Nanite Systems Helmet

[Gatekeeper]

Originally Posted by Timealude

i honestly never got this argument, i feel the IFF in the game is pretty good..i honestly dont think the same helmets are going to make it hard to tell the difference between friend and foe.

Personally I'd say the IFF functions of the UI are ok at best, they're certainly nothing to write home about and don't always work well.

Even when they do work perfectly, the problem is that people still base their first impression mostly on what the character looks like to work out if it's a threat or not - which makes sense, since you need to work out what class they are, what weapon they have, whether they've noticed you or not, etc.

Having to do that initial assessment of the character, and then do a second check for the colour of the triangle over their head slows you down, and makes it more likely an enemy will get the drop on you. So people either rush it and end up shooting friendlies, or they take their time and enemies start firing first.

This makes the game more difficult and annoying for everyone (nobody likes being TKed), and it's really frustrating since it would have been very easy to avoid by just following some sensible design guidlines:

1) Make character silhouettes distinctive by faction. I.e. the general outline of a TR soldier should be distinctive at a glance, and hard to confuse with an NC or VS one.

2) Make sure that a distinctive faction-specific colour dominates all camo patterns. Don't make camos that are mostly white, green, grey or whatever with some little flashes of faction colour - make sure all characters have large, clear panels of blue, yellow, purple, teal or red on them at all times.

3) Make sure that camo-patterns never use colours normally associated with the other factions. No purplish camo for NC, no yellow camo for VS, etc. VS giraffe camo is a classic example of how bad PS2 is at this.

4) Make cosmetic items clearly faction-specific: don't have masks or helmets that are basically the same for all factions. Give each faction a specific, distinct flavour. Things like the distinctive VS infiltrator helm and the Protoss helms based on it are a great example of this, whereas maniac masks or this new NS helm are the opposite extreme.

tl;dr - people mix up friends and foe all the damn time in this game, new players especially. This is due to bad art direction, which this new helmet will only make worse.