PlanetSide Universe - View Single Post - Meaningful Customization & Balance via Tradeoff Decisions
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Click here to go to the next VIP post in this thread.   Old 2011-08-02, 04:20 PM   [Ignore Me] #13
Malorn
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PlanetSide 2
Game Designer
 
Re: Meaningful Customization & Balance via Tradeoff Decisions


Originally Posted by EASyEightyEight View Post
You seem to be conveniently forgetting the time investment to specialization.
I'm not "conveniently forgetting" anything. (I'm not sure why you seem to be so hostile to me, but I digress...). Time investment = more possibilities and options. I'm pretty clear on that. The problem without limits is that everyone converges to the same thing and specialization becomes meaningless. That's why I put "meaningful" in the thread title.

Really, you're freaking out over something we shouldn't have to worry about a long, long time from now.
Smoking won't kill you for a long time, it's OK to start now!

Punting a problem doesn't fix it. I want Planetside 2 to be the best possible game and not de-volve into some pile of crap 5-6 years from now because the fundamentals of the cert system were flawed. If anything we should be more congiscent of long-term effects of systems than a normal game because we're seeing it now in PS1. We have an opportunity to provide feedback to the PS2 devs on the designs and avert disaster now and I'm doing that. You may not see the value in that but I'm not forcing you to read my posts.


Originally Posted by Soothsayer View Post
Tradeoffs are going to be what makes this system work.

There is a lot of value in your post Malorn, but I disagree with the notion of a total limit on active talents, in the context of your post.

While I do believe that some limits on the number of active talents would be ok, I think that there should be some categories where they may be active but unused. To clarify, vehicle talents apply when you are in a vehicle, infantry talents apply when you aren't in a vehicle.
My OP was more to move the discussion forward from "zomg 20% bonus!" to more of a how to make 20% work in a balanced way to keep specialization meaningful and not be a detriment to new players.

There are certainly ways to keep the core principle in ways other than I stated. For example, having a category of "vehicle talents" as you describe could work very well, providing there's a large number of vehicle talents and sufficient differentiation between them. Its just different levels of commitment and whether they want to allow someone to go balls-deep into a specific thing and that's all they do, or whether they want to enforce a spread.

As long as the player must make choices and those choices are limited and meaningful I think that's a good system.

My assumption is that there will be general infantry skills, weapon skills, armor skills, vehicle general skills, specific vehicle skills and whatever there is for aircraft. Not all of these skills will come into play at any given time because they don't apply. Why limit across the board? Let infantry talents apply when the soldier is on foot and the others as the circumstances dictate.
The scope of the limitations is not something I feel strongly about, only the fact that those limitations exist and we must make meaningful choices.

I chose the description that I did because by putting them all together its a larger commitment opportunity to the player. if you have 5 cohices for example, and you put all 5 into a pilot and nothing else, then you are fully committed to being a pilot. If someone else wanted to be a more jack-of-all-trades, they would sacrifice some of that pilot commitment, making the full-on pilot more specialized. If you split it up among different categories that cover different styles of play then the specialization is less meaningful IMO. I don't fundamentally disagree with what you say, its just I like the idea of someone being able to do a deep specilization and have it mean something.

I also see your point on being able to have more use of the full cert tree that player shave unlocked and not bits and pieces of it. That's fair too, so I'm sure there's some middle ground. If you have more ideas please share. I claim to be no authority here, just someone who is a zealot for good design principles. The design details can vary so long as the goals remain.


If you were to go as far as to limit active talents, I would feel better about having active talents available for a soldier's possible roles (Air, infantry, vehicle, universal).
As above, I don't disagree. It is one way to do it and I'm sure it can be done in a way that works out well.
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