Coincidentally, my cold/flu/ugly fever seemed to break yesterday, the same day that PlanetSide was entering its last day of beta. I was able to somewhat crawl out of bed and enjoy the last few moments of precious gameplay. I won't be buying it. Not because of bugs or horrible experiences or what not, but because at launch they didn't have the features they planned on including pre-launch or any kind of varied gameplay. Important features, which will now not be put in place for another six months. You see, they have to slowly trickle out this new content in order to keep people interested (because it's not exactly an infinite supply of Coolness right from the beginning - much the opposite) over a long span of time. In about a year, PlanetSide will not only have what it should have had at launch, it'll also have a lot more stuff that should make it something more deserving of its inflated monthly fee. Maybe I'll check it out then.

While dancing ludely in the fever dreams of the flu, I had a couple of interesting game ideas. The first of which, the one that I've been thinking about the most, would mostly be a survey in gamer psychology. I don't think it would be enjoyable to play for more than a few hours, but it would show us how your average multiplayer FPS gamer operates.

Imagine this:

Two teams, each with a base and a flag and a large mass of space seperating the two said bases/flags. Standard Team Deathmatch setup, but each team has (10,000) points and, more importantly, nobody can get hurt or killed. You have two guns: A slow-firing pistol that is inaccurate at anything more than short range, a quick-firing rifle that is a bit more accurate at long ranges. When you shoot someone, you take points away from their team based on where you hit and with what weapon - the pistol has a 2x modifier while the rifle is 1x. Head shots get 40 points deducted, Torso gets 30, limbs get 20. The pistol would get 80, 60 and 40, respectively. If your flag is captured or your team hits 0 points, you lose. So your strategy would be to fight conservatively and intelligently. If your team is losing massive amounts of points in a battle, you need to pull back or do something different. You can't rush in, because you can't kill the enemy and take the field just by killing all of the opposition - you need to make them fall back by dropping their points, then you need to swoop in and take their flag. When the flag is taken, the enemy will need to do everything in their power to drop your team's points to 0 before the flag-carrier gets home. There is no way to get it back once it is in a player's possession, so the defense around a flag will be tight and nearly impossible to penetrate (I imagine ten players surrounding the flag so that nobody can squeeze between them and grab it).

But what if your team is running low on points? You can get more. By doing a Player Suicide, you will be taken out of battle for a minimum of 60 seconds and then be placed at a spawn point in the bowels of your base. For this, your team will get 250-500 points, but you have distanced yourself from the Battle and it may take a few minutes to get back to it - in that time, your team could lose more points than you gave back.

I think it would be interesting to see what happens when a game focuses strictly on strategy instead of "Die, Respawn, Fire, Repeat."


posted by AppleMask at 5/19/2003 06:05:00 PM