I think people talk about how they are nostalgic for old cRPG and how now its just a nerfed Native port very often and it is pretty accurate.
The dev team seems to idolize and respect some elements of game design that enable players to be creative and make their own game, basically creating the tools and handing them to the players and hoping them the best. This is what Strategus essentially is, and what the old space game idea for P. Asinus sounded like. Thing is, you guys basically had this going in old cRPG, and I've seen it creep up whenever opportunities for it were available in the game.
Yet devs have gone out of their way to find these and completely remove them whenever possible, much to the detriment of the game and its appeal.
Battle is pretty boring now but it used to be a ghetto sandbox to do all sorts of memorable, awesome shit in. Ladderpaulting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgqMnNJzHrI), ridiculous builds, comical amounts of plate, awesome weapons, the dynamically hilarious metagame of peasants hiding in areas of a map so when you broke through the front lines in full plate you got to find a hut teeming with cowering peasants and slaughter them all.
Since then they just
slowly turned it into a Native port with nerfed everything. Playing on Battle is usually boring and often frustrating unless you are cav, ranged, or an unusually skilled 2handed player in full looms with a level 32+ build who manages to avoid cav and ranged for the first minutes of the battle (like me.)
Battle now is all based on a multi system with a chance of valor. Its okay but your only reward is a 4x becoming 5x, and there is really nothing to do besides kill.
Any effort to play the game in another way besides TDM over a stupid multi will result in rage or bans, and eventual complete overhauls by the dev team to patch things out.Core cRPG gameplay has basically been reduced to that empty kind of reward, a multi that most people only pretend to give a shit about. The gameplay itself is fun, but it has been made less and less engaging for some deliberate reason. I find Strategus more engaging due to not only funny politics, ability to screw people over with the overworld's gameplay, customizing your armies, and the fundamental gameplay of teamwork, the stories of how a battle went down, every push or takeover of a rooftop has its own little narrative to the larger battle.. it simply presses a lot more buttons then cRPG on its own does. I think a ton of this could translate to a Conquest mode for simply better gameplay with objectives to fulfill, but that is still just part of the broader picture.
Biggest problem by far in my eyes was all the balance attempts to "fix Warband" but jamming it all into the shit Battle mode of Warband, the soulless type of mode that wasn't even that good in the late 90s with Counter-Strike, and is extremely outdated.
Old cRPG had tons of flavor and life to it that managed to be hilarious past the shitty game type we played it in, but every patch has been trying to close the lid on personal flavor and creativity and make things more streamlined.I don't really understand why that became the mission statement of cRPG. "Native with nerfs." That's what it is now, instead of this half MMO, half dynamic griefing/trolling, all excellent combat game it used to be.
You used to watch 200 players cram into a shitty looking bridge on a map because everyone wanted to be as close as possible to get the most XP. Then some genious saw these tight packed crowd, and the ladder mechanics the devs had to "expand gameplay" by getting onto roofs and stuff. All of a sudden, you have an amazingly overpowered, fucking hilarious weapon that would launch 20+ people across the map to their deaths. This would make you rage if you got caught, be the best feeling in the world if you got a perfect ladderpault, became part of the strategy of the game, and then eventually got completely removed.
That's what you guys need to bring back, this mod is probably too far gone, and any and all new modes (Conquest, Rush, whatever you have in store) will certainly be improvements.
But don't lose sight of what you guys managed to capture for about a year, that so many players were willing to put up with all the grindy bullshitty OP ranged bad maps whatever elements to enjoy.I think chadz and friends have an idea about this, as Strategus is basically an open world facebook game that allows you to grief and screw other people over, and chadz is definitely a fan of this kind of gameplay from his original ideas about the space game in project asinus. Whatever you guys are working on now, it is crucial to get some of those "emergent gaming" possibilities back into it.
Allow and encourage players, groups of friends, whatever to build shit together, perhaps significantly alter the map. Back in the day people in cRPG figured out how funny it was to spam siege equipment in camping spots and stand there every round and people went with them, creating hilarious forts.This playstyle was forgotten about until ATS brought it back on NA, when
forward spawns and weapon racks let them build custom forts with unlimited throwing ammo in funny places from ladder placement and fight to the death. People who did this got ban polled, screenshotted, tk'd, and eventually you guys went so far as to try to remove this choice in the first place, so it goes back to a more streamlined and frankly boring experience.Fact was that was a group of friends thinking outside the box with a limited amount of sandboxy tools they had to do hilarious, memorable things that had resonating effects on people. Of course the reaction was usually rage at "being griefed" and it got stamped out, but it was
a good example of a design principle that should be embraced rather then frowned upon.
Imagine how much more fun the game would be if battle mode was 30 minutes long, maybe even hours long until a reset, and there was no winning or losing after one team is dead, letting you respawn. A bunch of people can choose to camp part of a map and build fortifications, then defend it like it was the Alamo for the entire map, while other players can just joust each other as cav in the plains while respawning. Peasants have menial shitty jobs but still get paid for the map and will inevitably be slaughtered over and over by the knights. More of that sandbox feel that cRPG used to have, that gave it a soul and personality instead of a simple deathmatch.
I think Conquest mode really could accomplish a lot with the current structure of cRPG and fixing many problems. You could have much longer rounds, a purpose to build with construction sites and lock down areas, take creative approaches to defending or attacking places, more teamwork, a more compelling game experience in general instead of generic battle gameplay of cookie cutter builds mashing at each other. A chance to step back from the boring slot limitations, recycled native gameplay, get people to do new things I talked a LOT about it in a thread I made, and
it recieved overwhelming praise and excitement. http://forum.meleegaming.com/suggestions-corner/conquest-gametype-combine-strategus-siege-and-battle-into-1-bad-assed-mode/I think a lot of these ideas are being explored for future development and maybe the team's next game, I'm not exactly sure. But
there were so many things in cRPG's history that captured this idea of enabling the players to make their own game and play their own way that usually had hilarious effects, and the dev team here has systematically stamped out every single one of them except in Strategus. And what do you guys have there now. People working to devise rules that anything remotely outside-the-box is "against the rules" because it makes people upset and cry about how some battles are not exactly identical to every other one. Because
some people think boring, formulaic gameplay with no new ideas is easier to win in, I guess. But it is most definitely not more fun to play.If anyone has some stories about things you or your friends have done or seen in cRPG or Strat, old versions or new versions, that were unique or funny or outside the box, even if people would call it exploiting and want you banned, I'd like people to share them.
