Tactic Angel
EVO - 514
25
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Posted - 2013.09.28 15:19:00 -
[1] - Quote
I was originally going to place my ideas in the section regarding new player experience which was really talking more about tutorials, but it became rather quickly apparent that I had too many words and was going off topic so I will separate my thoughts here.
I would hate to sound like I am advocating the path that "the best way to get new players into the game is to make Dust more like other FPS's," but it just seems more and more evident that there are two major issues with Dust as it stands now: there isn't much to do and the equipment curve is too great. The learning curve isn't exactly insurmountable. That wasn't the complaint I generally heard. I will give kudos to our friends at CCP for doing a remarkable job making this game ever-more playable. The game now looks quite good and responds well with increasingly reduced latency issues. These are, obviously, key to a good experience.
Equipment Curve
There are few games that have such remarkable rewards for longevity. If you play any other game (MAG, CoD, Battlefield, Halo, etc), playing the game for 6 months generally doesn't mean your weapons do twice as much damage and you are twice as hard to kill. Chances are, unless you know a lot about fittings, that this isn't the case in Dust either, but we have seen how builds can let you accomplish, generally, one or the other. It is easy to accomplish at least an appreciable middle-ground where you do significantly more damage than a Day 1 player can do and take significantly more punishment. I am not going to say that if you were to pick up MAG that you would be as successful with a Hollis (starter assault rifle) as you would with an Gotha (arguably one of the best assault rifles that required a higher level). As much players may have complained, the disparity between these two weapons was not exactly night and day, and in certain situations, you would actually still expect the starter gun to be better.
There is almost none of this in Dust. Nearly every new option is an upgrade. Every tier is more powerful than the last with little to no drawback. In fact, the drawback, if there is any, seems to be entirely based around ISK/aurum price.
This is, understandably, damaging to the long-term health of the game. It is also a problem that is growing daily. The difference between a day one player and a max-point character only grows. When you load up a first person shooter, you expect a certain level of parity with other players. If I haven't played as long, I expect to have fewer options and maybe not access to every last thing in the game, but I still expect to have a chance. You could say that the damage between a standard assault rifle and a duvolle is not out of line with traditional FPS's. Though there is a pervasive belief that the base damage on some of these advanced/prototype weapons is significantly higher than public stats, there aren't any other games that I know of that I can throw on complex damage modifiers and make that difference even higher. Similarly, we have all seen builds with nearly instantly recharging shields. These people are incredibly difficult to kill without a concerted effort, because they end up with a rather silly EHP.
The issue is that these things stack. More exp means a better suit. Better suits have more slots. They offer more power. More power makes for better mods. Its not a linear scale. Its exponential.
This is the sort of stuff that people coming out of the academy setting are facing. I was playing another character with some of my friends, trying to get into the game. I found that I had much more fun in these early, low equipment games where the difference was almost entirely the player, not the suit. Of course, none of my friends made it much past that. Though they were pretty good players, trying to take on people with significant dropsuit builds is just prohibitively difficult. When you go from a 3 KDR to struggling for a .5 KDR, that's very rough. I completely understand why people don't want to stick around for that.
Things to do
This ends of clashing pretty unfavorably with the lack of diverse content. Presently, there are only three game modes, which boil down to team death match, bases, and single base. I think you are always going to run into the issue that people are simply not drawn to this, particularly when you consider that Dust does none of these game modes substantially better than any other game or even better than average in some cases. If I were new, why would I play Team Deathmatch here? I could go on any other game and generally have a better experience. I'd almost have to be a glutton for punishment, wouldn't I? Skirmish, by far Dust's best game mode, is pretty sparsely populated, and this also means that you may end up in frequent 1-on-1's with someone with a suit 10x as expensive as yours, and twice as good. Do I need to address domination? I am sure I am not the only one, but I don't even enjoy domination when I am winning. Its just so one sided. I think this has a lot more to do with level design and the whole capture mechanic, but still, I don't see a lot of people playing DUST because they really like domination. Hopefully future already-announced game modes will help make this more of a draw, but I can understand some frustration with what we have now.
I completely love and understand the art of fittings in EVE, and you could argue that this FPS should have a similar small, highly dedicated base and should not try to appeal to a significant audience. That is fine. I disagree, but these are just opinions on what Dust should be. If you consider the role of Damage modifiers, shield modifiers, etc and how this relates to other "AAA" titles in the genre, there is little mystery why it is hard to get people into Dust. I think it can be fixed but there would have to be some give and take to high level equipment. It can't just be better in every way. |