A return to overloading?

[favorito]

I thought we could explore the possibility of bringing back Blood Frontier's "overloading", or some spin-off of it.

If you recall, overloading in BF was manually loading certain guns (the rifle and shotgun, if I recall correctly) beyond their normal auto-reloading capacity. The idea was never expanded upon to any great length, but the manual loading to hold more in your clip had a sort of rhythmic quality to it, and I believe it added something to the game.

I don't propose we implement in place of what we currently have, but in addition to. If we come up with any worthwhile ideas, I'll submit a ticket to the tracker, at which point Quin can come in and pick and choose what he likes.

I imagine it a little like this at present: for any given gun, you can load (manually, and a shot, or a segment of shots at a time) over a fully-loaded clip. The status of the overload would be overlayed over the full clip on the HUD. When the overload is finished (i.e., your clip holds twice the amount it normally does fully-loaded), your ammo HUD glows, and something would happen. Not sure what would be best to implement (if any, I'm sure there are better ideas out there):

-You get one shot that uses the whole overload clip. A kind of third alt-fire, does a lot of damage, or even insta kill. Would be time-consuming to implement this though, and so it's probably the least realistic.
-You go into a sort of "berserk" mode, and the ammo drains on a timed basis (when your overload clip drains empty, you go back to normal). Depending on the gun, you get a different ability (rifle gives you better accuracy, smg fires even faster, shotgun shoots out more flak rays, plasma has a bigger "Big Blue Ball", flamer's flames turn blue or white and do more damage, rocket has bigger explosion, etc.)
-Another timed deal, except you're simply more accurate and do more damage
-Also timed, normal reloading time is halved
-You simply have that much more ammo
-The overload clip just does more damage, a la an Active Reload in Gears of War
-You get one of the above abilities, but in addition to a timed drain, you instantly lose overload status if you get hit (think POW in Shinobi III)

Enough rambling from me. What do you guys think? Also, if anyone can find any Beta 1 footage on YouTube or something similar that would help illustrate, post away.

-favorito

[bonifarz]

The first thing that comes to my mind in this context is weapon jamming, which seems to be already in place and can just be enabled by setting some variables. Considering your list of buffs, those look potentially very interesting but insanely difficult to balance. I have the impression that just some increase of the clip size on its own can already have a rather large impact on weapon usage.

[riidom]

I'd like a possible negative effect on it too - so you have to think if it's worth doing it. Your last point brought me to the idea:
If you get hit while overloaded, you gain additional damage, depending on the number of additional clips the gun has at this moment.
Alternatively, you have less impulse energy/it regenerates slower/moves consume more.

[Architect]

maybe this is a tangent but i thought it would be cool to allow player to tweak weapon(with limits of course) and have that tweaked weapon live on after player, so you would end up with a variety of weapons until match is over, not sure if this is something that anybody would be interested in, just a thought

[Sniper-Goth]

maybe this is a tangent but i thought it would be cool to allow player to tweak weapon(with limits of course) and have that tweaked weapon live on after player, so you would end up with a variety of weapons until match is over, not sure if this is something that anybody would be interested in, just a thought

Attachments to the weapons? I this could unbalance the game depending of the person's configuration.

[favorito]

The first thing that comes to my mind in this context is weapon jamming, which seems to be already in place and can just be enabled by setting some variables. Considering your list of buffs, those look potentially very interesting but insanely difficult to balance. I have the impression that just some increase of the clip size on its own can already have a rather large impact on weapon usage.

I like this post. I'm apprehensive about the overloading idea on three fronts: balance, complexity, and workload.

-We don't want to stray from what we're already working towards (namely, a 1:1 balanced arsenal of weapons). I think the overloading concept itself is ambitious enough; we wouldn't want to overdo it, if we decide at some point to do it at all.

-Every implementation falls onto this spectrum of complexity. We would want this to fall at roughly the same place as the rest of the gameplay mechanics. Quin's worked hard to preserve this for the sake of keeping a low learning curve. Whether you hold this belief to be important or not, it's worth pursuing now if only for the sake of consistency and not introducing something that would drastically alter how the game plays (as none of us who love the game now would want that).

-"Workload" here is almost synonymous with "Quin", hehe, and so for that alone, we don't want to entertain any ideas that are unrealistically out-there. We'd conjure them up as pipe dreams, and as pipe dreams they'd stay; most of us aren't programmers, but common sense should be enough to keep the suggestions we voice within the realm of possibility. (Quin might laugh at this, as I'm sure there are implications to even the most basic ideas that we're all oblivious to unless we looked at how things are currently written, but we should at least try. : ) )

If we were to proceed, I think the most rational move would to be to just implement it how it was before, on top of the current loading system, i.e., you manually load ammo on top of the current clip until it's doubled simply for the sake of holding that much more in your clip. At that point, we could take two actions:

-If it proves to be too much from a balancing standpoint, there are probably easy checks we can put in place, such as losing the overload reserve upon getting hit.
-If it's not incentive enough to hold more ammo, we could switch over to one of the other "buffs", like giving a 10% [arbitrary number here, just for illustrative purposes] damage boost for any overloaded shot, across the board for all guns. Probably relatively easy to implement, if done universally it wouldn't create a balancing issue, and it's simple enough, but still relatively interesting, and could add another dimension to how the game plays.

[bonifarz]

-If it's not incentive enough to hold more ammo, we could switch over to one of the other "buffs"

The only buff I can think of for now that is generic enough to match all weapons and that does fit well with the concept of /weaponjamming 3 (a chance that the weapon explodes and you need to drop it) is to speed up the attack delays and charging times. However, weapon jamming is probably a bad idea with the new default that used to be the arena mutator.

[qreeves]

Weapon jamming has been removed in SVN.