Kipper
2012-09-01, 06:26 AM
We know why PS2 went for classes instead on an inventory grid like PS1 - to stop people being able to do everything in a single 'life' and force people to make a choice.
The problem is that a lot of people don't like it, they want flexibility, but I think they would also argue that jack-of-all-trades super builds would be a step backwards.
Here's my thought on a way you could allow deeper customisation - being able to build your own class without it becoming too overpowered.
Standard Units (Not MAX)
So rather than picking a class, keep the module slots that exist already, but in two overall archetypes - DIRECT and SUPPORT.
DIRECT:
Primary Weapon
Pistol
Melee
Grenade
Backpack Module
SUPPORT:
Suit Module
Deployable Module
Droppable Equipment
Tool Slot
DIRECT
"Direct" modules are all to do with You vs. the enemy. You can mix and match your guns to your preferred tastes, and improve those guns through certs - but they are all available to all (governed by weight limit). This means you can spec an assault class that uses a shotgun if you so wished, rather than it being the traditional 'engineer' weapon.
DIRECT - WEAPON SLOTS
This should be mostly self explanatory. The primary weapons are whatever you fancy - submachine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, heavy 'support' weapons. You don't have to carry one at all if you want to save on weight, that's fine. But the important thing is, you can never carry more than one.
The heaviest weapons would mean you'd have to take lighter equipment in the other slots, or remove some altogether.
The pistol slot is always for an offensive small-arms weapon. You don't have to fill the slot, but you can't use it for anything else. Same with the melee slot.
THROWABLE/GRENADE SLOT
You can start to become an engineer/medic type by equipping AoE throwables, but this costs you the ability to carry offensive grenades. The AoE stuff should be fairly low in effectiveness and/or one shot - you can't spam these and you have to buy stocks of them with resources. Certs would allow you to carry more than one or two in a stack, but only ever one type can be carried at once. This would give you a little bit of flexibility to do limited support without having to go into a full blown class.
Frag (normal, sticky, bouncy etc)
Flashbang (normal, sticky, bouncy etc)
Plain Smoke / Coloured smoke for camo or target markers.
Flare (for illumination purposes).
AoE throwable heals (maybe)
AoE repairs (maybe)
BACKPACK
This is mounted on your back, so its heavy equipment that is mutually exclusive, so this means can't be a flying cloaker for instance. You could leave the slot empty to save weight for other slots if you wanted. Obviously you have different types of cloak that vary in effectiveness/duration, and different types of jump that vary in duration at the cost of weight.
Cloaking devices
Jump jets
Automatic "Parachute" jets to allow safe bailing from height.
SHIELD/ARMOUR SLOT
Currently, you have different levels of armour with infil/LA/HA and everyone has a shield. I propose allowing you to choose your armour, simply with more protection = more weight. So if you want to be a lightly armoured engineer, you can carry a better turret, if you want to be a combat medic, you sacrifice some healing ability for survivability.
Shields become optional as a way to increase protection a little bit, but with a recharge. You should be able, if you wanted to - become either an unshielded heavy armour unit, or a well sheilded light armour unit, or anything inbetween depending how you like to play.
SUPPORT
The support modules would have to be governed by an overall type, so that you couldn't end up being able to do everything. So here, you could select 'engineer', 'medic' or 'none'.
DEPLOYABLE MODULE:
Deployable equipment takes some time to set up and is the key to specialising in support situations. The deployable effect is the strongest effect you can carry - so its the best type of repair/medical thing you can carry bar none. The cloak and shield bubbles would be effective to provide cover for a squad, but not large enough to cover a vehicle - except maybe a quad bike.
You should have to collect your deployable before you can place it again, and if its destroyed, you're done with it for that 'life'. Also, if its destroyed, I'd consider making it so that you have to spend resources to buy it again.
Mobile repair stations (engineer)
Mobile medical stations (medic)
AI/AA/AV turrets (engineer)
Portable shield bubbles (engineer)
Portable cloak bubbles (generic?)
TOOL & DROPPABLE SLOT:
The tool slot governs the hand held tools such as the repair or healing guns, if you're an engineer - you can take the repair gun - and if you're a medic, you can take the healing gun or the revive tool. You can't mix and match. Some tools are generic and can be taken by any sub-class.
The droppable slot allows you to place down a med pack or an ammo pack which resupplies/heals those near it. Its not infinite though, and once its consumed, it's used up. It can also be destroyed by gunfire/explosions.
You could also add explosives and mines into this slot (although mines might be more of a 'deployable').
Other generic tools available to all might include such as flare guns to fire into the sky at night to light up an area, or laser designators to provide a lock on for aircraft weapons or orbital strikes.
MAX Unit Customisation:
They are much simpler; you can't step into and out of a MAX suit, because you can't carry any equipment whilst piloting one. You can't throw anything, and you can't melee (or if you can, its a clumsy 'bash').
MAX units have the following slots:
Left Arm Attachment
Right Arm Attachment
Suit Module
Arm attachments are the usual array of AI/AV/AA weapons which you can mix and match. You could consider adding repair and medical arms to the MAX unit, to allow for a really heavy support class. Whilst feasibly, you could carry a repair AND medical arm - this would leave you completely defenseless in the build, which is a suitable tradeoff.
Suit module is the ability - MAX can't deploy anything, or drive anything - but there's no reason why it couldn't engage an extra shield on top of its heavy armour, or have a very limited flight or cloak ability. The suit ability could even be used to upgrade in other ways - a toggle-able 'zoom', night vision, or a shield/cloak bubble that it could project around a small area to cover a squad.
Essentially, what MAX has gained in survivability, it loses in flexibility, being able to do much less than a standard soldier, but being able to do it in a really 'heavy' way. The arms would be on par with deployable turrets/stations in terms of how fast they can kill/heal/repair.
It also means that MAX is no longer a purely offensive weapon - it could be used as a really cool support role, but it would really require some protection and backup from its squad having sacrificed its weapons to do that.
FINAL NOTE:
To prevent abuse, it would be important to have limited 'in-field' re-speccing. That is - you can change your kits at equipment terminals only, which should not be present on galaxies or sunderers. Only in facilities.
This also means that capturing a nearby 'tower' with a terminal is an important objective before assaulting a main base, because otherwise you can't change your loadout without going back to a friendly facility.
I'd hope that the above would allow people to really build a customised loadout that suited what they wanted to do and how they wanted to play without being unbalanced or exploitable.
It would introduce new concepts like:
Support MAXes which existed to repair vehicles or heal infantry
Snipers could choose between cloak and flight (or maybe sacrifice both for a heavy AV sniper rifle)
Assaulters to choose close range (shotgun) or long range (sniper) weapons
Any unit have cloak / flight including medics and engineers so they can keep up with squads that can do the same.
No unit to be able to mix OP abilities such as cloak AND flight.
Extra powerful variants of abilities are heavier, so the tradeoff in being able to cloak better or fly longer is to downgrade or remove something else entirely.
The problem is that a lot of people don't like it, they want flexibility, but I think they would also argue that jack-of-all-trades super builds would be a step backwards.
Here's my thought on a way you could allow deeper customisation - being able to build your own class without it becoming too overpowered.
Standard Units (Not MAX)
So rather than picking a class, keep the module slots that exist already, but in two overall archetypes - DIRECT and SUPPORT.
DIRECT:
Primary Weapon
Pistol
Melee
Grenade
Backpack Module
SUPPORT:
Suit Module
Deployable Module
Droppable Equipment
Tool Slot
DIRECT
"Direct" modules are all to do with You vs. the enemy. You can mix and match your guns to your preferred tastes, and improve those guns through certs - but they are all available to all (governed by weight limit). This means you can spec an assault class that uses a shotgun if you so wished, rather than it being the traditional 'engineer' weapon.
DIRECT - WEAPON SLOTS
This should be mostly self explanatory. The primary weapons are whatever you fancy - submachine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, heavy 'support' weapons. You don't have to carry one at all if you want to save on weight, that's fine. But the important thing is, you can never carry more than one.
The heaviest weapons would mean you'd have to take lighter equipment in the other slots, or remove some altogether.
The pistol slot is always for an offensive small-arms weapon. You don't have to fill the slot, but you can't use it for anything else. Same with the melee slot.
THROWABLE/GRENADE SLOT
You can start to become an engineer/medic type by equipping AoE throwables, but this costs you the ability to carry offensive grenades. The AoE stuff should be fairly low in effectiveness and/or one shot - you can't spam these and you have to buy stocks of them with resources. Certs would allow you to carry more than one or two in a stack, but only ever one type can be carried at once. This would give you a little bit of flexibility to do limited support without having to go into a full blown class.
Frag (normal, sticky, bouncy etc)
Flashbang (normal, sticky, bouncy etc)
Plain Smoke / Coloured smoke for camo or target markers.
Flare (for illumination purposes).
AoE throwable heals (maybe)
AoE repairs (maybe)
BACKPACK
This is mounted on your back, so its heavy equipment that is mutually exclusive, so this means can't be a flying cloaker for instance. You could leave the slot empty to save weight for other slots if you wanted. Obviously you have different types of cloak that vary in effectiveness/duration, and different types of jump that vary in duration at the cost of weight.
Cloaking devices
Jump jets
Automatic "Parachute" jets to allow safe bailing from height.
SHIELD/ARMOUR SLOT
Currently, you have different levels of armour with infil/LA/HA and everyone has a shield. I propose allowing you to choose your armour, simply with more protection = more weight. So if you want to be a lightly armoured engineer, you can carry a better turret, if you want to be a combat medic, you sacrifice some healing ability for survivability.
Shields become optional as a way to increase protection a little bit, but with a recharge. You should be able, if you wanted to - become either an unshielded heavy armour unit, or a well sheilded light armour unit, or anything inbetween depending how you like to play.
SUPPORT
The support modules would have to be governed by an overall type, so that you couldn't end up being able to do everything. So here, you could select 'engineer', 'medic' or 'none'.
DEPLOYABLE MODULE:
Deployable equipment takes some time to set up and is the key to specialising in support situations. The deployable effect is the strongest effect you can carry - so its the best type of repair/medical thing you can carry bar none. The cloak and shield bubbles would be effective to provide cover for a squad, but not large enough to cover a vehicle - except maybe a quad bike.
You should have to collect your deployable before you can place it again, and if its destroyed, you're done with it for that 'life'. Also, if its destroyed, I'd consider making it so that you have to spend resources to buy it again.
Mobile repair stations (engineer)
Mobile medical stations (medic)
AI/AA/AV turrets (engineer)
Portable shield bubbles (engineer)
Portable cloak bubbles (generic?)
TOOL & DROPPABLE SLOT:
The tool slot governs the hand held tools such as the repair or healing guns, if you're an engineer - you can take the repair gun - and if you're a medic, you can take the healing gun or the revive tool. You can't mix and match. Some tools are generic and can be taken by any sub-class.
The droppable slot allows you to place down a med pack or an ammo pack which resupplies/heals those near it. Its not infinite though, and once its consumed, it's used up. It can also be destroyed by gunfire/explosions.
You could also add explosives and mines into this slot (although mines might be more of a 'deployable').
Other generic tools available to all might include such as flare guns to fire into the sky at night to light up an area, or laser designators to provide a lock on for aircraft weapons or orbital strikes.
MAX Unit Customisation:
They are much simpler; you can't step into and out of a MAX suit, because you can't carry any equipment whilst piloting one. You can't throw anything, and you can't melee (or if you can, its a clumsy 'bash').
MAX units have the following slots:
Left Arm Attachment
Right Arm Attachment
Suit Module
Arm attachments are the usual array of AI/AV/AA weapons which you can mix and match. You could consider adding repair and medical arms to the MAX unit, to allow for a really heavy support class. Whilst feasibly, you could carry a repair AND medical arm - this would leave you completely defenseless in the build, which is a suitable tradeoff.
Suit module is the ability - MAX can't deploy anything, or drive anything - but there's no reason why it couldn't engage an extra shield on top of its heavy armour, or have a very limited flight or cloak ability. The suit ability could even be used to upgrade in other ways - a toggle-able 'zoom', night vision, or a shield/cloak bubble that it could project around a small area to cover a squad.
Essentially, what MAX has gained in survivability, it loses in flexibility, being able to do much less than a standard soldier, but being able to do it in a really 'heavy' way. The arms would be on par with deployable turrets/stations in terms of how fast they can kill/heal/repair.
It also means that MAX is no longer a purely offensive weapon - it could be used as a really cool support role, but it would really require some protection and backup from its squad having sacrificed its weapons to do that.
FINAL NOTE:
To prevent abuse, it would be important to have limited 'in-field' re-speccing. That is - you can change your kits at equipment terminals only, which should not be present on galaxies or sunderers. Only in facilities.
This also means that capturing a nearby 'tower' with a terminal is an important objective before assaulting a main base, because otherwise you can't change your loadout without going back to a friendly facility.
I'd hope that the above would allow people to really build a customised loadout that suited what they wanted to do and how they wanted to play without being unbalanced or exploitable.
It would introduce new concepts like:
Support MAXes which existed to repair vehicles or heal infantry
Snipers could choose between cloak and flight (or maybe sacrifice both for a heavy AV sniper rifle)
Assaulters to choose close range (shotgun) or long range (sniper) weapons
Any unit have cloak / flight including medics and engineers so they can keep up with squads that can do the same.
No unit to be able to mix OP abilities such as cloak AND flight.
Extra powerful variants of abilities are heavier, so the tradeoff in being able to cloak better or fly longer is to downgrade or remove something else entirely.