Author: Joel

So how should scavenger work in aftermath?

I think ideally it would be good if there were weapon tiers. This is easy, esp when you consider that you can skew weapons better with attachments.
T1 – A pump shotgun with frag rounds, G18 and a .44
T2 – One of the “best” assault rifles plus its optimal items. SKS or M417.

Utility weapons – RPG, M320 LVG.

Actually there are many options available. Ideally we want good weapons to be something a team works for, so having lots of them on a map detracts from the game overall. It would be easy to make a prefered set of weapons vs underdog weapons.

Things that need to be added or changed.

Health needs to be broken out of the medpack and turned into a periodically spawning item. On this note I would also say that health being boosted about 20% would be beneficial. Having played on servers like this I can honestly say it creates better firefights. The alternative is to have no attachments which also causes longer engagements due to slower TTK. 20% equates to around one more bullet in a fight.

Armour needs to be added. This is the largest problem since there is no mechanic currently. Armour would require extensive testing. Using quake numbers a full stack should add around 2-300% durability to a player. Different armour types would be fine here. A yellow and a red type that offer varying degrees of protection. The beauty of TDM is how levels can be setup to play very differently based on the load outs. Looking at popular TDM maps from quakeworld we see things like. DM2(2 red, 2yellow) DM3 (1 red 1 yellow) E1M2 (1 yellow 1 green). Wildy different setups there. In comparison to UT99 which is basically belt + jacket on every single map. Some variation would have made UT99 a lot more interested. Two jackets + belt? Three jackets? and so on. A robust armour system would give mappers much more variety.

An important thing to note is that simply giving more health is not the answer. Armour and health are very different because armour does not absorb all damage. Because of this grabing a red armour with 15 health does not offer you a great deal. You will still need to heal yourself somewhat before being more aggressive. Thus using health is not the answer.

Powerups – quad damage, invulnerability, etc. The class items could be used here. Defib is very powerful but I am not sure how game changing it would be as a short duration powerup. Quad damage could be fun, but at the same time would not be the same as in quakes. Maybe a powerup that doubled fire rate but halved recoil would be fun. This way if you miss you are not instagibbing the other player with one stray bullet. It would also make ammo a heavy consideration.

Another option would be a powerful weapon. Perhaps the M320 with a decent stack of ammo.

Ammo – Limit this to 3-4 ammo types – less if needed.

Scavenger TDM Maps

We want this to be 4v4. Maps need to be small enough to not have long travel distances between items, weapons and other key areas, decent interconnectivity without turning the level into swiss cheese is important. In addition being compact is good because we want spawners to be able to link up with team mates without a massive hike.

Ziba tower is the smallest close quarters map, however it is too large for the purposes of 4v4 TDM. Levels and atrium style maps are sorely missing in modern FPS and while they would not get past DICE QA in the older quake style, they could be created easily enough. A shopping center with ruined sections to add ramps.. Lifts, catwalks and so on. As already mentioned connectivity is important, ideally choke points should be negateable and locking down one area/item does not guarantee winning.

Spawn weapons

In the first post spawn weapons were discussed. As mentioned the spawn weapons consist of an empty pistol, a knife and a grenade. This leaves a player completely useless off spawn from a combat standpoint. In older FPS it may seem that spawn weapons are useless, but flooding enemies when they are weak should be a somewhat valid tactic. This allows taking down of weapons and camp zones even without weapons. This does not mean that spawning -> attacking should always be a valid tactic. A game that plays like this is quake 3 and its implementation of TDM, and while not bad it removes a lot of strategy and importance of items. Quake2 gave players a very weak starting weapon that did not allow much offensive action, or even defensive for that matter.

Players should spawn with something – but probably not a pistol as they are generally too powerful. A pump action shotgun with frag rounds, using the automatic shotgun damage, would do well here. They hit softly, shoot slowly but with 2-3 guys would be ok. Remove the suppression and we would be set!

A few more things..

Random weapon spawning has been mentioned on whirlpool as well as some other BF3 community sites. If this is entirely random it will completely detract from the gameplay. If all the weapons randomly spawn there is no rhyme or reason to how teams will play. The game will play worse than FFA. There will be no objectives, there will be no strategy.

By the same token players need to randomly spawn. If the current squad spawning system is allowed it compeltely detracts from the skill of surviving as a spawner and regrouping. This is an important aspect of TDM and while it may seem like it detracts from teamplay it in fact improves it due to increased difficulty of meeting up and playing together.

Plus spawn killing is similar to objectives and area control, if you control more of the map you have more “safe” area for your team to spawn in.

important – random spawning and lack of randomitem spawning.

Lets take a look at some factors that make TDM.. TDM

The spawn weapon

Lets look at the spawn weapons from various good TDM games.

Quakeworld ( Single barrel shotgun ): – Hitscan 6 pellets, 4 damage per. Max damage 24 – 500ms. 48dps
Quake 2 ( Blaster ) : Slow moving projectile 15 damage. 400ms reload. Around 38DPS.
Quake 3 ( Machine gun ) : Hitscan, 5 damage per, ROF 10 per second. 50DPS.
Unreal Tournament (UT99) : Hitscan 25 damage around 400ms reload. 50DPS.

UT2k3/4 had a stupid rifle that gave you grenades straight up. Also the shield gun. Horrible.

These guns are quite weak, in Quake 2s case it was so weak it was not really worth using.

Scavenger will have you spawning with a knife, an empty pistol and a grenade. This is a step away from the above examples and I think even more useless. This could be good or bad. It means you have to share weapons and does not allow you to instantly engage like in Q3 (cess).

I have tossed around the idea of real TDM in battlefield for a while and wondered how it would work. Assuming that weapons were not changed substantially. Would you spawn with a pistol? Would you spawn with a single clip of ammo? Thats not really “poor” enough since the pistols are quite good in BF. Would you spawn with the silenced G17? Probably the worst gun in the game.

No, you will spawn with a knife and a grenade.

Weapon Tiers

Now we need to look at how weapons in other TDM games worked. Assuming that quakeworld followed by quake 2 (ignoring CPMA) were the best weapon setups that offer large amount of strategy.

Quakeworld: Spawn(axe/shotgun), T1 (Nailgun/double shotgun/super nailgun), T2 (Grenade Launche/ super nailgun), T3 (Lightning gun/ Rocket launcher). Respawn 30 seconds

I have included sng in both t1 and 2 because it is arguably not that useful. LG could be put in T2 depending on the map, it is not really the go to weapon quite often due to lack of ammo. DM3 is a good example. LG is useful for killing enemy weapons but using it on everyone wastes ammo and soon you won’t be able to kill anything. This is why rockets are the key.

Quake 2: Spawn (blaster), T1 (machine gun, shotgun), T2 (Super shotgun, hand grenade, grenade launcher), T3 (Chaingun, Hyperblaster, Rocket launcher, railgun). Respawn 30 seconds
Looking at quake 2 we see the movement away from one weapon(rocket launcher) dominating and it shares the space with 2-3 other weapons. However in 1997 (esp in australia with lack of broadband) when q2 was released the hitscan and hyperblaster were not really reliable. This means that rocket is once more king. On modern connections the hitscan in q2 is probably better than rockets by a large margin.

Quake3: Spawn (fist/Machinegun) then (Shotgun, plasma, grenade, rockets, rail, lightning).

There are is no tiers. Grab a gun and go kill stuff.

Unreal Tournament (ut99): spawn (Piston/pistol), T1 (Biorifle, ripper), T2 (pulse rifle, shock rifle, sniper rifle, minigun, rocket launcher, flak canon).

Again no tiers – if you happened to spawn near a bio or ripper you would be about 2 seconds away from a good gun anyway. Add to this that EU played with weaponstay on and you have very few things to control.

Beyond the spawn weapon and the brief look at rocket launchers in quakeworld, each weapon does not need an indepth look. It is good if a weapon provides interesting utility but is not a mainstay, for example the grenade launcher in the quakes, the LG in some levels in quakeworld.

Armour and items

A quick look at item systems on offer is needed.

Quakeworld: Red armour(200@80%), Yellow armour (150@60%), Green armour (100@30%). A lesser armor cannot be picked up when there is active better armor that absorbs more. eg 100red > 150 yellow. Spawns 20 seconds after pickup

Quad spawns every minute. Mega spawns 20 seconds after health is used. Pentagram (invunl) spawns every 5 minutes. A game runs for 20 minutes.

Quake 2: Body armor(100, stacks to 200@80%) Combat armor (50, stacks to 100@60%), Jacket armor(25, stacks to 50@30%). eg 100red > 150 yellow. With the cut down values it takes longer to get a reliable stacked team. Spawns 25 seconds after pickup.

Quake 3: Yellow armor (50@66%), red armor(100@66%). Armors stack to 200 total from any source. Spawns 25seconds after pickup.

Quad and mega times are map dependant, usually 1-2 minutes.

Unreal Tournament: Thigh Pads (50, stacks to 150 armor@50%), Jacket armor (100, stacks to 150@75%), Shieldbelt (150 armor@100%). Somehow these stack together, the easiest is jacket+pads. Lesser two spawn 27.5 seconds after pickup, shieldbelt spawns 55 seconds after pickup.

Quad (amp in ut) spawns every 110 seconds. Mega is not in any popular TDM maps (a shame).

A brief look at quakeworld TDM

In case you haven’t noticed I am harping on QW TDM. While I have never really played this in a competitive format it is perfect for demonstrating how good TDM can be. We can work backward from here through the quakes and unreals to see how it has been degraded each release.

In quakeworld the important items are as follow.

– Weapons. When weapons are referred to this means rocket launchers or less often shaft.
– Armor. The armor your team wants is the red one.
– Quad. Needs to be addressed every minute or so

Maps are typically split in half or into parts, with an in control team playing specific rooms/points and the out of control team playing weaker points.

DM3 is one of the most popular TDM quakeworld maps. Read my post here about TDM and a more indepth look at quakeworld TDM.

Read part 3, how scavenger should work as a real TDM gametype

It has the potential to revitalise the competitive community. It is an opportunity to revitalise FPS. It is TDM.

So the upcoming DLC/expansion/whatever you want to call it has a new gametype, called scavenger. The basic premise is simple, and to the older audience will be familiar. Players spawn with minimal gear. A knife, a single M67 hand grenade and a pistol with no ammo.

From here players “scavenge” gear from the map. Since scavenger was only announced a few hours ago details are rather light, however DICE seem to have a record of doing things “the wrong way” so some speculation is required. Lets look at how it could work, how it should work and how DICE will probably botch it completely.

First up some old school TDM education for any younger players out there or those that played but did not understand what the goal in team deathmatch in quake or unreal boiled down to.

Control via Items was the goals, not killing the enemy. “Getting the most points” posted as the BF3 TDM goal quite often on whirlpool. Much the same way point control (thus bleeding tickets and forcing the other team to attack rather than defend) is the goal in Battlefield 3 Conquest, not “getting the other team to zero first”.

So how would this work? In older games, teamwork and coordination played a large part. Again on whirlpool many posters call out quakes and unreals as “twitch shooters”, yet they have more depth than cod or bf.. For instance in quakeworld TDM the goal was to try to get rocket launchers for your team mates (ie not pick up the weapon, TDM was played with weapon stay off), save/camp armour for team mates if you already had it, group together after being killed and secure parts of the map. For the majority of a game the goal would be to secure the red armour area as the “leading team” and the yellow armour area as the “down” team. Area control, much like in conquest. However simply controlling the area is not how you win. You win by using the resources your team has locked down to kill the opposing team. However this all goes out the window every few minutes when the quad spawns. When the quad is spawning your team needs to move on the spawn area and try to secure that without giving up whatever you were previously controlling. You can offset times of items in order to disallow quad being used to take your rocket launcher area for instance.. This does not exist in BF3 conquest. You have three flags to the enemies two – you can dig in and try to defend them, and most teams will do just that.

An example of a spot to secure in unreal tournament (ut99) is the portal from the bottom of deck16][ to above the lifts. Locking this down by either controlling the teleport entrance near the slime – or hanging around in the rafters near redeemer at the lift end would acheive this. Why would you do it? To cut the opponents options for attacking. Doing this does nothing to the points in the game but restricts the enemy movement and options. I think the lower port is the better play: easy to escape, good view of anyone from the other team dropping down, view of the belt and boots.

Another example is on DM2 in Quakeworld. This map is very light on weapons (one rocket launcher) and the aim is to get as many of your team rocket launchers as possible. When you get your RL you should be guarding the red armour. However on DM2 the best way to do this is not in the RA room, or anywhere near it really. It is outside at ring (invisibility). From here you can cover the RA room, the megahealth below ring which is also a corridor of travel from one side of the map to the other and you can cover the quad platform opposite. Getting a player to ring with a rocket launcher is quite important when you have RA control, or to take RA control.

But the real goal was items – the big important ones. Armours were camped and defended, but the goal was to get a stacked player on a quad and then retake shorter spawn item (armours/weapons) from the enemy team.

In quakeworld the weapon your entire team needed was rocket launchers – thus the goal was to go for these as well as armour. As time went by the “tiered” weapon balance disappeared. In Quake2 there were tiers, but to a lesser extent as there were many tier 1 items that were worth using.. In Quake 3 there were really no tiers as all weapons were quite good in specific circumstances. Unreal tournament had tiers but it was 2 crap ones (besides the spawn weapon) and about 8 decent weapons. This led to everyone having a decent gun compared to Quakeworlds rocket launcher scenario that took at minimum 2 minutes to get a full four rocket launchers. This is fine and just different. UT failed for TDM in other ways but for now that is enough.

Item driven gametypes, if done correctly, are much better. The items are the goal because they allow better killing and less dying. Simply locking down an area but not killing anything does little for your team. Items force conflict in a better way than flags and items are dynamic and give more options: Rocket launchers, Red armour, Quad… what to pick right now?

Maybe your team decides to secure armour next, or weapons, or quad is soon and you should abandon that plan and go for it? Or maybe ignore quad and try to get other items while the other team takes quad.

This is especially true for pub gaming where players generally play for kills and KDR. If the goal is to not die and kill lots of bad guys then getting armour and denying the quad is quite important, both to the overall game from a team point of view as well as the individual stats. I think TDM done well would be the best pub game possible because once everyone understands the goals, which improve KDR, everyone will be PTFO.

So yes, the overall idea was to kill the most but the goal was to secure resources and control areas that allowed this to happen. Few people really understood this (in 2000) and TDM between teams just below the best was quite often simply a free for all with two groups. I don’t think any teams I ever played against understood why we camped the bottom teleport on deck.

Lack of items is why TDM in COD and BF is so fail. Where is the reason to head out from your camp setup. There isn’t one. Competitive TDM in battlefield 3 would be a joke.

I think it is sad that TDM has gone the way of the dodo and instead we have conquest, bombs and flags as objectives. These games are pushed as having objective based gameplay but it has always been there – right from Quakeworld. Objectives have always existed and they were way more dynamic and interesting that conquest points.

Read part 2