Help me design my competitive multiplayer shooter

[ambershee]

I personally feel that the translocator completely ruins CTF. Quake 2 had it right, Quake 3 had it good. Threewave did it best.

 

[DarQraven]

Or you could re-hash deathmatch with a distinctive visual style... For example if UT had the look of Quake 3, or if Quake 3 simply had the movement of UT, I wouldn't keep hooping between the two.

WHAAT?!
Removing Q3's movement in favor of UT's?
...
-_-
That's the best part about Q3!!

 

[Adelheid]

No, the best part about Q3 is that I can actually hit things with their plasma gun and/or rocket launcher.
That and I don't get moaned at for playing like a psychotic Skaarj in a blood-rage.

 

[JaFO]

...
RE: Gametypes.

Multiple gametypes are overrated. People always go back to the main basic types. Look at UT -- all those gametypes didn't help it at all. Everyone stuck to DM/CTF/ONS. I'd focus purely on (T)DM until the game is near completion. No game does CTF right anyway since it requires the usage of a translocator to be playable and balanced but no one wants to copy UT.

I do agree that multiple distinct gametypes are overrated.

However I do think that (T)DM is far too basic a gametype to be considered in anything other than a pure prototype-stage of game-design.

You can frag players in practically any other gametype and in (pretty much any) gametype you tend to have a kill/death-ratio for showing off as well, so the bloodlust can be satisfied.

The real issue for such a basic gametype is focussing the action in the level.
Pickups and such do work, but only if and only if the players are focussing on the same pickup at the same time. And that is effectively what the primary objective does in the DM-variants.

A simple easy-to-understand objective is therefor all that is needed.
And there's only two variants for that :
(1) object-based : CTF being the most famous
(2) location-based : King of the Hill / Onslaught / Domination / etc

Of course the real trick is getting players to do act in either a defensive or supporting role because we all know that everyone already wants to be the hero that scores the winning goal.

 

[MÆST]

CTF is a classic that hasn't been topped. The best for a map design to force people to either defend or attack and not go off on their own looking for kills is to design a classic two forts style map where the land between bases is a no mans land.

I still would like to know what others think about the idea I posted above.

 

[Numb51]

For the movement system. I always thought of something where you dodge initially, then in the air you press the space key to initiate strafe jumping. While your strafe jumping, if you happen to be near a wall you can dodge jump off of it. You would also be able to just jump up once then dodge off a wall near you. The space bar alone should never initiate strafe jumping. It makes the surfaces appear to slippery, thus making percision movement for a beginner impossible.

I believe that dodging will never grasp the casual player to want to play competitively. It's just an entirely inefficient way to move for a non- trained ut player. People back in the day wanted to learn to dodge because UT was the hottest game out at the time.

This game HAS to be "easy to learn, and hard to master" in order to have a player base.
Not only that, but it NEEDS to have modern elements like long term reward systems most games have, and I'm not talking about ****ty xbox live like achievements, I'm talking about ways you can make your character unique, but not necessarily unfairly powerful.

The reason RPG's make people addicted is that they can make their character stronger and look cooler. In this case, Your character getting stronger would be you improving your individual skill, and your character looking cooler by being able to buy custom **** in like a store from getting money from winning a match. Much like a real tournament would do.

On a side note, I never played warsaw so I don't know how that movement goes.