CMaster
23-03-12, 20:07
Started writing this a few weeks ago when NC:R thread first showed up. Only just got around to semi-finishing it:
CMaster's big thoughts and recomendations for Neocron Reloaded post
There are my personal thoughts on things that would be a good idea with regards to Neocron Reloaded. It is based around the core idea of "taking the best from NC1 and NC2", with the slight provisio that I never played NC1, although have played pretty much every incarnation of NC2. It's also going to look at things that Neocron has never done right, and how they might be done better in the future. What this piece is also going to try and stay away from, is changing things from the "Neocron way" to "my way". Obviously that is not possible to entirely avoid, but the core concept is what NCR is trying to do is create a better Neocron, not necessiarly a better cyberpunk MMO. The rest of the thread is for people to agree, disagree, or spot the flaws in what I have suggested, because there will be some.
So some basic assumptions made:
Nukklear will not have the time or resources to really build a new game from the ground up.
Models, textures and sounds are importable from Neocron.
Code, world geometry are not
The idea is to stay true to Neocron without recreating the errors of the past
Systems are going to generally follow the route that they did before.
Nukklear will be happy with Neocron Reloaded existing as a niche product (IE no chasing afer WoW/ToR/Farmville user numbers, something like say, STO or BSG is more the idea), with it having a short and cheap development
Not withstanding the above, they would like NCR to be more accessible than NC, what with the original NC having a huge number of players who just "bounced off"
What's So Good About Neocron?
Given the idea is to take "what's best" from the many incarnations of Neocron, it's perhaps best to consider just what is so great about Neocron. Obviously everybody has a slightly different reason, but we can distill down some commonly agreed reasons.
Atmosphere/Sense of Place - This is one of the things that comes up time and time again with Neocron. It's also one of those thigs that is of course very hard to define where it comes from. However, we can certainly go some way to examing the key points. Sound design is almost certainly a big part of it. Effective sound really draws you in to a world. The graphical style certainly helps. Neon Signs and shops everywhere. Business. The use of furniture, raised walkways etc all helps in the levl design, although I'm not sure that the core level layouts do much good. {url=http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/365716.html]Others have written[/url] about the sense of place and design in Neocron. Sadaly, while a key component of Neocron, it's hard to really nail down what needs to be preserved here. The fact that NC is a sci-fi setting also sets it apart here. There's still very little done in the MMO world with a successful science fiction world.
Action driven gameplay. What brough me personally in to Neocron, and has certainly attracted plenty of others over the years is the nature of the gameplay. While most MMOs are tab-target driven and based off abilities on cooldowns, Neocron was sold to me as "a sort of multiplayer Deus Ex". Now it didn't live up to that claim in a whole bunch of ways, but the fact that Neocron's core gameplay was exciting, if rather flawed and lacking in depth really made it so much more worth playing than a lot of the competitors in the MMO space. There's a lot more to the game than just watching numbers go up, and that's a huge and important thing.
The skill system. Neocron's customisability in terms of character appearance is pretty poor. There's not a huge amount that can be done there, and once your character has been made even less. However, the customisation in terms of statisitcs and capabilities is huge. This, combined with the lack of class requirements on the vast majority if items meant that you never quite new what any character was capable of. Certainly, the classes had their strengths and weakeness, but there was no way to know quite what any spy, PE or monk was up to until you fought them.
What should we do about all this?
So, given some idea of what Neocron: Reloaded will have to change and what it won't, some vauge feeling of what works and what didn't in the original Neocron, we come to the major point of this post: what should be done in the new game. This isn't going to be a full design doc, it won't fill in all the details of how things should work. Instead I'll try to describe the general outline of how things I think would be best implemented. I'll also be drawing on both mine and other's posts from this thread
Don't be afraid to throw out what is complelety broken - especially when/if it is being developed from scratch anyway. We'll come on to some key examples of this later: Outposts, Missions and Hacknet.
Give NCR true FPS combat - guns fire either hitscan or projectiles, that do damage on impacting targets. The weird hybrid system of NC might have been all that was practical in its time, but now there should be no reason not to do things properly. So many of the problems NC faced with PvP (many of which were blamed generically on "clipping" would never have occured with such a system, defensive strucutres would be more useful, and it would drastically improve PvE, both ending (or at least severly limiting) safespotting while making player positiong vs mobs much more important. I realise some classic players love the current system of Neocron. But it's a strange system, something that immediatley alienates and confuses new players, and it's a system that doesn't really make any kind of sense. When I pull the trigger of my gun, I expect something harmful to come out the end. At the moment, all you get is pretty effects - the harm only comes if you were targetting something already (with a few exceptions).
Minimise instancing. This all comes back to the strong sense of world and place. Instancing really strongly undermines that. I don't say no instancing at all, as appartments after all are just permenant instances. I also see the chance for procedural mission generation that uses instancing. However, if you want to recreate the feel and best parts of NC, then the real, continuous world is an important part of that. Being able to meet up with friends, ambush enemies, or just encounter new acquaintences anywhere in the world is what made it work. I know that the drive in MMOs in general has been to an almmost entirely instanced world, with the "presistent world" element almost vanishing. There's a lot of people out there that want to see games standing in opposition to that however, and to follow the path of vaugely connected instanced spaces hurts the idea of Neocron as a living world worth fighting over.
No click zones - or at least, as few as possble. Make it so that maps can easily have new walk across zonelines added - even better make the world continuous and zoneline free, however that would likley be difficult. Click zones are an obvious bodge, have a bunch of weird behaviours tied up in them, and attack one of Neocron's strongest aspects - it's sense of place.
Focus on Neocron City - I'm guessing there's no easy way to import World Geometry over to Unity. Even if there is, fixing it up for the new engine will still be a big pile of work. What I'd suggest then is that rather than trying to recreate the entire world for first launch, is to just initally focus on the Neocron city. It's the most interesting part of the game, and huge chunks of it (most infamously Mainsewers, but also most of the Outzone and Via Rosso as well as things like the clubs in Pepper Park) went mostly unused. Make the city the real focus of the game. Make Mainsewers relevant and perhaps the link into higher level environments. Worried about the lack of OPs? Create player contenstible facitilites in an expanded Industrial Area. The wastelands can still be developed and implemented, that'd be great - but for starters, just the city would be enough. I'd say there's a lot of space for Neocron City to be pretty drastically redesigned. Keep the core idea - Outzone/PP/Plaza/VR. Keep some landmarks like P1 medicare. But the level layouts could be cleaned a little and the links between them improved dramatically. Places like the Outzone and Mainsewers need to be give a much stronger reason to exist. Make Neocron have something to offer all playrs at all levels, not just a trade hub, a PvP hub, and a couple of "maximum efficency" levelling spots, joined by whole swathes of ghost towns.
Make skills, differentiating character builds really matter. The skill system in Neocron is frighteningly complex. Five independtly levelled statisitics, each with a whole clutch of subskills within them that can be player adjusted. Despite the fact that a lotof this frequently went over player's heads, I'd encourage this system to be left as it is. However, that isn't to say there aren't some very important changes to be made. First off, I'd like to see the tech levels (and hence mainskill requirements) stretched dramatically. In NC2.3, a spy can acheive a dex stat of well over 120, I think pushing 130 at the upper limits. Doing so comes with a whole load of costs in terms of losing out on important subskills and defensive stats. However, right now, there is no reason to make the strech. I'd love to see it so that there could be multiple ways of building pure combat characters, rather than the fairly static environment we have now. The core things I would look to see possible are A: defensive builds, these would focus on gaining defence while using a low end (~80-100) mainskill weapon. Defence could be gained through improving psi, str, or con stats; B: subskill specailists, these characters would use a mid level (95-110) mainskill weapon, witha focus on boosting stats like weaponskill, agility and weapon lore (or new equivilants), they'd get good damage, fast aming and lots of ability to aim on the move with this sort of build; C: Mainskill pushers. Using the top end of weapons with high mainskill requirements (110-130) these characters would be able to use the fanciest, most powerful of weapons - but their defenses and their skills in using said weapons would be diminished. This only covers the combat side of things, but I hope where I am going is clear - there should be reasons to really push the envelope, opportunities in that space - but it shouldn't be necessary to be focussed on one particular stat to make a character viable.
Make the skill system transparent There has to be some element of caution here, or it can make it too easy to work out the mathematically "best" character. However there needs to be at least some more clarity in the way skills work, for so many players never really understood, and many crazy myths went around. The first and simplest aspect is that players should be able to see what skills they will gain experience in when using an item. Weapons should explain that they will train, say str and dex and int. Construction tools dex and int. Etc. Beyond that, players should be able to see in game what skills are contributing. The full mathematics needn't be included, but it would be great to see that your rifle damage was "70% RC 30%WEP" for example. Giving players a huge possibility space with their skills really isn't much use if they can't see what their skills do. While we're at it, let's not have any more of the stupid "sweet spots" like we see currently with hacking, where any more than 110-120 hack actually makes hacking harder again.
Remove implant (and armour) maluses. Now testing could prove me wrong with this one, but my feeling is this: by and large, the negative elements on implant's aren't really helpful. Merely using one implant over another represents a massive opportunity cost - that should be enough. Especially as most of these negative effects just succeed in being a nusiance - a slight speed reduction in exchange for badly needed mainstats is typical. It may be that the need to fight ridiculous hybrids forces negatives in to the equation, but I'd like to try without. (as an aside, it would be interesting to see items like the old Kami chips suuposedly were - huge, realy penalties in exchange for milder, but unusal benefits)
Missions. Missions in Neocron at the moment are broken. The horrible interface that is used to find them. The trivial rewards. The fact that a "very hard" mission involves killing a mob that is less than half the maximum enemy level. So I'd suggest ditching all of it as it is. Even the much loved "quickjobs" just encourage farming of the few specific mobs on the list (eg rats, aggressor captains) rather than brancing out into other zones. Instead, I think what has been acheived with Black Prophecy points towards something more desirable for this. Taking on a mission from a faction picks for a list of tasks (Raid rival warehouse/defend faction assetts/assainate rival individual/deliver key componet/etc/etc). The specifics of the mission are randomly generated, the player sent to an appartment style-lift to go to the mission zone. You could even introduce the risk of other players from the target rival faction being sent (who would of course know the relevant code to gain access) to intercept the player carrying out the mission. Elements outside the key combat aspects of the mission (and even some of those) should take place in non-instanced areas as well, to keep the important world link discussed above. If all this is too much to do, then make the mission system very, very simple. Three drop down boxes. Faction/Task(kill/const/res/rep/rec)/Target(mob name/item to be built/res/etc).
CMaster's big thoughts and recomendations for Neocron Reloaded post
There are my personal thoughts on things that would be a good idea with regards to Neocron Reloaded. It is based around the core idea of "taking the best from NC1 and NC2", with the slight provisio that I never played NC1, although have played pretty much every incarnation of NC2. It's also going to look at things that Neocron has never done right, and how they might be done better in the future. What this piece is also going to try and stay away from, is changing things from the "Neocron way" to "my way". Obviously that is not possible to entirely avoid, but the core concept is what NCR is trying to do is create a better Neocron, not necessiarly a better cyberpunk MMO. The rest of the thread is for people to agree, disagree, or spot the flaws in what I have suggested, because there will be some.
So some basic assumptions made:
Nukklear will not have the time or resources to really build a new game from the ground up.
Models, textures and sounds are importable from Neocron.
Code, world geometry are not
The idea is to stay true to Neocron without recreating the errors of the past
Systems are going to generally follow the route that they did before.
Nukklear will be happy with Neocron Reloaded existing as a niche product (IE no chasing afer WoW/ToR/Farmville user numbers, something like say, STO or BSG is more the idea), with it having a short and cheap development
Not withstanding the above, they would like NCR to be more accessible than NC, what with the original NC having a huge number of players who just "bounced off"
What's So Good About Neocron?
Given the idea is to take "what's best" from the many incarnations of Neocron, it's perhaps best to consider just what is so great about Neocron. Obviously everybody has a slightly different reason, but we can distill down some commonly agreed reasons.
Atmosphere/Sense of Place - This is one of the things that comes up time and time again with Neocron. It's also one of those thigs that is of course very hard to define where it comes from. However, we can certainly go some way to examing the key points. Sound design is almost certainly a big part of it. Effective sound really draws you in to a world. The graphical style certainly helps. Neon Signs and shops everywhere. Business. The use of furniture, raised walkways etc all helps in the levl design, although I'm not sure that the core level layouts do much good. {url=http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/365716.html]Others have written[/url] about the sense of place and design in Neocron. Sadaly, while a key component of Neocron, it's hard to really nail down what needs to be preserved here. The fact that NC is a sci-fi setting also sets it apart here. There's still very little done in the MMO world with a successful science fiction world.
Action driven gameplay. What brough me personally in to Neocron, and has certainly attracted plenty of others over the years is the nature of the gameplay. While most MMOs are tab-target driven and based off abilities on cooldowns, Neocron was sold to me as "a sort of multiplayer Deus Ex". Now it didn't live up to that claim in a whole bunch of ways, but the fact that Neocron's core gameplay was exciting, if rather flawed and lacking in depth really made it so much more worth playing than a lot of the competitors in the MMO space. There's a lot more to the game than just watching numbers go up, and that's a huge and important thing.
The skill system. Neocron's customisability in terms of character appearance is pretty poor. There's not a huge amount that can be done there, and once your character has been made even less. However, the customisation in terms of statisitcs and capabilities is huge. This, combined with the lack of class requirements on the vast majority if items meant that you never quite new what any character was capable of. Certainly, the classes had their strengths and weakeness, but there was no way to know quite what any spy, PE or monk was up to until you fought them.
What should we do about all this?
So, given some idea of what Neocron: Reloaded will have to change and what it won't, some vauge feeling of what works and what didn't in the original Neocron, we come to the major point of this post: what should be done in the new game. This isn't going to be a full design doc, it won't fill in all the details of how things should work. Instead I'll try to describe the general outline of how things I think would be best implemented. I'll also be drawing on both mine and other's posts from this thread
Don't be afraid to throw out what is complelety broken - especially when/if it is being developed from scratch anyway. We'll come on to some key examples of this later: Outposts, Missions and Hacknet.
Give NCR true FPS combat - guns fire either hitscan or projectiles, that do damage on impacting targets. The weird hybrid system of NC might have been all that was practical in its time, but now there should be no reason not to do things properly. So many of the problems NC faced with PvP (many of which were blamed generically on "clipping" would never have occured with such a system, defensive strucutres would be more useful, and it would drastically improve PvE, both ending (or at least severly limiting) safespotting while making player positiong vs mobs much more important. I realise some classic players love the current system of Neocron. But it's a strange system, something that immediatley alienates and confuses new players, and it's a system that doesn't really make any kind of sense. When I pull the trigger of my gun, I expect something harmful to come out the end. At the moment, all you get is pretty effects - the harm only comes if you were targetting something already (with a few exceptions).
Minimise instancing. This all comes back to the strong sense of world and place. Instancing really strongly undermines that. I don't say no instancing at all, as appartments after all are just permenant instances. I also see the chance for procedural mission generation that uses instancing. However, if you want to recreate the feel and best parts of NC, then the real, continuous world is an important part of that. Being able to meet up with friends, ambush enemies, or just encounter new acquaintences anywhere in the world is what made it work. I know that the drive in MMOs in general has been to an almmost entirely instanced world, with the "presistent world" element almost vanishing. There's a lot of people out there that want to see games standing in opposition to that however, and to follow the path of vaugely connected instanced spaces hurts the idea of Neocron as a living world worth fighting over.
No click zones - or at least, as few as possble. Make it so that maps can easily have new walk across zonelines added - even better make the world continuous and zoneline free, however that would likley be difficult. Click zones are an obvious bodge, have a bunch of weird behaviours tied up in them, and attack one of Neocron's strongest aspects - it's sense of place.
Focus on Neocron City - I'm guessing there's no easy way to import World Geometry over to Unity. Even if there is, fixing it up for the new engine will still be a big pile of work. What I'd suggest then is that rather than trying to recreate the entire world for first launch, is to just initally focus on the Neocron city. It's the most interesting part of the game, and huge chunks of it (most infamously Mainsewers, but also most of the Outzone and Via Rosso as well as things like the clubs in Pepper Park) went mostly unused. Make the city the real focus of the game. Make Mainsewers relevant and perhaps the link into higher level environments. Worried about the lack of OPs? Create player contenstible facitilites in an expanded Industrial Area. The wastelands can still be developed and implemented, that'd be great - but for starters, just the city would be enough. I'd say there's a lot of space for Neocron City to be pretty drastically redesigned. Keep the core idea - Outzone/PP/Plaza/VR. Keep some landmarks like P1 medicare. But the level layouts could be cleaned a little and the links between them improved dramatically. Places like the Outzone and Mainsewers need to be give a much stronger reason to exist. Make Neocron have something to offer all playrs at all levels, not just a trade hub, a PvP hub, and a couple of "maximum efficency" levelling spots, joined by whole swathes of ghost towns.
Make skills, differentiating character builds really matter. The skill system in Neocron is frighteningly complex. Five independtly levelled statisitics, each with a whole clutch of subskills within them that can be player adjusted. Despite the fact that a lotof this frequently went over player's heads, I'd encourage this system to be left as it is. However, that isn't to say there aren't some very important changes to be made. First off, I'd like to see the tech levels (and hence mainskill requirements) stretched dramatically. In NC2.3, a spy can acheive a dex stat of well over 120, I think pushing 130 at the upper limits. Doing so comes with a whole load of costs in terms of losing out on important subskills and defensive stats. However, right now, there is no reason to make the strech. I'd love to see it so that there could be multiple ways of building pure combat characters, rather than the fairly static environment we have now. The core things I would look to see possible are A: defensive builds, these would focus on gaining defence while using a low end (~80-100) mainskill weapon. Defence could be gained through improving psi, str, or con stats; B: subskill specailists, these characters would use a mid level (95-110) mainskill weapon, witha focus on boosting stats like weaponskill, agility and weapon lore (or new equivilants), they'd get good damage, fast aming and lots of ability to aim on the move with this sort of build; C: Mainskill pushers. Using the top end of weapons with high mainskill requirements (110-130) these characters would be able to use the fanciest, most powerful of weapons - but their defenses and their skills in using said weapons would be diminished. This only covers the combat side of things, but I hope where I am going is clear - there should be reasons to really push the envelope, opportunities in that space - but it shouldn't be necessary to be focussed on one particular stat to make a character viable.
Make the skill system transparent There has to be some element of caution here, or it can make it too easy to work out the mathematically "best" character. However there needs to be at least some more clarity in the way skills work, for so many players never really understood, and many crazy myths went around. The first and simplest aspect is that players should be able to see what skills they will gain experience in when using an item. Weapons should explain that they will train, say str and dex and int. Construction tools dex and int. Etc. Beyond that, players should be able to see in game what skills are contributing. The full mathematics needn't be included, but it would be great to see that your rifle damage was "70% RC 30%WEP" for example. Giving players a huge possibility space with their skills really isn't much use if they can't see what their skills do. While we're at it, let's not have any more of the stupid "sweet spots" like we see currently with hacking, where any more than 110-120 hack actually makes hacking harder again.
Remove implant (and armour) maluses. Now testing could prove me wrong with this one, but my feeling is this: by and large, the negative elements on implant's aren't really helpful. Merely using one implant over another represents a massive opportunity cost - that should be enough. Especially as most of these negative effects just succeed in being a nusiance - a slight speed reduction in exchange for badly needed mainstats is typical. It may be that the need to fight ridiculous hybrids forces negatives in to the equation, but I'd like to try without. (as an aside, it would be interesting to see items like the old Kami chips suuposedly were - huge, realy penalties in exchange for milder, but unusal benefits)
Missions. Missions in Neocron at the moment are broken. The horrible interface that is used to find them. The trivial rewards. The fact that a "very hard" mission involves killing a mob that is less than half the maximum enemy level. So I'd suggest ditching all of it as it is. Even the much loved "quickjobs" just encourage farming of the few specific mobs on the list (eg rats, aggressor captains) rather than brancing out into other zones. Instead, I think what has been acheived with Black Prophecy points towards something more desirable for this. Taking on a mission from a faction picks for a list of tasks (Raid rival warehouse/defend faction assetts/assainate rival individual/deliver key componet/etc/etc). The specifics of the mission are randomly generated, the player sent to an appartment style-lift to go to the mission zone. You could even introduce the risk of other players from the target rival faction being sent (who would of course know the relevant code to gain access) to intercept the player carrying out the mission. Elements outside the key combat aspects of the mission (and even some of those) should take place in non-instanced areas as well, to keep the important world link discussed above. If all this is too much to do, then make the mission system very, very simple. Three drop down boxes. Faction/Task(kill/const/res/rep/rec)/Target(mob name/item to be built/res/etc).