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Phoenix
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@Mink: Same here. I found after the first set of unlocks were coming out that when something happened to the server's connection to the master servers and everyone was limited to using only default weapons and no hats that the gameplay went from semi-crappy to rock solid. I wanted a "vanilla mode" option so that the original gameplay that sold me on TF2 would be possible again, but instead it went from one set of alternate weapons per class to insane hats, loadouts (hat + all weapons in a set = bigger bonus), and so many unlocks that it went from a streamlined, easy to learn but hard to master teamplay game with great visuals and great visual contrast (important in teamplay) to a mish-mash of God-knows-what and everyone tying up team spots standing around in the base trading hats instead of actually being part of the team that's trying to play the game. Real nice when you have two idiots standing in the base and 3 people are trying to fend off a 5 player team that actually knows what it's doing. We never got a vanilla mode because Valve was making too much money selling virtual items to non-virtual idiots, so I just deleted 100% of my inventory, wrote a negative review, and uninstalled the game in protest. To date, no official support for a vanilla mode exists that I'm aware of. If that changes I'll reinstall, but after this amount of time I'd expect to see Half-Life (episode)3 first. Oh well, at least I can play Duke Nukem... 
As for the community itself... the usual responses I got from other players regarding wanting a vanilla mode consisted of "that would split the community and it would be bad" (um, the community already split when the people wanting old-style play got sick of the unlocks and started leaving because the devs gave us the digital finger), or "there's vanilla servers" (without pointing any out, so where were these mythical servers, exactly?), or some other justification about how "at least Valve is supporting the game by balancing it and updating it" (odd since it became more unbalanced with each update), or the typical "stop whining" (but we can't give you a valid reason not to be unhappy) snobbery. I even had someone ask me for my inventory items after I posted my review stating that I was deliberately deleting them!
So yeah... anyways, let's hope Quake Champions doesn't have any fugly annoying visual stuff like that.
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  I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
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Gnam
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New interview with Tim at Polygon: http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/25/1227308...s-on-quake-champions-playable-charactersUnfortunately it doesn't really tell us anything new beyond officially confirming all the character details people already gathered from the trailer (Ranger gets a translocator, Nyx gets a blink, and Scale Bearer gets a charge). One detail I hadn't fully realized is that Ranger's translocator is supposed to be the spiked sphere from the Shubb boss battle...which is weird, since it doesn't even have spikes on it or any other resemblance to said spiked sphere. Still, I guess the basic idea of the slipgate warrior possessing a portable slipgate for a signature weapon follows soundly enough. |
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Gnam
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A total of 4 new characters were explained at Quakecon: https://youtu.be/gL1DLw46W30Anarki has higher base movement speed at the cost of health and armor. Sorlag spits acid for area denial (sounds like UT's biorifle). Galena drops "totems" that heal herself and teammates. Clutch is a big slow tank robot with some kind of shield. So much of the negative reaction from fans seems SO short-sighted and premature. So much parroting of "classes are the opposite of Quake" is going on, yet arguably Generations Arena is the most authentic iteration of an id shooter there is, and is distinctly class-based. In fact, if Champions had started out by introducing Wrack, Grunt, and Visor as based entirely around QW, Q2, and Q3 movement physics in the way Generations does, I feel it would have been much better received by fans, as the first impression would be "classes are making Quake more authentic" as opposed to "classes are making Quake more like Overwatch". I'm not going to hold my breath for QC to be too much like Generations, but I do feel it would have gone over better with the community to at least start out that way. Speaking of Doom 2016 multiplayer, I wonder if Champions will include Doomslayer with double jump as his main ability. He would still have to run faster than in Doom 4, or he'd get slaughtered. P.S. there is some leaked gameplay footage on youtube if you search. The allegations that Champsions would not have strafejumping were definitely flat-out wrong. |
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« Last Edit: 2016-08-09, 15:40 by Gnam »
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Phoenix
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There's always going to be haters that want things exactly one way and if it's not exactly what they feel it should be they'll never be happy with it. It's a small percentage, and devs know they have to ignore them. If people want an authentic Quakeworld experience... um, go play Quakeworld. It's that simple. Same with Doom, or Q3A, or anything someone expects to be 100% this or that. Nothing can ever be 100% to the original except the original. You can get close, you can reimagine, you can update sounds and visuals and environments and bring all the physics in, etc, but there's always going to be at least subtle differences. With something as major as Champions, it's going to have departures that some people will love and others won't. Doom 4 got a lot of hate like this before release, and it turned out pretty good. People need to wait and see and decide after they get to take it for a test drive. .gif)
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Gnam
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You can sign up for beta on the official QC site. There's some new trailers out, and some footage floating around from PAX. The official site now provides art, data, and a demo video for most weapons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHrq31NWBCgSome new tidbits of info: 1) There are alternate weapon skins based on prior Quake games. The Q1 RL and Q2 RG have been seen in addition to the default QC variants. 2) For a starter weapon, you can choose either a single barrel shotgun, "regular" nailgun, or machinegun 3) The Super Nailgun replaces the Plasma Gun. It does 150 dps instead of 200 dps, and possibly has a faster projectile speed. The projectiles are matte gray like Q1, which combined with the high speed and realistic lighting makes them almost impossible to see...I hope this changes. 4) The "super" alternative to the starter MG is the HMG from QL instead of the Chaingun (ugh). 5) The SSG does 120 total damage instead of 100 or 110 of QL and Q3. 6) Item timers are making a return from QL, at least on default server settings 7) Trailers for individual characters will be released as follows: Nyx - out now Scalebearer - out now Anarki - 3/29 Clutch - 4/12 Galena - 4/19 Ranger - 5/3 Visor - 5/10 Sorlag - 5/24 Slash was seen in-game at PAX even though she hasn't been officially announced yet. |
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« Last Edit: 2017-03-21, 00:36 by Gnam »
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Angst
Rabid Doomer
Team Member
Elite
  
Posts: 1011
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THE QUAD IS UT-DAMAGE-AMP-PURPLE..
That is all.
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"Who says a chainsaw isn't a ranged weapon?"
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Phoenix
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I'm not too fond of the fact that item spawns are all glowy and have timer rings. From the PAX footage I saw, item spawns (such as the Quad) are visible through walls... WTF? Those are two things I wasn't too thrilled over. There better be options to turn off the dayglow CPMA-ish brightskin crap or I'm going to hate it.
The champions themselves don't just have some special ability, they have varying max health and armor stats. For example, Galena had very low armor max - I think 50, and health was 100, whereas Sorlag had 150/150. You could go over these, but the armor and health would count down to them. That doesn't bother me too much, but I could see it being a balance issue where the "tank" classes... er, "champions" become unstoppable - unless movement speed is a factor. Hard to tell from the footage so far.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to bring to the table over Q3A other than updated graphics. So far I don't see anything groundbreaking, but it is early. I'll reserve additional judgment until I can get my stupid Bethesda account to actually work and try this thing out...
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Gnam
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I'm assuming admins wil be able to disable item timer graphics in custom servers (if the option for custom servers exists). IIRC QL disabled them for duel so hopefully QC will disable them for duel matchmaking as well.
IMO rather than changing starting and max health/armor per character. it would have been better to vary the benefit each character gets from pickups. So everyone starts with 100 health and zero armor, but depending on whether they're a light/medium/heavy character they get:
small health - 10 / 15 / 20
medium health - 20 / 30 / 40
megahealth - 80 / 100 / 120
armor shard - 3 / 5 / 7
small armor - 18 / 25 / 37
medium armor - 38 / 50 / 75
big armor - 75 / 100 / 150
I agree that it's a delicate balance in terms of how much advantage the medium and heavy characters should get vs the light, so the exact numbers are up for debate, but you get the idea.
Overall I do feel like Generations' method of seperating classes by movement physics and weapon variants makes more sense within the Quake framework than shoehorning in MOBA abilities. Even if the classes weren't based at all on replicating the gameplay of previous id games, it still puts the focus in class differentiation on movement and weapon skill, which is what Quake has always been all about.
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At least you guys are able to run it. For some reason the Bethesda Launcher won't run properly on my Win 7 install, so I couldn't even install the beta. Some other people have been having the same problems from what I saw on the Bethesda forums. 
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Gnam
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My full opinion on the beta, now that the NDA is lifted:
1 ) Rocket lag sucks
2 ) Grenade Launcher desperately needed
3 ) Damage buff for zooming is a terrible idea (Railgun, HMG)
4 ) Having 2-3 LG spawns on Burial and Sarnath is terrible
5 ) Super Nailgun @ 150 dps / ~3000 ups is too weak, should be 180 dps / 2000 ups
6 ) 80 DPS for LMG and 120 DPS for HMG is too high, should be 50 / 100
7 ) Single-barrel shotgun really should pump faster
8 ) Super Shotgun has the opposite problem of LG; not enough spawns
9 ) Armor values are too low
10 ) Visibility is bad for available vs. unavailable items, and medium vs. heavy armor
11 ) Mouse input still feels laggy and imprecise
12 ) Movement feels too slow unless you use 120-130 fov.
Overall, champion traits are the least of the game's problems. The weapon balance favors hitscan over projectile weapons really badly due to the combination of rocket lag, too many LG spawns, no grenades, low SNG damage, and excessive LMG/HMG damage.
As I said before, tha armor values are too low as it is, and the max armor for light characters is so little that it makes RA obsolete. Overall this weakens the resource control game a lot.
I don't think the champions are implemented in the best possible way, but they also don't hurt the game that badly. The fact that the devs don't appear to understand Quake weapon balance and aren't addressing people's criticisms there is far more alarming.
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Gnam
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At this point I'm no longer surprised when developers compromise weapon balance for the sake of casualization. What's really frustrating is the attitude from some actual Quake veterans who have taken the attitude that "no nade launcher is fine, it was just a skill-less spam weapon anyway" and "it doesn't matter how many LG spawns are on the map, you just have to get gud".
It seems like a lot of that attitude is a result of the way TDM and CTF diminished in competitive popularity in favor of duel through the Q3 era on to QL. When you no longer have to share resources with your teammates, it becomes a lot easier to use the "holy trinity" all the time.
It's only natural that rocket and rail fill the single-fire, high per-hit damage roles in projectile and hitscan respective, but once LG ammo isn't so scarce, it easily fills *everything* in between, diminishing the need for all the various volume of fire roles that the rest of the weapons provide.
Thus you don't have to rely on "lower" weapons like the QL, SSG, and Plasma/Nails nearly as much, and don't learn to appreciate the unique dynamics they bring to the game. Add to that the pervasiveness of Rocket Arena as the defacto pub/casual mode, and you wind up with huge portions of the Quake community who rarely ever see the rest of the weapon in the game, and believe RL/RL/LG is the sum total of everything in Quake.
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« Last Edit: 2017-05-13, 18:16 by Gnam »
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Phoenix
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My multiplayer experience began with Quake 2 as I was a bit late getting onto the internet, and deliberately so. I simply didn't trust connecting computers together, so I did not play Quakeworld online during its heyday... and I didn't like Quake 1 at the time anyway. With Quake 2 I got familiar with normal deathmatch, then I played Rocket Arena 2 extensively. To me, there was a place for every weapon. Since dialup was the rule, and lag was always a factor, the railgun and any other hitscan weapons were hard to use at first. Rockets offered splash damage, the chaingun offered sustained firepower, and the super-shotgun was forgiving in its spread. Nobody ever whined about the grenades during the early days that I can remember. There was always somebody crying over the BFG in normal deathmatch, but people always have something they don't like. The BFG is typically disabled in RA2.
Now enter cable/dsl. People started to get 40-90 ping, and then there were us dialup users with 200+ ping. The railgun started to become a serious threat, along with the chaingun, especially in RA2 since you spawn with every weapon sans the BFG. Add to that a lot of wide-open spaces, the ability to rocket jump without losing health, and dialup users had some problems. The grenade launcher became a great friend to me as I learned how to use it to cover retreats, hit players below me, and attack around corners to avoid exposing myself to railgun hits. It was a strategic weapon. Once low pingers started to be prevalent I heard the term "luck pillz" for the first time. A lot of these low pingers would love to do 2 vs 2 matches in open rooms, immediately switch from the rocket launcher to the chaingun and attack one player at match start, which was near instant death, then finish off the other player. It was considered by a lot of us high pingers to be a very cheap tactic because it deliberately exploited the ping delay that would allow them to attack first on the server. In larger team games or 1 vs 1 matches it wasn't so much of an issue, but in 2 vs 2 matches it was a point of contention. What's funny is the same people would complain about a high-pinger using the SSG...
Now taking ping differences out of the equation, what I loved about Q2, especially during my early dialup days (before my ISP went to crap and I couldn't even move after connecting, which pushed me over to broadband finally) was that every weapon had a purpose and a place and worked well. Here's the lineup of how I remember things:
The blaster, while mostly useless, was a way to humiliate an opponent.
Shotgun was good for finishing off a weak opponent at a distance, especially in RA2.
SSG was a good all-around for DM, and a great close-range finisher in RA2.
Machinegun was an overall decent weapon. You could finish with it, it was better than the blaster, and it was common. The damage rate was steady, but not overwhelming. In a large FFA you could get a lot of frags by finishing off weakened opponents after they traded rockets.
Chaingun was devastating, but the spinup would allow for someone to normally get a rocket or SSG blast in prior to the gun being up to full-speed. With high ping it wasn't so easy to keep on target so it got used in the water a lot to great effect, where movement was restricted.
Grenade Launcher was not as commonly used by other players that I remember, nor were hand grenades, but were more situational in use and less spammy.
Rocket Launcher needs no explanation. It was one of THE go-to weapons.
Hyperblaster occupied a unique niche. It was hard for a high pinger to use, and it got the nickname of "laggerblaster" as the projectile spam would cause some high pingers with bad connections to get packet flooded and stall their movement. For the most part it was disabled in RA2 due to the lag problem. In normal DM it was surprisingly effective if you could hit with it as it fired at the same rate as the machinegun, did almost twice the damage, and penetrated armor to a degree. Q2 calculated "energy" damage by downgrading your armor a type. A blaster hitting red armor treated it like yellow, yellow armor was treated like green, and green armor was completely ignored.
The railgun doesn't need much explanation, other than when playing RA2 it was very hard for a high pinger to use and low pingers would dominate with it to the point of not using other weapons. One tactic in RA2 was to fire the railgun to goad another player into switching to it to railgun duel at a distance, and while they were switching weapons close in while switching to rockets and hit them up close.
The BFG10K was quite the controversial weapon. I'm not sure when exactly people started considering it cheap to use, but opinions on it were definitely strong one way or another. To me, it was a rare weapon that could help a player that wasn't doing well to catch up a little, especially once ping differences became severe. For some people the hatred was so vitriolic as to be irrational. There was a mod called Weapons of Destruction that made every single gun in the game overpowered in various ways, especially hand grenades. I actually had a player complain about me shooting him off a wall (there was a grappling hook) with the BFG and calling it cheap... which to me was rather absurd considering he was throwing napalm grenades that basically saturated an area with repeating explosions that was basically instant death. There was also one specific role the BFG filled that was actually quite necessary, and I'll explain that below.
Now I look at the individual strengths and weaknesses of the weapons, the movement speed in the game, the availability of ammo, armor, and items, the map layout and spawn frequency of specific weapons, and Quake 2's gameplay was really very balanced. Rockets, rails, and chaingun (LG in Quake 3) were the "big three", but they were also the least common weapons. Shotguns, machineguns, hand grenades were more common. Weapons and items tended to be spread out well, and the map design was quite good for the most part.
There's only one controversial item that I would say tended to ruin the game, and it was the power armor. Maps with power armor tended to give God Mode to one specific player that would then dominate the rest of the match. The worst place for this was Q2DM8, since the power armor, megahealth, and red armor all spawned in the same spot in rotation. About the ONLY way to kill someone tanked up on cells was to hit them with the BFG repeatedly - especially if the person ran away all the time. I got into a match where a player was dominating the map and managed to tank up myself. He'd trade railgun shots with me and always make sure he was in a place to get out of sight in a hurry. After trading a few hits in the rocket launcher room we both chaingunned each other and he ran off before I could finish him, with BOTH of us running out of bullets. I think another player got a lucky shot in on him. Well of course he went straight for the power armor again, and I managed to get the BFG and some cells before he could hog them all, and fragged him two more times, then he left the server. So the most balance-killing thing in Quake 2 was never a weapon, it was actually an item. RA2 never allowed the use of power armor.
So with all of this said, there was a lot of good design in Q2 for map balance, and that translated fairly well into Q3A. Why this is not translating properly into Champions seems to be bad decision making on the part of the designers. The whole "you just have to get gud" argument is garbage too. I've played with semi-pro Q3 players and I've seen pro Q2 players at work, I managed to beat a pro Q2 player in a match one time while I was on dialup, and yet the first time I played around with Doom 16's public beta for multiplayer I died repeatedly and never came close to the top of the scoreboard. Why? It didn't play like anything I'm used to playing. Everyone plays different games differently, and just because you might dominate at one game doesn't mean you will at another. Take a CoD player that's never touched Quake and throw them into Quakeworld or vice-versa and it'll be a self-proving point, so "getting gud" is NOT an excuse for bad map design and item placement. Anyone that thinks otherwise should take a trip over to lvlworld and talk to some of the veteran Q3 mappers - something I suspect the Champions devs probably did not do.
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Angst
Rabid Doomer
Team Member
Elite
Posts: 1011
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Doesn't help that they spawn you with a mg, sg, and ng. I'm not a big fan of redundant newbie weapons, especially when you have (relatively) minor upgrades you can pick up.
It took me a few matches to properly realize that I spawned with more than just a machinegun..
Netcode and physics are still horribly broken, we'll see how that goes..
Honestly, part of me is convinced that there are no grenades because coding anything that doesn't go in a straight line is beyond their current programming ability -.-
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"Who says a chainsaw isn't a ranged weapon?"
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Phoenix
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Funny, since I managed to code several different bouncing projectiles - even ones that run perfect simultaneous physics simulations on client and server for the Arena BFG to avoid network packet overhead! 
I did finally get Champions to work for me. It seems the Bethesda Launcher functioning is dependent on certain Windows updates being installed. So far I have played one round with Ranger, on the map with the eyeball thing. After getting spawn fragged 3 times while trying to adjust mouse sensitivity I was able to land a solid 3rd place with 20 frags, 4 of them being gauntlet humiliations. I killed the Quad carrier once, got a hold of the Quad twice, and seemed to do most of my frags with the shotgun and lightning gun.
What I definitely do not like so far is the item spawns. I can't tell WHAT I'm picking up half the time because it's a green blob of something. The item timers make me think there's an item there until I get on it and see that, oh, it's NOT there. I spent most of the time trying to find someone to fight. I don't know the map layout, and I would either see someone really far away or run across a few people in combat. Actual combat, even with something like 9 players, seemed to be sporadic at best. I also do not like the outlines on the players. It's distracting. I just want to see the player model.
As for weapons... pretty much anything worked at close range. Nails, shotgun, lightning gun, machinegun - just keep the crosshair on them and hose them. Gauntlet tagging was pretty easy unless someone was REALLY expecting it. The only real frags I got with the rocket launcher was when I was Quadded, so I didn't get a good feel for it as I didn't have it most of the time. The railgun felt SUPER laggy... as if there's a pre-fire delay. I'm not sure why, but the few times I had it I couldn't hit with it, yet I could light people up with the LG very easily. It's too early to make a hard assessment of the gameplay overall as I've played exactly one round, but it didn't feel as tight as the earlier Quake games on movement, weapon impacts, and general feedback of what was going on. I didn't encounter any serious glitches or bugs that I could tell other than the railgun behavior, but it's very hard to test in a live match with strangers. I'm used to more controlled testing environments.
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scalliano
Elite
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Yup, that's me
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One thing that bugs me: why is it in modern shooters characters don't have actual team coloured skins anymore? I don't give a toss about showing off my loot unlocks in a team game, I just want to know who I'm aiming at and a tiny coloured arrow above my opponent's head doesn't really suffice. If I'm on the red team and my teammate has a blue outfit, I'm gonna bloody well shoot at him! Those habits die hard, y'know.
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PSN ID: scalliano
The Arena knows no gender, colour or creed, only skill.
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Gnam
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Someone leaked some design docs which confirm the addition of Keel, Doom, a death knight, a demon, a female marine, and some other characters: http://imgur.com/a/XoY7hBJ Blazkoicz was also added to the beta this week for E3. In lieu of the grenade launcher they added this "tri bolt" weapon which fires 3 rounds in a burst for 40dmg each, sticks instead of ricocheting, and only has a ~0.5 second fuse or so. It's a poor substitute if you ask me. Overall I'm still underwhelmed with the game. The devs have stuck to their guns on bad ideas like health rounding and zoom damage, they haven't improved the weak Super Nailgun, and the netcode is still bad. On the upside, they have removed a few of the LG spawns and added a couple more maps. At this point I'm not going to touch it for a few months and will consider playing again later down the line if any of the issues are improved at all. Regarding the new starter weapons, I think it was a good idea executed poorly. It could have been a great nod back to the diverse arsenals of Q1 and Q2, but the MG does so much damage, there's just no reason to use the single-barrel shotgun or starter nailgun. I also would have loved to have seen a blaster option, as well as the ability to throw grenade ammo, but they can't even seem to fix the 2 extra weapons they have now. |
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« Last Edit: 2017-06-14, 00:09 by Gnam »
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