside with a broken-down car you help to fix. I actually thought those were nice touches.
What I started to think about is how cool it would be for the game to link things up so that they actually mattered. You take the basic concept, your character is the "hero" of a sandbox where there are goons and friendlies, and actually add some advanced RTS/DotA elements.
Let's say that instead of unlinked areas with random battle spawning, the game could actually track a proper geographic "front", so that there were actual battle lines. I mean, arguably this has been done, with areas of a map linked to "control points", but it would be neat to actually move to a system where the lay of the land determines control with much clearer lines, such that guys aren't always idly roaming about in all areas. That would make infiltration feel a lot more interesting and risky than just "I went over here and wasn't seen". If you get into trouble, you would have to retreat back to your lines, or even a fallback point if you brought a mess home.
Essentially, you would be affecting the shape of the front as you moved from area to area, rather the way heroes do in DotA games. I hate DotA, but applying some of that to an RTS game would be great. Maybe you could even add an economic element where you have secondary goals which will increase your arms shipments or cash flow or the like, though I think this may already be sort-of present in some games.
Let's also say you could run training sessions. The more training sessions you run, the better trained your allies are, but the less time you spend at the front, fighting fires.
You could also tie those cute little random events - fixing cars, solving supply problems, whatever - to battle outcomes on the front. The crucial limiting factor will be time, so there's much less possibility of a twinkie-style do-everything strategy.
In a best-case scenario you could actually coordinate larger strategies, ordering attacks or retreats in certain regions in order to better shape your lines or take advantage of a weak enemy position or salient.
I guess since I have zero coding ability, that's all blue-sky stuff, but it really seems that that would give the genre a nice push forward, taking these little cutesy things that are trying to give a sense of "realism" to a pretty shallow game and linking them up to make your actions much more meaningful and interesting.
I'd also like to see more storyline FPS games make individual combats more. Fewer goons, but harder ones, requiring better planning or strategy (similar to what was done with the big boys in Bioshock). I guess this happens sometimes, but from what I've seen, the endgame always involves just amping numbers of goons or tacking on some armour on them. Of course this really depends on better bot AI. I'm interested to see what Valve eventually does with all that data they get from running MvMs.
What I started to think about is how cool it would be for the game to link things up so that they actually mattered. You take the basic concept, your character is the "hero" of a sandbox where there are goons and friendlies, and actually add some advanced RTS/DotA elements.
Let's say that instead of unlinked areas with random battle spawning, the game could actually track a proper geographic "front", so that there were actual battle lines. I mean, arguably this has been done, with areas of a map linked to "control points", but it would be neat to actually move to a system where the lay of the land determines control with much clearer lines, such that guys aren't always idly roaming about in all areas. That would make infiltration feel a lot more interesting and risky than just "I went over here and wasn't seen". If you get into trouble, you would have to retreat back to your lines, or even a fallback point if you brought a mess home.
Essentially, you would be affecting the shape of the front as you moved from area to area, rather the way heroes do in DotA games. I hate DotA, but applying some of that to an RTS game would be great. Maybe you could even add an economic element where you have secondary goals which will increase your arms shipments or cash flow or the like, though I think this may already be sort-of present in some games.
Let's also say you could run training sessions. The more training sessions you run, the better trained your allies are, but the less time you spend at the front, fighting fires.
You could also tie those cute little random events - fixing cars, solving supply problems, whatever - to battle outcomes on the front. The crucial limiting factor will be time, so there's much less possibility of a twinkie-style do-everything strategy.
In a best-case scenario you could actually coordinate larger strategies, ordering attacks or retreats in certain regions in order to better shape your lines or take advantage of a weak enemy position or salient.
I guess since I have zero coding ability, that's all blue-sky stuff, but it really seems that that would give the genre a nice push forward, taking these little cutesy things that are trying to give a sense of "realism" to a pretty shallow game and linking them up to make your actions much more meaningful and interesting.
I'd also like to see more storyline FPS games make individual combats more. Fewer goons, but harder ones, requiring better planning or strategy (similar to what was done with the big boys in Bioshock). I guess this happens sometimes, but from what I've seen, the endgame always involves just amping numbers of goons or tacking on some armour on them. Of course this really depends on better bot AI. I'm interested to see what Valve eventually does with all that data they get from running MvMs.
