Planned Death Camera

Recently the test of a new death camera was announced that would give you a brief view of your killer. I while that sounds interesting on paper think about any sort of stealth here. Stalkers would completely lose the ability to engage and snipers would also be at a big disadvantage because of it. It would take away the game's current kill/death experience and taint it with a Fortnite style. That can't be what the community of this game wants.

Source?

NM, found it https://www.planetside2.com/news/dev-letter-new-player-experience-august-2019

revealing peoples clever hiding spots because you died?

sounds like a terrible idea,
so you can rest assured, DBG is working on it.

May only be me - but - I quite like the sound of it !

Doubt we'll get a consensus on good / bad until it's tried. I liked the idea of the new spawn controls - until it was implemented of course

So we can replay just how good clientside really is.

You'll have a recollection of what happened
Your killer will have HIS recollection of what happened
and the replay will have a THIRD different recollection of what happened!

each one different yet somehow tied together like a doctor strange alternative timeline.

Got a phaseshift airdrop on a good spot? Nope, can't have high skilled play, because think of the new member's ruined experience dropping dead repeatedly, instead of learning to play.

They might as well delete stalkers and ranged weapons and simplify maps to have no hiding spots. Erase jetpacks too, can't have accurate carbines and blackhands.

Must cater to the lowest common denominator.

I wonder what the next brilliant design decisions will be, next to nerfing NC maxes to the ground followed by a forced max event.

Despite this being something I've seen requested a fair few times, I will always be against it. I understand that it's to help reduce the amount of hackusations, which is fair, but it removes a good portion of flanking tactics or the element of surprise. I think if this were to be implemented, a compromise should be made where after a certain battle rank, players no longer have access to the death cam, because by a certain point, they should have learnt basic game mechanics. Or alternatively, have it so that the death cam activates if the player has a death streak of 3-5 or so, to help them get get kills.

About as good an idea as third person view.

Terrible idea and addition, nothing else to be said. Legit do you think the majority of players were asking for this, or are the devs now appeasing 1-2 players in the game.

“To ease frustration of unfair deaths”. This will of course have the exact opposite impact as players will feel more frustrated than ever by some dumb clientside they can now see first hand. As mentioned above, wonder how the playback will be shown...from whose viewpoint or some third party camera view.

This will be detrimental to skilled and stealthy gameplay. Snipers, suppressors (already hardly used now likely no point), cloakers just go ahead and type RIP in chat now.

Other expected problems can include kill cam exposing locations of routers/sunderers not only well positioned players.

Would seriously like to know thought process on this cause the explanation for the addition is not sufficient.

So they are planning to make the new player experience better. I think they could go a lot further than they are suggesting. The kill camera is just a gimmick.

The things that make it hard/frustrating for new players is the highly exploitable game mechanics and poor base design.

Some of the things I would change:

1. Reduce the headshot bonus, especially for CQC weapons. Headshots should offer some advantage, however they shouldn't be an "I win" situation for vets where even if you catch them off guard, they can just turn around and ping you in the head. This would have the added advantage of reducing the effectiveness of aimbot hackers.

2. Similar to 1, make "I win shields" not deployable if you are taking fire. They should be a tactical tool that should be deployed by a HA before making an assault run, not something they can just ping on with split second timing. Even a 0.1-0.2 second cool down after taking damage would prevent them being abused as an "I win" tool.

3. Get rid of the really cheesy zero damage road kill, especially against maxes. Having a vet Flash or Harasser driver run down your Max and get off scott free must be frustrating for new players (especially so since Max Charge was removed, which was the only real defensive/evasion option the Max had). Light vehicles should take damage from infantry roadkill, and significant damage from Max roadkill. Even tanks should take minor damage from Max roadkill.

4. Nerf cheesy infantry movement mechanics like ADAD or crouch spam. If the mechanic itself cannot be removed via the use of intertia, then at least make it have a huge detrimental impact on COF and bloom, in much the same way as running or jumping does. Being killed by a vet doing the funky chicken is no fun at all.

5. Improve base design. Allow routes up onto the interior base walls so that defenders don't have to rely on jump jets. Many bases are glorified kill boxes (i.e. looked upon from an elevated position, with few routes out - they essentially become HESH farms). I'd also improve the placement of spawn points, especially teleport rooms. What's the point in having a teleport point in a spawn room that teleports you to a building 5ft away. Teleport rooms in all instances should be a significant distance from the main spawn room (e.g. Lithcorp central).

6. Make it so that infils cannot capture points without decloaking. It makes no sense that a cloaked stalker can troll a base indefinitely ghost capping the point, whereas for everything else they can do (laying mines, hacking terminals etc) they have to decloaked for. The cloak/decloak sound would give newbies a chance to flush the stalker out.

Has anyone already tried it?

I would say that the system could have merit, if implemented correctly. The current deathscreen method seems a pretty good way to do it:

• If spotted the camera would follow the enemy perfectly at any height or direction.
• If not spotted the camera will only pan into the general direction of your opponent and could be off by a certain amount of degree's, and will refocus the camera every time the killer manages to get out of the camera's perspective angle altogether.
  • In CQC this means the camera would simply show the killer running around your corpse and still "follow" him.
  • It only shows direction, not height. This means that a safe perch somewhere isn't revealed directly unless the target was spotted. Allowing the dead player to pan the camera up/down to look for an enemy could be allowed as at least the player would be looking himself rather than the system just saying "there ya go here he was".

A conservative interpretation of the description sounds like they're going to display a limited environment of the moment of your death in the manner: "this is where you opponnent was when he killed you and, if we pan, this is where you were when he killed you."

Don't mind this at all. Will be the same for everyone and an antidote to campers. If anything it will force players to be more clever, be mobile, evolve the meta, etc.

I think the Dev's are tired or the multitude of false hax submissions from new players. Plus if playing Infiltrator you should relocate after firing, your tracers already revealed your position.

In addition, I for one look forward to showing off my l33t across the cell kills with my Railjack. My only concern is if it from my exact perspective it will show them how to use the scopes. It took me an hour of shooting up into Scarred Mesa from across the cell to learn how to use that gun.

i play LA with minor cloak and sit ontop of the door frames at cap points and then nuke the enemy when they turn away, they never have a clue where i killed them from,
people come in with flashlights but noone ever shines it over the door because infils can't get up there, so i can hide there for ages,
picking off unsuspecting targets.

if they add this death cam, it'll reward my tactics by showing the enemy exactly where i'm hiding...

this isn't good for the game,

also i don't think its killcam, i believe it will just pan the camera from your killer to your corpse.

Instead of working on that DBG maybe fix the "cannot deploy or un-deploy when a sunderer is under repair" bug.

Ya...how 'bout dat?

Also, /report Liewec123 for hacking.

For everyone too lazy to open the link in the first comment...Here are Wrel's exact words taken from the news feed:
"Soon you’ll be seeing a revision of the Death Screen come to the public test server, and eventually to Live. This is a more modern style death camera that offers a brief look at your killer before panning back to your corpse. We’ve heard compelling reasoning both for and against features like this in the past, and ultimately we feel that there are pronounced benefits for all players when it comes to learning base layouts and easing the frustration of quick or unexpected deaths. On top of that, the new camera feels more in line with the pacing we see from modern day PlanetSide 2."
So against what some people in here have been saying it is not a replay of the scene. The only problem that does remain is that definitely does show us where the killer is hiding ultimately making the hiding spot useless after the first kill. We will see on the test server how exactly it looks but I am still strongly against such a feature since it ruins the raw open world strategy aspect of PlanetSide2 which is the big selling point. Judging purely by tracers and where you and your comrades are dying or not where the enemy might be located is part of the game. Fighting more skilled players without special tools like this is also part of the game and the challenge to work around.

I don't like snipers for sure but I don't think a kill cam is a good idea. Not only does it provide a dead character with meta-information that they shouldn't have it's also not going to help with hackusations in the SLIGHTEST, i'd say it's going to increase them when it now "proves" that they didn't have line of sight/fire because god knows the game can't sync two players who are both alive right now, it's not going to use some new magic to make it so killcams sync with the person who shot you!
Claims of being shot through walls will only increase with this.

If the team wanted to stop being cowards and be more transparent to new players they'd show your killer's ping on the killscreen instead of this nonsense but then a whole lot of people would have to make some staggering realisations about this game's netcode.

If anything it will make the game more dynamic as you won't be able to rely on the same things over and over, and if you do you have to be better than the other person to win. Remember, it goes both ways so it isn't like it is a thing will only affect you as your opponent has to do the same.

More importantly, new players won't have to go through the experience of not knowing what the heck is going on and learn what and from where they got killed.

Unless you're a complete idiot it's not hard to figure out where snipers are, though you'll usually take a death or two to pinpoint them exactly.
And part of the point of infiltrators is that they go invisible until just before they want to fire usually, deathcam will do nothing to help you find them then.
Curious what information we'll get from the deathcam otherwise.