A thought on the future of Empires

Recycle the other barracks.

 

Indeed.
Think of all the shit you have to do to start a game. After you join a team you must vote for a com, select as spawnpoint, choose a class, joining a squad, then pick a skill. It's a lot for a FPS and the process is not exactly smooth. You need to know keyboard shortcuts when you should just be gliding through a menu system.

I hope that once the aircraft are released, the mod will become feature frozen for a while so the devs can make the whole thing a lot slicker.

Heck, thats what I like about Empires! Take away the heavy learning curve and unforgiving gamplay and you dumb it down. Empires will never be a mainstream hit (though I'd love to be proved wrong) but it can still be big witrh the hardcore. Think of EVE Online. It's a brutal game. But it's popular. Not WoW popular, but with strong and healthy playerbase.

I find the players are no more unfriendly than any team based online game. In my experiance the average CS player is a homophobic insecure abusive dickwad. (present company excluded, of course :D ) didn't stop CS become a global phenomenon.

 

The phrase I think solokiller uses a lot is 'lose the complexity, keep the depth'.

Things don't have to be complex to be deep and fulfilling, in fact they should not be, as relying on complexity to produce depth is lazy and uninspired, a smart designer produces depth without complexity.

You can make the game competative if you like, but you don't have to make it difficult to learn, give huge bonuses to people who can master weapons, or generally discourage new players. CSS is popular because it's a simple concept, any idiot can pick it up and play it, it is played competatively but it is not complicated to learn, you pick a gun and then kill people, simple, it's simpler than most other games but has more depth than most deathmatch games, because of the variety of guns you have, it has a sense of achievement when you get bigger guns, and other elements thrown in like the bombs and hostages, but it's still quite simple to play.

 

I agree with you there. The area of overcomplexity I find in Empires is the overabundance of vehicle technology. I'd like to see the game stripped down to a max of four different types of engines, amours, missiles etc. Make their functions more district and obvious. For example: Engines. You need one standard, one high speed, one high heat dissipation and perhaps biodiesel with it unique 'move while overheated' function. Maybe.

 

The number of components isn't really an issue, CSS has a lot of guns and grenades, and you don't get to use every component most of the time anyway due to research, the problem is the interface to use the components is clunky, so people don't immediately understand what each component does, what the difference between cannons, missiles, and MGs is, and that all tanks need armor, engines, and weapons.

Players need to instinctively know what vehicle components do, and get immediate feedback on how effective their attacks are on enemy vehicles, probably in the form of visible damage, either model deformation, or simply a health bar or something.

Simplify the assembly interface, remove unneccesary information, have it so that you select a slot and it brings up things which can go in that slot, rather than having you select categories of components and drag them into slots, that removes the need to know what goes in what slot, and hides things if you're not using them, you need to keep as little stuff on screen as possible. Strongly highlight the selected slots and the component box when in use, so you know what you're doing, have armor plating be a subsection in its own right, and have the main image of your vehicle use simple icons and images to display what you have equipped.

Remove writing when it isn't needed, and have a box at the top telling you what your current selection does.

Basically the game shouldn't require a manual, if you need to read a manual to play the game you're doing something wrong in the design area.

 

If you only have one spawn point available, it should be selected automatically.

I'd like an 'auto-armor' button that fill your amour plating up to your max weight automatically, favoring the front and side slots.

Maybe this should go in suggestions....but you got me rolling here.

 

no no, dont reduce variety of equipment. just make it easier accesible, i.e. the load of menus u have to go through every gamestart can be pretty confusing for newbs and annoying for experienced.

signed

 

Some preset vehicles wouldn't go amiss either, both for new players and for commanders to use with a locked VF.

 

You can make presets for vehicles and name them if you take the time and get on an empty server. You can also set scripts so that the key binds will change depending upon which class you are...

There's a lot of features that are in empires that no one uses yet because it's not officially down somewhere, nor is there a place where it explains it.

unless the wiki was updated with how to s on those scripts recently.

 

I can bez Drill sargent?