Thoughts on Destruction in an MMOFPSWould

[Stardouser]

As of right now, this is more of a theoretical discussion because MMOs can't handle Destruction, perhaps in 10 years when we've had a large boost in the average CPU/GPU/bandwidth of a user.

But let's put technical issues aside and talk about it as if it WERE possible. Destruction in this sense means the ability to blast holes in walls, deform the terrain, up to and including completely destroy buildings.

And so, firstly, WOULD you want destruction, and secondly, to what extent? Since BF is the principal current game with any destruction, I will reference it: Battlefield destruction is pretty limited if you think about it, they won't let you destroy large buildings, or even small buildings if there's an interior capture point/flag.

And so, how would you want Destruction to coexist with your MMOFPS? As far as PS2 goes, it seems like a huge part of the bases we've seen are what in Battlefield would be indestructible for various reasons. Most of the structures in PS are for a specific purpose, they are not simply environmental buildings to take cover in, it, the only things that can really be allowed to be destroyed are indeed buildings that serve only as a fighting area and for cover. Such as you might find in cities; and while there are rumors I don't think we have any concrete information on cities.

And of course, switching gears a bit, let's assume the game was designed to have a lot of destructible stuff. This is an MMO, with a certain level of persistence...server resets aren't very often, and so, after a week, everything on every continent that can be destroyed, probably would be. How would we deal with that? Just let it be that way? A thought I had is that areas/bases/cities with destructible buildings in them could slowly self repair as long as no full scale combat is taking place, ie, if the front line moves somewhere else and it can go a few hours without large scale combat, buildings will start to reappear in pristine fashion. Of course, that's just an idea and probably one that will get shot down using the word "persistence".

Now, I'm not really starting this discussion because I WANT destruction, I would rather sacrifice graphics and destruction in order to be able to have a large scale MMOFPS , but because I know that 5 years from now or so, if MMOFPS takes off in popularity, Destruction is one of the new things every dev wants to do. It's probably one of the reasons EA/DICE don't do an MMOFPS, because they would have to scale back both graphics and destruction, and they can't do that because graphics is one of their biggest selling points over CoD.

[Raymac]

Dude, there would need to be some major respawning of anything that can be destroyed otherwise the entire game would just look like No Man's Land in WW1 faster than you could say "Look at that tree".

[WaryWizard]

Originally Posted by Raymac

Dude, there would need to be some major respawning of anything that can be destroyed otherwise the entire game would just look like No Man's Land in WW1 faster than you could say "Look at that tree".

Nanites could start repairing things after the are destroyed. Also, they could have engineers be able to boost the speed at which the nanites re construct things.

[EVILPIG]

Forgelight is capable and this is a planned feature for the future.

[Hmr85]

Originally Posted by EVILPIG

Forgelight is capable and this is a planned feature for the future.

Evilpig is right, I believe they would probably start off small with destructible bridges and such. It was in one of the PS2 Webcasts. I can't remember which one it was stated in though.

[EVILPIG]

Originally Posted by Hmr85

Evilpig is right, I believe they would probably start off small with destructible bridges and such. It was in one of the PS2 Webcasts. I can't remember which one it was stated in though.

They want (and it is a smart approach) PS2 as accessible as possible, so it is a technical issue. PS2 is backwards compatible to XP.

[Goku]

What Evilpig said. Right when PS2 was announced at Fan Faire it was either Smed or Higby that said forgelight was made in mind for destructible environments.

[basti]

Originally Posted by EVILPIG

Forgelight is capable and this is a planned feature for the future.

Where does that come from? Cant recall. :o

[Canaris]

Originally Posted by basti

Where does that come from? Cant recall. :o

nor can I

[Goku]

Original SOE formal announcement of PS2 at Fain Faire last year.

[TheRagingGerbil]

Originally Posted by basti

Where does that come from? Cant recall. :o

One of the first SOE podcast things with Higby and TRay. They were talking about destructible environmental features like bridges, walls, bunkers, etc. Said it was possible and something they want to do, just not a focus right now.

I thought specifically they were talking about the trailer with the blown up bridge and the base in the cliff face.

[Skitrel]

I'll address this in two parts as it's easier, as a long standing BF player, both competitive and casual, on both consoles and PC. I also maintain the most comprehensive guide to Battlefield 3 here:http://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield3...esource_guide/

So I feel like I'm pretty qualified to talk about this as I've seen destruction discussed a million times and participated myself.

Originally Posted by Stardouser

But let's put technical issues aside and talk about it as if it WERE possible. Destruction in this sense means the ability to blast holes in walls, deform the terrain, up to and including completely destroy buildings.

This is only correct of BF3, and is only the case because complete destruction was a shitty game mechanic. Bad Company 2 had complete and total destruction of absolutely anything, it didn't work, it was broken. Absolutely every single game turned into a fight on a completely flat map, with zero cover, nothing at all. The beginning of every single round would start with the defenders C4ing the shit out of every single building and levelling entire forests so that attackers had nowhere to hide, they would then be easily picked off. It was unbalanced, boring, and didn't work. BF3 DOES include completely destructable buildings, it just doesn't make absolutely everything destructible, and in fact is more realistic than complete destruction anyway.

Demolishing buildings is hard, buildings don't just collapse as a result of a few explosions and taking out walls, the physical supporting features have to go or they don't go down. In reality this isn't what happens, particularly with long row terraced style buildings (seine) and any large steel supported structure, the type of building is important, small buildings like put me ups and houses will go down, large buildings won't. This is reflected pretty well in game, there ARE completely destructable buildings, they're just not large strong ones.

For evidence, allow me to present some images, this is Karkand's destruction before and after:

And the following is the bombed out city of Sirte


And finally this is Berlin 1945


Both of these images suffered fighting and destruction MUCH worse than that of any Battlefield 3 match, and for much longer. As you can see, buildings are tough bastards and the overall destruction in BF3 reflects that pretty well, at least in an arcade like fashion. In reality it is MUCH harder to do that kind of damage to buildings in reality, they don't fall apart easily, unless they're made of crap, that's generally only small buildings though.

And so, firstly, WOULD you want destruction, and secondly, to what extent? Since BF is the principal current game with any destruction, I will reference it: Battlefield destruction is pretty limited if you think about it, they won't let you destroy large buildings, or even small buildings if there's an interior capture point/flag.

Wholeheartedly, YES. But I feel like it would have to be done very differently. A persistent game in a destruction world would need to repair itself otherwise it's going to end up an empty wasteland, and it couldn't be persistent permanently under such circumstances, it would have to reset.

To mitigate this, AI could be used. The AI act much like resource collectors in any RTS game, but instead they're the builders, repairers and supply/logistics of a persistent MMOfps world. A neutral faction in the world would go about repairing it, picture Halo ringworld type robots fixing everything up.

As part of building in this world, players would be able to call on their faction's AI to drop forward base buildings at locations, with a delay based on travel time to location, perks could speed this up with orbital drops. Dependant on the type of transport the supplying AI has to use, (air/land) it would make attacking enemy supply lines a viable tactic to disrupting their war effort. Set up anti air between the enemy homebase and their forward base and you effectively cut off their supplies, if it's necessary to have a constant supply line in order to maintain that base, keep turrets operational, keep it repaired, keep troops in ammunition, keep medics in medpacks and so on.

Players could also call on AI air trans as a form of extraction/insertion. Again though, players would have to be intelligent in their use of these things.

Combining Project Reality logistics with AI simplifies the concept so that it can be used in the mainstream (PR is a very serious game that few can handle), speed up gameplay and make it more accessible. Combining this with PS2 futurey-ness and Battlefield's groundwork for destruction is, in my opinion, the future of large scale gaming as computers, servers and connection speeds ramp up to a level that we can't imagine.

Put it this way, Battlefield 1942 came out 10 years ago this September, compare that with the BF3 of today. We haven't hit the point of diminishing returns when it comes to computing power yet and it's affect on what we get out of gaming yet, we're not even close in fact. There's so many things that can improve, we're laughably absolutely nowhere near realism when it comes to graphics, but ignoring graphics for the time being (because aesthetics are really what matter), scale and an increase in variables, such as destruction and hopefully cool things like I suggest above, which would eventually be manageable on big scales, are what we're likely going to see in fps in years to come, barring graphical increases.

[headcrab13]

For PS2, it makes sense to have some select items be destructible. You have to admit that the nanite concept (as WaryWizard said) would make for a good explanation of self-repairing structures.

You don't necessarily need fully destructible objects as seen in Red Faction, but the ability to bomb a bridge and slow down ground reinforcements could add some fun strategy to the game.

[headcrab13]

@Skitrel: That's a great post, and an excellent point. Just a hail of gunfire won't topple a heavy-duty base wall. I know the discussion about Forgelight's destructible objects capability is more along the lines of damage "states," where a bridge could be in perfect condition, then "damaged," and finally "destroyed," rather than rockets punching individual holes in things.

Still, it would be pretty awesome to see a future MMOFPS where buildings would show constant wear and tear, persistent bullet holes, and after days or weeks a severely weakened wall could collapse or a hydraulic door could be damaged beyond use.

[Stardouser]

I would say that the nanite concept makes full building destruction possible, simply because having them fully collapse won't last 9 months til the next server reset. But also, full building destruction wouldn't be able to be done in 5 seconds with one guy with C4.