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Killing Floor by Tripwire Interactive
nextnametaken
Posts: 2,212 Arc User
A while back I started a suggestion thread only hinting at this game.
I didn't want to come right out and say "copy Killing Floor", mostly because discussion of other games was off the table.
Within days of that discussion I found that "Blast from the past" could be farmed infinitely for loot and non stop super hero arcade fun with tastey XP from level 35 and up.
Close enough to satisfy that adrenaline, dopamine, "one more level" buzz Killing Floor does.
It also was something I could teach others about, which is a big big part of Killing Floor's team play experience. However so few players get into the Apocalypse, I had a rant or two in the forums about it.
Cryptic listened to what was implied in the suggestion thread and made the waves of Forum Malvanum with an announcer and the endless respawns in Fatal Error.
Like Jim Shooter once said to me in a a heart breaking letter that made me the super villian
I am today, "Close but no cigar."
The announcer is annoying and breaks the game play.
In Killing Floor the announcer says something like "Buy guns or be butthurt" and everyone is either too busy killing things to pay attention or hustling for her location, which changes from wave to wave.
She's annoying to, but she's not intrusive.
The endless waves in Fatal Error don't have any motivating reason to move around the map. So when we tried to run the mission like "endless combat, wooohoo" it just became like a screensaver or something, really boring.
The "every one run to the one prize at the end of the mission like a rat tapping a button for drugs" game play we have in alerts is pretty numbing, like drugs for rats. Killing floor says "run the maze for the button" and it's usually a big rush for everyone to do what needs doing the time allowed. Its also heartbreaking to zone in on wave seven at the least second with nothing but a pistol and a knife, oh man, especially since each player in the team adds monsters to the wave.
If we had some gameplay in waves, without interrupting us with cut scenes, offering varied reward or boost locations, I think it would be a lot more fun, like running up and down the road to blast the adds in Radiation Rumble, but with more gameplay than running up and down one road four times.
So this thread is for Cryptic's Devs to maybe check out the game, maybe play it, get the team feeling in there: the money begging, the loot and cash sharing, the wise cracking, the trolling, the locking doors, setting up bombs, hacking and slashing and running and gunning.
One way to capture some of the thrilling experience might be to improve alerts with a "Next Wave" button above the "Leave Map" button.
Skip the whole 'waiting to leave, click the leave button, rezone, requeue, waiting, readying, waiting, rezoning, respawning all the pets, waiting, check everyone's level, sigh, maybe leave, stupid cut scene, be the healer that has to attack first" boring delay we have now.
You had a good time in the team up? Stick together and look out, here comes more mobs and another boss on the same old map, but maybe from different spawn points and maybe with some more aggression than "duh huh, lets wait for those hero's down the dock to fight us".
I didn't want to come right out and say "copy Killing Floor", mostly because discussion of other games was off the table.
Within days of that discussion I found that "Blast from the past" could be farmed infinitely for loot and non stop super hero arcade fun with tastey XP from level 35 and up.
Close enough to satisfy that adrenaline, dopamine, "one more level" buzz Killing Floor does.
It also was something I could teach others about, which is a big big part of Killing Floor's team play experience. However so few players get into the Apocalypse, I had a rant or two in the forums about it.
Cryptic listened to what was implied in the suggestion thread and made the waves of Forum Malvanum with an announcer and the endless respawns in Fatal Error.
Like Jim Shooter once said to me in a a heart breaking letter that made me the super villian
I am today, "Close but no cigar."
The announcer is annoying and breaks the game play.
In Killing Floor the announcer says something like "Buy guns or be butthurt" and everyone is either too busy killing things to pay attention or hustling for her location, which changes from wave to wave.
She's annoying to, but she's not intrusive.
The endless waves in Fatal Error don't have any motivating reason to move around the map. So when we tried to run the mission like "endless combat, wooohoo" it just became like a screensaver or something, really boring.
The "every one run to the one prize at the end of the mission like a rat tapping a button for drugs" game play we have in alerts is pretty numbing, like drugs for rats. Killing floor says "run the maze for the button" and it's usually a big rush for everyone to do what needs doing the time allowed. Its also heartbreaking to zone in on wave seven at the least second with nothing but a pistol and a knife, oh man, especially since each player in the team adds monsters to the wave.
If we had some gameplay in waves, without interrupting us with cut scenes, offering varied reward or boost locations, I think it would be a lot more fun, like running up and down the road to blast the adds in Radiation Rumble, but with more gameplay than running up and down one road four times.
So this thread is for Cryptic's Devs to maybe check out the game, maybe play it, get the team feeling in there: the money begging, the loot and cash sharing, the wise cracking, the trolling, the locking doors, setting up bombs, hacking and slashing and running and gunning.
One way to capture some of the thrilling experience might be to improve alerts with a "Next Wave" button above the "Leave Map" button.
Skip the whole 'waiting to leave, click the leave button, rezone, requeue, waiting, readying, waiting, rezoning, respawning all the pets, waiting, check everyone's level, sigh, maybe leave, stupid cut scene, be the healer that has to attack first" boring delay we have now.
You had a good time in the team up? Stick together and look out, here comes more mobs and another boss on the same old map, but maybe from different spawn points and maybe with some more aggression than "duh huh, lets wait for those hero's down the dock to fight us".
Post edited by nextnametaken on
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You level up and get perks that make you tougher, faster, stronger, more accurate,more deadly.
Every wave you kit yourself out to be more effective or geared up to level your various 'perks'/archetypes.
You use fire, electricity, welding tools, blades, guns, explosives, and heals.
You play these awful ugly character's with hideous British accents that tend to
repeat the same annoying catch phrases over and over
like "Reloading" and "Cover me" and "I need some dosh".
When you are in the thick of a mob of horrors, big and small, and a grenade explodes next to you, a flame thrower is blazing all around your silhoutte, bullets are pumping into your back and head (because you're a boob blocking your team mates), and you slice off limbs with your katana, and every second after that for the next five to ten minutes is some variation of that theme, it feels incredibly heroic.
A lot more so than spamming the same key at the bag of hit points in alerts.
Speaking of bags of hit points.
The end wave boss, The Patriarch, is just that.
He scales health with number of players in the team and heals himself after running off invisibly and spawning adds a few times. Note he doesn't do this in the same exact viewing area as the team like in Alerts. He runs around the map and comes back out of hiding to kill someone horribly.
I always wander off to plant bombs so, I get chased down by the surprise boogie man a lot. Good times.
Since the boss and the number of adds scale with the team size, each wave, losing players or having a small team, or running solo aren't a huge issue. Taking out the boss with your knife as a level zero berserker isn't happening. But maybe you can grenade him and find more ammo/grenades between his heals. However unlike alerts, you are not trapped in there with him for two minutes alone, unable to do any damage or even make him pause. You die from boss kill and its game over.
Because the boss is a meaningful threat that take forty minutes of tension to reach and not "everyone gang up on this same guy/girl/monster every two minutes"
It's a bit much sometimes.
Champions with its stiff rag dolls and corny NPC characters provides a kinder gentler violence.
If Champions Online is a Pina Colada then Killing Floors is fistful of gasoline and ground mystery meat.
However, if Champions added gears and 'gibs' particle objects to robot enemies like the object spam of the earth powerset, well, just think of the carnage we could enjoy without wanting to BBQ or vomit.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Each time they do this they get front page over at Steam.
Each time the population pumps up and stays up even when the global Steam population
of current online players playing the top 100 runs low. Champions needs this kind of marketing action.
They have some kind of tie ins with Valve, kill x monsters, get some whatever they are called rewards, and you get a hat in Team Fortress or something. Pre-order some other game and you get access to a new sword or super gun offers appear occasionally.
Would be nice if Cryptic offered something from time to time.
I just had an idea of 3 subs for one! NW, CO, STO for the same low price of $9.99.
Maybe it wouldn't work to get everyone playing all three games but its something to throw in their
faces every four months or Steam mega-sale to grab the people who didn't seen or snag the opportunity before.
Could feature a different game in the bundle each time, just to keep them out on the road picking up tricks.
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Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
You get another taste of this during the winter event with Clarence.
It is a similiar thrill we had with the the Mega-Destroid event and Cryptic kind of tried to get
that 'it's important to move somewhere else on the map' feeling with Nighthawk, but that set up was pretty awkward.
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@Pallih in game
Funny you should mention that video from 2010
One big way of keeping their profile high is having these events that
introduce new temporary seasonally themed content every year.
Here's the 2011 map and the one from 2012.
Compared to four years in Champions Online
Well to be fair, this was Winter 2011 plus Whiteout under the tree at the end of the year.
Tripwire keeps the game relevant with some temporary holiday themed models and a map and a sale.
The game maintains thousands of concurrent players 24/7 for three years.
Well maybe it dips down to 900 something sometimes.
They advertise their deal, they don't just post to the facebook or a home page or login window that nobody reads.
They shove it into the faces of over 12 million Steam players, when Steam players are geared for the big sales and spending money and killing free time. They also use other outlets like the local computer store.
Actually they responded to player demand in their forums and offered the first female
player character, after two successful years without one, free if you bought the new boxed version.
The forum threads basically read like "I will pay you for a female character", and
"I will buy another copy of the game for my friends if you make this!" I didn't think they'd do it.
One sale/event happened after another, more scary monsters, more scary maps.
Then one day there it was in the local computer store, on the shelf!
The game used to be all the same style of 'trapped in this maze/map place, monster onslaught in waves while you buy guns and level up". Players modded it to have storied missions where it became "thousands of monsters just keep piling in at you while you push through this maze/map place to checkpoints with whatever gear spawns on the ground and finally reach the trader to actually buy stuff an hour later, and then survive another 40 minutes of hell"
So Tripwire added a new game format of long checkpointed missions like this.
We already have that, but because there's no queue/lobby and drop in feature its not so accessible.
Someone has to request team from someone, instead of anonymously double clicking a server or
mission or team name or something to that effect.
You can just jump into teams in CO, but its often awkward, people with their status as some mission
are actually RPing, banking, tailoring, something else that is not running that mission at all.
Long ago the dev blog said they planned to move all the missions to the 'new encounter system'.
To me that sounded like Alert Queue for every mission in the game.
People would pick their favorites and play the crap out of them.
As long as I queued my favorites, someone would queue it because it popped up in their list.
Just like it goes down in every multpilayer Unreal Engine game basically. That was a good dream.
We actually have this system in place almost.
The list of instances are there, and you can see all the players in a given map.
You can then request team from them, and they might be in combat and get mad or they might just be antisocial and get mad or because the map only lasts 2 minutes solo, their done before they can respond to your team invite and they certainly don't want to run that map again.
Or you can't get to the place in the game they are because of some crazy sequence that
needs triggering, KF player made mission maps had a similar flaw.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Oh, f*** off with this s***. We get it. You think we're rejects. You want to be the meat-headed jock shoving us in a locker. It's beyond counter-productive at this point.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
That'd be a viable argument if you could actually see full zones in that window.
Also doesn't help that you're comparing two games of different genres.
There is no #4, or #5 or #6.
You can search for those in the social UI and find every "#4", "#5" or "#6" zone in the game.
The comparison is completely valid because we can compare two different types of marketing.
One way is the Cryptic way, free to play, over priced premium content, no marketing, 20% sales on stuff gamers never even heard of, few content updates and fewer people in the game by the day.
The other game uses persistent sales and offers to an online market that is over twelve million strong and hungry for sales and offers everyday and especially at certain times of the year. That game's population is high enough that we can see it on the Steam Top 100.
We can see it drawing more daily gamers than a game with better character customization and team play than CO.
That game also goes on sale often for $7 or $4 or something to that effect. Never free.
We can see KF also draws more Steam players than a game based on a franchise with
a multi million person fan base that spends billions of dollars a year on the related products.
(Oh but its 305pm server time and Star Trek has taken the lead over both those games!)
Must be something to that marketing, huh?
Its not just genre because there's plenty of "First person shooter versus zombies", that also copy Tripwire's 'sell it while they are hungry' sales timing and tactics, that don't ever rate. People play them for three minutes and say "nope" and it sits in their library for life.
BUT, they spent $5 to $20 on it with high hopes and the three minutes they played add up to a number on a list, and that list gets large enough to show up and be noticed, and that leads to some people saying, "well other people like it, maybe I'll give it another go.", just like I did with Killing Floor and this game when it was 12,000 logins strong, and I've tried so hard to do with STO, TSW, DI, SRIII and L4D2 and say WTF?
If we want to compare genre.
Marvel's at around 2000 and DCUO is somewhere down the list at about 1,000 Steam players a day now, being tromped on by Killing Floor and STO and everyone else, but CO.
Or that may it have something to do with the fact that both games cater to different audiences. You're seriously trying to get people to take a bite of an apple and an orange to see if they both taste the same.
Get a team of 3 or 4. Up the difficulty. Enter an "activate the objects/npc" type of map.
Sidekick to a level one to three below the mobs.
Have someone go make all the mobs on the map mad even if it kills them, just to rile them all up.
Sometimes penetration causing range attacks do this through walls.
Now Push to the last room on the map as fast as you can without stoppping to kill everything, so that some mobs keep chasing and some mobs respawn because their leader type lives.
Or you can do your best to pull mobs from rooms and hold your ground for a different
kind of fight that's more like Killing Floor's standard 'find the best spot and hold it, they'll
come to us' kind of gameplay.
If anyone is defeated they stay down until everyone is dead or someone reaches that last room and stops whatever followed them in and whatever jumped on them there. Each time you do this is a 'wave.'
If you want to keep track of waves you can activate an object each time until the mission completes, you can leave all the objects alone and just keep mashing the mobs, just like not killing roots in Fatal Error or not entering the time machine in "Blast from the past" will give you endless spawns.
Oh each wave you are alllowed to add one power to your bar and/or some gear, you start with your energy builder plus another attack, and no gear.
You can meddle with the sidekicking, number of players active on a map, and/or adding gear for difficulty/xp gain/looting advantage etc.
Finish this all up with a boss fight mission, an alert or maybe use a boss fight mission with this kind of play through and just leave the boss alone until the last wave. Purple Reign and Poe-wnd scale up for two players, and the mobs in Poe-wnd seem to respawn on some unknown timer of their own.
I leveled twenty level forties before On Alert this way and supplement alerts with some variation of this for twenty more forties.
Now all we need is a UI to make it all happen at any mission door/zone anywhere, solo or in a team.
it's a first person shooter, a genre popular with males both adult,teens and preteens. Along with the car crash games near it on the list.
Now roughly what is the largest demographic of players for online games?
as for the waves of adds, go play NW, the people there are complaining about exactly that type of combat in dungeons with the boss fights.
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That's right. Champions doesn't need to be as succesful as killing floor, on the top 100.
It doesn't need to beat DCUO or Marvel. It needs to gain players instead of bleeding them.
It needs to sustain a healthy player base that pays real money for the product instead of pricing itself right out of the market. It needs to bury all the negative attention its generated with some
new blood that's wow'd by the incredible deal they got and all the fun they can have.
Persistent marketing with appealing offers will do that, where what they are doing
now post free to play rush and post On Alert band-aid has been having an opposite effect.
The "Try a premium AT for free with free character slot" promotion and On Alert revamp, brought the diminishing numbers at those times back up for very brief periods. However they are free to play numbers, not $5 or $20 for every head we count.
This isn't totally a comparison of CO and KF.
It's an open letter to Cryptic because they gave me, to some degree, what I asked for in the previous
thread about this game where I never explicitly told them the name of the game.
Maybe they'll play a bit and get that buzz going, have an inspiration and hire some marketing interns.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Because that's a boss fight and its Cryptic MMO style "Everyone stuck in a room, just wants to finish and get their reward and leave" style gameplay.
Killing Floor's boss fight is "Oh man where is he? He's somewhere on the map! Oh No there he is, take cover! Yay we hurt him. Oh where'd he go. I'm going to hide here. I'll weld this door. No don't weld that! Oh no, monsters! Ack! The boss look out! fight fight fight, ok safe again, aaagh monsters!, oh no the boss, bang bang bang boom kaplow slash slash kaboom kapow, yay we won!"
The journey and the finish (and the xp) are all the reward the players require.
MMO players are trained like rats to get/expect a prize at the end, and so they are not happy
if getting to the end takes too long for what the prize is. In Champions they've been trained to get their dopamine dose within two minutes, if looks like they won't they rage and leave the alert and spout off in zone about lowbies.
The same thing happens in KF at the trader. People scrounge and beg for cash to buy gear.
Not everyone is generous or even has enough to spare. Staying alive and figthing deep into the waves on a lowbie perk with just a pistol and a knife can be a bit too intense. Especially since each player adds mobs to the map, if you can't really take them down, someone else is likely to get overrun. Sometimes everyone.
KF's in game cash by the way is built up from $250 each time you start a new map to whatever you gain from kills each wave, with some wave finishing bonus applied. Champions could do this with recognition and sell low rent powerup buffs from a button and UI or NPC within the maps. I'd love to see a level where you could try/buy different powers every wave to really get a feel for the game. Maybe you are only allowed to have four powers total, just to keep the whole free form slot thing worth $3.50.
Champions is still listed under Atari, not under PWE. I have written to Customer service, I have contacted steam.
It also won't get any exposure if you can't even find it.
You have to type in most of the name to even get it to come up, when you search.
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My super cool CC build and how to use it.
You have to do that with any old and poorly marketed gamed with low population.
Freedom Force is still there, go search.
Killing Floor isn't on the front page everyday of every month.
But when there's a seasonal sale they make sure to put their product out there and so it
stays on the top 100 list everyday of every month.
The Atari thing is a management issue, not an issue with the marketplace.
All you are pointing out there is that Cryptic can't get its affairs in order.
lol, I did.
I didn't get the reference, so I did not.
Here's an ostrich with babies.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
@Aleatha1011 in CO | Keeper of the Cheesecake since Nov. 2011| Bunni BOT is on PRIMUS! | Come check out my deviantart page!
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Oh I heard that before. But it was so long ago that I forgot about it.
Here's a more recent musical quote for you to try to work into conversations:
"CALL NINE ONE ONE NOW BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WUBWUBWUBWUBWUWB SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE DA DA DA DA BOOOOOOOOOO JAAAAAAAA KUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKUKU WAAAAAAAAAAAAARF".
Admit it, you sang(?) along.
Here's Squirrelex:
#SQUIRREL TAILS NOW
My super cool CC build and how to use it.