Firefall Development Update - Part 2

Increasing the Skill Ceiling



“All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.”

Nolan Bushnell – Founder of Atari

Firefall is designed to be approachable and exciting to players of all skill levels, but it is important to reward the hardcore or regular player who has logged in countless days. A big part of this is giving that player room for improvement in their own skill. If there are opportunities to become exceptionally good with a certain battleframe or weapon, then there is something interesting and exciting for you to work towards and be rewarded for accomplishing.



Identifying the Problem


When looking at our core combat, we recognized that we have a number of weapons and abilities that are lower-twitch and lower-skill. These include things like beam weapons (healing, vampiric), AOE abilities (dreadfield, healing pulse, healing wave), buffs (heavy army, overcharge) and splash damage (plasma cannon). In moderation, most of these are ok, but we may we have gone too far in this direction and have taken away some of the higher skill opportunities we would love players to have on a regular basis.



Iterating on the Design


To fix these mistakes, we started a new internal milestone and have a large group of team members working on raising the overall skill ceiling in Firefall. The first things we looked are some of our core gameplay mechanics. We asked ourselves whether we feel a 6.0m/s run speed was fast enough. We asked whether our base jump height is enough and whether we should reduce gravity to give you slightly more air time after a jump. We questioned whether we should increase how much jump jet time you have and whether we should give you more air control. And, lastly, we discussed reducing our 60-second ability cooldowns to a more action-oriented, faster-paced 15-20 second cooldown.

Run speed

We’ve already made several changes internally that we are just now testing. We have bumped base run speed up 33% to 8m/s. So far, the team absolutely loves it. It is worth noting, however, that as we increase movement speed; we run the risk of players experiencing more I-made-it-safely-behind-a-wall-but-still-got-shot shots based on our networking model. We’ll see how this feels after more testing and getting this change rolled out to beta as soon as possible.

Jump Jets

We have tripled the pool of energy for jump jets which now allows you to get some serious hang-time. We still need to adjust how much air control you have and what your max velocity can be but in general we’re pretty happy with the direction.

Cooldowns

Reducing cooldowns from 60 seconds to 15 seconds, as an example, will do a couple things. First of all, it will allow us to break out of the mentality that since the player has waited for 60-seconds to use this ability it better make a big splash. We can focus on smaller, more situational-specific abilities that offer more interesting player choice. We can also make abilities more skill-based by having their effect not last as long. For example, imagine instead of Heavy Armor simply giving you a damage mitigation buff for several seconds, what if it simply gave you a shield that lasts 3 seconds and blocks the next incoming shot. Immediately, this becomes way more skill-based as you will no longer want to simply trigger HA on entering a skirmish, but rather you’ll want to wait until you see a plasma nova being charged or witness a Recon trigger Cryoshot, etc.

Skilled Weapons

Our next step has been to review each of our weapons and to ask whether they meet our minimum skill requirement. We’ve adjusted the splash radius and fall-off damage countless times for the Plasma Cannon but it still offers benefits for a “sloppy shot”. We have prototyped a new plasma cannon, the “Fusion Cannon” that has almost no splash damage but direct hits for a lot of damage. This should heavily reward skilled shots with this slower rate of fire cannon.

We are also reviewing the idea of beam weapons from the game. We want to remove Vampiric Beam and make it a skilled weapon. Since the healing beam is used to help allies we are less worried about having it be a beam, but making even this weapon require more skill would make the Medic more fun for everyone. We have prototyped a fast rate of fire healing pulse gun that requires aim and feels a whole lot more enjoyable than simply holding down left-click for the duration of the match.

The Medic class, while fun, has a major impact on gameplay, but not necessarily in the way that we would like it to. The Medic has two high-level issues that we are solving. The first is that he has an abundance of lock-on beam options that do not require enough skill or aim for high-skill, competitive play. The second is that the Medic’s pure-support nature has made him a required part of any team composition, and we would like to reduce both that requirement and his influence on the metagame by shifting his role from pure support to combat support.

The Engineer battleframe has stuck out as a problem class. Not only is it one of the lowest rated battleframes, but people overall don’t tend to even play it. There are two primary concerns with the Engineer battleframe in its current form. The first is that his weapons and abilities were designed to be too low-skill, low-twitch in nature, to the point that expert players do not have enough room to grow or shine. We’re addressing this by giving him offensive, higher-skill primary weapon options, as well as a suite of new abilities (which also address the second issue). The second concern is that the very nature of the Engineer’s deployables severely limits his mobility, which makes the battleframe largely unusable in competitive Firefall gameplay. The goal is to make him about strategic deployment without requiring that he remain stationary

The details for changes on both the Medic and the Engineer are enough for multiple blog posts in and of themselves. We’ll save the deep-dive for a future blog post from some of our designers.



Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make me a Match


For an online game, a proper matchmaking system is paramount to making a good game. A bad matchmaker breaks the fun and will cause more rage quits than any other single feature of the game. Suffice to say, we have our own problems here. Our matchmaker is still in its infancy, but we’ve already identified issues that deserve focus.

Fix existing bugs!

Why are level 1’s being put in matches vs 15’s?
Improve backfilling

Rules for when we do and don’t backfill, and making it worth their while
Add sweeteners

Get more people into queues – reduce queue times across the board
The way a matchmaker works is that it attempts to find other players to match you up with based on your skill level as determined by an algorithm usually based on your win/loss record. The matchmaker will constantly expand the skill requirements higher and lower over time in order to match you quickly while still keeping a reasonably close match. It’s important when developing a matchmaker system that you balance the requirements of a fair match with the time it takes to get into a game.

That’s one of the places where we think we can improve. Not only can we continue to tweak our algorithm that determines what your player skill is, but we can improve the messaging you receive as a player to better explain when you’re starting to face players outside of your skill range. In order to improve the time to queue, we also need to make sure players are queuing for the same maps as you are.

That’s where things like multi-queuing rewards can come in. The basics of this are that as a player, you are rewarded for queuing for more gametypes and more maps. The more things you queue for, the higher the rewards regardless of what map you actually end up in. This means that more players are queuing for more maps which makes it easier to fill the larger maps or the lesser-played maps. It also allows us to do things like Harvester weekends to incentivize players to play maps that don’t get much attention due to their longer queue times.

One of the biggest features that we’ve had to disable due to the issues identified above is the lack of full squad-based matchmaking. It’s extremely important to be able to play as an organized team. We recognize that and it is a primary focus of this milestone to bring squad matchmaking back and better than ever. Making sure to match squads against squads to prevent the pub-stomping that was so prevalent before.

We also wanted to take it a step further. While it’s fun playing with your team vs another team, it’s always better when you can challenge that other team and have a truly competitive match with some real bragging rights on the line. That’s why we are planning to implement the ability to challenge other squads in a direct head-to-head fight. Below is a designer concept of the challenge screen as it might appear in game.

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http://www.firefallthegame.com/blog/2012/05/24/firefall-development-update-_-part-2

interesting...