Tennis, The Duel

[Cognisant]

Building upon an earlier point that gameplay is essentially learning I've realised the shields in the Halo series serve to change the FPS dynamic so that it's more forgiving, if someone starts shooting at you the combined general inaccuracy of their weapon and the power of your shield gives you the opportunity to fight back, whereas in more realistic games you wouldn't even get a chance to turn around. The latter is more frustrating because there's little opportunity to learn, the fight is over before it even begins and who spots who first will always involve a relatively large amount of luck.

In this way tennis seems like a great combat game, winning isn't about what you do, it's about the mistakes you don't make, each players loss or victory depends almost entirely upon their own actions and therefore in almost every game lost there is something for the loser to learn from the experience.

So I envision a combat game in which a similar tennis like dynamic takes place, one in which blocking and dodging are where the skill is involved and actually attacking the other player is simplified. The player characters have weapons that are slow, but immensely powerful, and require very little aiming, such as massive swords, rocket launchers, or delayed affect AOE spells, and the characters can move very quickly, acrobatically, perhaps even teleport or whatever. The result is almost a kind of asymmetrical dance, perhaps with bonus points awarded for dodging with as minimal margin for error as possible which can be spent to empower one's own attacks, and closely dodging empowered attacks gets more bonus points so the risk/reward opportunities go back and forth.

If there's different kinds of weapons, different ways of dodging, and the destruction of the game environment literally changes the tactical landscape, this style of combat can become deep and complicated, almost like a martial arts game but slower paced and in 3D, come to think of it I've always felt the critical flaw of such games is how briefly characters telegraph their moves and how large a TV is needed to even see it sometimes, so rather than being a tactical combination of attack and defence it usually comes down to button mashing with side orders of memorised special moves and blocking only spammed attacks.

 

[Hawkeye]

There are many games that do this, although some are better than others.

NeoTokyo is a good example. It's very unforgiving unlike TF2...

Racing games with player collisions turned off are kinda like Tennis in that your mistakes cost you the game. Unless the game has some glitches like DiRT 2.

 

[Cognisant]

Neotokyo, cool.

It's not meant to be unforgiving, remember the rockets from Quake III Arena, they were really slow, any dumb-ass could dodge a rocket fired at him no sweat, but the rockets were powerful (and the blast could knock people off certain maps) so imagine that same game, with the rockets 50% slower, and the map consisting of destructible platforms like in spleef, and you can sprint and jump quite far.

Do you? *glues and straps Hawkeye to a chair* Do You See?

Or a race in Burnout where the winner is whoever gets the most points from near misses first, without crashing that is.

 

[Cognisant]

Fuck yeah.

 

[Duxwing]

Fuck yeah.

Better yet, the game could have two reload "types," one that retains the magazine, and one that drops it; the price for retaining the magazine, however, would be a longer reload because retaining a magazine involves dumping it in a pouch on one's hip, which takes longer than just letting it fall to the floor after removing it from the weapon. To distinguish the two types during play, the player would press "Reload" for the 'quick' reload, and press and hold "Reload" for the 'slow' one. Retaining the magazine could mean that the ammunition inside is returned to the general ammunition 'pool,' or the game could feature a more involved magazine management system that would pull 'fresh' magazines first and then draw at random (or, for extra fun, in inverse chronological order with a hint of random due to stacking and shaking, respectively) from the 'used' ones.

The player could even have an inventory screen wherein they could consolidate ammunition into a smaller number of magazines and select which magazines would be put in the vest, and which in the pouch. Upon fully re-loading a magazine, the player's inventory system would automatically move it to the vest, while partially loaded magazines could be kept either in the vest or in the pouch, and empty ones would be moved to the backpack to prevent accidental mix-ups. Magazine management is complicated and difficult indeed!

-Duxwing

 

[Cognisant]

Especially with different ammo types.

But I love the mag toss idea because it's simple yet creates a profound tactical decision, is it better to conserve ammunition or to have a full fresh clip ready to go in case the next opponent is well armoured?

 

[The Gopher]

Is this similar to tribes ascend at all?

"RELOADING
If you reload with a primary weapon and your clip is not empty, and remaining rounds in the clip will be discarded along with the spent clip, and replaced with a fresh one. Be careful not to waste too many rounds in this way."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

 

[Duxwing]

Especially with different ammo types.

But I love the mag toss idea because it's simple yet creates a profound tactical decision, is it better to conserve ammunition or to have a full fresh clip ready to go in case the next opponent is well armoured?

But I think that the decision could go deeper: Is it better to reload quickly, burning ammo, or to take one's time and conserve ammunition? The toss-retain decision would still be possible-- or even necessary, in thick combat-- but the ability to trade time and security for resources would also cause players to consider their distance from combat and the possibility of retreating to 'truly' reload.

Also important in any FPS are teamwork gadgets: deployable health kits, deployable ammo boxes (which would refill all magazines over time) revive and repair tools, and deployable sensors. Such additions make supporting one's team easy and even exciting: what if reviving a downed player involved playing a minigame, but granted the rank gain of several kills? In Battlefield 3, reviving a player takes two button presses (equip defibrillator, use defibrillator) and earns the same number of experience points as a kill, and healing a player from 0 to 100 HP grants even more experience points than a kill. Much is to be said for teamwork.

-Duxwing