As everyone is brainstorming ideas for Planetside 3 I'm watching old videos of Planetside 1. I never got to play 1, yet I'm noticing that the TTK for people is much, much longer than it is in Planetside 2. It almost appears as if the TTK is nearly double what it was in Planetside 2 where infantry in Planetside 1 can definitely take more of a hit. Is a longer TTK better than a shorter one? Which is more inviting to new players? Which has fewer drawbacks? Or did I just watch a weird video and that isnt' how it actually was?
I think it really depends on the game, personally. Longer TTKs generally require a different skillset and don't reward lucky hits nearly as much, nor do they favour stealth attacks or the element of surprise. Shorter TTKs often reward rapid, accurate shots, but can sometimes cater more to reactions than accuracy. Very short TTKs can almost nullify the advantage of numbers, which would matter a lot in PS2's setting. However they also favour cheating and don't play nice with server latency. I don't think there is a perfect answer to a potential PS3, just that TTKs should be much more consistent. We currently have anything from a full second of firing to instant kills, which just doesn't mesh well. As much as I'd like Red Orchestra 2's potential instant kills with literally any weapon to the chest, it has a lot of features built with that in mind. PS2 and to the same extent presumably PS3 likely won't have the necessary design choices to enable that kind of gameplay. And of course to say nothing of latency given the massive player scale. Ultimately I think longer, more consistent TTKs would probably be better for PS3. No bolt-actions, no shotguns, no OHK bombs, and a lower headshot multiplier would fit the game best.
I wouldn't say no to shotguns, or even explosives for that matter (which are easily spotted and have implants that counter most of them). A longer TTK is however the best approach at the game. Unless there are servers for every continent (which would need a lot of players) and/or a proper ping management system, where players with a higher ping are prevented from playing, there isn't much point in having such a low TTK. The low TTK results in many "suspicious" deaths, and hackcusations. As satisfying as it is to drop groups of people all at once, rewarding so much power to headshots in a game where it usually takes less than 8 bullets to kill someone anyways is deterring towards new players, who aren't familiar with these mechanics. Take the MAX for example, it has double the health and resistance than standard infantry. Yet, if a MAX steps out of cover without support, it'll die almost as fast as infantry, without even the need for explosives. That should give an idea of the health issues in Planetside 2. For Planetside 3 to succeed, the damage will have to be streamlined to make the game more comfortable for every player. Sure headshots can have a multiplier, and should be rewarded (by restoring health, shield, ammo), but they shouldn't cut down TTK by half. The short TTK can be abused, and overall isn't the best move for new player experience. Take a look at other games, most have higher TTKs. Obviously, nothing too crazy, but it should take closer to 1 second to kill someone, instead of the near 0.3s we have now. To compensate, larger magazines, shorter reloads (or even, shorter reloads on headshot kills), can be used to allow players to engage more than one target despite the low TTK.
1) Longer TTK for bodyshots. 2) Shorter TTK for headshots. 3) Increase initial CoF of auto (and to a lesser degree, semi-auto) weapons to make headshots far more difficult to achieve. Nowadays LMG can land headshots at sniping distance, it is a joke. This to narrow the gap between new players and veterans. Newbie, average and casual players will go for the safe and longer path (bodyshots). Skilled veterans will go for headshots taking some extra risk (misses). Fights will be more enjoyable, balanced and easier to understand/manage for new people. With today's TTK whoever opens fire first win 99.9% of the times, regardless of head or body, unless there are 50 BR of difference.
Short and long TTK's alone don't make a complete picture, what you need to add is the ease with which a target can be hit. The game Renegade had long TTK's and tiny targets to hit. Even if someone was about to clip through you they didn't fill the screen. Most combat with early game weapons was a long battle of health-attrition where the highest skill usually won. Anyway it goes as follows: long TTK+hard targets: Skill is rewarded, ambushes give a small DPS advantage but can't instantly win the battle meaning that a lower skill player ambushing a higher skill player can still be killed as the battle drags on. Skilled players have a chance at killing multiple targets over time but require much higher skill to pull it off. long TTK+easy targets: Skill isn't as much rewarded. This is a DPS battle where more guns at the same target will win the day. We actually have pretty much this in the vehicle combat if we ignored rear armor and such. Short TTK+hard targets: Skill is rewarded the most. Skilled players have the most chance of getting hits on enemies before they ever get hit allowing them to function as one-man armies. Short TTK+easy targets: Spray&pray heaven. It's easy to hit someone and kill them with it. Ambushes can kill entire squads quickly before they can react and skilled players are almost as likely to get hit and killed before they can do anything as the lesser skilled players. These are the extremes ofcourse. You can find middle-grounds to suit your needs. I think current PS2 is around medium-long TTK+medium targets, which is probably one of the better one's for the game's format and we should keep it around there. The 250% headshot bonus we have overall for weapons should be heavily reduced though as it rewards a specific weapon type more than others, allowing players to ignore most skills required for the other weapons and just focus on purely "can I hit the head right now?".
Problem is we need to have a balance between rewarding skill and not doing it. Rewarding skill is obviously the important thing for experienced players, but there will always be new players and ones who only an hour a week or so.
Long TTK values numbers. There is this mobile game called "Guns of Boom". It has auto aim, auto fire, and everyone has a ton of health, and it takes forever to kill each other, like over 10 seconds, if I remember correctly. That means that every time you get into a situation where there are more than one person coming to fight you, you are dead. We don't want the same effect in Planetside 2. Yes guys, it sucks to get insta-killed by a Heavy who chained 4 headshots on you, or a sniper you didn't even see coming, or a grenade, or a shotgun, and lets be real; I die to those things WAY more often than you people, and I have 0 chance of fighting back too. But the alternative would be giving numbers the only real advantage. If headshots matter so much less, you are going to kill one guy and die to the next 99% of the time. You wont be able to 2v1 anymore. Fights would be big, for sure! But they would also be big stalemates, and whoever has the most numbers would win. If vehicles still do a ton of damage, they are going to destroy infantry, and if they suffer the same long TTK, they would be boring. While the TTK in this game isn't as short as in other games where you only need like, 4 body shots to take someone down, it is short as compared to as long as it could be, if that makes any sense. I'd sacrifice not dying instantly for actually having some fun and making a difference with skillful players, though I can't do it. Would you?
Either can be successful when done well. COD and Halo basically embody these two paradigms and they are two of the most commercially successful FPS series on the market. Both models have advantages and disadvantages and which is "better" is down to personal preference. With a fast TTK a new player is guaranteed to kill people at least some of the time but also to die more, where in a long TTK game they may die less often but also get fewer kills.
You forget about 1 thing here: is there a way to make yourself a harder target? PS2 doesnt have a lot in the way of directly making you a harder target outside of abusing the ADAD spam method to spoof the hitboxes in the game. But imagine if players could move 4x faster? Or had smaller player models and hitboxes? Or if you got access to dodgerolls, hookshots to quickly traverse terrain, creating a decoy model, if you could do wallruns or other parcour moves? An FPS like planetside isnt an arena style combat where aim is just about the most important skill to learn, it should also have access to skills to make yourself a harder target. So what if you are attacked by 3 dudes in a long TTK game if you can reduce their DPS through your skills dodging their aim and bullets?
If it is a long TTK with hard targets, that turns into ultimate cancer. Say they had the movement they do now but a little faster, or you were firing from mid to long range. You sit around putting bullets into them, just for them to run behind cover and get healed up. You are perfectly right.
So you restrict healing and add weapons that are designed to flush enemies out of cover? If you have long TTK's but your self-regemerative shield/health is only a small part then you can change it into something more tactical. Sure you could run behind cover but if there is no time to heal up properly or you cant heal everything you havent gained anything from it. Cover could also be a temporary thing. Say if it could be destroyed if you fired at it, or you have hard cover and soft cover, where soft cover does not stop bullets but only reduces the damage output and obscures the player from vision (this is easier than adding and tracking hundreds if not thousands of cover pieces with health). Then suddenly it becomes a lot harder to find a spot where you can safely heal up and the places with hard cover become important places to fight over.
Noted. Still don't like it in such a big open world game. Say the TTKs jump to 1 second or more of sustained fire. Do you know how that would pair with the current state of the game? I play Infiltrator, and if it took 1 second of sustained fire to kill me, I'd die considerably less. You can dodge enough bullets for them to use up their whole mag trying to kill you if it takes twice the amount of bullets to kill someone. I also don't think it is a good idea to restrict healing in a game where there is a class dedicated to healing people. How would it affect those dedicated players? Say we make it take longer to heal someone. That would get very annoying to the veteran players. Longer TTKs in an open world war game with giant battles just doesn't seem very fun to me. While it does matter about how hard or easy the targets are to kill, I don't want this game to turn into a game of sheer numbers due to how long it takes to kill someone.
Longer TTK is what differentiates PS2 from a lot of other shooters with a few notable exceptions. In fact when people are complaining about something in the game it's usually something that kills you absent of that traditionally long TTK. For example, bolts and pump shotguns. What makes the longer TTK better is that PS2 is generally less campy and has more skill expression (emphasis on the less campy part, if you've ever played a short TTK shooter like CoD you know all about camping). Planetside has always been enjoyable when you have agency in the fight, it has always been miserable when you do not. Getting bolted before you can react is miserable. Getting hesh spammed is miserable. Getting instantly deleted by claymores is miserable. I have no idea why anyone, beyond intent for sabotaging the game, would advocate for a lower TTK than what we have now.
Technically, a sniper is a long TTK if you only hit body shots, but it has the potential to be an instant kill. A pump shotgun is instant if you hit all the shots, so nothing I can say there...
A long ttk widens the gap between noobs and vets, which is honestly pretty huge since we don't have any match maker. A long ttk favors numbers more than anything, and this game has a huge problem with zergs as is. I think the head shot ttk is perfect, but the body shot ttk is a little too long. Shortening the body shot ttk would be a huge help to most players, especially new players, which this game has always had a hard time retaining. It's interesting looking at the score screen at the end of a base fight. It's often 3 kills, 4 kills, a few 5 kills, and then 2 or 3 guys with 20 or 30 kills. What we have is great for those 2 guys at the top, but the other 50 players arent going to buy a subscription any time soon.
Pretty much hits the nail on the head for me. You can spend all your time getting into a good position, have the jump on the opponent yet they still win. If you cater too much to the few (those people who just seem to snap instant headshots no matter what) then the majority will simply leave. Much as they have been doing for a while now.
Why do you say a long ttk favours numbers, you didnt give any reasoning? There is safety in numbers, at any ttk people will congregate where they feel safest. One could easily assume that all players are so sick of dying instantly(short ttk) that they congregate where they have the most chance of either not dying, or being revived, i.e. a zerg. And why do you have such a problem with numbers anyway, you did see the advertisements for the game before you started playing right? I mean you did understand thats what you were getting yourself into? You do realise what youre doing is jumping into a swimming pool, and then complaining that you got wet dont you? Did you ever consider that zergs dont form because of some deep conspiracy, but that the people in them simply enjoy that sort of gameplay, hence coming to a game advertised as such with phrases like 'bigger is better' and 'size does matter'? And so whatever you do to 'combat zerging' is voided effort because the players themselves actualy want to be there? As ive said before, a zerg ceases to be a zerg if the enemy responds, being zerged is a failure of command, nothing more. P.S. Global pop imbalance is a completely different subject to zerging, as is double teaming.
Imagine two basilisk ants going at it. They have a crazy long ttk and it's just a dps race. Now imagine 2v3, the 2 wouldn't stand a chance no matter how well they focused fire. Now imagine those same ants with OHK guns. Maneuvering and aim would be much more important. It would then be possible for a really good player to get a good position, be a better shot, and take out a few bad guys on his own. You can do this with any units. Imagine if the ttk were halved in A2A. One ESF could fly in to an enemy squad and maybe kill 2 or 3 instead of 1. Numbers will always be an advantage, but a low ttk will always more highly reward good plays. Yeah, double teaming is a totally separate argument. I don't remember what I said about that but I agree. Zerging is kind of related. A lower ttk would let a few good ayers take out many more bads. And co. Bined with reduced spawn options, good plays could let zergs be defeated.
My good play for a zerg is losing the first fight, going back to the next base, putting up a ton of mines, and getting a good force of tanks together. We have a few Wraith Flashes taking medics and heavies around the fight that is about to ensue so they can take the point and hold if for a little bit, while the vehicle mop up the people who are turning around to go and get the point back. Have I tried this? No. Do I want to? Yes.
