I've been going back and playing a lot of Marvel Ultimate Alliance lately, and with the sequel on the way, I thought I'd put together a wishlist of things that I'd like to see improved in this version.
Glitches
First and foremost, fix the glitches. MUA was glitchy as hell, and it would be completely retarded for a good portion of them to not be fixed this time around.
Character Balance
There are lots of fun characters that simply aren't as effective as the powerhouses. If you're going to have a character who's deal is more than just big numbers, PLEASE boost their effectiveness so that they're not completely worthless. A lot of the buffs could be a lot better, and maybe have specific character-targeted buffs (i.e. extra armor for Hulk) to balance out the fact that they're more useful.
Better Boss Fights
Most boss fights in MUA are either 1.) Minigame driven or 2.) a normal enemy you can't stun/control with a lot of health. It never feels like you're fighting a real supervillian. Give them a weakness, make them more powerful, and make them susceptible to SOME form of status effect. Too many powers become useless when fighting bosses.
Better, Independent Online Play
Online play in this and all previous iterations of the game were essentially the same as playing locally. Instead, characters should be allowed to go wherever they please, and have their camera follow them. This allows you to actually split up if you need to, and you're never trapped because of where your teammates are. I think this would do a lot to boost online play, and could really step the game up to the next level.
Power Augmentation
The ability to have Spider-Man's web bullets hold enemies in place on hit or to have Human Torch's fireballs explode OR do burning damage creates a lot of interesting options, and gives players the ability to further customize their characters. The implementation can be tricky, but the key is to have as many different options as possible, without giving any one of them a clear advantage over the others.
Better Equipment System
The equipment in these games can end up somewhere between Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, and the original MUA. X-Men Legends toyed with the idea, but I think there's a lot of room here to play with different options for characters - with equipment providing a wider range of bonuses. Some of the items in MUA are really interesting, while others are a boring "+10 Striking." I think you can really mess with this, toy with different kinds of damage boosting, and make all the stats clearly visible.
Interesting Levels
This is straightforward, add some branching paths, make the environments more interactive and destructible, and make doing these things matter.
Better Enemies
Give the enemies a larger variety of attacks. Give them more interesting, varied bonuses. Instead of making them resistant to all powers, make them resistant to Electricity, or Ice damage. Give their attacks some interesting properties, and don't let any attack be guaranteed damage. Make the players have to think about more than "our damage numbers need to be higher than theirs."
That's it for now. It's too late to push to get any changes made to the game, as it's releasing in the next quarter, but here's a quick list of things I'd really like to see them do.
Showing posts with label marvel ultimate alliance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marvel ultimate alliance. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
Creating Powerful Characters
Today I'd like to talk about something that I think doesn't come up nearly enough - creating a powerful character.
Often times in games we end up playing as some average schmuck stuck in the middle of some crazy situation. And almost as often said schmuck gets a little more powerful in some form as the game progresses - whether it's physical strength, better weapons, or new abilities.
This model is great in that it gives the player a great sense of accomplishment as they progress throughout the game. Unfortunately it also leaves the initial portion of the game feeling a little less awesome. A standard practice in this case is to give the player everything up front, and then have the character "lose" their abilities, which must then be regained.
Of course, if your game is designed well enough, not having a ton of abilities at your disposal from the start isn't so bad, but what if your character started out that powerful and only got better? Well that's what we're here to discuss.
High Ceilings
One of the biggest issues with powerful characters is having nowhere to go. Superman Returns actually does a really good job of making you feel powerful, but as the game progresses, there's not a lot of upward movement (pun not intended). The key here is making sure there's room for improvement, and that everything isn't the same at the end of the game as it is at the beginning. Your character is powerful, but he still needs to get better.
Keeping On Your Toes
The other serious downfall with a powerful character is that they may be too powerful and the game no longer presents a challenge. So how do you make the scenario challenging for your demi-god while keeping things fun?
So you've got the right moveset, and you've got plenty of room for that set to grow, but how do you get people to believe that these moves are truly powerful?
Well, that should be it for now, this is simply a rough outline with several ideas to make a character seem powerful, while still keeping them in the scope of the game. It'll always be a tricky balance along with keeping things challenging, but it comes down to a lot of play-testing, and how the game feels in the hands of the player. And with that, I want to touch briefly on one last piece...
Multiplayer Woes
All of the above becomes infinitely more difficult to implement when you factor multiplayer into the mix - specifically versus multiplayer. No one wants to get hit with the aforementioned big, meaty attack, only to almost die from one attack.
In this situation, it's incredibly difficult to keep both sides feeling powerful - but the key is to make gameplay revolve around landing attacks over simply pounding the opponent. Your powerful characters are going to need tools to avoid getting hit by their own attacks, and should be able to take a good series of hits before falling to their knees. You don't want combat to drag on, but you don't want people dying so fast they get annoyed either. Besides that, we'll leave multiplayer issues for another post, as there's a lot to be said about balancing any kind of competitive multiplayer game, and is somewhat outside the scope of this post.
Often times in games we end up playing as some average schmuck stuck in the middle of some crazy situation. And almost as often said schmuck gets a little more powerful in some form as the game progresses - whether it's physical strength, better weapons, or new abilities.
This model is great in that it gives the player a great sense of accomplishment as they progress throughout the game. Unfortunately it also leaves the initial portion of the game feeling a little less awesome. A standard practice in this case is to give the player everything up front, and then have the character "lose" their abilities, which must then be regained.
Of course, if your game is designed well enough, not having a ton of abilities at your disposal from the start isn't so bad, but what if your character started out that powerful and only got better? Well that's what we're here to discuss.
High Ceilings
One of the biggest issues with powerful characters is having nowhere to go. Superman Returns actually does a really good job of making you feel powerful, but as the game progresses, there's not a lot of upward movement (pun not intended). The key here is making sure there's room for improvement, and that everything isn't the same at the end of the game as it is at the beginning. Your character is powerful, but he still needs to get better.
Keeping On Your Toes
The other serious downfall with a powerful character is that they may be too powerful and the game no longer presents a challenge. So how do you make the scenario challenging for your demi-god while keeping things fun?
- Swarms of Enemies. Put your powerful character up against an army. Keep in mind you don't want the battle to be at all annoying. It should be satisfying but still challenging. My humble suggestion is to have waves of semi-decent enemies - removing the annoyance of cheap shots from a ridiculous number of opponents coming at you at once, but still giving you the satisfaction of having kicked a whole ton of ass.
- Enormous Bosses. For a perfect example of this, see God of War 2, or Shadow of the Colossus. Make your bosses huge, and it'll equal out the power level of the character (not that SotC features a powerful character).
- Equally Powerful Rival. Give our powerful character a rival of equal strength. The combat should look as amazing as it is - a true clash of super powers. You don't want to make it a mirror match though, as that isn't a theme you can bring up again later in the game.
So you've got the right moveset, and you've got plenty of room for that set to grow, but how do you get people to believe that these moves are truly powerful?
- Variety. Give players the option to power their move up for big damage, or keep it fast and easy. A good example of this are a lot of the charge up attacks in Marvel Ultimate Alliance - it's a basic concept that time = damage, with the downfall being that you give up something like the ability to use an attack button, or mobility, or something in that vein, in order to get the more powerful attack. The key here is to make sure that both the fast and strong versions are useful, and that your game doesn't stuff the charged moves (making them effectively useless).
- Area of Effect. Any move that hits an area and can hit multiple enemies at once is a good bet. You don't want to overdo it so as to make it the only attack of choice when presented with multiple enemies - perhaps a timer on the ability or something of the sort - but in general this helps with the hordes of enemies we discussed earlier, letting you handle several opponents at once in a way that let's you feel powerful.
- Hit Hard, Hit Often. Your character should be able to hit HARD, and it should be obvious. Flying bodies, explosions, dismemberment, whatever it takes. When he hits, there should be someone, somewhere saying "oh, SNAP!' In addition, he should have the option to hit fast and often, allowing him to trade his powerhouse moves in exchange for something a little more combo-friendly. This is something the Devil May Cry games do fairly well, but not until later in the game when you've collected all the necessary weapons.
Well, that should be it for now, this is simply a rough outline with several ideas to make a character seem powerful, while still keeping them in the scope of the game. It'll always be a tricky balance along with keeping things challenging, but it comes down to a lot of play-testing, and how the game feels in the hands of the player. And with that, I want to touch briefly on one last piece...
Multiplayer Woes
All of the above becomes infinitely more difficult to implement when you factor multiplayer into the mix - specifically versus multiplayer. No one wants to get hit with the aforementioned big, meaty attack, only to almost die from one attack.
In this situation, it's incredibly difficult to keep both sides feeling powerful - but the key is to make gameplay revolve around landing attacks over simply pounding the opponent. Your powerful characters are going to need tools to avoid getting hit by their own attacks, and should be able to take a good series of hits before falling to their knees. You don't want combat to drag on, but you don't want people dying so fast they get annoyed either. Besides that, we'll leave multiplayer issues for another post, as there's a lot to be said about balancing any kind of competitive multiplayer game, and is somewhat outside the scope of this post.
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