Here's my take on the new movement code:
- Making inclines slow you down: Good
- 45-degree arbitrary impassibility map-wide: Bad
- Making steep slopes (i.e., mountain slopes and certain hills, but not little snow piles or small terrain features like small craters) impassable: Good (but currently everything beyond 45 degrees is impassable, which is Bad.)
In wanting to make terrain matter more, we've just gone a bit too far and made all terrain a straight-up obstacle in many places it has no business being an obstacle.
The issue is the 45-degree impassibility being laid over the entire map like a net such that anything and everything that happens to touch 45-degrees arbitrarily becomes an obstacle regardless of its height or how reasonable it is for it to be stopping mechs.
It's a frustrating mess to maneuver on certain parts of certain maps, and it makes not only the pilot feel incompetent but also at times leaves the player frustrated with the concept of movement in this game as a whole.
What we have a lot of on some of the maps, like Tourmaline and Frozen City, are terrain features - snow hills/piles, small craters, things intended to break up the uniformity of the terrain, to break up Line of Sight and serve to increase the three dimensional nature of the terrain - that shouldn't be stopping you from proceeding over them regardless of your mech class. Some of these are even in the midst of the intended lanes on the map and cause undo frustration and wasted time. These are things that should not be stopping mechs cold and inhibiting their movement completely. One can only imagine the impact on new players experiencing this in their first game.
Examples like the gentle craters on Tourmaline that happen to have a tiny bit of >45
o slopes at their lips, and the snow mounds/small hills of snow on Frozen City amidst the buildings that break beyond 45
o near their tops. They are simply in the midst of normal routes and paths and for a year or more now we've rightly held the expectation of being able to walk over them like a battlemech should. And forget about traversing the rock fields on Alpine, those are a mess too.
If that can be resolved, the gameplay will be much better for it.
I'm curious if adjusting the 45-degree angle up to 55-60 degrees might be the right solution, but also retain the ability to individually paint specific areas with an impassibility brush, such as the slopes of mountains on Alpine Peaks if they happen to be a bit less than 60 degrees.
This would help balance everything and make maneuvering a reasonable endeavor rather than a prime frustration. In FPS games, maneuvering should be focused on tactical movement, not getting stuck/unstuck. When it degenerates into the latter, there's a problem and it will have a negative overall impact on the game's fun factor.
Also, I find it funny that we are actually most concerned about small mechs being stopped by smaller rocks/obstacles, when quite naturally a smaller chassis with a smaller gait/step is going to be more easily stopped by a given obstacle than a much larger mech that could simply step over it.
If we are going to fix the annoyance found currently in things like rock fields and craters, I would certainly hope it is fixed for ALL mechs, not just some, and certainly not in an inaccurate way that gives an undue advantage to the class of mechs least physically able to actually step over such things.
Adjusting the current annoyances such that they are no longer impediments for light mechs is fine, but to do so while not also doing the same thing for all the other mechs would not only further imbalance the movement mechanics in favor of one class of mechs, it would also be the least logical way to address it when considering the physical attributes of each class of mechs - namely, which ones are most capable of stepping over a given obstacle.
Currently, I feel sorry for any mech larger than a medium that does not have jumpjets. It's a frustrating mess just trying to walk down some of the lanes, let alone engage in combat without arbitrarily being stopped mid-maneuver by all sorts of incongruous objects that should not be stopping you. It's not only just plain old bad gameplay experience, it's also often very illogical things that impede your movement. Perhaps this whole new movement archetype really ought to be relegated to hillsides and buildings where it belongs, for the sake of everyone's sanity.
Edited by jay35, 03 July 2013 - 09:29 PM.
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NOW we should help PGI as betatester, telling them every object in each map that stops a mech....
