... we're discussing a lot the production since Gearbox showed their first Colonial Marines screenshots. We tried to contact Gearbox to know if they eventually thought about releasing their developpement tools to switch on the engine.
Nothing is fixed at the moment. We're not sure that Gearbox is going to release a good game... we're not sure that they're going to release modding tools... and we're not sure that picking this game is a really wise choice to make a mod. FOR NOW.
Our ideas are still the same, and our goal is to tell a story, with mechanisms that we think good for a real immersive cooperative experience, no matter what tools, engine we're using. So keep in touch with the Requiem Team, you'll know soon what we're gonna do next week.
Besides that, the team want to remind you that, all features announced here for Xen Project are what we want to have in the game in the final release. But, as every development, everything is always changing, evolving... So don't rush on the website to say "You said it was going to be ingame but it's not...". We're giving you our gameplay ideas that are scheduled to be sooner or later in the mod, but we can't assure you that everything will be as we think of it at start. Just so you know...
Talking about that, the last news was speaking about revive system, here is the work we've done those last days :
Revive :
Every class can revive a player. It takes sometime to revive a player tho.
- - Support : revive a player really fast (25secs and 40secs), recover 30% of the total life.
- - Assault : revive a player, but takes much time (45secs and 1 min), recover 30% of the total life.
- - with no health pack : the revive action causes some side-effects to the player... the view is pretty blurry (from 5 to 10 secs), and the movement speed is decreased for this amount of time...
- - with health pack : Recover 30% more of the total life (so 60%). No side effects.
After sometime if the player stays in the coma, the player dies : mission failed.
Anyway, for the new stuff, here is the Quicktime Events details :
Quick Time Events
Healing, ammo resupply QTE : This quick time event is pretty simple, you got a bar displaying on the screen and you gotta press the button on a "hot spot" of the bar to speed up the action. (Gears of war like).
Fusing, Hacking QTE : This quick time event is harder, you got several key displaying one after another on the screen. You gotta press each one of them, if you miss a key the action involved with QTE will last longer than usual. The quicktime events are harder for an assault class, and easier for the support class.
That's all for now folks ! For the media part, take a look at Wolfreim's concept ;)
"with no health pack : the revive action causes some side-effects to the player... the view is pretty blurry (from 5 to 10 secs), and the movement speed is decreased for this amount of time..."
It makes sense that a person would limp if they haven't been properly healed, but I find the idea of a blurry screen unappealing from a gameplay perspective.
Having to bear through a 5-10 second penalty of partial blindness that's tacked on after waiting almost a full minute to be revived (with 30% health no less) just seems like it could be irritating. I'm also worried that it could make the game slow and I doubt people would like to stand around waiting for teammates to pop back up.
I would not worry too much about the official game, the video of the game looks absolutely crap... I am sure you guy could do a far better job with it. All you need is a quality animator to trump the Sega version...
And I do agree with decyx about the amount of time to recover/heal a player, then get back into the fight. I would talk 15 - 20 seconds max for the entire process. 5-10 seconds with the correct heal pack and 15-20 without. Those times are an eternity when you're under fire from those dang aliens! "We're all gonna die man, we're all gonna die!!"
I think i gotta put that in the next news too... but, all the "time measures" put in the gamedesign features are just NOT fixed at all. It's just some kind of example of what could eventually be ingame.
Besides that, as we were discussing with patrick a few days ago. We prefer to make a mod with "pretty frustrating balance" at first and then, change some stuff and evolve to a more flexible gameplay. Players will a lot more enjoy to gain flexibility... in the contrary, if we do a really opened gameplay, with marines running everywhere, having health at max after a revive with not even a side effect after being healed by a noob-butcher-marine who doesn't even know how to rescue his buddy (theoricaly speaking), if we have to balance game to a more "strict" way to play... i already know that we're gonna have tons of mail because we killed the mod or something like that.
I'm really glad that the community give some ideas, it's always helpfull. But i think i won't take time to say each time that is just for "the record" actually, and not play tested and balanced.