52 replies to this topic

[Quicksilver Aberration]

LordNothing, on 17 October 2023 - 10:49 AM, said:

single large scale planetary battle on one megamap. and some games have impressive megamaps now. with bases, front lines, rear positions, missions for all skill levels, etc. big map requires transport faster than a mech can walk so you can limit deployment range vs tonnage, so an entrenched unit can control a portion of the map but projecting force is expensive. you could in theory run your locusts across the map in a reasonable timeframe and attack that way, but with a serious disadvantage in tonnage. strongly reliant on batchall system to get units to actually fight instead of farm weaker opponents (why farm cbills when you can get a whole extra base). anyway its a thing for a future game.

The technical scope of this is incredibly large though, as PGI likes to remind us, they are not a AAA developer. Ultimately though, they just need to figure out what they want out of a PvP mechwarrior game. Me personally, what you describe sounds more like Battlefield with mechs and it leaves me thinking just a resounding meh. It would be fun to play every once in a while but not something that I would put time into like I did MW4 or MWO. It's more about the chaos than it is about being competitive (which is fun, just not something I would play in a more dedicated fashion). If you want an actual tactical game, any more than 8 players things start to get a little hectic. I mean 8 is more than most if we are being honest, as most are 5-6.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 17 October 2023 - 11:03 AM.

[LordNothing]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 17 October 2023 - 11:02 AM, said:

The technical scope of this is incredibly large though, as PGI likes to remind us, they are not a AAA developer. Ultimately though, they just need to figure out what they want out of a PvP mechwarrior game. Me personally, what you describe sounds more like Battlefield with mechs and it leaves me thinking just a resounding meh. It would be fun to play every once in a while but not something that I would put time into like I did MW4 or MWO. It's more about the chaos than it is about being competitive (which is fun, just not something I would play in a more dedicated fashion). If you want an actual tactical game, any more than 8 players things start to get a little hectic. I mean 8 is more than most if we are being honest, as most are 5-6.

im not convinced you need to be a triple a studio to make a mega map. with a fair mix of procedural generation (which may be real time or pre-rendered). say have a mix of hand crafted and procedural terrain hex tiles with a bit of realtime procedural integration at the boundaries or manually integrated clusters as well as dynamic hexes for bases. bt fans would love that. and they are easy to swap in and out as you move across the map. and it can definitely be added too through the live dev cycle.

thats terrain, mechs we have, core gameplay mechanics we have. it really limits the number of things you have to re-invent. you do need base building and transport mechanics, batchall mechanics, etc. pgi certainly is growing and maturing. mw5 for what it is has a level of quality far above mwo, and clans will improve on that too. so by the time they get to the unnamed mwo successor product, this can be 100% within their reach. im not sure an open world is the way to go, a more advanced arena shooter may be all we get. its just if it were to be done, that's the way to do it.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

LordNothing, on 17 October 2023 - 11:34 AM, said:

mw5 for what it is has a level of quality far above mwo

The procedural generation for MW5 was pretty meh, there wasn't anything that really stood out about any of the randomly generated maps, they just blurred together. Honestly that was my feeling playing MW5 as a whole, meh. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't great. I'd take community made maps over procedural generation any day.

TBH, I don't think the mega map is what will draw back BT fans like Bishop. I think there is a hardcore base of BT fans that didn't want an arena shooter like MW4 was, they wanted a more hardcore combat simulator with mechs. Now that megamap might be part of it, but it would only be one piece of the puzzle to draw people like that back. However combat simulator is pretty much mutually exclusive with what MW4 and MWO are, you appease one, you will alienate the other so the real question is who would PGI try to go after for an MWO2.

[LordNothing]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 17 October 2023 - 02:25 PM, said:

The procedural generation for MW5 was pretty meh, there wasn't anything that really stood out about any of the randomly generated maps, they just blurred together. Honestly that was my feeling playing MW5 as a whole, meh. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't great. I'd take community made maps over procedural generation any day.

TBH, I don't think the mega map is what will draw back BT fans like Bishop. I think there is a hardcore base of BT fans that didn't want an arena shooter like MW4 was, they wanted a more hardcore combat simulator with mechs. Now that megamap might be part of it, but it would only be one piece of the puzzle to draw people like that back. However combat simulator is pretty much mutually exclusive with what MW4 and MWO are, you appease one, you will alienate the other so the real question is who would PGI try to go after for an MWO2.

procedural on its own is meh. but you can do something like a 30/70 mix of modeled tiles and procedural tiles. and for big stuff like mountains you can do tile clusters. procedural tiles can be dynamic, could be deformable and could receive battle damage, crashed dropships, bomb craters, etc. a tile engine has other benefits. for one you can stream them in and out to increase physics (hit detection), rendering and network performance. you can readily swap tiles, say replace a terrain tile with a structure tile for base building. base tiles can also be a mix of procedural and static tiles. a mech factory might take a full tile but you might be able to subdivide tiles for smaller structures. wall tiles would be quasi procedural and could link up with adjacent wall tiles and can link up with gate tiles or turret tiles.

procedural tile merging is also a feature, as tiles of all kinds would border properties. including an elevation curve per edge and two curves so you can generate border geometry that links up seamlessly between two adjacent hexes. edge properties might also include terrain type, if they match they merge seamlessly, unmatched like water and land would form a shoreline on the border. large changes in elevation between curves can generate cliffs. hand crafted tiles just use the geometry edges as their curves. anyway i think the problem with mw5 is that the terrain system is more or less generic and not spec'd for the mechverse.

sure i would like a pure sim mechwarrior with really deep mechanics, and far more detailed build construction. and as realistic physics you can muster in a stompy robbit game. no matter what you do you end up alienating some part of the community, but its not like design by committee has been a successful practice either.

[The6thMessenger]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 17 October 2023 - 02:25 PM, said:

The real question is who would PGI try to go after for an MWO2.

Everything costs money. It's going to be hard to justify making a niche game to a niche audience. I think, as reported by DV, is that they are going casual moving forward, as it's going to have more general appeal.

If nothing else, maybe they can pitch in a 3D anime for Netflix to go for, seems like they were greenlighting a lot before. A half-assed stompy-robot, could be just another Tharkad propaganda.