I've been playing Quake Champions since CBT#1, and some people don't realize this but the game has improved a fuckton since then.
Keep in mind that my feedback is obviously based on my personal experience with the game, so any issues you might have had with the game will not be pointed out here if it didn't happen to me.
Back in CBT days the game ran like absolute crap. People complain today about performance, but it has come a long way since early Beta, it still has much to improve (and I'm sure it will) but remember that it has been much much worse and people said it would never be good enough back then. We also had the infamous rocket delay and 0 dmg rockets, that are arguably an engine issue (take it with a grain of salt as this is something that we don't really have any evidence aside from anedoctal ones). The game at the time was a stutter mess all around, but it also had a bug where the game would stutter for a fraction of a second specifically when you'd fire a rail. There was the also infamous pixel perfect hitboxes that were a big part on the netcode issues. Oh, and the more FPS you had, the more laggy you'd be because of the upload rate and the game used to crash every 10 to 15 minutes. Sound was also much worse, you couldn't hear absolute shit.
About balance. We began with a system that had different HP/AP values for each champion ranging from 75/25 to 150/150 that six months later gone to 100/50 to 175/175 and that was specific to each individual champion. We also had the round system, that rounded the amount of hp you got from a health bubble to the "next 25", which was terrible, let's be honest. And btw, timers on small armor and health was 15 seconds, and Light Armor gave 25 AP. We also went through various changes in the movement. We had speed caps for each champions as well as differente accel values, we later had forward accel and "bunnyhop" (which was not really bunnyhop btw, but ok). And then they removed Speed Caps, but lowered air accel to compensate (which didn't work because the game felt slow as fuck). We went through various "champion & weapon metas" too. We had the squishies meta, the Anarki+anyone meta, BJ meta, Clutch meta, Doomslayer meta. We had rockets at 1200 ups, OP nails, zoomed 100 rails and we had trash tribolt and Tribolt WMD(Weapon of Mass Destruction)...
----------------------------------------------------------------------I kinda like the tribolt although I'm still mourning the Grenade Launcher, but hey... what can you do... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Now... I'm going to talk on my opinions about the game in it's current state.
- Performance
It was improving more and more every patch, but in the latest update it went a little backwards. Stuttering, that was something that I haven't had any issues for months, is happening again. It's not a lot, but it's happening. Performance is really important for Quake. Please, id... I know it is a priority for the team, and I know that Game Development is not a walk in the park, but still... It doesn't hurt to remind that it should be better. I should also add that the first patch we got without a PTS test, was also the first to make performance worse.
- Netcode
To be fair, the netcode is actually better than most succesfull FPS in the market right now (I mean it) and, as I said, it's much better than CBT era. It feels better than CS:GO and Rainbow Six Siege, and it is almost Godlike compared to the likes of the recent Battle Royale fever. Still, these games ARE NOT Arena Shooters. This week I was playing a duel, I was Visor and I was low. I used my sight to escape my opponent and he was CLEARLY behind the wall following me, and still his LG kept hitting me without line of sight... This was on 30 ~ 40 ping, which is... let's say... not ideal for a game like Quake. I'm not gonna come here and tell you, like some* smartas*ses around here already suggested, *to "copy the code from *Insert game here* and paste it to QC code, it shouldn't be hard"*. As I said, I'm well aware that Game Development is not easy, but Netcode & Performance should be in a better state, specially now that it has gone F2P.
- Content (Champions, Cosmetics, Game modes and Maps)
Currently, we have a good Champion Pool, every character is very distinct and original, they're all very well designed and their skins too. Now, although I don't really care that much about cosmetics, we currently have too few champion & weapon skins to justify an ingame store. I believe that's why items only go on weekly rotation instead of being all available at once to be bough by anyone. I'm not a big fan of lootboxes, so I'm not going to talk about them, except that Reliquaries drops are still questionable.
About modes, I'm very happy with the current modes we have in game right now, and even more happy about the addition of CTF, Slipgate and the other unannounced modes to come until the end of the year, I'm very optimistic about them. BUT... We still have to talk about Duel and what is going to be made about it. Current Duel format encourages too much defensive play and makes abilities matter too much. I had games where the opponent gets 1 frag and spends the rest of the round hiding and running away, and it's a rewarding strategy and I (and many other players) think it shouldn't be this way. Duel should reward skill and smartplay, and although you could argue that hiding and fleeing is indeed smartplay, but I'd say Duel should also, on top of that, be fun for both players*.* It's been months since we've been told about Duel being reworked, and we got nothing new since then. I'd really like to know ANYTHING about it's progress so far, and I'm sure I'm not alone with this.
I can't wait to play DM17. It's so nostalgic, I used to play deathmatch with my friends all the time on that map. It's not a competitive map, but it's crazy fun for casual modes. Instagib is going to be amazing in it. About the rest of the map pool, I'm very satisfied with it, maps look great and are, in general, very well designed. I'd still like to see other art styles beyond the Elder God themes. Also, what happened to the reworked Lockbox item layout? I'm still waiting on that too. Also, Vale of Pnath could get some adjustments in the item layout too, some people suggested that the Railgun traded places with the Heavy Armor, I think it's a good idea, would be nice to test the map with a different layout. Still looking forward to new duel maps and symetrical CTF Maps.
- Balance (Items, Weapons and Champions)
Balance is something that have been getting better and better with time. BEFORE YOU STORM THE COMMENTS... I'm aware of the Four Horsemen (BJ, Clutch, Death Knight and Keel). But it's true. Many changes over the past year made the game much more balanced, I'm talking about changes in items (light armor 30 seconds, and 50 AP) and Health bubbles at 15 seconds and the HP fixed at 100 with overstack to 125 across the board and different armor values distributed through Light(50 AP), Medium(100 AP) and Heavy champions(150 AP). Rocket speed has been lowered to 1100 ups and nails are harder to hit than before, Tribolt is in a good place right now IMO, but I would still prefer the Grenade Launcher. We got the tribolt under the reason that "grenades make the game too spammy" and now the tribolt is... well... a spam weapon... Also, fine adjustment to the Shotguns made them both more consistent. about the machineguns, I still think that 9 damage for the SMG is a bit too much, although it's not the end of the world. I'd still prefer rails at 80 dmg, but 90 is ok. LG is fine, it received a bit of a "buff" the last balance update, which was unnecessary imo, but it didn't really made that much of a difference. Overall I think weapons are well balanced and shouldn't be changed much, if anything maybe make them a bit "weaker" across the board, but that's not the point.
Now... the champions... I want to get rid of this asap... but Death Knight, although he is my favorite character, is completely stupid. 150 damage from a missed shot is so unintuitive that I can't even. It's so absurd that some people might have seen me saying that this is actually a bug tha counts splash damage as direct hits, because I just don't think that anyone in their right minds would think this would be a good idea. Ok, so with that out of the way... BJ/Clutch needs nerf, the way they work right now is just unfair. I have a mindset when I'm think about champion balance: If I die in less than 3 seconds in a fight where I have the position advantage and I'm fully stacked (with Mega and Heavy), and I didn't fuck up movement/aim, then something's not right. There's a fine line that separates "rewarding the user" and "punishing the opponent". Abilities should reward the player using them, not punish the other player for free (If that makes sense). In the case of Clutch and BJ, their mere presence is enough to scare you away of an item even if you're 200/200 (175/175 actually, but anyway) because you're going to get punished hard. Also, Visor's ability, while it's not Overpowered per se since it doesn't really deal any damage, I think something should be changed, maybe by showing enemy through pulses (like a sonar) or at least some audio cue so you can hear him using his sight, it doesn't have to be like it was before, when the entire map could hear him saying "I can see you" in russian, but some mechanical noise audible at a certain distance should work. IMO Keel's grenades are still a bit of a problem (including being one of the reasons we won't get the Grenade Launcher back :P). I think grenades should be more for area denial. So my suggestion is give him 10 grenades, but don't let him fire the grenades simultaneously with weapons and give it a reload time so you can't just damage away. This also would make him a tool to deny hourglasses, since you would be able to always pick them up for grenades. I'm a bit tired now, so I can't think of anything else right now, but if I think of something else I'll be adding it in the comments.
If you got here, thank you for reading! :)
Submitted August 27, 2018 at 09:53PM by holydiverz https://ift.tt/2MShsqI
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