SmedBlog (last year): NPC Enemies and Armies

[Darthkorr]

no. Keep it PVP only

[TaintedPaladin]

<-- My reaction to NPCs in PlanetSide 2

[Majordopehead]

as a 4th faction with tries to steam roll all the factions yes...maybe once or twice a year other than that .....no sorry PS is a FPS 1st and a MMO second......

[super pretendo]

Honestly I don't see too much of a problem with cannon fodder robots, as long as its a special part of the game. Like, if a faction has a few centers, then engineers have the privilege of deploying simple automated ground robots with short range guns.

[SUBARU]

Just have one question,WHY?

[super pretendo]

How is there this much of a negative reaction to something that would actually augment the vision and playstyle of PS2, while esports, which is a full 180 from the MMOFPS open world formula, gets praise?

[Murkie]

Did I miss the part where someone actually explained why it was necessary to introduce PVE to Planetside 2?
When I first saw this I honestly thought it was a joke.

[SergeantNubins]

I'd go with the nc waves thing, if it was limited to one map only, but not across all maps. Its going to be a love it or hate it thing, and most people seem to hate it so keep it limited and it wont cause too much harm to those that really dont like it. I like the scripting thig.. cant really see how that would work as it would mean one person in charge of the waves wouldnt it?

Super powerful aliens.. actually of the 3, this is the idea I like least. I dont find it fun to spend an hour blasting a big powerful alien that has a million hitpoints.

[fvdham]

Replace with: NPC wildlife.

Maybe: dinosaur/dragon planet.

[Drakkonan]

I really want a PvE focused MMOFPS, but Planetside isn't, and shouldn't be that game.

It's just not worth all the work that goes into coding adequate AI.

[Celfoid]

I don't necessarily have a problem with the concept. I think I would prefer PS2 to be primarily PvP, but every now and then a few aliens to spice things up wouldn't be too bad. It shouldn't be a regular thing, IMO.. but a special event tossed in there every now and then.

Perhaps it could be coupled with any sort of change that may substantially effect the gameplay or meta-game of PS2. For example, introducing naval warfare by having aliens roll up on various coastline bases across different continents and just starting a massive assault, before the factions even have naval capabilities themselves. Have the factions fight them off and reverse engineer the tech or something as plot. Maybe the aliens have some kind of new experimental weaponry that gets added to the pools of each faction after they NPC army has been driven off.

I dunno, not really sure if its a good idea, just throwing it out there. But I wouldn't want consistent NPCs in PS2. The only AI I'd want to see everyday is that from turrets n' whatnot. :P Like in PS

[RoninOni]

Originally Posted by Blackwolf

Why random? If you were going to launch an invasion, wouldn't you put some thought and organization into it?

X number of small things per Y big thing which acts as a commander or lead unit. Y number of big things per Z great big thing if you want a larger scale invasion. The recipe works no matter what kind of aliens you use (a race of aliens that are similar to each other and pilot vehicles, or a insect like race where there are vast differences between creature 1 and 2 based on what they were born to do).

I said random or designed....

Anything designed shouldn't become too formulaic though

Originally Posted by Drakkonan

I really want a PvE focused MMOFPS, but Planetside isn't, and shouldn't be that game.

It's just not worth all the work that goes into coding adequate AI.

http://www.firefallthegame.com/

MMOFPS with PVE focus.

It'll have PvP, but it'll all be more arena like like WoW's, not warfare like PS2, so both have room to exist.

Red5 is also looking to be another excellent community focused developer, so I'm actually really excited. It's beta is out, so sign up.

It'll also be F2P with primarily cosmetic items for sale.

[brighthand]

I'm voting for the first idea only. Some random -BUT RARE- Alien invasions will add some more life and variation to the planet- especialy combined with other random events such as snow storms and heavy rain and such. All of that would enhance the the experience.

What would degrade the experience is NPC armies and other random, resource-hogging fodder. It would be highly unsatisfying not being sure if the kill I just got was off of a fellow human, or some place-holder NPC (look at Brink). And if there were an indication of it being an NPC, I would still be annoyed that the people I came online to shoot are in the base behind there, while I have to deal with these foolish toy robots first before I can get to them.

Idea 3 just sounds like muddy waters for an FPS. While this is an MMO in some respects, I would be leary of drifting too far from the FPS formula with player-created robots and such, as you may be tampering with your currently very solid formula. Soon you would have market places, and villages, and hotels and pets and all kinds of nonesense, when people just wanted to engage in all out epic WAR. IMO, if I wanted to play an MMO (an RPG MMO), I would have chosen WoW, or Rift or something, but I didn't; I came here to engage the enemy in glorious strategic bah-tuhL!

EDIT: as for those Aliens, can one of them be a giant tall Collosus thing with powerful death rays? I would love to see one of those just drop down behind a tank column, and unleash oblivion light, wiping out 1/3 of their forces, then look over to my direction and starts klaterring over to us...the meaning of fear would become clear on that day.

[Duskguy]

i would highly reccomend that SOE takes say a year of normal PVP only and sees how that goes while adding/ upgrading it.

THEN ask again about the idea of a PVE faction/ invasion.

it could be that the PVP only will tire out many players or feel repetitive and people may want a change. and there could always be a seperate server where people can import their character to and play on that would get these npcs/invasions while there are servers dedicated to just PVP.

[zoidsking]

Originally Posted by Smed

I didn't go into much detail in my blog post. There are 2 separate ideas here. One is simple - Alien NPCs (the original Planetside design called them Shifters). They are superpowerful aliens that come in and attack everyone. There are a lot of special things about them I don't want to reveal right now but the idea is more the Alien Queen and not Zergs. So there wouldn't be thousands of them. But they would be nasty as hell.

The second idea is this. What if we had certain captureable buildings that when combined with a steady flow of resources the players had to pour in would result in waves of "creeps" ala LoL or DOTA that would go towards premade points in the world. So to attack a particular base one tactic would be to capture a nearby base.. capture the spawning facility and that would result in the NPC wave (again not thousands) moving towards a specific targeted base to attack.

One other key point about them I didn't mention - they would have buildable AI that players could actually make through a scripting language. (forgot this part too) - Also you would be able to sell that AI to other players if you were an AI designer. Think Robot Wars or cRobots.

These are just ideas. I enjoy the feedback.

Thanks

Smed

the first idea sounds good id say every 2 weeks for a 24-48hr period the day on week 2 being random so we don't know they are coming to keep things interesting. The other 2 ideas don't sound good at all to me and would ruin the player controlled aspect of the game.