Topics

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Feedback and Suggestions / Utility weapon: Air Blast Cannon

« on: July 26, 2013, 05:54:33 am »

Hey there,

I remember reading somewhere, that people were searching for ideas for utitliy weapons, to increase the diversity of usable weapons.
I hope I'm not repeating an often posted suggestion here, but how about this:

A weapon that builds up air pressure and upon release it pushes your ship in the opposite direction you are facing. How strong the push is depends on charging time and ship mass.

So, how could this be used? Depending on the position of the weapon and the direction it is facing you could use it for quick evasive movements (i.e. dodge a charging pyra by quickly moving sideways), use it as a emergency break by facing forward in the direction the ship is moving. Or just use it for short bursts of speed by firing backwards. Maybe even let it affect other ships that are near you, so you can push them away.

What do you guys think?

Imo this could open up some pretty interesting trick-play and new strategies. One other plus would be, that this weapon is even then viable, when it is not facing the enemy (or rather: it's especially viable then), which means that you can utilize more of your ships weapon slots at once.

2

Feedback and Suggestions / Ingame display of ship status

« on: June 20, 2013, 08:45:40 pm »

Hey there,

I've been playing the Engineer class for a while now and I quite like it, although I feel like that this class is the most tedious one to play. This has several reasons in my opinion, but I want to focus on one of them in this thread. It's about the thing the Engineer is mainly built around: the actual reparing and keeping the ship in shape.

Right now you are constantly running around the ship, trying to find anything that needs your attention. The thing that helps you with that are those floating icons that show you where there is something to repair. Although they do help you to find the stuff you want to repair, they only give you somewhat of an overview of the ship, if the ship itself is small. On bigger ships like the Galeon you quickly have problems with actually noticing when something gets damaged heavily and where your attention is needed the most.

The most obvious solution, for me, to that would be the permanent display of all parts on one fixed part of the screen. That way you could determine the state of your ship with a quick glance. I already wanted to post this thread earlier, but then I learned about the spectator mode and the fact, that there in fact is such a display of the ships state in the game already!

This lead to the conclusion, that you guys willfully excluded such an overview from the ingame perspective. I can only guess why this was done this way, but I think it would either be a gameplay or a design decision (only display the most basic info on the guy and let everyone figure out the rest themself / don't clutter up the screen with too much information).


Well, because this is the case, I'll now have to argue why I think GoIo would benefit from such an interface update.

First would be the fact, that the Engineer would actually be able to fulfill his role in the team better, than he can do it now. The most important thing an Engineer can do (within the scope of his class) is to repair the right stuff at the right time. So a good Engineer distinguishes himself from the rest, by applying his own ressources to the most important parts at the right time. With such an update you'd actually help the Engineer to do what he is supposed to do. Since I believe that the basic actions of Gunners and Pilots (shooting and flying) are in themself more enjoyable because of their very nature, I'd say that such support for the Engineer class is justified.

Then there is the teamplay aspect. Guns of Icarus is a teambased game, so everything that improves teamplay, also improves the game itself. With a fixed display of the ships parts you could also add an indication, when someone is repairing / rebuilding certain parts. I don't know how many times my friend yelled at me to repair the hull / balloon / engines or whatever, when I actually was doing just that at that very moment. When you see that something is being repaired just now, you can also use that information to distribute your own ressources more efficiently.
You could say that such a thing could also be solved by communicating more with your team (by voice chat for example), but I'm not going to tell them everytime I repair or rebuild something and then there are also those players that don't have a microphone, this would also help them alot.

Then there is the part of noticing when something has been destroyed on your ship. This would also obviously help you with that. Now, one might argue that noticing such things also belongs to the "skills" of an Engineer. Well, I guess you can argue both ways. For me this would mainly be a convenience feature, which is not about "dumbing the game down", but rather enabling the Engineer to be more effective at what he does.




Sooo, lots of words, I guess I was rambling on too much Since I had some time on my hands, I prepared a screenshot with how I imagined this:

(sorry about the low graphics quality, my laptop can't handle much more )

It's obviously just a concept, but I tried to make as less distracting as possible, so it only takes up a small amount of space, while still providing a good amount of information. Basically, what I did there was to add little symbols right next to the ship parts, which show you when a part is being repaired / rebuilt, when it's on fire or when a gun is curretly manned. Destroyed parts have a red border, damaged ones a light colored one and fully repaired parts have a dark border. This should enable a team to work together more effectively, which imo also leads to a better game experience.


That's about it for now and I'd like to hear what you guys think about that!