PlanetSide Universe - View Single Post - Niche vs customizable vehicle roles.
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This is the last VIP post in this thread.   Old 2012-06-29, 05:49 PM   [Ignore Me] #38
Malorn
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PlanetSide 2
Game Designer
 
Re: Niche vs customizable vehicle roles.


Originally Posted by maradine View Post
Is that true?

For aircraft, my understanding is that the underwing munitions are visually distinct in both shape and quantity. In the case of the Lightning, I don't think we've seen any of the other setups. For the other vehicles, I wouldn't expect main gun sidegrades to have much of a visual signature, any more than I'd be able to tell the difference between the M68 and the M256 on an Abrams at range.

Put another way, do we even know enough to have legitimate concerns about this yet?
Yes the underwing guns are distinct on the aircraft, but relatively speaking that is a small part of the aircraft. Watch the stream and look at aircraft flying around, they move way too fast and turn to distinguish whether it has missiles or rocket pods. It's particularly bad at night when shape is all you have to go on.

It needs to be more obvious and weapon pods on the underside of the aircraft is not distinct enough. There's no name tags to tell us what something is, all we have to go on right now are the small differences in armament that are not obvious.

And yes, I watched the streams and had no idea which types of aircraft were A2A and A2G unless we were looking at a kill cam. The Lightning skyguard turret was disabled for the demo so we can't say on that one, but the galaxy guns and secondary guns on tanks were very difficult to distinguish as well.

Originally Posted by Haro View Post
Well, the only aircraft that really makes a large shift in its primary role from air-to-air to air-to-ground are the empire specific fighters. As far as I know, and maybe I'm wrong, but the Liberator will likely stay in an bomber/gunship role, so there's not a lot to adjust there, and I feel like the Galaxy's weapons primarily are primarily defensive, and therefore (not counting the gunship, which is likely a ways off.) It's not to say that there shouldn't be distinguishing characteristics for them, there should be, I just don't think it's as high of a priority as it is for tanks.

That said... I think the fighters could use large missiles instead of rocket pods for air-to-air, to differentiate. Maybe experiment with different shaped wings or fins or... whatever the scythe or whatever it's called has.
Obviously there's different priority for vehicles. If it's a resource concern they could focus on the vehicles that need it the most first and defer the others to post-launch.

Lightning, ES Aircraft, and ES tanks are the high priority ones to have easily differentiable as they all have hard counters available as customization options. When facing these vehicles its important to be able to immediately identify what that vehicle is capable of doing, especially if it's a difference between an easy-kill and getting insta-gibbed. When both possibilities exist for the same vehicle that's bad unless we can clearly distinguish which is which.
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