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Iron_Guard8's avatar
4 years ago

Things the next shooter needs

Time to cover things I feel the next game must have, regardless of what style of game they go for (whether it’s more of GW3 as opposed to BfN2 for example). Some of these we’ve covered before and if I’ve forgotten anything, please comment with them!

Netcode must be solid. All 3 shooters have hit registration issues of varying degrees. About the only good thing I can say about Valorant is that it has excellent netcode so this isn’t the issue there that it is in our shooters. I feel this is one of the most crucial things we need for the next game. Having our attacks hit what they are supposed to hit, being able to tell where an enemy is and it be correct is crucial and needs to be a prime focus.

Bugs have to be minimized and fixed in a timely fashion.  Bugs are the nature of the beast in modern games as they’re far more complex than they used to be with big teams doing different parts of a game instead of one person or a very small team making the whole thing. With that being said, all 3 shooters still have more bugs than I would normally expect, and all 3 were left in a state after support was pulled where they really need some work. GW2 and BfN both launched in bad shape too, and I know we lost a lot of people early on in both games over these issues. The next game must launch in more solid shape, and bugs have to be squished as quickly as possible, especially those that affect balance and gameplay. And don’t do a Founders where the game is still a beta after very little public testing, that really hurt BfN badly.

Solid and fair economy. And I mean both for how we spend real money, and for coins and any other currency we have in game (I’m hoping for coins being the main currency again, with regional currencies being a thing as part of the free roam regions’ experience and on a similar vein, the time shards for the Gnomiverse). GW is the only one of the trio I felt really got this right; buy the game or the deluxe edition, and then buy coin packs if you like. GW2 started off with a similar situation, but took a turn for the worse with all the upgrade packs, especially the Torch and Tail one that gave you Torchwood and Hovergoat. The red and blue trials were rough, but worth it to earn those characters, never been a fan of buying things when it’s more interesting and enjoyable to earn them. BfN’s economy is even worse than GW2’s became thanks to the way coins and regional currencies end up worthless after a while and how bad the rainbow star situation is. I’ve posted about ideas to make a fair economy and the removal of randomness that a lot asked for, but regardless of what ends up being used for the next game, it has to work, feel fair, and not give those that spend more money a power advantage over those that don’t. Playing the game and especially PvP matches need to feel rewarding as well. I also want currencies to always be useful and desirable.

Powerful, but easy to use, communication system. And I’m talking about quick and easy voiceless communication. I always turn in game chat off as it can be awful or just annoying; anyone who played GW before they fixed the issue and experienced the always on voice chat knows what I’m talking about. GW has 4 gestures, GW2 regressed down to 2 as the other 2 were swapped to changing through characters in solo Ops, which I use but not all that often, BfN’s system is far and away the best here. I’d like to see that BfN system refined and streamlined, with focus on tactical stuff over the ‘fun’ ones, but the core system in BfN is along the lines of what I’d like to see.

Core mechanics have to be fine-tuned. I’ve been playing shooters back before the use of the term ‘Doom clone’ and have experienced all levels of responsiveness, smoothness, and adjustability, and BfN in Founders was the worst I’ve seen baring the terrible game ‘Mortyr’. It’s much better now, but I still get weird jumpiness of my targeting cursor when zoomed in as a Cactus and Deadbeard that has gotten me vanquished. Before working on costumes, weather effects, cool changes to the main hub (like Giddy Park, which does look great to be fair), and the store, get the moving, shooting, camera, and aiming feeling as good as it possibly can be.

Don’t let veterans have a power advantage over new players. This can be hard to 100% get right, but the very least keep it like it is in GW2 and BfN (GW’s upgrades are random, but veterans tend to have more of the random upgrades as they will have purchased more packs), but my idea for upgrades was to not have them even linked to levels and instead be always available so brand new level 1 player can compete equally with a level 90000 veteran, skill and knowledge being the main factors instead of who has spend the most money or leveled the most. Consumables have an effect here, one reason I don’t mind BfN’s timer as we’re all equal there, but they matter less than things like a basic Super Commando or one with the upgrades in GW.

Give us an incentive to play and support the game for years. Without making us feel the pain of FOMO or feeling forced to pay/play, entice us to hang around by making the game fun to play, rewarding, fair, exciting, and well supported. Imagine how many more players we’d have in GW2 if it had more balance and bug fixes along with greater support like new variants, maps, community challenges, and keeping the better portals available, or Ops phase 3, more new characters, and more prize maps for BfN. This happened to Heroes too, great game, good ideas and support just cut off. This really needs to stop and the next shooter would be a great place to see that happen, and hopefully PvZ3 gets the same love and support as it has great potential from what I’ve seen. I bought a lot of coins in GW and GW2, and some of the GW2 packs as well as the Feastivus pack and some rainbow stars in BfN, I even joined EA Play for BfN to get the extra costume bits for BfN just to show support. I did cancel that after BfN lost support though. I’ve said this a lot, but make a game where we love it and want to show that via spending extra money on the game, but don’t make it feel like we have to. Some folks just can’t spend that money and they may just leave if they feel, or they actually are, missing out. Don’t drive people away, we need a healthy population.

Marketing, communication, and promotion. One thing BfN lacked compared to GW and GW2 is that we barely knew it as coming, and we’re on the forums and many of us are on the Reddit and follow on Twitter! Only a few videos, and even Sir Patrick Stewart, couldn’t provide enough buzz over the game. I did enjoy the live Twitch streams, but they got cut off, thanks to Covid at least partially, and compared to getting videos for almost everything for GW and GW2 made their absence for BfN even more striking. Give us some teasers, and more videos, and please, much better communication between the community and the dev team. The devs always seemed cool to me, even if I disagreed with them on some things, they’re still awesome to have around. I want to see the awesome video support GW2 had for its early life brought forward to a new game, and I normally don’t even use Twitch at all, but I was there to watch the streams from Neighborville after work, that’s how much I love PvZ shooters!

7 Replies

  • @Iron_Guard8 gw1 and 2 have some questionable netcode at times but bfn's is down right infuriating at times and it made playing chomper and superbrainz as actual melee characters a nightmare.

    2. Games in general just need to slow down when it comes to bugs, yes I would like new content faster but I'd rather wait and have quality than a buggy mess but this is sadly the modern gaming mindset of gotta get it out now and fix it later.

    3. If you simply remove the charactwr packs from gw2 and its economy along with gw1's is really solid. Bfn shot itself in the foot by removing the incentive of things to buy and instead trying to drip feed us content which just causes players to get frustrated when they at least can't buy something.

    4. The problem with bfn's communication system to me is that it takes far too long to say what you want as you gotta search through all the dang emotes and pointless communications rather than just a simple medic or follow me call button.

    5. Veterans aee always gonna feel more powerful because they've been playing longer and thats just a fact of life, every game has a progression system to where veterans are gonna have something a newbie wont and I hate to say it but some people are just gonna have to get over that and git gud.

    6. The prize maps and bfn rainbow stars were an awful fomo grind system that made many people quit altogether, I get they can't pump out maps and characters every month but maybe actually having events and modes that don't suck on maps that arent poorly designed and give us more of what we already enjoy would be a better system like the portal and trials in 2. They need to actually create a game people will actually enjoy playing unlike bfn.

    7. Bfn's marketing is some of the worst I've seen for a triple a title. We only we're announced on the day the game was available and they showed literally no gameplay to hide the fact that it was a poor overwatch clone. They genuinely screwed themselves over here.

    One thing they definetly have to get better after bfn is the core game play and map design as the characters, camera, abilities, and animations are all so floaty in bfn and the lack of ttk really hurts any sense of weight to the weapons.

    The map design imo is also the weakest of the 3 shooters with lack of high ground, flank routes, gimmicks, poor spawns, and invisble walls everywhere and come on does anyone even play anything but turf maps in bfn?

    Mixed modes literally died because no one wants to play it with all the stupid changes popcap made to them like 8v8 and 2 point capture system.
  • Iron_Guard8's avatar
    Iron_Guard8
    Legend
    4 years ago

    @stukapooka As far as the veteran thing. Knowing how stuff works, map layout, and how characters play will always give a veteran an advantage over a new player. What I want to avoid is having veterans straight up do more damage, have more health, or other advantages over new players. In all 3 of the PvZ shooters, I've seen new players do extremely well, which is showing their skill off, and it's not a huge issue in our shooters, barring special cases. But in other games, people who pay more or play a long time have some times insurmountable advantages and we can't have that in a new game.

  • stukapooka's avatar
    stukapooka
    Legend
    4 years ago
    @Iron_Guard8 I get what you're saying but thats more of a flaw of the progression in the upgrade system so unless you introduce the point system from bfn into gw2's upgrade system so people cant have health and damage at the same time this problem will continue.

    Bfn shares the same problem with having the upgrades that actually make a difference to the character like rapid fire be available to the max rank sweatlords.

    It's a big problem that needs to be seriously examined or we could just take the lazy route and throw out upgrades altogether lel.
  • gametrieuk's avatar
    gametrieuk
    4 years ago

    @stukapookaWell, I have to disagree on most points here, I don't really see that many of these problens in BFN.

    1. Yes Hit detection is a problem in nis and shooters, but seriously in GW1 this is hundreds of times worse than BFN, GW2 actually has less Hit detection problems than BFN, but it's still horrible, like in the case where I exploded a barrel in 2 peas and they just came out alive and killed me with 100% HP, or due to someone leveling up the game crashes and simply destroy Hit detection and their abilities don't work.

    2. About bugs, currently BFN is the one with the fewest bugs, GW2 and GW1 is full of bugs, besides the physics of the 2 games is a bug by itself.

    3. I really agree about the coin issue, it's terrible in the 3 games, but in BFN they have even less use (except Switch)

    4. You can save the main ones in a tab that can be used more quickly.

    5. Yes, veterans, they will be better, but the game can give many advantages in this respect especially with GW1 having only 2 good classes the other 3 are basically useless and Super commando and Agent Pea being simply invincible or GW2 that exists Pay to win with Z7 or Twilight Chomper, or simply the legendary characters that are not easily accessible to novices.

    6. Prize maps are very good, they manage to attract people to collect new items every month, about Rainbow Stars I agree.

    7. About the maps, I completely disagree, the GW1 maps are beautiful, but with a horrible design, which encourages camping 100% of the time, GW2 has simply abhorrent maps, they are ugly, bad design, the maps have hitbox in something like carpet, in other words, if a raptor can stop your shots, maps basically without covers is basically playing in a big open line, besides that the classes don't work well on them. About people only playing turf in BFN it's basically the same in the other 2 games, I just don't find sessions in any mode other than turf, mixed is terrible in GW2, 12v12 looks like a mess on small maps and the fact of having turf makes the rotation of maps being much slower or mixed is pretty depressing and in GW1 it's 8v8 like in BFN which is one of the real attractions of that way for me in GW1 it's just more fun than in GW2.

    About looking like a bad Overwatch, it's just wrong and meaningless, as in this view GW1 and GW2 are just a worse TF2 this is basically looking at a game and judging it by its inspiration.

  • stukapooka's avatar
    stukapooka
    Legend
    4 years ago

    @gametrieuk1. Agreed that hit detection netcode has always been a problem.

    2. Gotta disagree here bfn by far has the worst bugs and they're a constant nuisance.

    3. Agreed, bfn has the worst economy by far.

    4. The favorites tab can still be cluttered and requires a good amount of time to find what you want if you save a lot of them as a fair amount of the messages feel like filler.

    5. By that same logic bfn is just as bad die to the upgrade system as the legendary upgrades will take a fair time to acquire and branium basher dominates the game.

    6. They definetly need to be managed better though, people have other games they want to play and things they have to do in real life and having a system that relied on fomo tactics until the switch port that allows you to work at your own pace was a very poor idea.

    7. No offense but you're probably the one person I've seen who genuinely prefers the bfn map design. I do agree though that gw1 maps could be a camping mess due to the lack of an official sniper for zombies and the ungodly amount of spam of peashooter and footsoldier. Have to hard disagree with you on the gw2 maps though as ugly is the last word i would use to describe them, especially compared to the sterile and lifeless maps of bfn that suffer from enormous problems with ttk and sprinting.

    8v8 is more of a mess than 12v12 due to bfns awful spawn system which can spawn you with the enemy team at the start of a match.

    Mixed modes were quickly left to rot in gw1 but 2 actually tries to have the quests give you incentive to play them. Bfn had mixed modes be removed from the game in less than a year and genuinely made bad choices with the modes like the suburbination changes. 8v8 team vanquish in gw1 wasn't the regular mode btw.


    Except in the comparison to overwatch they forgot what overwatch gets right in its design and completely forgot it.

    Tf2 and gw were meant for 12v12 casual play while overwatch revolves around 6v6 2 of each category, one of each character teams comps which doesn't work when your in a 12v12 setting with shields, no character limits, and no ultimates to nuke the enemy team to break stalemates push with. On top of not having 2 entirely separate teams. Overwatch simply wouldnt work if a team had 4 Reinhardt's , 4 doomfists, and 4 bastions which bfn constantly finfs itself falling in.

    If they were so inspired by overwatch they could've at least realized why its specific mechanics work like Overheal and shields rather than just copy and pasting mechanics to the point of almost a ripoff while still relying on gw game modes and ideas from gw1 maps for turf which by the logic here would still make bfn the worse version of a clones clones clone given that both gw's took inspiration from tf2 before overwatch came out and did the exact same thing with tf2 so why steal ideas from a game who stole ideas from the same source you got them from in the first place!?

  • gametrieuk's avatar
    gametrieuk
    4 years ago

    @stukapooka

    2. Morph glitch, texture glitch, physics bugs like teleports for touching bombs, abilities not coming out, walls without collision you can shoot through them, they're just textures, all seed of times and moom base z is like that, come to look like a rushed map, lack of map limits, ROF spray bug and many others are common in GW2 and I see at least 1 of these a day, in BFN the maximum I saw was simply a flying 80's.

    5.Upgrades can be achieved by playing and with a stipulated progression time, as it's not luck nor is it exclusive for you to buy it.

    6. Seriously with 15 hours you can complete a prize map in BFN, that's 30 me a day in a month which is basically the minimu for a pass, they are already easy, I just don't see why you would have to depend on bugs or money for terminal , a guy with a busy schedule like me, who could play 1 hour a day, I managed to finish the Wizard's prize map in 12 days, currently I don't do anything so I play 6/7 hours a day, which made me finish the Imp's prize map. 2 days without bugs, farm or other things.

    7. I'm certainly not the only one, maps with Great White North, Moom Base Z, Zomburbia, Wall Nut Hills and Seeds of Time are stopped at the extreme to the point that no one advances, cover is lacking and simply some reason for you to advance, after all Close Range classes with Scientist, All-Star, Imp and they can simply always pick the best variants (which are always the most camping possible, like Paleontologo, Z7, Hockey, Golf, SHRImp, Astronalta...) and stay camping all the time and like the game is slow you have no reason not to camp, it will always give you more rewards and you will die less, GW2 looks like a chess game so much that your matches are stopped on these maps, going to TV you have maps with designs that don't make any sense for a game, Sand Sands, Coliseum, Team Park, Lunar Landing, Frost Criquet, Bone Island and Aqua Center, are either super Camping or Shock Points, where whoever spams the most wins.

    I've never had problems with 8v8 and I've always found it better for small maps, Spawns look good too.

    honestly you can have 4 SB in GW2 and he's basically a better Doomfist, he's the only mobile character in a game where everything is slow, he's just annoying, not only that but in GW2 you can have pretty much any character with damage elementals which just makes the game a pollution of effects where you can face a group control character (electric or toxic), a support character (ice) and a pressure character (fire) in the same class without any distinction, that's honestly worse than 5 BB 9001.

    And about the example that PVZ copied a game, that's just silly, seriously BFN has lots of original ideas in their characters maps, concepts and stuff, putting BFN or any other PVZ as a copy is just not knowing what an inspiration is, after all BFN really made the GW1 classes go from being shallow and simplifying TF2 concepts to something new and unique to them.

    Some examples of this are:

    Chomper in GW1 and GW2; just a copy of a Spy mechanic, completely randomly placed on a character without worrying about anything.

    All-star in GW1 and GW2; where they did heavy, with skills of an assault class, and with a completely useless shield, which was supposed to be a damage sponge is just braindead spam.

    Scientist in GW1 and GW2; Well, it was based on the doctor, with a Braindead shotgun, which is the laziest shotgun I've ever seen in a game, it's a hitbox that deals damage up close, with a precarious healing and with serious DPS abilities it's funny how it is. is the same as soldier 76 in OW, use your movement, get close, shoot your bombs and heal yourself, and repeat incessantly, I just know it went totally wrong, to the point that it took 5 years when BFN released that people remembered they could heal with doctor.

    Sunflower in GW1; Congratulations, you are useless because you don't have enough damage, her abilities were poorly distributed, to the point that she seemed useless on her own, and unable to provide everything necessary for the team due to her lack of mobility, she seemed a role against everyone the characters and the fact that the GW1 regen is horrible and the revival system is pitiful.

    Engineer in GW1 and GW2, a support based on the TF2 engineer, but with a quiz kit and primary, that only builds a Teleport and is a worse pea, with abilities of an assault and sniper class, I just try to understand that, they just made a lazy version of a TF2 character and literally didn't even know how to rework his abilitie, because all he needs was to be a buggy Hitbox version of Peagatling.

    Soldier in GW1 and GW2, he's an assault class that's better at long ranges than Cactus, a sniper character, so great, he's just good at any range, unlike snipers who get bad at close range, basically best class in the game.

  • Iron_Guard8's avatar
    Iron_Guard8
    Legend
    4 years ago

    I forgot a couple things:

    Strong Anti-Cheat.  Obviously this is more of an issue for PC players like me, but GW2 has had hacker problems for a very long time and they ruin matches. I have heard that it is possible to hack consoles with some 3rd party stuff, but no idea if that's true or not. I've seen hackers in GW, although that was just in Ops, having infinite ammo as a Pea Gatling was weird, but I've never seen this in BfN thanks to the same anti-cheat as I saw in Paladins.

    Cross-play. I know there could be issues with controller vs. keyboard and mouse, but cross-play has worked in other games I've played, including Paladins, and it would help keep more modes active and populated so we don't have to turn off mixed mode like they did in BfN. TT is my favorite mode, but I don't want to play TT as my only game mode.

    I'll not get heavily involved in the discussion that popped up here, except to say, I like all 3 games, I like GW2 the most, all 3 games could use a big patch to fix issues that persist in them to this day. For me, all three games have things I like most and things that I don't like. I want a new shooter and soon, preferably more like GW than BfN, but BfN has stuff I want to see in a new game as well. All shooters copy each other in this day and age, Blizzard made OW so you know that thing steals from all over, because that's what they do; take someone else's ideas and make money off of it. I have 500 hours in TF2 and 250ish in OW before I uninstalled OW permanently, 893 in BfN, 321 in GW, 2825 in GW2, 400 in Paladins, and close to 70 in Gigantic before it got shut down so I play a lot of hero shooters, GW2 for all its flaws, is still my favorite and most fun, largely because it's PvZ. I truly hope we not only see that new game but they learn from the past and make the best one yet.

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