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I've had action space sims on the mind recently (TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, etc.), and I'm even playing Freespace 2 now. These games were great, and I want more of them. And I want them better. Plus, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person whose childhood wasn't at least partly consumed by spaceships shooting at each other with lasers.
So I'm going to ramble for a really long time about the awesome game that I think somebody should make. Because I started and couldn't stop. And maybe other people can share their thoughts on the subject.
BTW, this is pretty much the definition of TLDR.
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Of course, none of that has a lot of bearing on the actual combat experience, which is a more challenging thing to deal with. For the most part, it's way too difficult to do damage to opponents that aren't essentially standing still, whether that involves them tunneling at you from a distance or just not evading while you're on their tail and blasting them. So ideally, you want to make it less impossible to deal with dogfighting targets that are moving quickly, without it just reverting to a game of outer space jousting. I think the most obvious way to deal with this is to bring in a greater variety of weapon mechanics, and preferably NOT in an either-or sort of way (i.e. equip this anti-fighter weapon NOT this anti-bomber weapon OR this anti-capital ship weapon at the beginning of the mission). Here are some possibilities:
* More spread-type weapons, i.e. projectiles launched in clusters to make it a little more likely to do decent damage at close range, without requiring pinpoint accuracy.
* Projectiles that cover a large volume with relatively low damage, or that grow over time to make it more likely to hit a target at range while not making it a given that you'll hit them at short range.
* A low-damage kind of auto-tracking beam weapon that is very likely to hit a target within a certain cone in front of your ship. Something that doesn't do sufficient damage at close range to make it desirable over other alternatives, but gives you some option for doing damage at range, preferably with the goal of encouraging players to bring it in closer to use other weapons.
* Less emphasis on missiles as an I-WIN sort of deal. Lower damage, faster lock-on. Possibly with a spammable version with weak tracking and a less-spammable version with better tracking, so that players have some intuitively-different-but-tactically-similar options. In either case, a complement to the "primary weapon" that isn't incredibly overpowering.
* Greater distinction between anti-capital-ship ordinance and anti-fighter missiles. Preferably with some way to shoot at targets on a capital ship without barreling straight at them, like a delivery offset or limited tracking.
I think there's also some room for more diversity in how you move around the environment, beyond just "going fast" and "turning a lot". Some kind of short-range jump device could enable you to jump a short distance forward to gain ground or avoid incoming fire, or alternatively it could work to place you directly behind an enemy (only on targets that are fairly close to you already, though not necessarily moving in the same direction). A similar mechanism could function to immediately reverse your direction. All of these would probably be on a fairly lengthy cooldown sort of deal.
You could also have some ways of disrupting how an enemy moves through space. For example, you could have some kind of wide-cone wave that disables or at least retards the ability of an enemy ship to maneuver, though maintaining their speed (I vaguely remember something like this being done in TIE Fighter).
Now, these still kind of maintain the general problem that you're spinning around in space. You could add some conditions in that serve the function of bringing players closer into the capital ships in the game; for example, in some cases very large ships could emit a large radiation shield against radiation that otherwise harm small craft (maybe shielding from space debris instead), to encourage you and your enemy to be within range of these larger ships and thus basically bringing another object into the fray. It should probably be pretty neutral, in that case, so as to prevent one side from having a distinct advantage. I imagine there are some other sorts of things that could work to make you want to be flying around other large ships rather than out in the middle of space!
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