Just a quick note i origionally posted this in the discussions thread and figgured that was probably inefficient so i am reposting it here.
This is gonna be kinda long but i hope you can bare with me, however i will also add a TLDR at the bottom of the post for those who dont want to read through this whole thing.
So the rebalaces i would like to see would have two goals in mind,
1. to make combat feel more fluid, at this current moment enemies are far to bullet spongy requiring multiple weapons and several mag dumps to effectively engage a single enemy.
2. to allow players to get more attached to their tools, much like a player can get attached to their ship in the base game
and a potential third outcome, i do also think some of these changes will make it easier for the developers to balance individual pieces of equipment in the future.
FIRST CHANGE
Enemy Rebalance
so the first change i would sugest would be to rework how the enemy scaling works. At the moment the dificulty scaling for enemies is linear, you have your Threat levels from 1-10 (i think it goes to 10)
and every level there are more enemies and they have more shields and maybe some better weapons but thats about it. This isnt very interesting and ultimately equates to the higher tier encounters emphasising the bullet spongy nature of the combat.
Now i believe i know why this mechanisim is used,
1. It is very simple and relatively easy to initially implament (I am personally of the belief that the developers where struggaling with time, not their fault)
2. To promote the upgrading mechanic for the weapons, ie a base weapon would only be used for low tier combat and you would slowly work your way up to the higher tier combat by upgrading your weapons. This would also be the primary source for the time sink / time investment for Odyssey.
However this system does have its drawbacks, instead of the combat itself feeling more interesting or dangerous it simpily becomes annoying as you are facing the same enemy as before however they just eat more bullets.
So instead we break the enemies down into 3 seperate encounter types. 1, pirates 2, security/military 3, alien (when they are added). We keep the tier system as before from 1-10 but now the encounters will look something more like this.
(Just a quick note for context, i would also add at least 3 new weapons to the game, 1.laser or kinetic revolver 2. kinetic pumpaction shotgun 3. bolt action rifle , these weapons do have a puropse in the balance structure ive planned out here. sidearms are Tier 1, shotguns/ boltaction are Tier 2, SMGs are Tier 3 , rifles are Tier 4 and rocketlauncher, sniper and LMGs(in the future) are Tier 5)
Threat Level 1 :
narative: scavanger landed to loot some debries
Purpose: basic introduction to combat, adds life to senarios
Unit types: scavanger
Number: max 3
Gear: no shields
Weapons: sidearms
Threat Level 2 :
Narative: Small group of scavangers or pirates
Purpose: first interaction of a actual threat
Unit types: Scavanger and armored scavanger /or/ pirate
Number: max 6
Gear:no shields, slightly better physical armor
Weapons: mostely sidearms, 1 or 2 members have a Tier 2 weapon
Threat Level 3:
Narative: organised crime, mostely pirates
Purpose: A more complete combat encounter, long range enemies and will serve as an introduction to Heavy unity (very slow but very heavy).
Unit types: Pirates, Heavy Pirate(CQC) and Long range priate
Number: +- 10 enemies
Gear: mostely no shields (those who do have have very weak shields),
Weapons: Mostely Tier 2 weapons, Heavys would have shotguns and would move slowly, Long range would stay at distance.
Threat Level 4:
Narative: these would be basic security units you would find on planetary bases
Purpose: first look at more organised combat
Unit Types: mostely basic patrol units, the ocasional marksman(sniper), 1-2 sentry skimmers
Number: +- 10
Gear: Everyone has tier 2 shields, a little stronger than tier 1
Weapons: Tier 3 weapons mostely(SMGs), the marksman would use a long range weapon
Threat Level 5:
Narative: low tier military, this would be the standard level for a conflic zone with organised combat forces facing eachother, this would also be the tier of a small military instilations defences
Puropse: full organised combat, welcome to the war
Unit Types: Riflemen, Snipers, sentry skimmers and 1-2 guardian skimmers
Number: 20+
Gear: Tier 3 shields these would be the larges thields that you would find on non special units and would be about twice as strong as tier 1 shields
Weapons: Tier 4 weapons, the name says it all... rifles...
Threat Level 6:
Narative: thems the hard core bois, gonna kill u real gud. High end military similar to tier 5 however specialised units added in the mix
Purpose: this would be the real combat challange, the intention would be to almost force player cooperation.
Unit Types:Riflemen, Snipers, Jugganauts(Heavy units with much stronger shields and armor however they move very slow, they use SMGs) , guardian skimmers and 1-2 goliaths
Number: Yes
Gear: Tier 3 shields for the riflemen, jugganouts would have very large shields however they would move very slow and wouldnt seek cover to compensate.
weapons: tier 4 and tier 5 weapons so rifles, LMGs(when added) and rocket launchers
Threat Level 7-10:
Narrative: Alien encounters
Purpose: this would be reserved for either thargoid or guardian encounters... we dont have any of those yet but... looking forward to it
So this roughly breaks down how i would split up the enemy encounters. Having a more condensed structure that has a more defined role for each tier, making it easier to balance them. As opposed to a more linear aproach where it gets a lot more challanging to account for everything in the middle.
This would also add a lot of variaty to the encounters, players would have to make equipment considerations based on that you whould expect to face. At low tiers you wouldnt even see enemies with shields for example. Aditionaly this is easier than constructing entirly new AI logic for enemies but rather just changing their stats a little more dramatically.
SECOND CHANGE
Armor and shields
The changes i would make here are relatively straitforward, firstly i would remove the stat improvements from upgrading your suits (dont freak out haz plan) so when you upgrade your suit all you get is an engineering slot.
Then i would make shields a seperate item that you purchase with 3 basic tiers... Tier 1-3. Tier 1 would be the most energy efficient but the weakest, Tier 3 shields would be the beefiers but also the mose power hungry and Tier 2 would be well rounded.
Then i would make armor native to the suit, thats pretty easy flightsuit Zero, Artimus suit gets some protection( like 5% or something), Maverick suit slightly better (10ish %), Dominator suit is combat orintated so 15-20%.
THIRD CHANGE
Weapons
Now this is a rather tricky section becasue the weapon balance will be central to the combat flow and feel, im sure the developers have struggled with this topic since before they started building odyssey. I will however propose a basic idea to follow, Every single weapon should be a compatent tool on its own. From the starting pistol to the most high tech assault rifle no matter what weapon you are using you should feel confident that you will be able to at least defend yourself with it.
What the average time to kill should be will be dificult to pin down. I reccomend having some open combat tests with players in different senarios with different game builds to try and really pin down what will be enjoyable for the majority of players but for now im going to say about 2-5 seconds.
So to start remove the stat improvements from all the weapons, no more upgrading damage and mag size (stay with me now dont freak out). Between the shield and armor changes all the weapons should have a time to kill of arround 2-5 seconds for a Threat Level 5 rifleman in a combat zone( good armor + best standard shield). The only exeption to this would be the heavy pirate and Gugganaut units who would have a much longer time to kill (and the skimmers).
With this setup it would also be easier to design and balanse upgrades you would want to make for weapons because you would not have to account for changing damage numberes or magazine sises because they would be constand reguardless of upgrading.
I think these changes would make the combat itself feel more lively and dangerous, it will be easier for you to kill most enemies however you can die really quickly as well. Idealy this would cause the player to take a much more cautous approach to combat really thinking about what they are going to do and how they are going to solve the problem of whatever mission they are trying to acchive.
HOWEVER, i also believe this brings us to a problem that the higher tankiness that we are currently dealing with was hiding.
FORTH CHANGE (the change that will bring everything together)
Companions and Reviving
This last big change is designed to address what would probably be the biggest difficulty with changes to combat i am reccomending. The player is almost always outnumbered.
This is a pretty big problem, even now in its current state players get swarmed and the thing that allows us to survive for the most part are our shields as well as the fact that most weapons do very little damage per shot. Now imagine if you could only take 10 shots in total, in many combat senarios you would die before you even know what happened.
To address this is propose two additions (they are also in the title), that being downstates with reviving and AI crewmembers/teamates. This downstate will give the player some leway for making mistakes, instead of rounding the wrong corner and going strait to the respawn screen you would enter a revive state. Then an ally can come and pick you up using a medical pack (either using one of thiers or one or your own).
The AI teamates would act to help directly counter the outnumbered situation, both addign collective hitpoints and firepower to your side of an altercation as well as being able to revive you in case you go down.
To add to this (and i might make some ignorat statements here, i am somewhat new to the programing scene) the companion AI might not even be that hard to implament. We already have AI that can register us as friendly in combat zones. Therefore to make companions we could just have AI that function in a very similar style to the combat zone AI we just set the companion AI to the players faction and the companions would agro whenever a hostile party was detected. As of control over the AI, set their default state to following the player when not in combat, and if combat does start a single comand to return to the player if the player decides the AI are moving to far away. Once AI companions are in it would be easy enough to add new comands over time.
Another factor reguarding AI companions to consider is just the insane amount of potential they they could have to help build a narrative for the players. imagine companions with procedrially generated loyalty missions, that if compleated will give you small bonuses from that companion. Perhaps little snipits of character that can come from their lore and so on. im not saying do anything like that to start but as a foundational step companions will have amazing potential.
Just another thing i wanted to throw in here, having watched the UI team livestream recently. We could hire crew members like we already do (litteraly through the same UI elements however the crew we hire would also have a on foot combat status) and when we land on a planet we could choose to disembark with out crewmembers as a fireteam (I do forsee some complications reguarding companions and SRVs however those could be worked arround with relative ease). And this way the UI team wont have to worry about adding too much new UI. xD
ADENDUM
I dont really expect much to come from this thread im starting here, there are many ways that the combat experiance in Odyssey can be improved and made more enjoyable and this is but one solution from a single Elite fan. Ultimately i just want to see Elite getting that little bit closer to that "best Sci-fi space life expreiance" we all want it to be.
I also didnt talk about economy changes that would be effecting this gameplay, i havnt forgotten about those however that wasnt the point of this particular post so i omitted them (this essay is long enough xD).
I do have more ideas on how to flesh out many of the ideas i have presented here, and if this post gets enough traction i will certainly try to elaborate ( i could honnestly talk about Elite gameplay design ideas all day).
It would also be cool if we could get some discussion from the Devs reguarding the design desisions and thought processes that where utalised in the construction of the Odyssey gameplay. I can all but guarentee that it was more though through than many of us would initially think and i would love to lean more about the process.
Hope you all have a good day
CMDR FRANKENHEART
o7 commanders
I totally didnt forget the TLDR... ._.
CHANGE 1: Break down the threat encounters into fewer more well defined tiers so it is easier to balance them
CHANGE 2: Lower the armor and shields significantly.
CHANGE 3: Any one weapon should be a compatent tool on its own. Buff the performance of most weapons so that the average kill time for all weapons is roughly 2-5 seconds (this time is entierly up for debate and thorough testing should be held to find a comfortable Time To Kill)
CHANGE 4: AI companions and Downstate/revive, this wouldnt just be a nice to have i think it would be rather necissary change for the balance. Given the more deadly combat flow changes ive outlined this would probably be a core feature in player decision making.
This is gonna be kinda long but i hope you can bare with me, however i will also add a TLDR at the bottom of the post for those who dont want to read through this whole thing.
So the rebalaces i would like to see would have two goals in mind,
1. to make combat feel more fluid, at this current moment enemies are far to bullet spongy requiring multiple weapons and several mag dumps to effectively engage a single enemy.
2. to allow players to get more attached to their tools, much like a player can get attached to their ship in the base game
and a potential third outcome, i do also think some of these changes will make it easier for the developers to balance individual pieces of equipment in the future.
FIRST CHANGE
Enemy Rebalance
so the first change i would sugest would be to rework how the enemy scaling works. At the moment the dificulty scaling for enemies is linear, you have your Threat levels from 1-10 (i think it goes to 10)
and every level there are more enemies and they have more shields and maybe some better weapons but thats about it. This isnt very interesting and ultimately equates to the higher tier encounters emphasising the bullet spongy nature of the combat.
Now i believe i know why this mechanisim is used,
1. It is very simple and relatively easy to initially implament (I am personally of the belief that the developers where struggaling with time, not their fault)
2. To promote the upgrading mechanic for the weapons, ie a base weapon would only be used for low tier combat and you would slowly work your way up to the higher tier combat by upgrading your weapons. This would also be the primary source for the time sink / time investment for Odyssey.
However this system does have its drawbacks, instead of the combat itself feeling more interesting or dangerous it simpily becomes annoying as you are facing the same enemy as before however they just eat more bullets.
So instead we break the enemies down into 3 seperate encounter types. 1, pirates 2, security/military 3, alien (when they are added). We keep the tier system as before from 1-10 but now the encounters will look something more like this.
(Just a quick note for context, i would also add at least 3 new weapons to the game, 1.laser or kinetic revolver 2. kinetic pumpaction shotgun 3. bolt action rifle , these weapons do have a puropse in the balance structure ive planned out here. sidearms are Tier 1, shotguns/ boltaction are Tier 2, SMGs are Tier 3 , rifles are Tier 4 and rocketlauncher, sniper and LMGs(in the future) are Tier 5)
Threat Level 1 :
narative: scavanger landed to loot some debries
Purpose: basic introduction to combat, adds life to senarios
Unit types: scavanger
Number: max 3
Gear: no shields
Weapons: sidearms
Threat Level 2 :
Narative: Small group of scavangers or pirates
Purpose: first interaction of a actual threat
Unit types: Scavanger and armored scavanger /or/ pirate
Number: max 6
Gear:no shields, slightly better physical armor
Weapons: mostely sidearms, 1 or 2 members have a Tier 2 weapon
Threat Level 3:
Narative: organised crime, mostely pirates
Purpose: A more complete combat encounter, long range enemies and will serve as an introduction to Heavy unity (very slow but very heavy).
Unit types: Pirates, Heavy Pirate(CQC) and Long range priate
Number: +- 10 enemies
Gear: mostely no shields (those who do have have very weak shields),
Weapons: Mostely Tier 2 weapons, Heavys would have shotguns and would move slowly, Long range would stay at distance.
Threat Level 4:
Narative: these would be basic security units you would find on planetary bases
Purpose: first look at more organised combat
Unit Types: mostely basic patrol units, the ocasional marksman(sniper), 1-2 sentry skimmers
Number: +- 10
Gear: Everyone has tier 2 shields, a little stronger than tier 1
Weapons: Tier 3 weapons mostely(SMGs), the marksman would use a long range weapon
Threat Level 5:
Narative: low tier military, this would be the standard level for a conflic zone with organised combat forces facing eachother, this would also be the tier of a small military instilations defences
Puropse: full organised combat, welcome to the war
Unit Types: Riflemen, Snipers, sentry skimmers and 1-2 guardian skimmers
Number: 20+
Gear: Tier 3 shields these would be the larges thields that you would find on non special units and would be about twice as strong as tier 1 shields
Weapons: Tier 4 weapons, the name says it all... rifles...
Threat Level 6:
Narative: thems the hard core bois, gonna kill u real gud. High end military similar to tier 5 however specialised units added in the mix
Purpose: this would be the real combat challange, the intention would be to almost force player cooperation.
Unit Types:Riflemen, Snipers, Jugganauts(Heavy units with much stronger shields and armor however they move very slow, they use SMGs) , guardian skimmers and 1-2 goliaths
Number: Yes
Gear: Tier 3 shields for the riflemen, jugganouts would have very large shields however they would move very slow and wouldnt seek cover to compensate.
weapons: tier 4 and tier 5 weapons so rifles, LMGs(when added) and rocket launchers
Threat Level 7-10:
Narrative: Alien encounters
Purpose: this would be reserved for either thargoid or guardian encounters... we dont have any of those yet but... looking forward to it
So this roughly breaks down how i would split up the enemy encounters. Having a more condensed structure that has a more defined role for each tier, making it easier to balance them. As opposed to a more linear aproach where it gets a lot more challanging to account for everything in the middle.
This would also add a lot of variaty to the encounters, players would have to make equipment considerations based on that you whould expect to face. At low tiers you wouldnt even see enemies with shields for example. Aditionaly this is easier than constructing entirly new AI logic for enemies but rather just changing their stats a little more dramatically.
SECOND CHANGE
Armor and shields
The changes i would make here are relatively straitforward, firstly i would remove the stat improvements from upgrading your suits (dont freak out haz plan) so when you upgrade your suit all you get is an engineering slot.
Then i would make shields a seperate item that you purchase with 3 basic tiers... Tier 1-3. Tier 1 would be the most energy efficient but the weakest, Tier 3 shields would be the beefiers but also the mose power hungry and Tier 2 would be well rounded.
Then i would make armor native to the suit, thats pretty easy flightsuit Zero, Artimus suit gets some protection( like 5% or something), Maverick suit slightly better (10ish %), Dominator suit is combat orintated so 15-20%.
THIRD CHANGE
Weapons
Now this is a rather tricky section becasue the weapon balance will be central to the combat flow and feel, im sure the developers have struggled with this topic since before they started building odyssey. I will however propose a basic idea to follow, Every single weapon should be a compatent tool on its own. From the starting pistol to the most high tech assault rifle no matter what weapon you are using you should feel confident that you will be able to at least defend yourself with it.
What the average time to kill should be will be dificult to pin down. I reccomend having some open combat tests with players in different senarios with different game builds to try and really pin down what will be enjoyable for the majority of players but for now im going to say about 2-5 seconds.
So to start remove the stat improvements from all the weapons, no more upgrading damage and mag size (stay with me now dont freak out). Between the shield and armor changes all the weapons should have a time to kill of arround 2-5 seconds for a Threat Level 5 rifleman in a combat zone( good armor + best standard shield). The only exeption to this would be the heavy pirate and Gugganaut units who would have a much longer time to kill (and the skimmers).
With this setup it would also be easier to design and balanse upgrades you would want to make for weapons because you would not have to account for changing damage numberes or magazine sises because they would be constand reguardless of upgrading.
I think these changes would make the combat itself feel more lively and dangerous, it will be easier for you to kill most enemies however you can die really quickly as well. Idealy this would cause the player to take a much more cautous approach to combat really thinking about what they are going to do and how they are going to solve the problem of whatever mission they are trying to acchive.
HOWEVER, i also believe this brings us to a problem that the higher tankiness that we are currently dealing with was hiding.
FORTH CHANGE (the change that will bring everything together)
Companions and Reviving
This last big change is designed to address what would probably be the biggest difficulty with changes to combat i am reccomending. The player is almost always outnumbered.
This is a pretty big problem, even now in its current state players get swarmed and the thing that allows us to survive for the most part are our shields as well as the fact that most weapons do very little damage per shot. Now imagine if you could only take 10 shots in total, in many combat senarios you would die before you even know what happened.
To address this is propose two additions (they are also in the title), that being downstates with reviving and AI crewmembers/teamates. This downstate will give the player some leway for making mistakes, instead of rounding the wrong corner and going strait to the respawn screen you would enter a revive state. Then an ally can come and pick you up using a medical pack (either using one of thiers or one or your own).
The AI teamates would act to help directly counter the outnumbered situation, both addign collective hitpoints and firepower to your side of an altercation as well as being able to revive you in case you go down.
To add to this (and i might make some ignorat statements here, i am somewhat new to the programing scene) the companion AI might not even be that hard to implament. We already have AI that can register us as friendly in combat zones. Therefore to make companions we could just have AI that function in a very similar style to the combat zone AI we just set the companion AI to the players faction and the companions would agro whenever a hostile party was detected. As of control over the AI, set their default state to following the player when not in combat, and if combat does start a single comand to return to the player if the player decides the AI are moving to far away. Once AI companions are in it would be easy enough to add new comands over time.
Another factor reguarding AI companions to consider is just the insane amount of potential they they could have to help build a narrative for the players. imagine companions with procedrially generated loyalty missions, that if compleated will give you small bonuses from that companion. Perhaps little snipits of character that can come from their lore and so on. im not saying do anything like that to start but as a foundational step companions will have amazing potential.
Just another thing i wanted to throw in here, having watched the UI team livestream recently. We could hire crew members like we already do (litteraly through the same UI elements however the crew we hire would also have a on foot combat status) and when we land on a planet we could choose to disembark with out crewmembers as a fireteam (I do forsee some complications reguarding companions and SRVs however those could be worked arround with relative ease). And this way the UI team wont have to worry about adding too much new UI. xD
ADENDUM
I dont really expect much to come from this thread im starting here, there are many ways that the combat experiance in Odyssey can be improved and made more enjoyable and this is but one solution from a single Elite fan. Ultimately i just want to see Elite getting that little bit closer to that "best Sci-fi space life expreiance" we all want it to be.
I also didnt talk about economy changes that would be effecting this gameplay, i havnt forgotten about those however that wasnt the point of this particular post so i omitted them (this essay is long enough xD).
I do have more ideas on how to flesh out many of the ideas i have presented here, and if this post gets enough traction i will certainly try to elaborate ( i could honnestly talk about Elite gameplay design ideas all day).
It would also be cool if we could get some discussion from the Devs reguarding the design desisions and thought processes that where utalised in the construction of the Odyssey gameplay. I can all but guarentee that it was more though through than many of us would initially think and i would love to lean more about the process.
Hope you all have a good day
CMDR FRANKENHEART
o7 commanders
I totally didnt forget the TLDR... ._.
CHANGE 1: Break down the threat encounters into fewer more well defined tiers so it is easier to balance them
CHANGE 2: Lower the armor and shields significantly.
CHANGE 3: Any one weapon should be a compatent tool on its own. Buff the performance of most weapons so that the average kill time for all weapons is roughly 2-5 seconds (this time is entierly up for debate and thorough testing should be held to find a comfortable Time To Kill)
CHANGE 4: AI companions and Downstate/revive, this wouldnt just be a nice to have i think it would be rather necissary change for the balance. Given the more deadly combat flow changes ive outlined this would probably be a core feature in player decision making.