Galactic War - How to make it awesome.

Well if they arise naturally from the game mechanics.

Take a look at a lot of objective team based shooters, like team fotress 1 & 2. Usually you have to get into an enemy base to do a thing, plant a bomb, get a flag, etc. You always spawn in your base, they always spawn in their base.

So the more progress you make, the closer you get to their spawn point, and the less effort (in movement) it takes for them to attack you. So it's always easier to defend.

I am not sure how you'd make the inherent game mechanics of a galactic scale war favor the underdog though.

The only thing I can think of is that each time will probably still have the same amount of players no matter how much territory they have. So for example let's say there are several 12 man teams all over the galaxy fighting in out. One team is winning more often than not and has 4 solar systems. Now they can split up in 3 man teams to protect their 4 stars.

But one team has been losing more often than not and only has 2 stars left. They can split into two teams of 6 to defend their entire territory.

The funny thing is the crowd you claim to speak for who only has maybe one or two hours a day for games probably doesn't care about achievements. Only dorks with too much free time on their hands care about tedious achievement collecting and cosmetic sh!t.

It's my firm belief that gamers who need silly reward stickers to enjoy a game are playing for the wrong reason, and should rethink their life priorities.

Achievements, hats and other 'rewards' are parasytic to gameplay and by virtue of that are incapable of making anything 'awesome'. They've enabled far more elitism and bad online behaviour than competitive play has ever done.

I forgot to mention, it's nice to meet all you guys!

It seems that of my suggestions, the star-destroying thing is the only thing that worries you. I'm not suggesting a Death Star (I should have been more clear) you'll notice I said "weapon" instead of "unit." I was imagining more of a missile, a one time use thing. And obviously it would be counterable (with difficulty). It wouldn't be feasible for one team to steamroll an opponent with them. Even so, I understand how such a weapon could be problematic. I was just brainstorming ideas.

And with things like the interstellar planets there would definitely have to be a limit on how many of those you could bring to a match or the solar-system would get crowded. Again, I was just brainstorming.

I like some of the ideas that people are throwing around about them being team projects...I was sort of imagining it being something that was constructed in the meta-game (read: galactic map) but then deployed/countered during a battle.

Well, that point will be reached anyway uber-units or not and it's up to the losing player to know when to GG gracefully. I could invade with three uber units or three million normal units. Either way, my opponent is finished

Uber units could even add more ways for an underdog to gain an advantage...If your opponent's star-missile fails, they're down a ton of resources with nothing to show for it. Metal planets or orbital platforms they fly into your system can be captured and turned on them. Wormholes could leave an opponent undefended at home if you manage to close it and leave the opponent's army trapped at the wrong end of the galaxy.

What's the difference between all this and being able to amass a horde of nukes or inter-planetary artillery in a normal match?

I can spot the word 'hats', i've never seen Team Fortress 2 being a bad game because of hats. Cosmetics are a fun part of customization that most people like, and it adds to the fun of a game.

All these ideas would be truly awesome in a single player vs AI or coop vs AI, but a travesty in a multiplayer game. One reason being that many of the ideas would be difficult or impossible to balance and would frankly be more fun if they were NOT balanced.

I'd also rather not have all "sectors" interrelated or affect the meta game. It's not fun to have things you didn't do affect your game. At the very least the player should have the option to have an isolated galaxy.

So, in the context of a player vs AI campaign, I'm liking all these galactic war ideas.

Team Fortress 2 was only good when it followed simple old-school gaming principles. The game went down the crapper really fast afterwards.

A normal match only lasts for an hour or so. Galactic War looks like can drag on for quite a while.

Also tell me this, Pawz:

Assuming once you've collected all 'achievements' and leveled your 'asteroid' to the maximum tier. Would you be motivated to go back to the Galactic War at all?

A couple replies..

It needs to be 100% clear that multiplayer PvP must be fair, balanced, and unaffected by the meta game apart from, perhaps, cosmetic changes.

The point here is to draw the people who play singleplayer vs the AI into the general online community, and to make that an equally vital part of the overall meta-game. To bring the people who love building mods together with the people who like playing them, and give them the opportunity to be involved in the larger Galactic War. Ultimately it's to get people socially connected and give them paths to perhaps join the PVP scene.

Ayceem you seem to think I'm arguing that PA is going to suck and therefore we need some flashy tinsel to attract the masses. I'm not. I'm also not suggesting that achievements or hats are going to make people play the game. What I AM suggesting is that achievements / game modes / mod support / etc may entice people to play online who would otherwise just play single player.

I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to come back again and again to a strong RTS game that invites me to have fun in a variety of scenarios, both player vs player and player vs AI.

When your only option when you come online is to play ranked games, and you don't want to play ranked games, where are you going to go? Why would we want to exclude these people, especially in the context of a meta-game like Galactic War?

If we do get achievements, can we make them hard to get?

None of the classic steam achievements for being able to get through the tutorial without you mind exploding.

I mean tough challenges that can take weeks to complete.

You mean bring back the meaning 'achievement' for an achievement? Sounds like a plan to me.


I suggested a tiered approach - several levels for the same achievement, with the highest level being very difficult to get.

Steaam 'Congrats you ran the game' achievements never appealed. I'm thinkking something more along the lines of Borderlands BadAss ranks

From: http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=40422&start=90

I honestly think that every idea that has been mentioned and brought up is doable. The one BIG thing about this project that Uber has taken on is that they really need to have played any and all games that they can possibly play as well as look into the communities of those games to see their feedback. This will give them extremely valuable information that they can use to expand on what did not work in that other game, why it didn't work, can it work, and if it can, will it benefit this project. Just because you have worked on other games/created them does not mean you have a full understanding of the elements and what the people actually playing the game felt about it. It is impossible to fully understand your own work without looking at it from anothers perspective. I feel confident that this team may actually achieve this for the first time ever. Game developers overlook all of these factors as it seems it's all about 'hey I want this in a game' and completely ignore everything else because that particular thing, they way they want it is the only thing that matters.

Sure, Uber wants big battles... Sure they want galactic scale battles and wars... but if they don't compare other games elements and aren't open-minded, then they'll fall right into the same trap other developers fall into because they didn't want to let go of certain aspects of their ideas and never get to the point where their idea gets expanded into that super awesome deal.

Wrong thread?

"Achievements will make people do so-and-so." - This is your argument.

Why do we want people who are only interested in single player to go online? If they're staying with single player, it's because they like single player.

Then you don't need achievements. Good games entice people to come back by virtue of being good. Achievements only get fools to stay until they collected all of them, at which point they put the game down forever.

Have you heard of this nifty function called 'custom games'?

I know some games where figuring out what tine thing the tutorial wants you to do, in what specific way, in what order, is ten times harder than playing the game itself.

Ironically, these game generally don't have an achievement for completing the tutorial.

sometimes people change their preferences or find the taste for something if they get to enjoy a new gaming style. Stranger things have happened

bad games don't necessarily get better by adding achievements, but good games also don't get necessarily worse by adding them. In the end if PA gets to be a really good game achievements won't hurt, they even might be a nice addition if in itself done well.
As for attracting only fools, with a large enough player base (rules holds true also for any other large enough crowd) you get some percentage of fools and idiots, but in all likelihood they will be dispersed over all types of players (however you want to categorize them)
so: don't panic.

If people want to go online, they're going to do that by themselves. And what exact taste would they have to aquire? Online multiplayer is its own appeal; you take your regular single player skirmish and make it online, so instead of fighting the computer, you're fighting creepy strangers. That's it- that's all there is to online multiplayer. People aren't fu©king idiots to not know this.

No-no-no...you've got this all backwards.

Achievements can only be a detriment because they distract you from the game's objective.

Here are some examples from years ago of playing Team Fortress 2: There is a heavy achievement for keeping your primary weapon firing for a determinate amount of time; which is gained by standing in the respawn room and finding a spot to keep your mouse button on hold instead of being useful your team. Another two achievements require you to waste an ubercharge on performing an idiotic emote and for using your melee weapon respectively, putting your medic and your team in jeopardy. There is also at least one achievement I know about that requires you to die to the environment.

This is all useless sh!t which has no place in any game, yet every player is tasked to perform all these things at least once.

Games are best when they have simple rules and objectives that everyone can follow, which is how the successful real life games are structured. Football players don't earn achievements for consecutively kicking the ball ten times, nor for getting tackled five times in a single match; racing drivers don't gain an achievement for racking up x amount of dollars in car crash damage. The only goals in their minds should be this- get the ball through the goal; be the first to cross the finish line. The only 'achievement' to these games is called winning.

Every feature needs to justify its existence by serving the purpose of the game and the victory conditions it lays out, and achievements don't do this.

Actually, there's a massive social element to playing online.

You shouldn't be so naive to think that online is synonymous with blind auto-matched ranked games.

There's more to online multiplayer than just games. I like to think people that don't know this are ******* idiots.

I was being facetious. *sigh*

Online multiplayer is bringing the environment of single player skirmishes and local multiplayer online. Not exactly hard to understand this appeal. People who don't want it won't use it; people who do will.

There is no way that you need achievements to have a good social environment. And there is no excuse to put rewards in to enable pubs to play nonsensically, which isn't even the same thing as just goofing off and having fun.

And this is another time I've been accused of having a man crush with ranked play.

I enjoy the daily challenges in Halo Reach (online & campaign), they're not much different from achievements. I also enjoyed completing achievements in Batman: Arkham City. Achievements can be fun, I say go for it if there's time to develop them.