I think an important observation here is that the systems that the player has to learn must be as simple as is humanly possible. It is the use of those systems in interaction with other players that creates the gameplay. Go is the illustrating example, of course. The “system” is placing stones, one at a time, onto intersections of a 19x19 board. It is only when two players alternate moves using that system that things get interesting.
Single player games provide their entertainment by inviting the player to learn and use their inherently-complex systems. The systems themselves are the lion’s share of the game’s entertainment. If that’s repeated in a multiplayer game, then players will be discouraged as they experience a barrier to interacting with other players. Just the act of moving from point A to point B requires effort, so they lose interest.
There’s also the converse, where the more interesting the systems are, the less players are interested in interacting with other players. In fact, other players become a burden, interrupting them while they try to play solo with the systems.
Let me disagree with you on this: the player’s interaction must be as simple as possible, not the system. The system is the globality of the player’s interactions, both with the players and non-players, not the other way around. Or to put it even simpler, a gameplay / system is set on rules, and the simplicity of rules does not determine the complexity of the gamplay / system.
As you said yourself, GO rules are rather simple, yet the strategy and tactics (or system) that it generates are incredibly deep.
Same for chess, which I know far better: there is little more than a dozen total rules, including pieces movement. Yet the system is incredibly complex as well.
And that’s probably the hardest part: keeping the rules and interactions simple, while allowing complex strategies from it.
Depends what is to be learned. For simple rules, those are both great: you can learn chess’ rules simply by observing players or toying around a chess simulator, which is the rule enforcer.
As for learning the proper chess strategy, although imitation might work at first, you’ll have to get lectures (either self-teaching or courses) if you want to understand and progress faster than only through trial-and-errors.
That’s a really long OP addressing a lot of issues.
Regarding the warp situation, I would much more prefer a really ‘soft warp’, the player shouldn’t even know he is in warp, no large red sign, no button to press, no velocity requirement, no alignment requirement. The engine is perfectly capable of doing this, it’s a huge strength for IBS against all other space games there. Make warp completely seamless, as velocity increases, increase the acceleration rates, don’t even notify the player until he wishes to do something that is not allowed in ‘warp’, like fire weapons, at that point display a gentle ‘high velocity’ warning and play a dud sound.
Gameplay isn’t seamless, and players need to know about that seam. When outside of viable combat speeds, my weapons should be deactivated.
If speed changes are manual, then approaches to moons and stations will be tedious, with plenty of players either cratering their destinations or simply badly overshooting them.
I’m still waiting for INS to converge on the proximity warp system. I can’t understand why it isn’t being used. We talked about that system for years and nobody could shoot holes in it other than the stuff about small ships intercepting large ones. Solving that shortcoming is a Nice To Have. The basic system is a Must Have. It doesn’t even have to use warp frequencies for ship interceptions. Just implement disruption by moons and stations and such.
The current warp mechanics have a proximity system already. It hasn’t been correctly tuned yet. It’s supposed to limit the warp velocity around stations / planets / moons, so that you don’t constantly overshoot.
Okay, so you’re headed in that direction. I’ll wait to see what you come up with.
I’ll add that I spent only a few minutes with the latest version because of the movement system. The prior version I tried had manual warp and that was clear enough. I didn’t care for it, but I could get around. In the new stuff I started on a moon surface base and wanted to get to a space station. So I stood the ship on its tail and went straight up as fast as possible. I wanted to leave the moon and get going. Well, the automated warp kept trying to kick in, but it kept failing. I didn’t know why, and it was frustrating and distracting to keep going through that process. So I closed the software. Movement is fundamental to gameplay, and if movement is that annoying, it’s not the game for me.
All this is to just underscore @cybercritic’s observation about seamlessness. Movement should be simple. Leave the complexity to the meatier gameplay systems.
As an example, if atmospheres are to supposed to be a deterrent to ships flying in too fast, do stuff to the ship to penalize the pilots of overspeed ships - but don’t destroy those ships. Players need to learn, and destruction is a crappy way to learn about a movement system. Overheat the ship. Take systems offline. Increase the ship’s sensor signature. Do what you like, but don’t compromise the ship’s ability to move. Let ships come in like a meteor - but with every system offline for the next 5 minutes. Or whatever.
I would extend this right up to taking out any reduction in control while in atmospheric flight. If anything, make atmospheric flight easier than space flight, but with the heating problem. You can go fast, but you’re going to overheat your systems and stand out like a meteor on other people’s screens. There should absolutely not be any reduction in control.
Separately, if the forum software allows it, when we type an @ sign and start typing a name, don’t leave out the names of people who have posted to the current thread. Put all names in there. I don’t want to split between navigating a menu of choices (if the person has made a post) and typing out a name (if they haven’t). That’s just awful UI design.
Weird… The speed threshold for auto warp is so high I have never activated it after my first test. I can only see one reason to abort warp: when the warp speed (set during warmup or remembered from last warp) is below the conventional speed (that should be fixed BTW, just bump initial warp speed to 1.5 times current speed or something). Very frustrating indeed.
I like your signature penalty idea. I would be ok with just a shield and/or energy drain too.
I had the same problem with the auto-warp engagement, it kept engaging then dropping out and I was in space at the time, there seemed to be no way out of the cycle. My guess is I pressed space and disabled auto-assist, which broke the warp velocity vector while the velocity trigger kept firing.
What problem is auto-warp trying to solve? The only thing I can think of is catching new players who don’t realise the warp exists who just hold W. This doesn’t teach the player how to engage warp for themselves and doesn’t even give them an indication of why this thing has suddenly happened.
It’s (sometimes) worth trying things out and in this case I think it should be reverted.
For a ‘casual’ player the hard warp is too difficult, we had a streamer that played during the previous Alpha weekend and they couldn’t figure out how to engage warp, it was a really awkward situation. There are way too many barriers for a casual player with a million different key-bindings and menu items atm.
And TBH holding W to set velocity seems like a much better idea than the current setup with 10 different keys being used, it would free 1-0 keys for something that’s usually mapped to those keys, like weapons and equipment slots.
I don’t think pressing a key is too hard to learn for casuals. The reason why some had problems is because there are no hints or explainations inside the game currently except the keybindings screen which they didn’t bother to read apparantly.
Also some people didn’t know how to fire missiles recently and asked how to do it. Is this a reason to make missiles automatic, I don’t think so.
The game should make it easy to do these things, the worst thing you can do is blame the player for ‘not getting it’. It’s a slippery slope, because everyone becomes an idiot at some point with that mentality.
You can already do that right now, just remap the IncrTargetSpeed / DecrTargetSpeed events to W / S and remove the keys 1-0.
If the consensus is that it’s better than the current default mapping, I can do the change. However after testing it, I find it a lot less intuitive than the current scheme, especially in close areas where you’ll bump into walls all the time. But if you test it and find it to be an improvement, please let me know.
What is the increment? I would be ok to use that if it is exponential like with the number keys. Or map it to the mouse wheel instead, I rarely need the precision it gives.
The 0-9 being used for setting speeds is a little excessive, but I like the strafing controls the way they are. Could we instead keep those, and have a “Select next preset speed” button? E.g. press ] to cycle through 100… 250… 500… Etc. And [ to cycle back. Mouse wheel could still control it more analogue-y, and it frees up the numeric keys for weapon-related stuff (which is perhaps more familiar to people).
Absolutely; however which keys would you use to increase / decrease to the next speed level ? If you use 1-2 ( where it’s closest to the hand on the keyboard ), that leaves 3-0 for weapons or other functionalities… but these keys being very close and starting at 3 ( while 1-2 is for target speed ) might confuse new players.
Allright, the target speed cycling has been implemented and will be available in the upcoming patch ( in a few hours ). Event names are “NextTargetSpeed” and “PrevTargetSpeed”. I’ll bind them to F5/F6 for now.
I personally will try target speed cycling on the mouse wheel. I feel like the way the wheel works now doesn’t really work that well and would be better as two buttons (the manual set speeed up/down).
How do other 6DOF games handle this? How does Decent do it?
This doesn’t teach the player how to engage warp for themselves and doesn’t even give them an indication of why this thing has suddenly happened.