Originally Posted by CutterJohn
How many do you expect there to be?
MOAR VEHICLES! will not make a bad game better.
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I expect there to be more roles that are not shared among vehicle platforms to make it more interesting and varied gameplay. Rather than sharing all roles among all vehicle platforms because it cuts down on development time.
And not defining vehicle roles and niches properly will lead to confusion, disregard and improper use, not to mention generalised playstyles.
Defining the function of a unit is very important as is making it recognizable for others. It makes all the difference to how you can handle or approach such a unit. If everything looks the same from a distance, it is going to be very annoying and very boring over time because these situations cannot vary a lot. Even with some tweaked stats, they will still handle and be handled approximately the same, where as if you have more platforms you have room for alternative combinations of vehicles to create more strategies and combine different advantages and disadvantages. Some overlap is fine, but I'd rather they are distinct vehicles, that can be tweaked than jacks of all trades platforms which you you customize for the situation each fight at the touch of a button. Handy for the user, but IMO that will become rather annoying gameplay wise as someone you just had the advantage over as a paper (AV vs air) platform, suddenly has changed at a vehicle term to a scissors platform (AA vs air) during your second pass. How easy it will be to switch remains to be seen of course, but such situations will probably occur a lot around base fights.
Still, there can already be huge differences between just light, medium and heavy tanks and they can differ even greater depending on the armour plating thickness and angles you provide them, their turret, viewing systems etc. Two unit platforms to cover ALL OF THESE roles on top of roles that are not traditional tanking roles is very little. If you only use one basic platform, your options are becoming very limited, regardless on whether you can get a small armour buff or change the colour of the headlights. I presume they will be using multiple hitboxes on the new vehicles to dedicate weakspots, which will mean you'll be aiming at the same weakspots over and over even against tanks of different roles. That's a bit boring as it is predictable, not?
Compare with World of Tanks where every tank has completely different hitboxes, engine locations, plating setup, periscopes or not, big or small turrets, heavily reinforced or light turrets and hulls, big weight and low weight to engine ratios, etc. Those units each behave in their own unique way and each is modified with modules making each behave different with different loadouts. Basically we will only get a couple of those whereas there you got dozens of tanks that each play differently and play even more differently when you load different modules. Each unit has different weakspots you can make use of and here they'll be pretty much the same every time (if there is such a thing as vehicle hitboxes at all).
In PS you don't need as many platforms as in WoT, but I find it annoying that a one crew vehicle like the Lightning already removed the Skyguard niche and a dual crew vehicle at that.
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