Hi everyone, sorry for the delay again. We've been working on a cover and vaulting system (not sticky cover though) that's in the game and working quite well! It's pretty exciting how much interaction you feel like you have with the environment now and it's something I don't think I've seen in an MMO context before. Jump Packs in Transports - At the moment, we're looking at taking the logical approach and saying that you can get in a (for example) Rhino with a jump pack, but it might take up more seats or have other consequences. Building on the battlefield, continued - Player-built walls are a particularly tricky issue, because in addition to the problems of making walls look good on any type of geometry, if people can build walls anywhere then it's not too hard for them to do something that really screws up the gameplay (or griefs their own faction). It's not impossible to address, we just might not pick this battle for now. Mines - These are tricky as well, especially in an open-world environment with thousands of players since it's no small loss for any one character to just throw mines out anywhere and thus the world could be blanketed with them! Of course, there are options here as well and we're investigating them. For example, an upgradeable option to put a minefield around a stronghold could make for some pretty cool gameplay. We'll see! Recoil - I like the feel of recoil quite a lot, we're planning on putting it in the game. Of course, Space Marines shouldn't have much, if any, recoil on their bolters, since the power armour should take care of most of that, but the bigger weapons have the possibility and many Ork weapons should jerk like crazy (while at the same time packing a huge punch). Dual-Wielding - There will be dual wielding for certain types of melee and ranged weapons, if not at launch then slightly after. Status Effects - There will definitely be status effects in the game, including poison, although we don't want to treat them like debuffs in typical MMORPGs. Every status effect will be of a relatively short duration but very intense and it should be very rare that you have more than one at a time. Think of a fire DoT in normal MMOs and compare it to being on fire in a game like Left 4 Dead. We're going for something more like the latter. Armour Penetration - Yep, this is pretty important. We're experimenting with different ways to do it (destroying armour faster than normal? doing damage through armour?), but it is a major component of the combat system. Finally, thanks for all the kind words! It's great having such passionate fans - I periodically give a recap of the stuff people are excited about to my combat team and they really appreciate it.
in response to you're 'wall's' issue, did you think to make different level of walls could be purchased with resources? like spending X amount of resources would build another wall around the current fortifications. low level spenders would only get a small wall made of wood (that could then be blown up!!!) higher spenders would get a much taller wall made of stone with weapon emplacements.... you could even add multiple wall's, that way if the first wall fall's you could then fall back the the next one. same idea could go with the mines, more spent means more mines are placed.
Well as far as mines go, there's quite a few things that can be done to tame them: Restrict mines to a single class. Obviously not everyone wants to play the same class, so unless a group decides to really get organized and mine it up this will drastically reduce the number of mines on the field. Only allow one mine to be carried at a time. Even when they can be resupplied, this creates a perceived scarcity that causes people to be sparing in their mine placement. Make mines difficult/time consuming to resupply. This combined with the above can make mine-laying a task that truly rewards the patient, while discouraging people from just scattering mines thoughtlessly. Restrict the number of mines that one player can have active simultaneously. This will probably have to be done to conserve server resources anyway, but this number should be a good deal higher than the number that they can carry, to encourage a patient and thoughtful approach to minelaying.
Thanks for the answers Brent!! different status effects for each weapon will help a lot to make them feel unique, do you guys know wicht attacks will trigger the effect? maybe the charged attacks?
OK, being able to fortify a position? I'd like to say that I like the idea but I don't like it. I think it is effin awesome. Awesome like edible body paint, that kind of damn awesome.
It sounds very much like you have pulled a lot of ideas from Planetside 2 which I am very fond of. The description of the world and it being "persistent" sounds very similar. Is Planetside 2 a good basis for imagining how this game will feel?
Imagine Space Marine with improved combat, 4 different factions and in a similar scale to PS2 (the devs aim to even bigger fights). And for dessert you can have instanced dungeons against tyranids and a last stand mod.
I think they said that the dungeons would be open world right? or were they just instances that could be guarded? Thanks for the update on the progress Brent, were all excited!
All the dungeons are instanced, they are gonna try to make tyranids swarm the open world battlefield but they don't know if the servers will handle thousands of players and thousands of nids at the same time.
