Changing the Core Gameplay Loop - 2019

Introduction

The smash hit FPS subgenres of Survival and Battle Royale have proved something – current day FPS gamers want adrenaline and lots of it. They want to put it all on the line and invest time and thought into their gameplay. They don’t want a game where the time to contact is less than a minute, where you are straight into the meat grinder from your spawn point and where simple numbers are what make a difference. They want skill to matter, they want tactics to matter and they want to have fun watching others play the game to boot.

Planetside 2 had totally different development goals in mind when its world, spawn systems and its objectives were developed. As a result it is struggling.

To change the game to the better I suggest a few core changes:

1. Increase the time to contact (TTC)

2. Dynamic objectives

3. Team play is everything

Let’s break these down and dive into some details

Increasing time to contact (TTC)

Doing this makes each fight more important, rewards situational awareness, tactics and skill. It also forces teamwork. The original PS is a reasonable example of this as you had a respawn timer which was multiple times PS2s and added to the run from your spawn you are probably looking at 10 times the TTC. In the original game our squads stuck together. Sunderers got filled. Vehicles stuck together. Squads grouped up. In PS2 we stream out of the spawn into the enemy sights and get killed one at a time. Sunderers get killed while their spawning players run away blindly.

We could simply increase spawn timers, but that would just be a stop gap solution which does not have any effect on the distance between the spawn and the objective. There should be about a minutes worth of travel between the spawn and the objective I believe to push people into working together, especially if this is further enabled with the changes I detail below.

Dynamic objectives

PS1 and 2 both have a similar problem with world and objective design. The designer of a base has to design it such that it can offer an enjoyable fight both for a small fight with tens of players, and one with hundreds. It also has to cater for lop sided fights where one team is outnumbered, both attacker and defender depending on the situation.

The Survival and Battle Royale sub genres do not have this problem – the objective there is simply to survive… could this be what we fight over. Simply to crush your enemy, to see them driven before you and hear the lamen.. *coughs* … yeah, you get the idea. To be fair though objectives in PS1 and 2 essentially are this, just you have to survive in a certain area. The problems arise when spawn points are too close to them which makes it more purposeful just to camp the spawn/destroy it, removing the fight entirely and along with it any resemblance of fun.

What I suggest is that objectives and spawn points need to be made very separate, with fair and equal spawns for both attackers and defenders around a central objective. To do this I would have objectives appear in the middle of opposing forces, and spawn points for the two factions then appear around it. Whichever side can take and hold the objective then have that as a spawn point, while they have to now take the enemy spawn which deactivates and another spawn appears for them further back. This maintains the battle flow, and allows a front line to shift back and forth across the entire map.

Team play is everything

Team play feels like a rushed afterthought in PS2. Everything revolves around simple numbers, and many, many players believe that squads and platoons simply make the game worse by purposely unbalancing fights so that they can win. And you know what? They are probably right. Looking at it the other way it is the players that just play for the joy of fighting that pad out fights into large stalemates that never really get anywhere. Balancing the desire to actually win and capture territory vs enjoying a fight has been a constant battle since the first PS game and there is no clear answer.

However with the system detailed in the “Dynamic objective” section we now have a fight which revolves around specific areas removed enough from spawns to make team play more important and no one can be blamed for ending a fight as it would never end necessarily. To make full use of this squads should spawn in together – via a single large drop pod which then acts as the spawn (and later objective potentially) for that group.

Further alterations could also galvanise players into working together as we have recently seen done near perfectly with Apex Legends (AL). Along with spawning the group together we could make it so only a player’s squad members could revive them, which would make staying alive matter more and reduce the meat grinders in small buildings. You could even have an equivalent system where a squad mate has to take a revive token back to your drop pod, making the freshly spawned have a buddy and give rise to more interesting tactical choices. AL also has its brilliant ping system, which would suit PS perfectly.