Let's make it the Battlefield of sword games! 16v16 and 32v32? All-out sword war?! | Forums

[Aarpian]

The only way I can see something like this working is a game mode akin to assault.

Consider the following:

Teams are 12v12, with each team further separated into 4 players. Team A has to breach the castle at 3 different points with 4 players at each site, and team B has to defend the castle with 4 players at each site.
Each entry point has 3 objectives that need to be attacked/defended. Once a group of 4 players has managed to complete all their objectives, the respawn times for the remaining defenders are increased and the 4 attackers and defenders on that point now spectate the rest of the game. After the defenders have been beaten (or the time limit expires), the teams switch over. The team that performs the best (defends the castle with most objectives remaining or assaults it successfully the fastest) wins.

Crucially, there would be geographic barriers that would stop players from being able to access the other spawn areas or objective points. If you wanted to add a bit more team play without turning it into a cluster****, perhaps you could strategically place things like ballistas on rampart walls that can be fired at other areas, so you can give a limited amount of help to the other groups on your team.

[Ymir.exe]

Aside from 5v5 which I still maintain would be fab, and has become the de facto standard e-sports team size, something I think could be pretty great is a 3v3v3 or a 4v4v4 faction locked. So you have all three factions fighting each other at once. Vikings can attack Samurai and Knights, Samurai can attack Vikings and Knights, and Knights can attack Vikings and Samurai.

Now that I think about it, that would be sort of like the fight you saw in the cinematic trailer.

[DrExtrem]

But cutting down masses of players fluently, gets harder with every player, the p2p-host has to.. well... host.

Sure it would feel awesome to play 16vs16 or even 32vs32 but the used technology has its limits. IMHO, you would need dedicated servers to host games of such magnitude. That's why I proposed the addition of "soft bots" ... sergeants, who make the battlefields more diverse.

[Aarpian]

For me, the highs in this game almost always come from 1v1 or 1v2 scenarios. 4v4 fights in the same area always felt a bit too messy for me to enjoy fully.

[iHunny]

I have the feeling that people who wants massive battles have not yet played the game.

[DrExtrem]

I have the feeling that people who wants massive battles have not yet played the game.

Maybe. I am totally ok with 4vs4 modes. There are already games who offer 32vs32 ...

[Dez_troi_aR]

I find it hilarious that some ppl don't understand constructive criticism, just because you can't see something being possible doesn't make your opinion the final word on the matter.

There was a time when Call of Duty was at the top all alone. It was better than many games of the same genre for many reasons. Fan boys said no, it's perfect, don't change anything but weapons, maybe add vehicles, but multiplayer is fine as is. Then there were those of us who realized it had much more room to shine if the devs would just listen to the fans who enjoyed playing and exploiting certain features. Camping was the largest complaint in the forums in those days, and many thought it was just a part of the game, get to that sweet camping spot first and defend it and you win. Then people like myself came along, understanding a simple solution to deal with camping, which was add destructible environments. Go ahead and camp that building, I'll just blow it up, now go find another camping spot you noob!

And then some creative geniuses came along and created Battlefield, still an FPS with infantry focused battles and similar objectives, but let's add vehicles and destructive environments, and how about a new game mode that encourages teamwork instead of camping called Conquest! Before this happened, the uninspired said, you can't have fully destructive environments, how would they render all those different elements, servers won't be able to handle it, they can't make whole buildings crumble, you can't have people flying jets or driving tanks, that would be too OP, blah blah blah. How many versions of battlefield have come out since, I'll wait?

So the point is it can be done, it just takes the right group of inspired individuals to pull it off. You can't tell me graphically that BF1 isnt superior to For Honor, which has tanks, jets, infantry, destructive environments, and 64 player game modes. Servers seem to be able to handle all this, so optimization is the key.

As far as battle becoming hack and slash instead of skilled button presses and planned movements, useless arguement. People will always find a way to spam grenades or camp certain areas, that's why you make objectives people, it encourages teamwork, duh!

The real issue is the fight mechanics. Yes, I think For Honor is freaking AWESOME, and with a few tweaks has huge potential as a top tier Esport. But they obviously were inspired to improve upon the battle mechanics of Chivalry Medieval Warfare, which had "slash" or "side defense", "hack" or "top defense", and stab, also there was a "kick" or "guard break". So while FH improved upon the mechanics of Chivalry MW, it bit just a little too much and so suffers from some of the same flaws of that systems fight mechanics, which show up most in gang fights larger than 2v2.

The solution is once again to draw inspiration from other successful games, and undoubtedly Batman Arkham Knight has the best fight system to date. I'll leave it hear and go more in detail on how to utilize those fight mechanics in a pvp scenario in another thread.

The discussion ends for me here because i have already filled a page with ranting about how i can not see this work gameplaywise. The game already looses some of its quality when 4 people hack at each other simultaniously.

Lets just be clear that saying "naaaah you are just not using your fantasy enough" does not settle the case. The problem still stands that the gameplaymechanics of the game work in 1vs1 scenarios. Shooters are completly different because a "1vs1 encounter" happens all the time but only lasts for seconds (aim --> shoot --> notfastenough=dead/win=next target/missed=take cover or start again). Also in shooters you can implement a lot of stuff because you can easily give the players tools to handle every situation, namely weapons.


You reacting with telling me to use my imagination more is very fitting in a way, because that is all you do. Fantasize about all the cool sceneries inspired by all the movies etc. you have seen and projecting them into the game. Of course i can think of cool stuff that i'd like to see happen. But would it be a coherent element of the mechanics that make this game work or would it interfere with them ?


(And your suggestion of dropping the-Art-of-Battle system in favour of the arkham-knight fighting system is..... questionable)

[xLeapingLizardx]

No offense, but you seem like the type of player I would destroy so hard on the battlefield, that you would quit, calling the game garbage just because you cant defeat me!But this would mostly be a hand-eye coordination issue on your end, not so much the fault of the games fight mechanics.

Wow... That was just too random...

This is LITERALLY what game devs do! Im an Artist in school for Game Development, the use of IMAGINATION is what drives all games bro, seriously! Not only do we fantasize about cool scenarios that inspire us, then create thumbnails and storyboards to organize those concepts, we manifest those thoughts into playable reality for gamers like yourself. You literally insult all of us artists who understand this as FACT, you only get to play it because we dreamed about it in our minds and took the initiative to make something happen. I don't work for Ubisoft just yet, but im sure anyone who is involved in the creative process would tell you the same. So yeah, maybe you should stop the conversation here!

I see what you are saying. But we are talking about a game that's basically already created, its direction, theme, mechanics have already been chosen... You aren't creating a game from scratch. So I think when making suggestions you should adjust it to what is already in the game. Not making huge overhaul of the mechanics and the direction of it.
Again I think if you want to do that, find a different game or petition for For Honor 2 with these changes.

Wow, i guess im just misunderstood. I didn't suggest dropping the Art-of-Battle system at all, i suggested it could be improved by simplifying certain aspects of it, this is constructive criticism, not just saying something doesn't work, but suggesting alternatives as a source of inspiration for improvement. The AOB system in For Honor is completely unique in a lane all its own, but that doesn't mean its perfected just yet, hence the nerfs from the alpha build, and surely there will be more after the Beta. Which says what, "were still working on ways to improve it" Which is exactly why feedback forums are an integral part of development, tho i don't expect all of this to resonate with non dev types.

In his defense, mentioning Batman Arkham Knight fighting mechanics was pretty random. It's just so different that it doesn't even make good sense to mention it alongside For Honor.

[MisterWillow]

And then some creative geniuses came along and created Battlefield, still an FPS with infantry focused battles and similar objectives, but let's add vehicles and destructive environments, and how about a new game mode that encourages teamwork instead of camping called Conquest! Before this happened, the uninspired said, you can't have fully destructive environments, how would they render all those different elements, servers won't be able to handle it, they can't make whole buildings crumble, you can't have people flying jets or driving tanks, that would be too OP, blah blah blah. How many versions of battlefield have come out since, I'll wait?

So the point is it can be done, it just takes the right group of inspired individuals to pull it off. You can't tell me graphically that BF1 isnt superior to For Honor, which has tanks, jets, infantry, destructive environments, and 64 player game modes. Servers seem to be able to handle all this, so optimization is the key.

As far as battle becoming hack and slash instead of skilled button presses and planned movements, useless arguement. People will always find a way to spam grenades or camp certain areas, that's why you make objectives people, it encourages teamwork, duh!

I'll just copy/paste what I said over here, because it's still relevant.

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Completely different circumstances, environments, and tactics are involved in something like Battlefront (or shooters in general).

For example, deaths in shooters occur far more quickly, and any firefight that you are involved in only lasts a couple of seconds even if you're a highly skilled player (in which case, you probably killed your opponent from across the room). You can find a position and slaughter five people in rapid succession, lob a grenade that kills multiple people bunched up. You yourself can be killed by someone you didn't see and you have no way of countering.

Melee necessitates being right in your opponent's face, and fights have the potential to be over a minute long. Incidentally, I can't wait for this to actually come out and for people to get really good, because then fight length will only go up, add to that the fact that being outnumbered can be countered and defended against. Aside from the level 4 Feats (Arrow Storm, Catapult Strike), there's no comparison between the two strategically (or even mechanically).

Have you played Chivalry, if so you can easily see that this is where For Honor draws inspiration for its "Art of Battle" fight mechanics. They seen the flaws of Chivalry and improved upon them.

If they drew inspiration from anywhere it was War of the Roses or Mount and Blade, and neither those, nor Chivalry really play like For Honor because of the latter's lock on, which requires you to focus on a single enemy, rather than being able to run into a group of enemies and begin attacking wildly. It's been a very long time since I played any of the others, but I don't recall if WotR, M&B, or Chivalry even have lock-ons. I remember the combat mostly consisting of two people banging themselves into one another and swinging wildly until one fell over at the best of times.

Maybe I didn't see the Chivalry pros, so you can call me ignorant if you want, but the combat is hardly comparable. I also remember the movement and weapon swings being pretty floaty (for lack of a better word).

Chiv, WotR, and M&B also have legitimate ranged combat, meaning you don't have to even engage the enemy in melee combat at all if you don't want to, and the devs have been pretty clear that ranged combat outside of certain feats, which have cooldowns preventing you from treating the Kensei like an archer, isn't something they're interested in implementing, and I don't think it would really add much if they did.

No offense, but you seem like the type of player I would destroy so hard on the battlefield, that you would quit, calling the game garbage just because you cant defeat me!But this would mostly be a hand-eye coordination issue on your end, not so much the fault of the games fight mechanics

Okay, you need to calm down a bit. There isn't any need for any of those insults or self aggrandizement. You can surely defend your point of view without resorting to that sort of thing.

More to the point, his argument was that the faults of For Honor's combat system reveal themselves once you start fighting multiple people. It's manageable in 1v2, very difficult in 1v3, and nearly impossible in 1v4. If you should encounter any more than that at once, you might as well put the controller down, and there's very little incentive for players to not group up and pick people off. Even with 4 player teams, there is very little incentive for people to not group up and pick people off, especially in the other 4v4 modes.

Multiply that up to the possibility of fighting 5-10 people at once, and it becomes an unplayable mess. Add feats into that and you have absolute chaos, especially if you're a character who has something like the Catapult Strike. Consider time to respawn and you have the potential of one side being half-there for most of a match should one side fall into a rhythm of killing one person in a group, moving on to the next, killing them, and so on, and by the time the first player who died respawns a large chunk of their team is also waiting to respawn, so they are constantly outnumbered.

You might think they should just wait for the rest of their team to respawn before returning to battle, but in a gamemode like Dominion, that only means they're constantly losing points by doing that, so the one of the only things they could do in that situation is decrease respawn time to be nearly instant, which almost negates the death in that mode.

Umm, the game play mechanics also work in 2v2 3v3 and 4v4 scenarios respectively. And there are plenty of good videos on youtube showcasing this.

Again, though, the combat mechanics are limited so that adding more people than that creates unnecessary burden on a defender, because being outnumbered is usually unmanageable beyond 1v2.

This is LITERALLY what game devs do! Im an Artist in school for Game Development, the use of IMAGINATION is what drives all games bro, seriously! Not only do we fantasize about cool scenarios that inspire us, then create thumbnails and storyboards to organize those concepts, we manifest those thoughts into playable reality for gamers like yourself. You literally insult all of us artists who understand this as FACT, you only get to play it because we dreamed about it in our minds and took the initiative to make something happen. I don't work for Ubisoft just yet, but im sure anyone who is involved in the creative process would tell you the same. So yeah, maybe you should stop the conversation here!

I'm also an artist who went to school (briefly) for game design, and it's also important to understand that any concept you have will be shackled and restrained by the limitations of the game's mechanics in the end, and some mechanical systems simply do not allow for some concepts to become a practical reality.

In this case, the combat system was designed to simulate melee combat for players to actually fight each other while still remaining accessible (so it's not Kingdom Come), but in doing that you eventually run into the reality of melee combat of not being very fun (or even very survivable) when surrounded, which is a perfect transition to...

The solution is once again to draw inspiration from other successful games, and undoubtedly Batman Arkham Knight has the best fight system to date. I'll leave it hear and go more in detail on how to utilize those fight mechanics in a pvp scenario in another thread.

In a single-player environment, it's perfectly feasible to allow players to throw people around, attack two people at once, jump over opponents, duck, counter, etc etc and generally be an example of superhuman ability, but once you introduce competitive interaction between players, you have to make sure attackers and defenders are on more-or-less equal footing in terms of mechanics. For example, if you took Arkham's combat system and translated it to multiplayer, you'd probably have both players waiting for the other to attack so they could utilise the counter, but if you have a counter that functioned like that---again, because it's important to keep players equal mechanically---you'd either need to tighten the timing considerably, or give the initial attacker a counter to the counter. But does it stop there, because if it did, one player would want to counter the counter, so again, you have a stalemate. So, do you add a counter for the second, or an endless counter system, where entire 'matches' would consist of two bodies twisting one another around in an endless series of counters?

Even if you had counters alternate buttons (so after the first counter, the button switches from triangle to square, then to x, then back to circle, then square, and so on randomly), people who are good at QTE's will still be able to chain a series of counters rendering them theoretically unbeatable.

Probably belaboured the point too much (apologies), but the point is you are bound to the mechanics, and the mechanics of For Honor don't really allow you to effectively defend (let alone fight back) against more than 3-4 people, and in an environment where there's twice as many opponents at least on the enemy team (with a likelihood you'll encounter a group of 4-5 or more), the feasibility of the entire premise crumbles.

The AOB system in For Honor is completely unique in a lane all its own, but that doesn't mean its perfected just yet, hence the nerfs from the alpha build, and surely there will be more after the Beta. Which says what, "were still working on ways to improve it" Which is exactly why feedback forums are an integral part of development, tho i don't expect all of this to resonate with non dev types.

The only changes to the core Art of Battle system from reveal until now (as far as I'm aware), is the addition of deflects and Revenge, and those were added before any alpha tests. While it's true they changed how deflects worked, that's the only thing to alter between alpha and beta.

The nerfs you're referencing are to characters, not the system.

[Aarpian]

I'll just copy/paste what I said over here, because it's still relevant.

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All that ****

Good post. Personally I wouldn't have been able to resist chastising him for his snark.