Gunner = Arcade Action Cam for the 12 yr olds?
- Thread starter MyHammer
- Start date
Hehe multicrew packhound assassin ships. Don't even need to turn to face!
Last edited:
With Multi-Multi crew raid groups for big dangerous Alien underground caves and battlegroups, I think Gunner will be very important and fun! All with long hair of course.
You wouldn't necessarily be fighting against the pilot in either alternative, turret stabilization is a thing. The only thing you'd have to worry about is hitting your traverse limit, and even that wouldn't be a problem with 360 first-person (ie see-through-ship/COFFIN).
Good job I have 6 of those bad boys all modded. went with extra ammo 22/217 on all of them now with thermal bla bla side effect.
Great fun
Gyro stabilisation, servo feedback loops HHHHHHHNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG. Sorry, I used to work on those.
I think they did make it act like the SRV turret, in that it's not connected to the direction the SRV travels. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect your pilot to need to fly steady to help the turret gunner aim. That way teamwork is rewarded. The disconnect seems odd, but I suppose multi-crew needs all the help it can get to be able to compete against an equivalent number of Cmdrs in a wing.
Ok, got your attention.
There are several parts I do like about multicrew, but I think I should adress
what bothers me about it at the first glance:
Its clear that FD takes the route here to an Arcade sort of gameplay which breaks
a lot rules of the ed universe, and one of them is that cam view.
I am not against the 360 view, what bothers me is that its not immersive in
the sense of being physically possible in any way. If FD would have
made it more schematic, so that the ship itself is a rendered wireframe and the spacebackground is replaced with something else, I would be able to believe
I have some sort of tactical view which is rendered by the ships computer.
But having like a "real" 360 degree cam which is not even existant (or can you shoot it down?) is by all means totally destroying any immersion (for me)
Sure, many of you will like it, but I had hoped FD would somehow maintain
some consistent ingame rules with their features.
I just want you to know I respect you as a fellow Commander, but please, for the love of the Holy, stop doing this to yourself and just enjoy the game.
Do any of you past the age of 40 possess a sense of suspension of disbelief? You know that the images you see on your monitor are an 2D optical illusion are not real, and anything is possible in a game of make believe?
Stop hurting this game.
So we agree that you can play the game how you want to, and I'll be shooting things with the turret as the captain of the ship yells "Don't get cocky, kid!" And how I play will not affect how you play. And how you play will not affect how I play.
I'm glad we can play our different styles and still have fun!
Last edited:
My guess is that this was a deliberate design choice - and not just for showing off the external details of a ship.
Firstly, I remember playing Ascendancy, I think it was? Basically, you could be crew on a ship and be a gunner - but the really annoying thing was that whenever the pilot manouevred, it would throw off your aim. Now there are solutions to this that keep it first person - you could have a 'turret cam' that moves independently of the pilot's manouevres. However, this solution gets complicated when the gunner is controlling multiple turrets with limited traverses on both sides of a ship. It's not insoluble - you can have the camera switch to the underside of the ship when the gunner looks 'down', and some kind of UI that tells them which guns can traverse onto the target and which can't. Making the ship transparent during the transitions could be done.
But I think it was a deliberate choice to bring the view of the gunner back, and not only show the ship itself, but also give more peripheral awareness. This gives certain advantages:
1. If you can see the ship you're on and it's current attitude in relation to the target, you intuitively know which turrets can fire and which can't - and more than that, you can see how the pilot is manouevring and see which turrets are about to lose traverse as well. This seems to me to actually be the simplest and easiest way of conveying this information to the gunner, as well as making the transition of view from one side of the ship to the other seamless.
2. It always struck me as a deliberate design choice that there is no rear camera for the pilot, nor are their little UI arrows that point you to your currently selected target. This not only gives ships a blindspot behind them (which enhances combat as its a vulnerability to manoeuvre for), it also incentivised learning to read your scope and operate the range to keep a greater awareness of the things around you... and even when you do use your scope, there is still that sense of nervousness when someone gets behind you, as it's very hard to work out their attitude relative to you or their manouevring just from their target hologram. Giving the gunner both the UI arrows and the greater peripheral awareness seems to bring this full circle - and put together this incentivises exactly the kind of thing that ought to happen in Multi-crew - the gunner can now be on the look-out for threats, can warn what type of ships are approaching from behind, tell the captain what the target is doing ("Wait, he's boosting! He's messed up! Get your nose around now!"). In other words, it encourages co-operation and shouting at each other, which is really what Multi-crew should be about, heheh.
So basically, I don't think it was a choice to make it 'arcadey', but that the gunner having much better awareness and UI tools to keep track of the things around the ship is meant to complement the captain's limited views, which themselves were deliberate design choices. On top of this, I think the gunner not getting a scope is equally part of this design choice - because that means while the gunner has great awareness of the things they're looking at with their admittedly wide angle view... they still also have a blind spot behind them, which in some ways is worse than the captain's!
Firstly, I remember playing Ascendancy, I think it was? Basically, you could be crew on a ship and be a gunner - but the really annoying thing was that whenever the pilot manouevred, it would throw off your aim. Now there are solutions to this that keep it first person - you could have a 'turret cam' that moves independently of the pilot's manouevres. However, this solution gets complicated when the gunner is controlling multiple turrets with limited traverses on both sides of a ship. It's not insoluble - you can have the camera switch to the underside of the ship when the gunner looks 'down', and some kind of UI that tells them which guns can traverse onto the target and which can't. Making the ship transparent during the transitions could be done.
But I think it was a deliberate choice to bring the view of the gunner back, and not only show the ship itself, but also give more peripheral awareness. This gives certain advantages:
1. If you can see the ship you're on and it's current attitude in relation to the target, you intuitively know which turrets can fire and which can't - and more than that, you can see how the pilot is manouevring and see which turrets are about to lose traverse as well. This seems to me to actually be the simplest and easiest way of conveying this information to the gunner, as well as making the transition of view from one side of the ship to the other seamless.
2. It always struck me as a deliberate design choice that there is no rear camera for the pilot, nor are their little UI arrows that point you to your currently selected target. This not only gives ships a blindspot behind them (which enhances combat as its a vulnerability to manoeuvre for), it also incentivised learning to read your scope and operate the range to keep a greater awareness of the things around you... and even when you do use your scope, there is still that sense of nervousness when someone gets behind you, as it's very hard to work out their attitude relative to you or their manouevring just from their target hologram. Giving the gunner both the UI arrows and the greater peripheral awareness seems to bring this full circle - and put together this incentivises exactly the kind of thing that ought to happen in Multi-crew - the gunner can now be on the look-out for threats, can warn what type of ships are approaching from behind, tell the captain what the target is doing ("Wait, he's boosting! He's messed up! Get your nose around now!"). In other words, it encourages co-operation and shouting at each other, which is really what Multi-crew should be about, heheh.
So basically, I don't think it was a choice to make it 'arcadey', but that the gunner having much better awareness and UI tools to keep track of the things around the ship is meant to complement the captain's limited views, which themselves were deliberate design choices. On top of this, I think the gunner not getting a scope is equally part of this design choice - because that means while the gunner has great awareness of the things they're looking at with their admittedly wide angle view... they still also have a blind spot behind them, which in some ways is worse than the captain's!
Seriously, I will start to take you all seriously if you get blown up, you remain offline until your 'corpse' is picked up by a rescue ship and 'resurrected' back at a station, in real time, because boy a lot of you sure are picky-choosy when it comes to immersion.
Then again frustration is necessary to improvement? If you don't feel like you're doing terrible and should get better.. then by definition there's no incentive or even room to improve. What I got from tonight's stream is that manning the turrets....has absolutely no skill element to it. Where do you go from there as a player? How do you improve if you already start at the apex of what you can do since you're manning auto-aiming turrets? Sure there's no frustration, but that also means there's no satisfaction to it.
The most fun I've had in Planetside 2 was flying a Liberator while a good friend of mine was manning the ventral anti-tank 150mm, which is controlled from a first person pov, with a rather tight fov and limited arc of fire. Using it effectively requires a fair amount of cooperation between the pilot and the gunner, and it took us time and effort to get to learn and work together to the point where we're confident we can engage even fast air targets with it. There's been a lot of frustration on the way there, plenty of stupid deaths due to us fumbling and failing to communicate, not knowing what the other can do, not knowing what our aircraft can do... But more than anything there was a lot of fun. Learning and improving together is fun and more than makes up for the frustration involved. I'm fairly sure we would have gotten bored of it very fast if instead the game was just about picking a target in 3rd person view and letting the game do all the aiming and shooting for us.
Now I'm not necessarily advocating first person view for telepew turret controls, but it would be one way of adding a skill component to it, and you can't add elements of skill to your gameplay without adding frustration as well.
As it stands multicrew simply splits already shallow and overly simplistic gameplay between several players, so I'd have prefered Frontied to put on their big pants and actually developped new mechanics (electronic warfare would be a perfect addition to combat) to make multicrew interesting rather than merely add a mechanical skill floor in the form of first person aiming.
Last edited:
In conclusion, stop hurting the game. Or just go back to playing classic Elite, a lot of you seemed a lot happier then.
Say hello to Galaxies 1, and 3 through 8 for me, while you're at it.
Say hello to Galaxies 1, and 3 through 8 for me, while you're at it.
This was trialled pre Alpha and FD decided that it was something they didn't want as game-play rapidly devolved to "follow the arrow".
Sorry - I don't see your point. We both purchased a first person title, I did it because I don't want to play a third person game. I'm now getting cheap third person content in the game I purchased due to its 1st person gameplay focus. I'm not oppossed to you having an option to man a turret via a third person camera, but I am annoyed and feeling slightly cheated to be forced (if I want to use that feature - which I did, very much so) to use a camera mode I purposely purchased this game to avoid. I did a lot of research pre-purchase, read the roadmap, read articles and interviews with the developers, there was much emphasis on the game being "First Person" - this is a massive deviation from that.
So no, we do not agree.
Last edited:
I think you also have to take into account what would work in VR.
Having a gunner stuck in a turret in a ship moving along six axes, while the gunner is trying to shoot at something moving in the opposite direction would be a recipe for vr players wanting to ride the porcelain bus at very short notice. The turret as implemented will i feel reduce motion sickness while allowing a person to experience the scale of Elite in VR.
Yes on the surface it is arcady but i also think there are deeper tactical elements that people can explore. I certainly expect PVP crews will work out tactics to best optimise how they attack.
For example i think that the positions of the large weapons on the Federal Assault ship will lend themselves heavily to being used for Turret multicrew play and may shift the balance away from the FDL whose gun positions are more suited to forward fire.
Having a gunner stuck in a turret in a ship moving along six axes, while the gunner is trying to shoot at something moving in the opposite direction would be a recipe for vr players wanting to ride the porcelain bus at very short notice. The turret as implemented will i feel reduce motion sickness while allowing a person to experience the scale of Elite in VR.
Yes on the surface it is arcady but i also think there are deeper tactical elements that people can explore. I certainly expect PVP crews will work out tactics to best optimise how they attack.
For example i think that the positions of the large weapons on the Federal Assault ship will lend themselves heavily to being used for Turret multicrew play and may shift the balance away from the FDL whose gun positions are more suited to forward fire.
Help me help you, I don't want to lose you.
We're stronger with you than without you!
We're stronger with you than without you!
Nice reasoning but when you actually listen to FD and Sandro constantly saying they can only do so much and they only have so much time you will realise that they looked at what they needed to do:
Make a better external camera system
Make a gunner turret view for Multicrew
Take external camera system, add an overlay, alter the angles and lock them.
Presto, gunner turret view.
It offers the viewing angles they needed to make it work and it allowed them to be efficient with development time.
Stop wondering what they could have done and look at the obvious reasons why it was done this way!
It's not a bad implementation at all, and it works!
There's so many posts saying "I wish they had done it that way", "I dont like it, it should have been like this"
All the additional stuff to the game has been done with time limits and limited number developers, why would this be any different?
Last edited: