Anyone who regularly plays games can tell EC is going to be pretty fast paced just by the short demos of the pre-alpha stuff they've shown in the twitch streams. For someone who has been gaming for so long, you seem to lack the ability to analyze basic gameplay You also completely ignored what either me or Killslim said, we said that enemies automatically showing up is bad, shouldn't be done, is detrimental to the game. Having them show up if they have been spotted (as in a player looks at them and hits a key which 'spots' them) for a short duration or if they are moving within the range of a motion sensor (ala recon tools in PS2) is there to represent situational awareness of infantry who have advanced tracking tools and sensors built into their helmet/gear. Yeah I will admit gameplay in certain game series has been boiled down to simple twitch reaction skill. But honestly if you look beyond CoD there are plenty of shooters that cater every damn variety of player. You have Red Orchestra and Rising Storm for the WW2 mil-sim fans, you have ArmA and Operation Flashpoint for the modern day mil-sim fans. You have Counter Strike and CoD for the twitch reflex, 'high skill', rapid-shot players. You have Battlefield and PS2 for large scale, combined arms that aren't as fast as CoD or CS but not as slow as ArmA or RO. Oh btw the auto-aim and auto-fire thing has already been invented, it's called an aimbot, it's just a little more time before it is added to CoD as an official bonus DLC feature.
I can cope fine without a minimap depending on the game. I play lots of different games, ranging from flight/milsims to pleb tier action games. I don't exactly think "Christ, if only I had a minimap" in the games that don't have them, primarily because that particular game works well without it. I just think that EC will need one based upon the scale we've been told of by the devs, and the rough pace we've seen so far in pre alpha. Even then we have THQ's Space Marine as a rough benchmark.
Going a bit off topic I'd have to say the actual combat aspect of THQ SM's PVP is about as frustrating of a PVP experience as I can recall, and not at all a benchmark to be striving towards. Whether it's the poor netcode, or poor severs, getting killed by a guy with a chainsword from 10 meters way facing 90 degrees away from you gets old fast. I've experienced battles with hundreds of players going head to head in Warhammer Online, and rarely experienced that type of garbage, so I'm pretty sure THQ's pvp issues can't be blamed on connection issues. There's also the fact that the laspistol outguns a Lasrifle head to head, Vengeance launcher spam, the melta is modeled as an antipersonnel shotgun, assault jet packs are your only melee option, TTK is non existent, your armor acts like a shield(as in power shield, with regenerative properties)., ... there's a laundry list of shortfalls. THQ's PVP... I'd say there's more "lessons learned" on what NOT to do in a full blown MMO style shooter. On an up note, while I rarely play PVE games, I've played the campaign about 5 times. The overall experience is truly epic, and it's too bad we will most likely never get to play Captain Titus again and see what happens next. Exterminatus mode is also loads of fun.... The Chaos Unleashed DLC, if you can find some team mates, good times as well and very challenging.
This is all good in my ears. Do you have links to the previous topics about mini maps? Didnt find them when i searched for it. '++ agree Smal area scan beacon device thingy? (scanning for enemies), equipment to be invinsible/ hide from this scanning? How can/ is it possible to implement some kind of fog of war in EC/ an mmo? I would love shadows/ fog/ mist really effect what you see but it seems hard to achieve that for the developers due to players beeing able to change screen brightness and other stuff negating the original mechanics fog/ mist would have on what you see. Games of inspiration? Visual forced/ restricted by different gear goggles would be cool, like without nightvision you wouldnt see more than 10m, or goggles for spotting stealth units. I cant come up with more ideas but im sure theres more to it. Battlefield 4, the minimap is buzzing, kinda like lag or effected by a disturbance, imagine a vox-com disturbance/ background noise but visualized. cool effect. ~0.33 View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whJ6cdARY90[/quote]
I would be satisfied with a copy of Planetside 2's minimap: spotted enemies would be visible on the minimap, and certain classes / vehicles would have access to different kinds of scout radars and censors, allowing them to show the enemies within a certain radius as dots pinging once every couple of seconds (they also show up like this when they fire an unsilenced weapon), although I feel like these were perhaps a bit too accessible in PS2.
Given the small TTK, it needed accessible detection equipment. You can probably make it harder to get in EC because the TTK is long enough to not warrant needing constant detection to avoid ambush farming.
I would support minimap spotting, so long as we avoid the infamous Battlefield HUD pips that let you see enemies through cover and abuse splash weapons to get easy kills. It'd also be nice to have the ability to take a moment to check a larger-scale map with the spotted enemies on so you can quickly get a feel for the general layout of your team and the enemy team, like in BF again. As the others aptly stated, there won't be the time to explain to your team that there might or might not be a group of guys just behind that orange wall with the half-broken aquila via voice chat when battles will involve possibly hundreds of players. It's much cleaner and quicker to just show some red dots on your minimap and save fifty guys all trying to talk at once.
this +1 and I'll add that we should remember that not all the players in your squad/strikeforce may either speak the same language as you or even be using the same voip ingame or otherwise as you are, relying on direct player feedback rather then an inbuilt passive feedback system like a minimap would be a flawed choice
I'll agree to disagree with some of you guys on this. I don't think anyone's right or wrong here, it's just a matter of how challenging of a gaming experience you want EC to be. As far as the comment that Tarl quoted above, I have to say you guys are totally full of shit. You've either never played large scale Realm versus Realm on comms with other players, or you're talking out your ass. Comms are essential in competitive gaming, especially for TEAM BASED game play. A minimap showing enemy locations severely cuts down on the advantages of team play and teams using voice comms. Seeing as how Behavior has said time after time they want to ENCOURAGE team based play, I don't see how red dots on the minimap feed into that train of thought. I've gone on at great lengths describing how situational awareness has increased 10.. 20.. 30 fold over the last few years with better surround sound, better gaming headsets, larger and larger tv screens and PC monitors, built in voice comms. You can see the enemy sooner, you can hear them shooting, yelling. You can hear them running or walking above you, behind you, below you. You can see their tracers, smoke from their weapons.. and you can instantly relay this information to your team mates via comms. This seems to have fallen on deaf ears. And of course you wont be able to communicate the position of enemy players to EVERY... SINGLE... PLAYER... on your faction. You shouldn't ever expect to be able to... NOR should the system artificially carry out this task via a minimap, because it's an impossible task for humans, or Space Marines in the 41st Millennium. This is what recreates the fog of war in a gaming experience. And tarl, that's your opinion my friend. A "flawed" system is one that totally removes the unknown from your gaming experience, in my opinion. It removes the fog of war(not literal fog, look up the definition whoever was talking about actual fog).
Explain to me how RvR comms work, because I'm imagining that it only contains the leaders and not the rank and file. Anyone who has been in a channel with 48 people (1 platoon in PS2) can tell you that comms get washed out as every player tries to relay information to squad and platoon leaders. So I'd contend that you are speaking out your arse if you think that large numbers of players can communicate effectively when you need very precise information.We also never said comms weren't essential either, I don't think anyone of us said that, the squads that have comms are way more efficient than those who don't. also answer me these How does having enemies show up on the minimap reduce teamplay? What happens to players who don't have or don't want to use mics to comm with teammates? What happens when a squad is made of players who don't speak the same language? How many players constitutes a 'team' and how does this 'team' communicate effectively within a larger force? It won't be for every single player, it'd be for those in the immediate area. Spotting in PS2 only relays the info to friendlies within 150m which is roughly big enough to get info on one side of a major facility to the other. Saying that SM's wouldn't have advanced systems for alerting their battle brothers for things like enemy positions and hardpoints is ridiculous. He's ex-military, I wouldn't go telling him to look up fog of war since he's probably experienced it As I keep repeating, none of us want enemies to automatically appear on the minimap, we want them to appear in situations that you'd normally be able to track them; within a motion sensor zone, 'spotted' by a friendly, firing a loud gun 'within earshot' etc. You are ignoring the finer points of our system to try and make it look more flawed than yours.
