We had plans for implementing base assets and player loadouts as part of a full overhaul to Legions before it got backburnered in favor of InstantJam. The private testers were privy to the plans and had access to all the concept art and design documents. I'll go ahead and share where we were heading before the shutdown just for the sake of getting those ideas out there. This is by no means dictating how things should be done. We did put a great deal of thought into these issues, so I'm just posting this to try to help, but ultimately it's the community team's decision which direction is taken.
The plan revolved around a desire to bring more depth to the gameplay and cater to as many play styles as possible while maintaining the spirit of the game. There were three major changes/additions: physics changes, custom loadouts, and base assets.
The first part was a drastic refinement of player physics - slowing down acceleration, adding more of a feeling of fluid momentum, adjusting the camera and camera effects, while adding to the feeling of extremely fast speeds. The idea was that if acceleration is slower, players will be closer to each other at all times - closer targets means more detail on-screen and larger targets, which means more excitement. The stronger feeling of momentum added to the sense of fast speeds and made prediction and leading easier to grasp. We had some early test builds that were starting to feel pretty good. New weapons and weapon balance would follow, along with custom loadouts.
The custom loadout system we were working on was based on a free-to-play dual-currency microtrans model with a leveling system and tiered equipment brackets that you would gain access to as you level. Players would earn soft currency based on their performance, and be granted large chunks upon leveling up, but also have the ability to pay for hard currency. Players would start with a simple versatile preset loadout available to them, with more presets available as they level up. They could also create custom loadouts that would allow them to strongly specialize in particular roles. The goal was to allow players to be able to naturally afford the best equipment to specialize in a single role by natural gameplay, but players who wished to populate more loadouts with top-tier equipment, or have more than one heavily customized loadout would need to spend money. Higher-tiered items would not be more powerful, just more specialized - in the interest of keeping the microtransaction components from interfering with the skill-based nature of the game.
We spent a long time working on the designs, and what surfaced was an out-of-game menu for selecting and customizing loadouts. The menu featured six piece-specific slots for armor (head, chest, arms, legs, wings, core) and a 4x4 grid of equipment slots (similar to a Diablo-style inventory). There was a weight/energy/armor balance in effect for all the equipment, and some would offer special attributes.
One example is that the starting loadout would feature a helmet with decent armor, no energy, and a couple tracking systems for newbies (lead indicator on the targeting UI in-game as well as a skiing hand-holding UI to color-code terrain and sort of guide you on where to land or when to down-jet, etc.). As players became accustomed to leading and skiing, they might choose to create a custom loadout to trade off that headgear for, say, a helm with high energy capacity for increased shield/cloak/jet/snipe power or duration, extra armor, enhanced zoom levels, etc.
The grid was a way for us to balance weight and power against capacity. With this system you could cram as many weapons in there as possible, but if you weren't on the heavy frame, which allowed for the more powerful wing mounts, you would be encumbered most of the time and pretty vulnerable - so there was always a tradeoff. On the other hand, you could have just a rocket launcher (4x1) or chaingun (3x1) and fill the rest of your inventory with of hand grenades (1x1 each) or health/energy charges (also 1x1 each). The grenades were frag, EMP (zero all energy for a short period of time for all in range and cancel overdrive effects), and energy (immediately activate overdrive for all in range). Charges would quickly recover a set amount of health or energy. You could also fill in your extra inventory space extra ammo for specific weapons (2x1 each). So it was pretty flexible in that sense.
The energy core idea came from the private testers (either Bugs or Mabel, I don't remember exactly). They would basically use your energy to perform a special action. We had eight of them ranging from movement overdrives, like the current ones, to special uses: kamikaze, warp, blast, cloak, shield, etc. These would be balanced based on energy requirement, so some of the specialized cores, like warp, would only be available to those who decked out their suits with energy capacity armor pieces, so they would need to sacrifice either mobility or armor. In turn, the energy capacity would make them more suited use equipment fitted to certain specialized roles like healer, engineer, sniper, stealth, etc.
The engineer and healer roles both required a plasma beam (1x3 tall) item that would act as a main-hand weapon with a homing arc-beam type of targeting. The beam would have a relatively short range and recover health for teammates in range, or repair base assets in range. There was a 2x2 range modifier that drastically increased the range.
The base assets plan was to use panels mounted in specific places in the levels. At the start of a round, each structure cluster would have a central mainframe and a series of interior and exterior panels - some with assets already in-place, and some empty. The addition of a 1x1 schematic storage device would allow players to visit the mainframe and load one of any available schematics, move to a panel, and transmit the schematic to the panel - which would cause the panel to begin transforming into the asset the schematic was for. At that point, continued use of the beam by one or more players could drastically speed up production. A single schematic could be used to place any number of base assets of that type, but the player would have to re-visit the mainframe to change schematics for different types of assets or asset upgrades.
Loadout creation and assignment would all be handled between matches, so the assets were limited to in-game stuff. Some of the ideas we were throwing around included: turrets (obviously), sensors, turret tracking enhancement computers, ammo stations, plasma/nano nodes (healing stations, basically), backup servers (keep everything running at reduced capacity if the mainframe goes down), etc.
We talked about a bunch of balance implications. Some of the stuff mentioned here seems insanely overpowered (especially warp), but we had some pretty good balance checks in place from the design front and most of them were talked out in a lot of detail. Note that these changes are a mountain of work to implement and require essentially starting from scratch on all level design. I wish I had some more of the level concept stuff that Lance Bass did for L2 so I could show you guys. Here are a couple:
Anyway, that's the gist. Here are some design wireframes of the invo equipment grid stuff so you can see roughly what that might look like.
Sorry for the wall of text. Thanks for reading!
) at how much L:O would be different from now and the future (somewhere around 50 or so updates, maybe a hundred) if even half of these ideas were implemented.
