There are a lot of features that can be added to make Dust 514 more immersive. This blog will outline changes and additions that could achieve this. Gameplay takes priority but keep in mind immersion is the whole point of a first person perspective. When games are ‘experienced’ instead of being played, they have the opportunity to become much more than just entertainment. EVE’s ‘I Was There’ campaign is almost entirely based on remembering interactions that felt real. And at its core, that’s what immersion is.
[Out Of Battle]
- Mercenary Biography: It would add to the roleplay element to be able to write our own short biographies for others to see since it could be our way of sharing our character’s story or act like a mercenary resume.
- Message from Employer: In the war barge, a message from your employer would really reinforce the feeling that we are mercenaries hired by someone. It can just be standardized messages that depends on the contract accepted. There is also the possibility of voice messages from EVE players when they’re the ones who hire us.
As another tool to give us the ability to let us choose our experiences while still allowing us to feel like mercenary corporations, we’ve gone on at length about how game modes could be used to separate different types of contracts. Early Dust lore is full of individuals like Muryia Mordu scrolling through available contracts to find work. This Open Beta screenshot seems to shows the female protagonist navigating selections. Having our CEOs and directors select through lists of available types of jobs would be a great tool to make us feel more a part of New Eden.
[Movement]
- Wobbling HUD: When we run, our helmets move a bit from the inertia and this should cause the HUD to wiggle a bit as a result of the movement. This actually was in Dust but for some reason it was removed. Bring it back, please.
- Vaulting, Sliding, etc: More real world movement options besides walk, run, and jump for mercenaries would really help make us feel more in the game. Battlefield 3 is a good example of this. Players can vault over certain obstacles as they can in real life. The movement in Dust needs improvement and adding some aspects of a game with great movement is a good start.
- Prone: Prone gets a bum rap for being the tool of snipers and campers when it has many tactical aspects. Like better use of cover, lowering your target profile, and stability that results in more accuracy. Its negative aspects can easily be eliminated by slowing down the animation. This will make getting into prone and rising from prone useless in a firefight.
[Effects]
- Weapons Fire and Explosion Lighting Effects: On some maps there are parts permanently on fire and those parts have a lighting effect that brighten and shine on nearby objects. The forge gun charge also has that effect as it brightens the the objects around it. ALL gunfire, explosions, and turret fire should have this effect. We’re shooting burning hot plasma, lasers, etc. Even the conventional Minmatar SMG and HMG have a muzzle flash. Our weapons fire should emit more light than a simple fire. Not only would this be a realistic and immersive but it would add a level of tactics to darker maps since firing without thinking could alert your location to others. It could look like this:
- Nova Knife Burning Edge: Nova Knives have burning plasma edges but they don’t look like that at all. When slashing, the Nova Knives should have a burning glow effect similar to the concept art to make them really feel like dangerous plasma edged blades.
- Explosion Shake: Explosions, including grenades, should make the ground shake. It could look like this:
[Kills, Deaths, Rebirth]
- Killed by a Headshot: Sensors and cameras are located in helmet so when one is killed by a headshot, the sensors and cameras should be damaged. This should result in distorted vision and noticeable cracks on the HUD while laying on the ground. This is good for immersion but also would be a good way to find out that you died from a headshot. The distortion could look like this, plus some cracks:
- Get a Kill With Headshot: There should be a distinct sound specific to headshots. That sound would be the noise of the helmet equipment being destroyed. The game needs a headshot notification noise.
- Camera Should Stay With Corpse: When I get killed (mortally wounded) from a high location and my body falls down, my point of view remains where I died. This makes it really jarring when I get revived and my point of view suddenly changes to where my body fell to. It feels like I just teleported which can be confusing. Please don’t freeze the POV of the player during death. Let the POV travel with my body.
- Sky Spawn: Drop uplinks are wormhole tech and CRUs store clones so it makes sense how mercenariess can just show up there. For ground base spawns and spawns on objectives, there is no explanation for how we appear. Instead of magically appearing on bases and objectives, we should be dropped down into battle from the sky. Could be explained with cloaked NPC drone dropships. This would me make more sense and be much more immersive than just magically appearing on the battlefield. This would provide more variety to spawning and alleviate problems with being spawn killed.
[Animations]
- Default Melee Animation: With most guns, it looks like you’re elbowing instead of hitting someone with the gun. I find that it looks kind of silly. It’s a minor detail but it could use some work. The melee animation needs to look like you’re actually smacking someone with the gun model.
- Gun Animation While Firing: Light weapons, other than the laser rifle, should rattle back and forward when you fire them. The force of the shots ejecting from the gun should push the gun back against the user. It does so already with the AR (and maybe some other guns) but is barely noticeable. It needs to be increased.
- Vehicle Entering, Seat Switching, and Exiting Animations: Not only would this be more immersive but it would make use of vehicles more balanced since those in vehicles won’t be able to instantly switch seats to dodge shots and exploit the enter and exit mechanics in combat. FPSes has been hampered by these ‘instant’ vehicle mechanics for too long. Players can enter and exit tanks via wormholes apparently as they instantly materialize inside and outside of the behemoths at will. The same goes for dropships and LAVs. If players want to be able to exit vehicles with speed, make them pay for it the New Eden way (with ISK and SP). Introduce an ejection seat skill and module. Otherwise, give drivers and pilots a much longer animation to enter and exit vehicles which will improve gameplay and force players to exit early or ‘go down with the ship’.
- Reloading: This one is really important for gameplay. For the assault rifle, and maybe other weapons, the reloading animation is not synchronized properly with the reloading completion. This makes the reloading animation very misleading and cause new players to constantly cancel their reloading accidentally. This should obviously be fixed. The game should track and resume your reload progress to resume from where you left off if it gets cancelled. If you remove the magazine and cancel reloading, then you shouldn’t have to remove the magazine again when you start reloading again. Similarly, when you put in the new magazine but get interrupted, you should resume from where you left off in the reloading progress.
[Models]
- Legs: It really breaks immersion to look down and not be able to see your own legs.
- Logistic’s Arm Computer: It is not well fitted on the arm of the logistics suit.
- Arm Computer: The image is static while performing hacks. It looks like random spots on the screen. The image needs to change while hacking and there should be a touch keyboard for the mercenaries to tap.
[End Game]
- MCC Destruction: When the MCC is destroyed, don’t end the game yet. Let us see the MCC fall, skid through the ground lifting up dirt, and explode during gameplay as part of the scenery. The MCC crashing down should kill players, installations, and vehicles caught in its way. This spectacle would really make players feel like we are a part of the scene. It could look something like this:
As always, we’ll continue to attempt to help promote and publish ideas that help establish, enhance and grow the Dust 514 community as much as we can. Have any ideas that need sharing? Would you like to join our staff as a writer? Be sure to contact us at [email protected].
Also add where the goal was to take a bunch of bases until the MCV shields are down, (like maybe using EMP weapons over the forge guns ) then the final goal is to board the MCV and hack a series of consoles to make the MCV explode from within … (much like they did in BF2142). It would give the losing team a chance for a last stand in an enclosed environment
I can see boarding the MCV being a viable option, but I would rather not see hacking a console as the final victory condition. Hacking a console in DUST is boring. You stand around staring at an animation of your merc poking at a wrist display while an animation goes from empty to full. It's not exciting. I would prefer something that's more engaging, like breaking important stuff. Imagine doing something like in Halo, where you destroy the Pillar of Autumn by destroying the coolant system. It required action, and I can see players being better at defending critical systems than mindless AI…
Also Mechs……
MTAC
Night time fighting with night vision would be sweet too
They don't have night vision in the futu…oh wait…
sov maps!!!!
How bout just scrap BUST and put moar resouces into EVE! We don't need another bad clone of BF3
I really like the idea of the MCC falling form the sky and destroying everything in its path.
I got to play for a very short time at a friends house one weekend. Poor guy thought it would be a quick DL, ah well.
That being said I all of the changes mentioned in the article would go a long way in helping the game.
My first impression was while it was fun it felt kinda two dimensional. There wasn't anything that really made me feel like "This is EVE". Slap clown faces on the other players and it could have been "Clown Commando 2013" (patent pending)
I thought the same. The game is a fairly generic shooter, on the face of it. The problem for us, as EVE players, is that the gameplay lore never really delved into a lot of the not-space stuff on a deep level. There were random weapons named, or dropships that had names, or individual units within the various empires that were named in the lore, but for the most part it was this ambiguous part of the universe that didn't really matter, or alternately fit whatever ideals you had for futuristic ground combat.
Now, EVE players have this abundance of lore, and there are some inconsistencies in design. Some of the gear doesn't have the right look or feel of a particular race. Some of the problem is the low graphics quality, which I think is keeping CCP from putting flavor items like decals on vehicles. Seeing golden script on a tank definitely says "Amarr." the architecture is also generic. The books have planets with distinct architectural cues from their parent cultures, and that should be expressed on the battlefields. Golden arches, rust-colored make-shift buildings, angular high-tech landscapes, or sweeping organic feeling buildings would definitely help with giving the game more of an EVE feeling. Until the orbital bombardments start annihilating everything.
Speaking of which, destruction physics, are a great way to add continuity to the battlefield, which is an important thing to keep in mind, when players are going to be battling for control over the same planets. Glassed landscapes, cratering, and buildings reduced to rubble (and eventually rebuilt) would all help add some immersion to the game. Of course, that's asking a lot of CCP.
So basically you mean ccp to create an entire new game! i agree
considering they have mroe or less remade eve multiple times, over the next 5 years, maybe elss, tis not ahrd to believe they will eventually change most of the original code of DUST to amke enw features possible.
"make a new game" doesnt always mean "scrap what you got"
I Agree with alot points mentioned. It would only add more to the feel that they are actually part of EVE. though, My biggest questions to Dust is the ability to transport them once they are emerged into the SOV mechanics if this is suppose to give us a way to enlist Merc Help for SOV campaigns? getting them from Point A to Point B. how would it work? Future sense of immersion:
Possibly Carrying them in a specialized Transport giving them visuals directly from the "inside of the ship > watching through the windows" point of view. seeing capsuleer ships passing through would give them that feeling that they are indeed part of a mission or being transported to meet up with the rest of the infantry they are going to die with at the staging system / station, and what not. Getting an alert that they are jumping through the stargate "jump drives active 3, 2, 1". the works..
Would they be allowed to actually be deployed on planets without having to be forced into a game match? would they be able to blob? would PI Command centers be given the ability to set defenses like we do for POSes? just alot of questions in regards to DUST 514. It would only make sense because they are to be merged into the EVE universe that they are allowed the ability to be deployed at ANY given time of the day. Defending planets would be like defending POSes in some aspects. Being seiged is something well worth having in both low and null. would DUST be merged into EVE like its suppose to? or is it going to be another Silly "Log on > get a Game match >Log off? Cuz so far ive not seen much of what DUST would be capable of at this point and time. Would it really expand out of Factional Warfare? =S
DUST mercs will not need EVE pilots to transport them. They have unlimited Jump Clone ability without the need to go set up a Jump Clone first.
They will also have a War Barge which will be piloted by NPC at first, but will eventually be piloted, or at least have a course set, by DUST mercs.
Lets hope its not Autopiloted…. or Dust players will have to buy alot of popcorn for the ETAs.
Allow corporations to fight for and colonize planets so they get revenue/mineral.
Other corporations cold challenge and attack the planet districts to claim them.
Oh and add corporation hangars!
Pretty much like eve null sec anyway
have to agree with all points !
but at the end of the day dust 514 simple have a too bad graphic.
maybe in some minutes when PS4 details are public we can hope for a change. www.vg247.com/2013/02/19/ps4-announcement-…
So basically ditch the unreal engine in favour of frostbite/2.
No need to. The Unreal Engine is still quite potent and was not used to its full potential at all. And it´s atually not hard to make games look decent with it. I mean, just have a look at UT3 (from 2007). It used an earlier version of the same engine and looks 10 times better.
Dust is shit. Let someone else build it maybe it can be salvaged
Thats your opinion.
Literally thousands of people disagree with you.
How does that make you feel?
Screen shake of any form is fucking terribad.
Vaulting/sliding mechanics in games are always awful, just gives more options for something to go wrong. You want to jump? Well fuck you, you're standing next to something you can vault and that is all the game will let you do now. Just learn to navigate the environment. (What happened to the good old days of vq3/cpma movement?)
Also will never understand the fascination with wanting to see legs when you look down, more shit to get in the way like over sized gun models, useless hud bullcrap that has no option to disable.
This game would have been better off being something like a Tribes clone or a revamped Quake/Unreal instead of a Battlefield clone. But the game had to chucked out on to a console and cater for an inferior input system so interesting movement/gameplay styles get shot in the foot.
I honestly agree with every point except the horrible "we need headshot SOUND EFFECTS", that always struck me as absolutely retarded in toher games, theres nor eason shooting a helmet should sound different from shooting a chest-plate when they are both made of the same maerial.
as far as chances of implementation of ANY of these, CCP never seems to do well with multi-tasking jesus features and game-changers, DUST players need to get together and decide which one they would love first and tell CCP they need to work on it, and keep doing that, showing CCP positive support and opinions, until theyve worked through the whole list. CCP wont do anything if all they EVER get is negative feedback, every now and then they NEED a "your doing great guys, how about trhowing THIS up on the schedule enxt? alot of us are WILLINg to WAIT for tis development to finsih instead of bitching/whining until you release it ahlf-finished and shitty".
just my 2 cents, sorry for grammar/spelling, on a mobile device.
These are all good modifications that can be developed on the same platform to improve the game. I am sure CCP has plans for some if not all of these concepts already. Good job to the OP however as more discourse on these issues is important. CCP – we have seen hundreds of FPS's. You need to innovate to differentiate.