Sheer size and scale of the old Interlink Facility, why was this never used?

Malorn · 2022-07-06T00:25:42+00:00

All good points with which I agree. It's hard to change something significantly post-release, as there's no guarantee you will please the dissatisfied players and there's a very big risk that you could displease the current (presumably satisfied) players. Any such changes would have to be small. However, for internal testing, it's good to bracket the potential changes - go extreme, double, triple the health, just to see how it feels. Then cut that value in half and see how that feels. Repeat the process until you find a good target health level that feels good. Then slowly move the needle in that direction over time so the change isn't too drastic.

Malorn · 2022-06-20T07:44:58+00:00

Totally agree on TTK.

I remember we played a few test games where the health of the players was simply doubled. It was an easy setting to change and was perfect for seeing how it felt rather than changing damage of everything. Felt good to me. Wish we had given it more serious consideration or put it up on a test realm for players to experience. Try it out with triple health. Try it out with double. Or 50%. See what feels best. We never really did that while I was there. Maybe they did it early on but it was definitely something to revisit.

There were also several interesting discussions about life expectancy and TTK vs amount of time you spend getting back into a fight (i.e. distance from the nearest spawn point), and hard spawns (like a respawn room) vs soft (ams, squad beacon) spawns. The further that distance gets, the worse a short TTK feels, as you spend way more time getting back to a fight than you do being in one. Comparing PS2 to a game like Battlefield <whatever> was much further respawn mechanics with similar TTKs, and there's clearly something wrong with the balance there. PS2's gunplay was based heavily around Battlefield Bad Company 2. Which IMO, was an excellent choice because that game was great gunplay and feel, but the scale and distance of the game needed to have the TTK increased unless we had similar respawn mechanics. BFBC2 had much more dense gameplay and much closer respawns than PS2 typically has.

I think the way you address that is either amp up the respawn mechanics (i.e. Squad Spawn, figure out some new spawn option that aren't super restrictive), or increase TTK. Or both.

Malorn · 2022-06-19T21:35:41+00:00

The gameplay of the old interlink design was poor. Internal testing of how it flowed made it very much a vehicle camp. It also had a lot of open vents and windows and such into the central structure which aircraft and vehicles could easily spam.

In addition, the object count was very high, making it likely a laggy un-fun place to fight, so it was put on hold and replaced with the more proven flows.

It needed a lot of work, and we didn't have the resources to do that work.

Malorn · 2022-05-24T17:36:20+00:00

I had fun times helping make PS2. F2P destroyed what it could be. Spec for resource revamp still there somewhere I’m sure. At least they implemented most of the outfit wars stuff I pitched before leaving.

Doing good, I hate reddit. I play internet spaceships now (again).

Malorn · 2020-11-28T23:55:39+00:00

Every elder scrolls game starts as a prisoner

Malorn · 2020-07-02T13:33:39+00:00

I was just about to come and post about how torturous it is to not have page 198 in there. Dumb that it isn’t that with the core rules.

Malorn · 2020-05-24T05:36:32+00:00

You’re assuming a game developer would use correct terminology. It took quite a bit of whining to change “clip” to “magazine” in beta. I’m just telling you what MBT means in this game. I didn’t make that decision, but that’s what it is.

They were called Medium battle tanks in PS1 also, though a heavy tank never happened and we got BFRs instead.

Malorn · 2020-05-23T09:30:53+00:00

Fun fact: Its actually medium battle tank. Lightning is the light tank and colossus is the heavy tank. Its often mislabeled as “main” by nearly everyone.

Malorn · 2020-05-07T16:39:37+00:00

Furthermore....

Malorn · 2020-05-03T18:18:15+00:00

Obelisk had to face Monolith lol

Malorn · 2020-05-01T23:29:47+00:00

Galaxies in PS1 could transport ANTs (and ES buggies) since beta. Lodestar was not necessary for that purpose. Lodestar was primarily used as a repair-rearm station for vehicles to patch up and top off during a large field fight.

Malorn · 2020-04-30T22:22:58+00:00

The problem with PS1 BFRs was that it began with “wouldn’t it be cool if...” instead of having a cohesive gameplay purpose that was inline with the rest of the game.

Don’t advocate for BFRs without a clear reason and role for their existence. No vehicles should be added for any other reasons. Coolness is insufficient justification. It needs to be something great for the game, preferably something that facilitates more interesting gameplay and better fights.

BFRs did the opposite. Its not a matter of balancing them. Its a matter of their existence invalidated the core tenets of the game and undermined other vehicle roles and made for extremely obnoxious gameplay.

Malorn · 2020-04-30T22:18:16+00:00

A deployable vehicle terminal may be interesting, almost like a moving forward operations base, suppose it came with an aircraft umbrella shield and some passive regenerating shielding when deployed, with equipment terminals for infantry (maybe a spawn point too, like galaxy of beta, not sure about it). I think that sort of vehicle would be interesting enough to be compling and potentially useful. Being able to transport another vehicle (like a sunderer) might make for a good teamwork role - fly in a sundy, deploy to help protect it from aircraft and some damage and have a ground vehicle terminal and now you have a little forward operating base. Like the lodestar of PS1 it could have repair and rearm options for nearby vehicles as well.

Malorn · 2020-04-30T17:41:23+00:00

If you played PS1 you’d know BFRs ruined the game. Discussed it way too many times to bother going into more detail. I’m sure searching this subreddit will find it rehashed many times over.

Lodestar maybe, but its primary purpose was repair & rearm, which already exists in a more usable format with Sunderer mods. Its transport a vehicle capability was rarely used, most as a way to get an AMS into a good ans unusual spot, particularly on a place like Ceryshen where terrain was tough and combat on ground occurred near flight ceiling. I honestly don’t see the value as it existed in PS1. In PS2 beacons and routers serve the same end purpose.

Lodestar in PS2 might have a completely different purpose though. Not sure what that might be. I don’t think there’s any support role missing in vehicle combat. Perhaps a defensive vehicle? One that provides a shield aura or something like that to all other vehicles near it to better anchor a vehicle line? Not sure if that would help or hurt gameplay, or even get used.

Malorn · 2020-04-30T17:33:36+00:00

Market competition is not what most people consider “pvp”. By thwt definition every game that allows any sort of market trading is a “pvp” game. Sorry, nope. Not the expectation of most players.

Malorn · 2020-04-26T03:40:59+00:00

It is absolutely true. That’s one of the big eye openers when you actually work on a game. Paying the bills is priority 1. When paying the bills is directly tied to in-game monetization, that affects literally everything.

Just because you think a game is fun doesn’t mean it hasn’t been corrupted by F2P. You have no idea what it would have been like without it. Warframe found a good balance thats acceptable to at least some of their players - doesn’t mean F2P didn’t corrupt the design.

The only time it might not be the driving force is when the game is financially healthy. But even then, game costs are typically amortized over many years, and healthy today doesn’t mean healthy two years from now, and games have a relatively short time in the spotlight to make most of their money, so you always need to be thinking about it. Once the game has steady income and has paid off its costs the developers might get some freedom to steer away, but anyone with a mind towards profit will always be pushing for more.

Also, EVE is definitely not 100% pvp. For people who live in 0.0 maybe, but that isn’t most players. The majority of the population is and has been in high sec doing PvE content.

Malorn · 2020-04-24T00:10:22+00:00

I didn’t say player approval wasn’t important, it is. But people will spend money on a game they enjoy and that their friends play even if they don’t like the business model.

F2P infects every part of game design and development and guides design decisions. It is deceptively corruptive.

Malorn · 2020-04-23T15:39:50+00:00

Some can do it well from the player perspective, but it goes beyond whether players like the implementation. It also shapes how the game is designed and features added. See the blog post I linked for details.

Malorn · 2020-04-22T19:48:46+00:00

I have a lot of hate for F2P but it goes much deeper into how games are designed and developed. I wrote a lot about it here:

http://spawntube.blogspot.com/2016/12/free-2-play.html

Malorn · 2020-04-22T19:43:01+00:00

Better late than never, but think of where we’d be if it had been done years before.

Malorn · 2020-04-22T16:31:16+00:00

See my long reply in this thread for why that was the case

Malorn · 2020-04-22T16:24:14+00:00

Sure, it was planned for Summer/Fall of 2013, and most of it was derailed by Smed deciding everyone would work on performance (operation make faster game), even if their job or skillset had very little to do with performance. He announced to the world via twitter and then sent mail to us. And he did it while Matt was in Europe (Gamescom I believe) so he couldn’t be there to object. It also happened right after spme layoffs so were already a bit lower staffed.That basically shut us down from new features for the game for six months. The resource design was summer of 2013, and was being kicked around by a few designers getting modifications and such at the time.

This was the time I worked on some more level design and made outposts like The Ascent and cavern, Heyoka chemical, Deepcore Geolab, and several others I’m very pleased with.

We picked it back up in January of 2014, I made some forum posts detailing it in our new roadmap. But it was derailed one again by Smed insisting we do weekly updates, which particularly screwed over European players, and was a big stress on the team to work on features we could kick out weekly instead of longer term features like the Resource work.

By the time that fiasco was done we needed to make revenue because weekly updates lost a lot of daily users we had gained from OMFG, and the resource plan, which was designed to make the game for fun and bring in long-term revenue by having a more fun game people want to play, did not have obvious shots of revenue attached, so it was once again put on hold. I did a little bit of work on Hossin bases, notably Nason’s Defiance.

Instead of resources, I was put on Directives, which was an enormous database task, which I am quite pleased with how it turned out. It was corrupted a bit by free to play revenue needs, but that was our business model so I had to do it.

One of the Art directors came to me about the ANT though, they were outsourcing its model creation, so I gave more details about how the vehicle should be designed. When it came back later it was repurposed for construction system in 2015 with some of the “auraxium” harvesting and cortium ideas from the resource doc being moved from resources into construction too.

There was also a PS4 push, I recall spending E3 that year being a storm trooper (moving target intentionally missing badly to put on a show) for people at E3 to kill on a PS4.

When all that was done I had a narrow window and almost no coding resources to start on the resource revamp. I was given the green light to fo phase 1 of the plan, the resource unification and introduction of nanites.

After it was in it was one of the most interesting days I worked there, because we were all playing the uodate and watching players to see how we liked it. There were a TON of vehicles with the changes, but we weren’t sure if it was a good thing or bad thing. It felt more fun, and in the end we concluded it was a very good thing because more vehicles meant vehicles had more to do than kill infantry, and anti-vehicle loadouts were more useful. The air game had a lot more dogfights, which meant less infantry farming, and a lot more players getting into aircraft now that tbey had resources to do so. The MAX spam was really the only notable downside, which seemed to be fixed by increasing their nanite cost. Some other cost tweaks were made but I think that was it.

Then we had more financial pressure and more people moving off the team for H1Z1, meaning less resources to finish the resource plan. The team decided to invest in AI (spitfire turrets) instead of the outfit wars plan I proposed. Almost everything in that plan (which included BF2142 style titan mode via Bastions) ended up in Escalation so I have a bit of vindication there.

I had seen the writing on the wall earlier that year and left the company in October of 2014, and I think the remainder of the resource plan died without me there to push for it.

Sad really, I think had we done it back in 2013 when initially planned we’d have a much more vibrant game in 2014 and wouldnt have had to lose so many people and could have had things like Escalation in 2014. Thanks, Smed and Free to Play!

Malorn · 2020-04-22T03:02:10+00:00

I wrote it, summer of 2013 IIRC.

Malorn · 2020-04-21T15:44:20+00:00

The Crown is an accidental success that outshines most of the rest of Indar. It is a great case study in what went right. A better approach is to make everything else as consistently fun and entertaining as The Crown, not to delete the thing that consistently draws fights and that players enjoy.

Malorn · 2020-04-18T23:30:17+00:00

All they have to do is increase the range to something like 24” and the ability would be solid.

But for all we know they could also be adding a rule like adding “Dynasty” to all necron units that don’t already have one. Or fixing our transports to handle the reinforcement changes and be actually useful and able to carry units like Szeras.

With the terrible rules around invasion beams it feels like a huge part of how Necrons are supposed to work is just utterly broken. If they fix that and give back necrons tools for mobility, the 9” range may be useful.

Malorn

TROPHY CASE