Wirehead Studios

I dunno if this has already been posted.

An idea just came into mind.  In Quake 2, most or all powerups you picked up were stored in an inventory for later use.

What would you think if this feature was in Generations for the Strogg Class?  Would it unbalance things out too much?  Is it something perhaps planned for a later release.  I think that would be great.

I dunno how hard it would be to implement.  The Medkit in Quake 3 is stored for later use...perhaps it could work off of that.  I'm not sure about cycling through your powerups, but I'll leave that for the team to answer.

The way I see it (although I could be wrong) is this.  Consider the average life span of a respawned player.  In a large game, theres a good chance you'll be fragged a lot.  Carrying items around for later use wont necessarily be an unfair advantage.  As long as you remember to use them when you do and use them wisely.  It can actually put you at a bit of a handicap if you don't remember you have them when in the heat of battle.

When the Strogg player is fragged, the item could be dropped as always, reguardless of whether or not it was activated.

It may be a little unfair if several items are stored away in the Strogg's inventory, keeping them away from the other payers.  And I dunno how fair gameplay would be if a Strogg player was killed and (for example) a Quad, Regen, Invis, and Haste all popped out of his body.

Well anyway, just thought I'd throw this idea out there.  I could be wrong on several accounts reguarding how this could work, but what do y'all think?

That powerup storage was a single-player feature, not a multiplayer one. As such, it will not be implemented in multiplayer.

Seriously, imagine a Strogg player who saved up 4 quad/invulns. They could be invincible and quadded for two minutes straight. This is probably why this feature never left single-player in the first place.

Powerups were instantaneous in Quake 2 DM, like Tekhead says. It's also throw the general way Quake 3 flow works off kilter.

Perhaps it could work for the holdable items, since they're holdable in the first place - but what about having two Lost Souls of Vengeance? That'd be odd, to say the least :]

Having 5 self-teleporters would get annoying REALLY quick to the opposistion.

..unless somehow a LSoV slipped its way in O_o

The inventory in Q2 was also featured in coop, Not just single player. ;)

Prehaps resurgence can give all classes inventories or something.

Whoops.  I completely forgot that it went away in multiplayer.  I played a somewhat even ammount of Single Player and Mulitplayer, so maybe my memory geared towards SP at the time.

But y'all are right.  I never considered having stored away multiple powerups of the same type.  Geeze.  Haha imagine having 6 Quads and using a Quad every 30 or so seconds (I dunno how long you usually have the power up's effect).

Actually... it was a server-side flag in Quake2. Bit 4 (decimal value 16) of dmflags toggled this feature.

The default settings was to enable 'instant powerups' but you could disable that. And quite a few servers I know of did disable it, 16388 was a common DMFlags setting that I ran into a lot, which was very simple. Quad Drop, so if you manage to kill the bugger you can loot his shiney blue glow from his corpse, and Weapons Stay, much like Q3A. :-)

As for holding 4 quad damages... what was taken care of quite easilly. You could never hold more than one in deathmatch, as I recall. :)

So, yes, you could 'save' the powerup if the server allowed it, but you couldn't stockpile them.

(Edit: More specifically, you could never 'carry' more than one Quad Damage, for instance. You could 'carry' one while one was in effect, effectively letting you 'chain' together two Quad Damages, but that was the limit.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC in single player Q2 you couldn't carry more than 1 quad anyway. I remember because I would always forget to use them, so then when I found another one, I would use it just so I could pick up the new one.

I think having the berserk/medkit/LSOV as the only inventory powerups is fine for now. I don't think it's worth the trouble making every powerup inventoriable and most people would probably prefer to play without it. As it is I forget to use the medkit half the time I have it.

I kinda like the idea for Resurgence, but not DM.

I agree with dna. It's a good idea for Resurgence, but not  for DM

In earlier versions of Q2 you could carry multiple powerups in your inventory throughout the game.  Later releases capped it at one powerup because it got too damned easy to just save up quads and invulns and just go quadded-invuln for four minutes on the Makron or any other boss-type creature.

For deathmatch it really serves no purpose, and destroys map flow.  For Resurgence it might see some purpose, but we'd have some decisions to make here - do we allow only Strogg Troopers to carry powerups around, and everyone else has to use them instantly, or do we make the carry-a-powerup a feature for all classes?  Not only that, but how are you going to select the powerup to use it?  That requires code, and an entirely new way to handle powerups.  Remember, every new "neat feature" delays 1.0's release that much longer.  Keeping powerups for later use may or may not be possible in the code, but I would question the usefulness of it at all in the long term.  Is it really something people can't live without?

My vote: Forget it. Let's get cracking on stuff that's really important and has bigger nostalgia-value, too..

Agreed, actually. I was just correcting some facts. Shifting the entire Generations DM to 'Carried Powerups' would so utterly and completely change play-balance it wouldn't be worth the headaches. :-)