Sorry to go off topic, but I still have an old copy of Fireteam somewhere, does anyone still play it? I''ll have to fire it up and get online and see.....

On topic : I don''t see what''s wrong with making a game that forces teamplay. Look at Ghost Recon et al., where the AI has to pretend to be your missing squad mates :-) if you are not playing multiplayer. If people make overtly single player path games, why not make overtly multiplayer path games?

quote:Original post by doomhunk
Sorry to go off topic, but I still have an old copy of Fireteam somewhere, does anyone still play it? I''ll have to fire it up and get online and see.....

Sadly, I think it died a long time ago. I never played it much because there was a decent amount of time where I couldn''t even get to the lobby (during the beta) and I never made it back once it was fixed. Even FireTalk (the IM based on the voice technology used in FireTeam) is gone.

quote:
On topic : I don''t see what''s wrong with making a game that forces teamplay. Look at Ghost Recon et al., where the AI has to pretend to be your missing squad mates :-) if you are not playing multiplayer. If people make overtly single player path games, why not make overtly multiplayer path games?

Well, multiplayer and focused on teamwork are a bit different. There are many multiplayer games that you can basically go off and do your own thing and it''ll work just as well as being a team player. Focusing on teamwork probably means that a team of average players working together will be as good as or better than a team of highly skilled players who aren''t working together. Basically, you''ll probably lose anyone who doesn''t work well in a team. How many people that is, I don''t know.

Point taken Way Walker, I was being a bit lazy in expressing myself so badly.... thanks for picking that up.

I have been thinking about one particular session of Ghost Recon that I have played where I took the opposite approach to how I normally play it. I set up an alpha squad of three, a beta squad of two, and then I took the last spot for myself as a lone sniper. I moved the two squads around to cover me and act as a buffer, and I merrily played through the first five or six missions just creeping about and sniping. I came unstuck after a while, but hey. The point is, when faced with a game that would appear to force team play, I did my best to go it alone :-) although I suppose I still relied on the two squads to save my skin from time to time.

Anyway, to return to the original poster's topic :-) he's making a game where multiple players play together in teams by being housed on the same capital ships? Sounds interesting. If at first I thought it might be a bit restricting, I have only to think of B-17 Flying Fortress to realise that this can be fun, especially when you get to move around from station to station on board your ship. In a sense, your capital ship is a similar construct to say, defending the castle in the beachhead map in multiplayer Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I think if your capital ship team is together by virtue of location, plus they are all different but complimentary character types like medic, gunner, leader etc but more relevant to capital ships... so maybe missile spotter/target painter who electronically paints targets for missiles to go for, sandcaster/defender who fires chaff and sand to protect against missiles and lasers, conventional gunners who fire lasers, pilots, etc etc......

[edited by - doomhunk on June 4, 2003 10:27:57 PM]

quote:Original post by spikespiegel
thats right, if anything were focusing on the logistics of combat but still were going to leave it open for users to jump in a small ship and fight (home base defense)

were still in the design phase for the capital ship system, but id like to hear what you guys think about some kind of way of promoting users to be able to use capital ships, one thing im worried about our plan now will be jerks jumping in critical ships and just joyriding around in them. im playing around with ideas of using some kind of ''performance threshold'' where you skill in the game plus feedback from your peers can promote you to different ranks, which will allow you to pilot different vehicles.

i dont know im still working out some ideas and seeing if its feasible... at the same time i dont want to make it too complicated to have fun playing.

I don''t know how viable this option would be, but you could do something like FireTeam. You don''t jump into existing games, you form teams before the game begins and that''s how they stay throughout the game. Teams are formed in the lobby, where you can see a person''s name and stats. If you don''t want someone on your team, you kick them off your team. Also, people would get a reputation just through the community. If you had a bad experience with someone, you would just take the appropriate steps to not be on a team with them.

Of course, this does lead to some other design problems. Games were kept short (10 min) so that teams wouldn''t be broken up. It also requires a lobby where people can talk. I''m not sure how that figures into your plan, but it might be something to think about.

quote:Original post by spikespiegel
note, the defence fighters are bindable to capital ships

Have you ever played subspace? players could ''bind'' to other players like in that, also ship captians can eject stupid players from their ship.

What we had planned was that depending on your current ratings you would have to wait longer to respawn with a more powerful captial ship.

I played a little subspace, but not much. Spent more time in infantry. Is "binding" similar to "attaching" or "summoning" in infantry? Or more like "binding" in EQ or life stones in AC?

Not sure how I feel about your rating increasing your respawn rate. New players are already at a disadvantage just because they haven''t played as much. Like in CTF in Infantry, new players not only have no skill, but also only have the bottom-of-the-barrel equipment, making it much harder to get started in CTF.