Two blog posts in one month? At this rate, we might even get one out every week. Sometimes there just isn’t much to write about, though.
We had a very interesting playtest on Saturday, August 24. Not many players were online, so we decided to do something different. We loaded up the Training map and tried out all of the abilities to see which needed bug fixes or stat changes. In this blog post, I’d like to share what we learned.
The first thing we noticed was that it is very easy to get a lot of Armor and Health in Revn. And based on the past month of playtesting, this seems to be the most effective combat loadout in the game. Kyle has become somewhat infamous for a very tanky, high damage character loadout. DPS players struggle to counter these “bruisers”, resulting in an unbalanced meta.
So how did this happen? How did we intend players to counter tank loadouts? The Armor stat was designed to counter snipers and DPS players. It greatly reduces the damage taken, allowing an attacking player to push forward into an enemy base or perhaps to defend a choke point leading to his own base. Well, that’s where abilities come into play. “Caster” type players are categorized as players who focus on using abilities rather than weapons. These casters can use their various abilities for crowd control, status effects, damage-over-time, and many other mechanics.
The problem, however, is that casters’ abilities were under powered and often didn’t offer enough upgrade tiers. Once we identified this as the root of our trouble, I called up Daniel and we started buffing various abilities and filling in the upgrade tiers. Path 0.4.12 will include these buffs, and I hope to see casters become more dominant in the meta this week.
The end result we are hoping for is a triangle of playstyles and counters. Tanks counter DPS, while DPS counter casters. Finally Casters counter Tanks, locking them in place and helping their team take down these bruisers.
Oh, and remember that mini-map rework I promised in the last blog post? I finished it! I even live-streamed a lot of my work on it, which you can check out here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/470828106. The official Unreal Engine channel raided us about an hour into the stream, which was awesome! I’m very thankful for the opportunity to show off our project to all of their viewers.
Alright, that’s all I’ve got this week. See you all on Wednesday at 7:00 PM for the community playtest!
