The mice and the food on button press experiment all over again (most games are). In order to make it effective, you have to give out a good pellet often enough.
In other words: For the RNG system to be “fine” it would need a mercy mechanic to work. Since Fatshark really does work with true RNG (most devs are not daring enough for this), it means you can get lucky three times a row or conversely get absolutely blasted on your rolls 50 times in a row.
It’s dice roll for dice roll a new chance every time. And with 4 upgrade levels and only 2 of those being redeemable, it means you low odds to get the combo you really want.
That’s a really old post.
At the time we didn’t have Brunts Weapon Lottery, Emperor’s Rewards dropped with some 20% odds rather than 100% and locks were additionally based on category (Changing one perk meant you could only change perks, changing one blessing meant you could only change blessings).
The only way to reliably get weapons at the time was the Shop.
The current additions to the system gives more “tickets” to the lottery, so to speak. You get more rolls, but that doesn’t really reduce the odds all that much.
With Brunt’s you are trading one layer of RNG (item type) for being blind to a more contentious layer of RNG (weapon stats) with a massive (compared to VT2) item level range.
The locks are an improvement but still are a permanent lock on a weapon forcing you to start again if the result isn’t what you want.
Emperor’s gift is still a full-on lottery since all aspects of it are random, with no feedback on whether your actions in mission (secondary objectives) are improving it at all. You can’t even break it down into anything useful, unless you luck out.
While the additions do improve the odds, it hasn’t particularly improved the experience of getting items, especially when the system makes you brick your items yourself.
Because there are other ways to incentivise crafting or de-incentivising min-maxing other than effectively never giving your players what they want and making players ruin their own hopes?
If they didn’t want people to craft they could have just removed the crafting and crafting complaints would be non-existent, as long as they strip the itemisation too, that way they can shut up the “any weapon is viable” crowd too.
Too much RNG isn’t fun when it removes player control or agency.
Anyways other, more niche “wargames” have done similar things. Foxhole and Hell Let Loose come to mind on that front where to succeed you at least need some loose command structure.
Also not an FPS but Divinity: Dragon Commander my beloved (game is crusty as hell but I love it).
Didn’t Warhammer fantasy have 1 or 2 popular MMOs back in the day?
I remember playing back in the day the human faction needed an actual experienced player who knew how to command and communicate and players willing to listen to actually win games. Without either of these aliens could just pick people off and dominate resources until they just charge with their best units.
Once they get someone who can coordinate several squads of players to focus down high value aliens and burn though the aliens resources while holding their own. Humans are unstoppable.
Yes. That’s precisely what I meant. Revolutionary game conceptually. But too unique perhaps? It had a dedicated group of players and dwindled away. Absolute niche.
But this type of concept is what I see working if done right. For Warhammer anyway.
This was like reading a prophecy. It’s same thing over and over again with FS. They were even more greedy now, tryin to squeeze additional revenue from product they will (again) abbandon via FOMO and RNG.
Oddly enough there are 2 other examples i can think of both on Source.
One was a mod called Empires where the entire game revolves around a PvP Battlefield like experience with tickets, objectives, base building, and vehicles but the entire game is centered around following commander orders, building a base, capturing resources and building up RTS style to eventually beat the other side by running them out of tickets, killing all enemies when no spawn is active, or destroying the command vehicle.
Other example I can think of is Nuclear Dawn which was basically the same game but on a smaller infantry v infantry scale rather than including vehicles and other stuff and was much more cyberpunk focused. Game was fun but i think the devs intentionally tanked the game for some reason. Game is dead now but was really good for the time.
Both really pushed the theoretical limit of what could be achived in the source engine.
There was also an actual RTS someone made as a Source mod with Resistance vs Combine. There were some drop in features as units but it was an RTS first.
It does exist! It had 800k subscribers at one point, was shut down in 2014 but still has a fan run server available. I know nothing about MMOs so I don’t know if that was considered good or bad but it appears to have favorable reviews?
Also had this really cool trailer:
(Why the hell do MMOS always have the best trailers of all time that is nothing like the gamplay in the slightest. Old school equivalent of modern mobile game ads.)
Apparently last year they announced that Nexos was making a PvE MMO for Warhammer Age of Sigmar ( ) but I don’t know anything beyond that.
So at the very least there was one Warhammer MMO that people seemed to like although it was focused almost entirely on PvP, and they appear confident enough to try another, although more focused on fantasy. Side note: Would Inquisitor: Martyr be considered an MMO?
Back somewhat more on topic, I always thought Battlefield style would probably be best. Bigger maps and a larger focus on objectives, but not too in depth or “realistic” to push people away.
Personally my “dream 40k game” would be in that style of 32 vs 32 or hopefully now 64 vs 64 as all Space Marines set in the Horus Heresy. It’d be very easy suspension of disbelief to have people be customized as any Legion they want, and I think would be more interesting and add more of a spin to normal FPS games like Battlefield being in Power Armor etc (I am very biased I love HH as a setting). That or also something like either battlefield or one of those more niche titles, but pve as like 50-100 guardsmen fighting off waves of orks, chaos cultists, Tyranids etc.
it was dogwater. the PVP balance was actually really terrible and they had no way to keep the population balanced (as you will see if you play the fan-server, the major groups playing rotate which side the play on and everyone not in their circle just gambles on if they get rolled or not that day) the PVE balance went down sharply if you didn’t have a lot of people in the area because of how it worked and all the items were worse than the PVP rewards so it was usually empty and a bunch of classes were “you have one useful build and that’s still pretty mid, you should play a more meta class instead of one you like”.
it did let you ambush and slaughter elves though so it wasn’t without a silver lining.
That’s what made the old Battlefield games great. Bad Company 2. It was the maps. Even though there were certain chokepoints there was alot of vegetation, buildings, hills, lots of cover as you move area to area. You can sneak through the bushes and use smoke launcher/smoke grenades, permanent spawn beacon to flank.
It’s destruction on buildings, walls etc were actually better than Battlefield 5 and 2042 in particle effects and mroe modular walls to break down.
Later Battlefield games became more flat land, open terrain, fish in a barrel for snipers. In a real war, soldiers don’t run out in the open, they move using buildings, cover, hills, vegetation.
Bad Company 2 you could get top of scoreboard with negative KD and get most points by soloing objectives in rush mode as attacker blowing up mcoms. One soldier can make the difference. I know because I abuse the hell of spawn beacon behind enemy lines because they all have tunnel vision scoping in opposite direction.
Nowadays - Not enough terrain cover to push forward. It is flat land design to encourage cluster f.
Battlefield Vietnam - Another great example of vegetation, hills, cover. It gave people motivation to push forward using cover.
In objective based games there should be more reward to playing the objectives than kill count. Then people will play the objective with more motivation than sitting on a hill sniping all day.
I’ve heard lots of great things about the older battlefield games. Unfortunately that was before my time and I never really had the chance to play them (partly age, partly my parents were really, really against me playing M games). My first Battlefield game was Bf 4, and I am still very fond of it even with it’s more “arcadey” feel. Additionally I loved Bf 1 and had a ton of fun with it.
However I don’t think a more casual game experience is always bad. And especially with 40k already being a dense setting, I feel like it could be easy to content creep a game into something only lore nerds like me would like.
I think really the closest thing I’ve had to that is playing Hell Let Loose, which I also really enjoyed on the opposite end of the spectrum. More realistic engagement distances, open fields where you have to stick to hedge rows or use smoke to advance safely, etc.
Still to this day Bad Company 2 is being played on private servers without needing additional cost. Basically means don’t have to rely on EA servers anymore.
To unlock weapons and attachments, simply by playing with that weapon for couple of days. Nice and simple back in the day.
Hell Let Loose - Good example of how tactics, cover, positioning, smoke gave people more confidence to play the objective.
) but I don’t know anything beyond that.