Sole Fenychs
Sinq Laison Gendarmes
Gallente Federation
201
   |
Posted - 2014.02.16 13:51:00 -
[1] - Quote
So, there's all this talk about everyone wanting militia variants of everything.
Which makes sense. It's also comparably easy to pull off for CCP.
Here's an idea that would require some work. Also, considering the attitude on this forums, I fully expect people to shoot me down for the hell of it.
Anyway:
No militia gear should be racial. Strip all the racial stuff out and allow players to learn the characteristics of each equipment type first.
Militia gear should be the stuff that isn't specialized in any way. The stuff that you can buy as a civilian if you get the right permit. The racial suits should be military-level equipment, advanced are for elite troops and prototype are special ops.
This allows new players to play without needing to consider racial characteristics (Which they won't know, anyway) and instead focus on learning the game and how the mechanics work.
Here is how I would go at it:
You have three suits - Light, medium, heavy.
Each suit will be capable of giving the player the experience of some of the specialized suit types.
This means that the medium suit will get two equipment slots, because it also doubles as logi.
There would be an issue with the Commando, because a militia heavy with one heavy and one light slot would be kinda problematic. The best idea is probably to have the light suit with one equipment slot (instead of two, as will be the case in 1.8) and two light weapon slots, because the commando is the squishy of the heavy classes. The heavy would then be able to give the Sentinel experience with a heavy weapon.
All suits would have 50/50 tanking profiles - Shield and armor equal, but crappy. They'd have a rather high amount of slots, to allow new players to play around with different styles. Note that it might be useful to have stacking penalties shown dynamically in this scenario to not cause confusion.
This streamlines the approach to the game - Take one of three suits, then fill it with the kinds of modules that seem like they might be nice to have. Instead of selecting one of twelve (actually more, considering the specializations) suits through eight sections of the store, new players will only have three to consider.
What this idea lacks, however, is something that teaches the new player what each role is called. For that, you just need a proper naming convention - "Militia medium assault & logistics suit", "Militia light scout & commando suit" and "Militia heavy sentinel suit". The description of each suit would then also explain what those terms mean, because that's where players will first search for an explanation.
But it wouldn't be dropsuits alone. There would be a non-racial version of certain weapon classes.
For example, there would be a weapon with the simple name of "rifle". Note that assault rifle should be renamed to plasma rifle at this point.
The rifle has no base variant. Instead, it exists in four variants - Tactical, Assault, Burst and Breach.
This gives new players access to all racial rifle behaviours without confusing them with terms like "Scrambler rifle" that might prevent them from taking a look. Each of the variants would have a less severe version of the racial weapon's drawbacks, to ease them into the different playstyles - The Tactical would overheat, for example, but without damaging the player and the charge shots would be very quick charges with far less damage output than they would have on an Amarr variant. The Burst would have even less spooling time than the rail rifle, which would obviously cost it damage output and range.
This also teaches the player what those four modifiers mean when they crop up again in the advanced tier.
Again, the description would elaborate - In this case, on which racial weapons those variants are mimicking.
There would be some stuff that simply can't be stripped of the racial identity - Like the racial equipment types, grenades and speciality weapons - But those elements would be easier to grasp if the more basic aspects of the game were streamlined.
For vehicles, there would be no real need to rework the weapons due to their rather distinct characteristics and names. (Models that fit the visual style of the rest of the militia stuff would be nice, though)
However, the base chassis would also follow the streamlining process. When vehicles variants come back, there would also be an approach that allows each vehicle type to be learned with just one basic chassis. The militia dropship would have a front turret slot, but handling that is only moderately more agile than the current militia dropships, meaning that it would make a sub-par ADS with less crazy handling.
And, yes, I know that this idea will never be implemented, because it's too much of a resource investment. I still wanted to throw it out, though. Maybe a part of the idea will give inspiration for helping the NPE. |