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up/down in space. time for overhaul?
avnas
Member Posts: 51 Arc User
the most jarring thing about playing this game for me is that everything is very much limited to facing "up" - and this is compounded by the addition of discovery ships, who definitely do ignore up and down in space in their series.
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So if you change the way space works to let people face whichever way they like, how are abilities, controls and movement handled? how to address or prevent a jarring change in game operation?
1) controls and movement
not much actually needs to change to make 360 degree movement work. there's an artificial limit to how far you can turn in an arc right now which can simply be removed. it might be nice to have a roll control, which would be fairly easy to apply to the two stick console arrangement. this would stop a big change in operation, but other control systems could be considered like moving the current wsad controls to mouse and putting thrusters onto WSAD. (with a control scheme similar to war thunder or elite dangerous) - but these options change gameplay operation more and would mean targeting would need a button. maybe just offer this as a different style of controls.
if thrusters were added it would enable more drifting maneuvers using ship inertia, which is pretty cool really. i'd quite like to have my ship using it's thrusters to go upward while the engines go forward and i steer downward, you could flip the ship on it's nose. more nuanced controls (could be a nice D-pad control scheme for thrusters) would greatly impact the amount of cool technical maneuvers people could do.
it'd be nice if ship inertia was a bigger thing, it's quite odd how we just stop on a dime in space. i should have the option to drift rather than simply coming to a stop when i disable my engines.
2) abilities
how do you stop removing large amounts of click abilities from feeling like a big change in how the game operates?
offer players the ability to bind multiple abilities from various locations to a single hotkey. this means that you're only really going to be pressing a few different binds at most. like i'd set one up to trigger all beam, damage and battery skills, then a couple for different heals, and then space active traits. if the mouse control scheme was used you could reduce a lot of different abilities down to a few binds at once, rather than clicking 20 abilities - which, by the way, i'm annoyed that to get maximum effectiveness i have to look at my tray not my ship. offering concentrated ability activation which is player customised however they might like can only be a good thing.
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Addressing disorientation and limited weapon arcs in free space
the current control limitations could be retained within an ability similar to threatening stance, and these will level out the ship when de-activated
most weapons should be given a wider vertical arc, so that cannon and torp builds only really have to horizontally match to fire. something with a 45 degree horizontal arc should have 90 degrees vertical. it actually makes sense if you think about how a bird of prey's cannons for instance can move.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
So if you change the way space works to let people face whichever way they like, how are abilities, controls and movement handled? how to address or prevent a jarring change in game operation?
1) controls and movement
not much actually needs to change to make 360 degree movement work. there's an artificial limit to how far you can turn in an arc right now which can simply be removed. it might be nice to have a roll control, which would be fairly easy to apply to the two stick console arrangement. this would stop a big change in operation, but other control systems could be considered like moving the current wsad controls to mouse and putting thrusters onto WSAD. (with a control scheme similar to war thunder or elite dangerous) - but these options change gameplay operation more and would mean targeting would need a button. maybe just offer this as a different style of controls.
if thrusters were added it would enable more drifting maneuvers using ship inertia, which is pretty cool really. i'd quite like to have my ship using it's thrusters to go upward while the engines go forward and i steer downward, you could flip the ship on it's nose. more nuanced controls (could be a nice D-pad control scheme for thrusters) would greatly impact the amount of cool technical maneuvers people could do.
it'd be nice if ship inertia was a bigger thing, it's quite odd how we just stop on a dime in space. i should have the option to drift rather than simply coming to a stop when i disable my engines.
2) abilities
how do you stop removing large amounts of click abilities from feeling like a big change in how the game operates?
offer players the ability to bind multiple abilities from various locations to a single hotkey. this means that you're only really going to be pressing a few different binds at most. like i'd set one up to trigger all beam, damage and battery skills, then a couple for different heals, and then space active traits. if the mouse control scheme was used you could reduce a lot of different abilities down to a few binds at once, rather than clicking 20 abilities - which, by the way, i'm annoyed that to get maximum effectiveness i have to look at my tray not my ship. offering concentrated ability activation which is player customised however they might like can only be a good thing.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Addressing disorientation and limited weapon arcs in free space
the current control limitations could be retained within an ability similar to threatening stance, and these will level out the ship when de-activated
most weapons should be given a wider vertical arc, so that cannon and torp builds only really have to horizontally match to fire. something with a 45 degree horizontal arc should have 90 degrees vertical. it actually makes sense if you think about how a bird of prey's cannons for instance can move.
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Comments
Weapon arcs are just that, weapon arcs. A 45 degree weapon arc means 45 degrees in all directions, not 45 horizontal and 90 vertical. If you want a wider firing arc, use a weapon with a wider firing arc. If you want to run torps or cannons, then you deal with their firing arc limits. Flying the ship properly to bring weapons to bear is a much canon as the way the ships fly an is all part of what little bit of skill is actually needed to play this game. Otherwise they might as well just make every weapon an omni weapon and get rid of firing arcs completely taking piloting skills completely out of the equation
Would like to fly without some kinda of flight-assist/limitations.
Main ships: Dyson Tactical Science Destroyer + Qui'Tu Class Pilot Raptor