Vehicle disabling

[Stardouser]

A lot of stuff from BF3 has been discussed but I haven't seen this being talked about. Battlefield 3 has a "feature" wherein a vehicle, let's use a tank as an example, when it hits 50% health, it is "disabled". This means that its speed is crippled and it then begins to slowly burn (lose a few health percentage points per second).

This applies to jeeps as well, and aircraft too.

I do not believe this is something that PS2 should have, and I haven't seen it discussed yet.

What say you?

Edit: NB: I am against disabling. This is not an idea suggestion, but a prevention thread.

[PredatorFour]

As a dedicated mag driver i resoundingly said no. If you played PS in tanks you would know what i mean when i say some of the best times were `getting away` when you had pretty much no health at all. Managing to escape/blow up the prey stalking you then find a nice place to repair was awesome and a big factor of why driving tanks was so fun.

You also knew when you had half health to gtfo outta hostile situations knowing you could at least take some damage on your way to repair.

[Gandhi]

I don't think it has a place in this game. It makes sense in BF3, where you have a limited number of people and tanks on the map, and might want to make an effort to save a disabled one. But in Planetside's scale if a tank is going to be disabled at 50%, you might as well just have it explode at 50%. Getting out to repair it would be a non-option in any kind of busy fight and nobody from your team is going to run into the melee to do it for the same reason. With the sheer number of people playing I don't think limping to safety at a crippling pace is going to be all that practical in most cases.

But I have nothing against, say, losing your main cannon either as a dice roll as a result of severe damage or by targeted attacks. Or even crippling your speed in the same fashion, as long as it's not too easy to do.

[Xyntech]

I think that as long as a vehicle has health, it should keep going. Yet at the same time, I like some of the ideas behind disabling.

I would propose this:

All vehicles are fully functional until they reach 0% health. Once they reach zero health, they become either disabled or destroyed.

If a vehicle has 1% health and is hit by a tank round, it is ALWAYS instantly destroyed. If a vehicle loses the last of it's health to small arms fire, it will ALWAYS be merely disabled. How powerful the final blow was, how low the vehicles health when that final blow was delivered, and the base quantity of armor that the vehicle has would all determine how likely it was to just be disabled or instantly destroyed.

Disabled vehicles would then be given a secondary health bar, with burning damage slowly eating away at it until the vehicle finally blew up. Additional enemy shots could hasten it's final destruction.

The crew inside would have to get out to avoid taking burn damage, but assuming they were able to survive outside the vehicle, they could then attempt to repair the disabled vehicle.

I just don't think it's right for a vehicle to claim to have health and yet not be able to function, or for every vehicle to be disabled before being destroyed. I don't see any problem with having a system in place that allows for the potential to 'revive' a dead vehicle, provided it was merely disabled and not destroyed.

[FastAndFree]

Most definitely no, except for aircraft at the very bottom few percents of their armor bar (replacing blowing up with crashing and then blowing up)

[Coreldan]

Lol. What did BF3s vehicle disabling even do? It never stopped moving, it never stopped shooting. But hey, free points for "disabling" vehicle despite it being fully functional.

[Fenrod]

At less than 10%, aircrafts should be slowed down.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

I think that as long as a vehicle has health, it should keep going. Yet at the same time, I like some of the ideas behind disabling.

I would propose this:

All vehicles are fully functional until they reach 0% health. Once they reach zero health, they become either disabled or destroyed.

If a vehicle has 1% health and is hit by a tank round, it is ALWAYS instantly destroyed. If a vehicle loses the last of it's health to small arms fire, it will ALWAYS be merely disabled. How powerful the final blow was, how low the vehicles health when that final blow was delivered, and the base quantity of armor that the vehicle has would all determine how likely it was to just be disabled or instantly destroyed.

Disabled vehicles would then be given a secondary health bar, with burning damage slowly eating away at it until the vehicle finally blew up. Additional enemy shots could hasten it's final destruction.

The crew inside would have to get out to avoid taking burn damage, but assuming they were able to survive outside the vehicle, they could then attempt to repair the disabled vehicle.

I just don't think it's right for a vehicle to claim to have health and yet not be able to function, or for every vehicle to be disabled before being destroyed. I don't see any problem with having a system in place that allows for the potential to 'revive' a dead vehicle, provided it was merely disabled and not destroyed.

Actually, that's not a bad idea, because the disabling occurs AFTER it would have been dead in any other shooter game.

And for the immersion lovers, here's a thought. It seems like the tanks have a top mounted machine gun on them...what if a destroyed tank persisted for a few minutes where all the systems are broken and destroyed but people can jump into the top spot of the turret and use the machine gun? Those machine guns might be remote controlled, I couldn't tell.

Originally Posted by Coreldan

Lol. What did BF3s vehicle disabling even do? It never stopped moving, it never stopped shooting. But hey, free points for "disabling" vehicle despite it being fully functional.

They still move, but at about 1/5 speed.

[Malorn]

In the GDC video I'm quite sure I saw a Prowler go disabled just before it was destroyed.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Malorn

In the GDC video I'm quite sure I saw a Prowler go disabled just before it was destroyed.

If disabling occurs just before destruction it's not a huge deal. HOWEVER, I should mention that with BF3's system, you have to repair all the way to 100% before the disabling stops. If disabling occurred at 10%, it should stop when repaired past 20%.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

I would propose this:

All vehicles are fully functional until they reach 0% health. Once they reach zero health, they become either disabled or destroyed.

Disabled vehicles would then be given a secondary health bar, with burning damage slowly eating away at it until the vehicle finally blew up. Additional enemy shots could hasten it's final destruction.

The crew inside would have to get out to avoid taking burn damage, but assuming they were able to survive outside the vehicle, they could then attempt to repair the disabled vehicle.

What you describe could be achieved with a single health bar. Its just bigger and at a certain point the vehicle becomes disabled and starts on fire. When that happens depends on how big the 'disabled' health bar is vs the normal health bar. Just stitch them together.

You seem to dislike having a false sense of health where you see a health bar and it's not really the health you have because some of it will mean you are disabled.

That seems reasonable to me to show players exactly how much health before their vehicle will be useless rather than hiding it inside a health bar.

But on the other side of things, its also important to show hostile players exactly how much health is required to blow something up. I assume there will be an advanced targeting implant or something similar that shows health of targets. The opposite is true for blowing something up as being in i - you don't care about disable, you just want to know how close something is to being dead and having two health bars is deciving as to what it might really take to destroy the tank.

[IronMole]

Planetside used to have vehicle disabling on aircraft (lost control at certain damage) until they changed it to the bailing mechanism.

[EVILPIG]

I'm all for the ability to damage components that will affect a vehicles performance. I don't want this if it will affect game performance due to excessive hitboxes. I think a happy medium is for random systems to be affected when a vehicle gets under a certain threshold. 25% seems more appropriate to me.

[lolroflroflcake]

I've always found vehicle disabling to be sort of a pointless form of trolling on behalf of the people who make the game, sort of a last, "ha ha you sucked at driving/piloting and now your gonna die for it."

I mean just randomly exploding once you reach a certain damage level is also silly, but I really don't need the game to help me along in dying.

And plus if your a good driver and are constantly escape the fire of the entire enemy empire by the skin of your teeth I feel you should deserve to escape, not end up crippled and barely moving while some jerk picks you off at his leisure. It's a feature to make the game revolve around infantry by making vehicles even more vulnerable, so I don't like it.

[Tamas]

NO.

It's a bad concept to begin with. The only acceptable thing is that when left with <10% HP it may start to "burn" - aka slowly looses it's remaining HP. Even damaging tracks/engine/turret is a far better idea (temporarily disabling or reducing effectiveness).

The way BF3 works is stupid to say the least and I played since BF 1942 (first game). Auto regen if above 50%, if below - disabled and slowly burning - want to fix it? Fix it to 100%.....

If what 10-15% is the mark where disabling should occur and the fix should be at ~20 %.