Author: Tonester <@home>     Reply to Message
Date: 9/13/2004 11:31:33 PM
Subject: RE: To people who liked wfa, wf etc.

I (and many others) preached the whole "better menus, in-game tutorials, better default binds, etc" but no-one listened.

WFA was funny. Things like the Engineer and Sentry drew alot of new players in, but they would leave for 1 of 3 reasons:

1) The community was too small and/or all the servers were locked/empty

2) The things that drew them in were so overpowered/unbalanced, once they got good enough to know, they left and told everyone the game sucked

3) They could never get over the very very very steap learning curve

The binding system for Revolutions needs to be streamlined a ton from Q3A.

Main1
Main2
Nade1
Nade2
Special1
Special2
Grapple

Each class should have 2 main weapons, 2 off-hand weapons (nades, pipebombs, etc) and then 2 special powers/abilities like sentry, plasma, kami, laser, alarm, etc.

This would allow players to make 1 global config that would apply 90% of the needed binds to every class. The other 10% of binds for each class would be done via a seperate menu for that class.

Bring up the Binds Menu
From there, you have tabs:
Global (affects all classes)
Class Tab (one for each class)

The Class Tab would focus mostly on the more in-depth binds for a particular class or comms. And, unlike the Global Binds, the Class Binds won't interfere with Class Binds from other classes. I.E. Binding key "A" to an Engineer won't stop you from binding key "A" to a recon as long as key "A" isn't bound in the Global Tab. Upon switching classes, the game would load all the binds under that particular Class Tab first, and then load the Global Tab next (and overwrite anything).

This would make a huge stride in solving the binding learning curve. New players could jump in and do ONE binding (Global) and have access to 90% of the binds. As they progress through the learning curve and start gravitating towards a particular class, they can load up that particular Class' Tab and start fine-tuning the other binds without impacting any binds for any of the other classes (or the Global Binds).

Easy to learn.... hard to master.

Grappling should definitely have some sort of "how-to" video that ships with the final product, as well as an obstacle course level to practice on via single player. Hell, even add a bot with scripted events that leads the player through various stages of the obstacle course and demonstrates the moves for them. Have menus like "Tell me how again. Show me how again. Let me try it. Skip this obstacle. Etc"

Mods and games now are polished (very polished). If Revolution isn't equally polished, it will suffer the same eventual fate that WFA did; the best mod in the world... that no one played.

I'd love to help on this stuff. We launch our gaming center in a couple of months, and one of the guys I'm partnering up with is a pretty avid FPS player and he said he LOVED Q2WF and WFA but could never get it to run right, or didn't understand it, etc. When I told him it is the game I played the most, he was all excited and wanted us to put it on all the machines and have me start giving classes to new people and give away free game time to teach it and pimp it out.

I'd love to do this same sort of thing for WF:R The game is so good, I just don't see how avid FPS players can't love it... as long as the devs give them a fair shot at loving it.

Too long, but damnit... it's been a while. ;) Deal with it.

Tones
_