An FPS Idea: Attrition

[Zor]

This is just some musings on my part and i am not a huge FPS fan. The only two that i have played extensively are Command and Conquer Renegade and Fallout 3.

One idea that comes up in allot of First Person Shooters (especially ones that are sci-fi or have sci-fi elements) is the idea about Elite Forces and super-soldiers or things on that line. The reason behind this, people would rather see themselves as the badass best of the best murder machine with the coolest toys rather than just another Footslogger and it makes it a bit (and yes, i said a bit) more believable when you have just slaughtered seven dozen Terrorists/Russians/Nazis/Aliens/Renegade Mutant super soldiers to stop them from destroying New Jersey and suchlike. Fair enough. However, i was considering something of an opposite approach to this.

Basically it goes as such. Its the future and their are colonies about and all that. On one of these colonies, something happens and suddenly a whole lot of war has started there and the good guy powers from earth come in to save the day (this is a bit of a placeholder, but it fits my idea well). The idea here is that instead of the usual space marines, there are robots, hordes of Disposable cannon fodder non anthropomorphic robots. Specifically i had the idea in mind of calling the robots (and the game) Attrition.

The player commands a squad of these robots against these bad guys, with several categories of Robots (Rifle, Heavy Machine Gun, Sniper, Grenadier, Tankbuster) that can be customized. Each of these Robots is fairly week when compared to the enemies, which have some big heavier units latter on. The player also does not command one Robot. In addition to more conventional squad based combat, the player can assume direct control over each of his Robots, cycling between perspectives. If the bot that the player is currently commanding dies, it automatically toggles to the next extant robot on the queue. As an extra part, the Robots have a self destruct feature allowing them to go Kamikaze on their enemies. Additional Robots can be picked up in various areas. For a multiplayer experience, some of the heavy hitting enemies could be brought in during the campaign to contrast against the attrition robots.

Just throwing ideas out there.

Zor

[adam_grif]

This is just some musings on my part and i am not a huge FPS fan. The only two that i have played extensively are Command and Conquer Renegade and Fallout 3.

Renegade is pretty terrible and Fallout 3 has horrible shooting, so you're not off to a good start.

The idea is fine and I've had a similar one myself in the past, only it was more like a Forever Peace setup where you were stomping over third world guerrillas in your remote piloted death robot instead of interstellar warfare. Having swarms of weak allies vs tough enemies might be less great since FPS combat tends to be its most satisfying when your guns feel very powerful and bring down enemies quickly under sustained fire. Conversely, weak player-characters usually only works in certain kinds of games since constantly dying sucks, however that seems like it's kind of the point here and I'd definitely give it a go at least.

[xthetenth]

It sounds kinda like you're going at the same general feel as men of war: assault squad, just from the fps end instead of the strategy end. I quite like that game, or at least the betas, so I'd say it's definitely workable, especially with actual polished shooter mechanics.

[Lagmonster]

This kind of idea has been done many times in different situations. Clive Barker's Jericho was the most recent I can think of that gave you a squad with different abilities and the ability to shift between them.

[xthetenth]

Oh yeah, the different squad members has been done a lot, but part of what makes this somewhat distinctive is that the lives of your units are cheap and they're pretty replaceable, something it definitely shares with MoW:AS, especially with the multiple interchangeable units.

[Sarevok]

This idea is as old as the first squad based shooters, starting with the original 1998 Rainbow Six game.

[CaptHawkeye]

If you want to make shooters interesting again then one thing that needs to happen is quantity of enemies needs to be replaced by quality. We *should* see more things like NPCs using health packs, tactical aid, IE: abilities available to the player too. While cutting back on cheating shit like seeing the player through walls, respawn spamming out of closets, etc

But that would take work.

[Steel]

This idea is as old as the first squad based shooters, starting with the original 1998 Rainbow Six game.

I'm relatively sure the idea in Rainbow Six was to minimise casualties rather than wear the enemies down with waves of your men.

[Zixinus]

The problem with FPS games and turning them into squad-shooters is that of controlling your squad and being an active participant at the same time.

Republic Commando was great, but you couldn't do much more than designate cover for your squadmates and revive them when they die.

Swat 4 offered much more options and relied very heavily on properly utilising your squad. Problem is that was a pain in the ass to effectively use the menus to manage them. I actually stopped playing after my fustration at the inability to quickly designate orders fast enough.

Then there is Operation Flashpoint, offering a wide array of tactics trough a horrible GUI that the developers refuse to upgrade in fear of angering their fanbase.

I am sure that there are examples of games where the squad-fighting control is better combined, but you still end up with a problem: having to use both the squad-control interface and reacting to being under fire.

Personally, I'm waiting to see voice-recognition in-built to the game.

More interesting would be if you could only control one robot at a time, each with a different layout and you can only summon a robot a limited amount of times. So it would not punish death too much, you would have to wager in tactics and strategy into the robot you are using and still try to make it look like a fair fight a bit. Because using super-advanced robotic soldiers to crush colonist rebellion is not usually seen as heroic.

[Losonti Tokash]

Sounds a bit like Urban Assault. Spewing out squads of robots and taking direct control of them was pretty much that game's entire premise.

[Sarevok]

This idea is as old as the first squad based shooters, starting with the original 1998 Rainbow Six game.

I'm relatively sure the idea in Rainbow Six was to minimise casualties rather than wear the enemies down with waves of your men.

I mean the idea of playing as replaceable mooks.

In R6 it is ok to die as long as there is a squad member remaining you can take control.

[PeZook]

Except, of course, for the part where you only had a limited number of guys and if one died, he/she was lost permanently for the rest of the game.

[Sarevok]

Nah if you go into the Roster screen there are infinite number of literal nameless faceless mooks available as reserve forces. Suppose you are a sadistic commander that sends everyone with a smiling picture and biography to be killed off. You can still spam wave after wave of expendable commandoes.

[PeZook]

Huh...

Would've made my life easier had I known about that

I always assumed that dead squad member = lost forever.

[Sarevok]

Dead characters are gone forever. The guys I am referring to are unnamed reserve members you can recruit. They apparently exist in limitless numbers unlike the named characters of which there is a finite number.

[xthetenth]

In R6, if I remember right, the faceless ones kinda suck, so there's a strong impetus to keep your ones alive. Also there isn't much midlevel planning. It would be interesting turning things on their head from the usual shooter mechanic of relatively incompetent enemies. Might be interesting if flanking and the like was encouraged like in, say, Full Spectrum Warrior.

[PeZook]

In R6, if I remember right, the faceless ones kinda suck, so there's a strong impetus to keep your ones alive. Also there isn't much midlevel planning. It would be interesting turning things on their head from the usual shooter mechanic of relatively incompetent enemies. Might be interesting if flanking and the like was encouraged like in, say, Full Spectrum Warrior.

They ALL kinda sucked, actually. Their AI was nonexistent (LOL waypoint 30cm to the right of the door! WE CAN'T GET THROUGH), and frightened college students were capable of turning around and wiping out your entire squad in half a second

Had I known I could just send waves after wave of mooks at the terrorists I would've saved myself a lot of grief

[Tolya]

Oh yes, I remember that one. "Untrained students without military experience took over a water processing plant in Oman, we have to stop them!"

Cue RB6 music.

A squad of elite superhardcore awesome supersoldiers who can shoot a peanut out of the hands of a squirrel enter the room. A lone freightened studend with an AK47 starts shooting and kills everyone before anyone has a chance to take aim and shoot. Even on auto aim.

Rainbow Six: Raven shield was much better in this respect. Enemies actually took their frikkin time to raise their guns, aim and fire, instead of instakill hip shooting.

And Renegade wasn't such a bad game. It was funny as hell, I regularly laughed my ass off during cutscenes.

Like the one on the freighter: two nod soldiers walk up to a minisub.

- Look, one of the new subs!
- Cool! Are they armed?

Commando opens the hatch and kills the two soldiers with a pistol and says:
- This one is.

[Axiomatic]

Actually, I think it might be better to look at games like Battlezone for this.

They were essentially First Person Strategy games, where you sat in a tank, and had to roll around the battlefield and give commands personally. If your tank was destroyed, you ejected, and then could tell any other tank to give you a ride.

[xthetenth]

They ALL kinda sucked, actually. Their AI was nonexistent (LOL waypoint 30cm to the right of the door! WE CAN'T GET THROUGH), and frightened college students were capable of turning around and wiping out your entire squad in half a second

Had I known I could just send waves after wave of mooks at the terrorists I would've saved myself a lot of grief

Yeah, I'm probably projecting ghost recon on them, where your guys were roughly competent too and you got a lot of gains from xp, but the replacements were bad and not going to catch up to your elite squad of awesome teamness especially considering their stock guns. If the player is using robots, how about a system to reward survival and good play without the back to zero fun. Something like for each level, your bots improve, but if one gets a kill or a few kills and survives the mission they get more? Even then the thought of a ghost recon style game where you can actually go in aggressively is awesome, especially combined with a proper tactical interface. It might be better still if the asymmetrical type of fighting in the game gets played up, so you have to exploit your better intel and management against enemies much more powerful than yourself routinely rather than just smashing bots on big things.

[KlavoHunter]

If you are looking for justifications why surviving 'bots "level up" or "upgrade", well, you could say that the particular unit is becoming better-adjusted to its teleoperator, or that, because you aren't constantly in need of replacements, HQ can afford to gamble and send some of the better gear your way and have a reasonable hope that it'll pay off in results...