Castle/node siege layouts and 250v250 or 500v500 battles.

I sincerely hope Intrepid is already way ahead of me on this one, but here goes.

I worry about the implications of them going from 250v250 to 500v500 battles, and their castle design. Even if they stay at 250v250, the castle we saw in Alpha 1 was not a good design for that. It's too small and cramped, and the objective was a single point at the throne in the throne room that had to be channeled at for a few minutes.

Go to around the 1 hour 8 minute mark in their latest dev stream to get a feel for the layout:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB7gWTpeB08&t=4087s

Or check a pic I took in A1 for a better sense of the overall layout perhaps:

In A1 the defenders all respawn up behind the throne room. The attackers respawn at their base camp, and can portal out to various control points on the map, if the attackers control them. Or they can ride all the way.

Now, it's quite possible the castle in A1 was designed for 100v100. I think it was big enough for that. But it's way too small for 250v250, or worse 500v500, unless they change how the castle siege is won or lost.

If the attackers were strong enough to enter the throne room, basically everyone congregated in that single area. First the pitched chokepoint fight to get inside through the open gateway, then the fights around the pillars in there, and finally the attackers trying to hold the defenders back through the two chokepoints inside the throne room. 200 people fighting in that room is doable, but that's about the limit I think.

The two control points in the castle yard were not important enough to really fight over by either side once the throne room was open. They weren't unimportant, but it made more sense to almost all fight inside.

For 250v250 or 500v500, the castle layout has to be different. It should not be about only channeling one point for 5 minutes to win. I think they need to spread it out to 2 or 3 points at the very least. It's not enough to make the throne room bigger I think, although that would help of course. I think we need more important control points on the entire map to spread people out, and also more final objectives to win, so all 1000 people don't try to squeeze into a single room to fight.

As for node sieges, there is much we don't know yet of course, but where I can definitely see a Metropolis siege having space enough to accommodate 1000 people fighting over it, a lvl 3 node isn't much bigger than that castle, so the same issues may arise.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Sylvanar

In this simulated environment the players are evenly spread and so looks ok but in actual game a lot of clustering would occur. One of the issues with only throne room as objective is defenders camping inside the castle and AoE-ing the chokepoints.

Ofc the castle needs to be bigger for 250vs250 or 500vs500. I think one of the ways to spread the crowd would be to have multiple objectives at different locations of the castle. Lets say, at the four corners of the castle there are security checkpoints/rooms which need to be captured/defended as well aside from throne room. This way there would be less campers at each chokepoint and more skilled players would be able to breakthrough.

This is just the base idea which can be built upon quite a bit, like if order of capture for objectives, holding the objectives for a specified time or once captured cannot be captured back by defenders, etc etc

daveywavey

Yeah, I quite liked how they did it in ESO, where there were multiple locations that needed to be captured/defended. It spread out the defenders a little more, but also gave them the opportunity to fight back once they lost a location.

Sylvanar

How 'Wintergrasp' was implemented in Wotlk was very good imo. We had to get vehicles from buildings located quite far from the main objective, in this case the castle, burn some additional buildings outside and eventually it all ended with a final push/defense at the castle. Since castle can be damaged via vehicle only, both side had to attack and defend simultaneously to win it all.

Again at the end of the day, the crowd needs to be spread to make the encounter more fun and viable.

unknownsystemerror

The castle in A1 was literally there to give people something to do while they tested the backend to entice people to log on. The 5 pvp castles in the release version have their own individual layouts and are meant for 250v250 as guild focused objectives. Node sieges are meant to be open to all (sign up conditions apply), will be based on the layout of that node settlement (as they have promised huge variation in node settlement layout based on world manager initial placement on "pop", biome, and terrain features) Those will be 500v500 if they can get it stable enough. They spend way too much time prefacing every livestream and every test session with "work in progress, not indicative of final product!" and yet we still get people complaining that X isn't to their liking.

George_Black

In L2 it worked just fine. Exactly the same design

Nerror

Obviously it's all WIP. My worry is more along the lines of the uncertainty of how many players they need to design the castles and nodes for. I don't see same design work equally well for 500 and 1000 players, especially with collision detection, and we might not find out until much later in A2 how many players they can squeeze in.

Nerror

George_Black wrote: »

In L2 it worked just fine. Exactly the same design

How many players per siege in L2? Max.

George_Black

A thousand on each

George_Black

There is give and take on the castle design.
First of all the siege starts on the outside, before the walls are breached.
Ranged classes have the upper hand.

If the attackers get to the throne room, melee classes have the upper hand, big time.
It's fair.

Dolyem

Got me thinking so now I am considering game design for a battle based on the castle we saw in the dev update

daveywavey

Dolyem wrote: »

Got me thinking so now I am considering amusing memes for a battle based on the castle we saw in the dev update

I fixed that for you.

akabear

More scope here. but I always was fond of the idea that the inner areas of the castle could be changed by the defending clan so the attacking clan were not fully aware of what it would be when they entered.

And also for much more 3 dimensionality than current with upper\lower\side vantage points, hides and all manner of cover.

daveywavey

akabear wrote: »

More scope here. but I always was fond of the idea that the inner areas of the castle could be changed by the defending clan so the attacking clan were not fully aware of what it would be when they entered.

And also for much more 3 dimensionality than current with upper\lower\side vantage points, hides and all manner of cover.

Heh, that'd be interesting, depending on how much could be changed. Or maybe some kind of internal barricade that a Tank has to channel to break down. I wonder if we'll be able to set up siege weapons wherever we like, so we can have thirty of them staring down the main gateway.

Sunboy

Maybe make the whole map an objective. North, south, east, West. Triangular so it's faster to switch in the middle but more dangerous. Every live player at the end counts. Not for castle siege but some other mass scale pvp event.

Much love 😘

Caww

Hopefully the game assets are modular enough (is that a thing?) to change if any game damaging choke points or exploits show up once real thinking, conniving and devious players start getting into this.

Dolyem

CCC_Dante wrote: »

My only concern is the character collision. Especially in narrow spaces, it can be the case that these areas are large enough so that there are no problems. It could be a mess, if there are 200 people on one spot with character collision. I also hope they get a proper balance together so it doesn´t end in an "AoE" claster fu** like in most games and you can push deep with your train into enemy groups.

-heavy breathing in no AoE cap for zergbusting-

Dolyem

@Nerror I made another discussion focusing on ideas/concepts for this from everyone because I didnt know if it matched up with what this post was for.

Nerror

akabear wrote: »

More scope here. but I always was fond of the idea that the inner areas of the castle could be changed by the defending clan so the attacking clan were not fully aware of what it would be when they entered.

And also for much more 3 dimensionality than current with upper\lower\side vantage points, hides and all manner of cover.

I would absolutely love if defenders could place some walls or just change the layout even a little. Great idea, even if for an expansion type thing

akabear

Additional "blue prints" could be unlocked by clans as quests and conquests.

Stronger clans, more choices of blue prints.

Child Item