Kay Wolf, on 07 October 2013 - 06:24 AM, said:
Do you think MWO is, now, or could be, eventually, ready for this level of tactical expression? I don't know anything about Red Orchestra, am not a PvP player anywhere but in MechWarrior, period, so I only have your word to go on, so forgive me if I would also ask you, "screenshot, or..."? I know this would take more than just a screenshot, hehe, to prove your point, so don't worry about it. But, about MWO... could it be ready, do you think?
That's the million dollar question, really. Now? No, it's not. In the future? A couple of months ago I'd've laughed at the idea, but it's (slowly) getting there. There's still a dozen things deeply wrong with the game (Ghost Heat, EWAR, etc) but only so many of them impinge on the tactical side of the game.
There are four real issues I see with MW:O from a tactical standpoint:
a: EWAR. The state of the electronic warfare game is atrocious, which is unfortunate because it's an area MW:O had the opportunity to really stand out in, no other FPS really has the scope (PS2, maybe) to incorporate an elegant, cyclic EWAR game the way a Mechwarrior one does, and it's one of the few areas where the TT setup actually translates well. Sadly, PGI took it in a totally different direction and, as a result, there is no Electronic Warfare game. There's an Anti-LRM/Radar item, a Streak tax of 1.5t/2crit and an LRM tax of 1t, 1crit, 1e-hardpoint. I, and plenty of others, have gone into a lot of detail elsewhere about how it could work, so I won't soapbox here.
b: Weapon falloff. This causes a lot of weapon balance problems, in such a pervasive manner as to impact the tactical game. An AC/20 does almost as much damage as an AC/10 at AC/10 optimal. Short ranged weapons aren't short-ranged, and lasers are unfairly impacted due to a: worse falloff range and b: their damage/range relationship being inverted compared to ballistics. And LRMs aren't actually very "L" when ERPPCs can whack them for significant damage from out of LRM range, never mind that the missiles take a month to arrive above ~750m.
c: Time To Kill. This is an interesting one because most other highly tactical shooters have a very low TTK. The general trend, in fact, is for HP to drop as "tacticalness" increases. This has to do with the influence of the individual relative to the team. The extreme example at one end is Unreal Tournament/Quake Arena where players are bullet sponges and at the other RO2 where you can survive a hit to a limb, or a low-calibre torso hit, but most of the time hit = dead. (
Interestingly stopping just short of 1HK actually promotes tactical play more than a 1HK setup because, again using RO2 as an example, you often can't be quite sure if you dropped someone at range, or winged them.) However, Mechwarrior is something of a different beast to non-mech-based FPSs due to the varied weapon systems and the locational ablative HP. Part of the problem with MW:O at the moment is that if you fight in a high enough bracket, backup weapons are generally dead weight unless the primary weapon is ammo constrained (
and even then, for a lot of them two medium lasers could easily be two more tons of ammo) because you don't loose limbs. You lose your CT, unless you're obviously XLed at which point you lose an ST. Even if you fight in a moderate bracket, if you lose the armour on a compartment you can more or less guarantee losing it in short order. Losing actual components is rarely relevant since the whole compartment invariably follows. There'd be a lot more tactics in target selection both at the compartment and mech level if Internal Structure were significantly increased, meaning higher TTKs without increasing armour, thus meaning a longer time for components to be exposed. At the moment you just focus down an enemy mech, aim for the CT and nuke it as fast as possible. With longer TTKs without affecting armour you'd see two effects - firstly it would actually be worth purposely knocking the AC/20 out of a Yen-Lo (or indeed an Atlas) and then ignoring it for more important targets with most of it's damage neutered, secondly it would nerf Ballistics by hitting their ammo consumption, which is a problem at the moment, it's pretty hard to run out of ammo in MW:O and that impacts the usefulness of energy weapons quite badly.
d: Engagement scale. For reference, Red Orchestra 2 runs at 32 players a side, as does BF3. I don't think MW:O is ever likely to move beyond the 12-man team for Inner Sphere forces. For one thing they're largely sticking to canonical force sizes and the next one up is, I believe, a Battalion at (
12*3=) 36. I just don't see PGI pulling that off
any time soon, given the strain Company level combat put on both low-end player computers and the servers. Certainly they'd need a lot of new maps. However, this is where respawns can play a part
in certain game modes.
Firstly, I
don't think respawns, even in wave format, are appropriate for either of the current game modes as they stand. For one thing, capture objectives are far to close to the likely respawn locations. A wave respawn method would, however, allow for certain kinds of asymmetric game mode. Give one team no respawns, a higher tonnage limit and a highly defensible position, and the other team respawn waves. Team 1 has to defend their cap from team 2. Hey presto, a Normandy Beach Landing-esque map/scenario/game mode. This is essentially how RO2 works, except there are phased capture layers and the defenders do have respawns, just less. On larger maps you can introduce a central capture point or three (
quite possibly the Conquest capture locations minus the spawn ones) and give both sides respawn waves. That will produce a protracted battle for the central territory with waves of reinforcements arriving, who are then faced with the decision to either reinforce the combat point, or divert to an un- (
or lightly-) guarded enemy cap point.
In both the above cases, respawn waves can increase the engagement scale without needing to increase the number of players on field.
As for RO2, you're right a screenie won't do it justice. However I'll use an anecdotal example of my primary 'class' from RO2 - the Machinegunner. Now, whilst you can hipshoot the thing, it's an emergency measure and can be discounted for general play. You can set up either in windows (
kill a lot of people before your head gets blown off) or hunkered down with a sightline (
less immediate massacre potential, also likely to live longer than 30s). However, you can't just consider where you and your squad are moving. There are reinforcements (respawn waves) and one of the important roles of an MG is to cover the routes they will be using to link up with the surviving members of their team (
it's important to note almost every map has two potential spawn points per side at any one time and you can pick which you arrive at, which makes literal spawncamping a lot less viable). So you have to decide if you'll support the advance or attempt to interfere with reinforcements, or try and find a (
usually more exposed) firing position that allows for both. That decision point (
and it's only one decision point, for one class) is the crux of the issue. The more decisions like that you're forced to make, the more tactical depth a game has.
That is how respawns make RO2 a more tactical game.
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