TnR is teamplay
Like many other projects, TnR started with a question. It was a question that had been present in my mind for a long time and during countless gaming sessions; why is there no first person shooter game out there that dares forcing the players into cooperation?
Teamplay gaming is nothing new, ever since Threewave's capture the flag mod for Quake 1 there has been a lot of fps games were teamplay is key. However in public matches the teamplay mechanics, and even more so, the teamplay feeling has often been lost. Staying together might give your team an edge but soloing and going Rambo will give you more kills and is more fun.
The simple solution to this problem is forcing teamplay. In TnR going solo is not only less effective, it is during most circumstances not effective at all. The problem was solved...
...Or was it? When TnR started its transformation from an answer to a game I soon found out that forcing people is not very nice if they are not forced into something that is fun and rewarding. It's not only about creating a game were teamplay naturally occurs, it's also about creating a setting were teamplay is fun.
Team feeling
An important part of making teamplay fun is creating a set were a certain feeling of dependency between the players in the team is present and a mood were your own achievements in the game are hard to distinguish from your teams achievements as a whole. All teamplay oriented games have to work on this team feeling and in fps games this is often achieved by adding SWAT or war themes to the games. These themes make the player relate to real life scenarios were working as a team is the key for survival, creating a somewhat false feeling of team effort.
For TnR I was not really interested in themes. I wanted a game were a team feeling was achieved because actual team efforts took place and took place often, not because playing it reminded you of something from real life. There are more team games out there that rely on game mechanics rather than themes to bring this team feeling, Team Fortress is one example, but what distinguishes TnR from Team Fortress is the "took place often" part.
Teamplay on every level
Knowing that your teammate has your back adds to the team feeling. Knowing that every player in your team is doing their part gives a certain thrill. In TnR you don't have to look at the scoreboard to figure out if your team mates are doing their job because if they are not it will be painfully obvious to you when you stand alone facing a duo that you simply cannot beat by yourself. The teamplay is there every second not just as a strategic reminder but also as part of the action, this is micro scale teamplay. The teamplay you find in most first person shooters revolves around strategy and tactics. These elements are fun indeed but that intense feeling of teamplay often occurs when you find yourself in the middle of the action with your team mates by your side. These moments are what TnR is all about and to create them as often as possible the game prohibits you from doing some of the basic actions by yourself but it also gives you new possibilities and awesome stunts to pull off when you cooperate with others.
Too awesome not to implement!
When the development of TnR started the approach was to keep it simple. I wanted it to be a solid game without a steep learning curve and to achieve this I believed in keeping the features at a minimum. Then I found myself saying to Locke, "a feature containing a synchronized taunt gesture would be really cool!", and we ended up with the power taunt.
This was not to keep things simple and it was a bit wacky and over the top but it seemed like the right thing to do because it sounded awesome. From the beginning we didn't want the feature to affect gameplay that much but after hours of testing we realized that this feature really added to the team feeling. To synchronize a taunt and watch the body parts of your enemy fly gave a quite unique feeling of cooperation and success that I rarely felt in other fps before.
To sum it up
Giving a feeling is what gaming is all about and when developing a game there needs to be a good balance between awesome features and robust gameplay. This mod dares forcing people into a certain set of rules, hence the rules themselves needs to be fun no matter what theme they are applied to. With TnR I hope we can give you a game experience that lets you cooperate on a new level with other players in a way that is intuitive, competitive and fun!
LazyDog
Lead Designer
Tanks and Rogues
"why is there no first person shooter game out there that dares forcing the players into cooperation?"
Erm... A LOT do... I think your about 10 years to late.
not many force you to be cooperative. every FPS I've ever seen lets you go off on your own with no repercussions except things can get a little harder.
this forces you to work with at least one other person. if not you're dead.
As I said in the article “Teamplay gaming is nothing new". It’s the “forcing” part that is new. And well there is Army of two but this is more of an arcade game and the game mechanics mostly revolves around cooperative campaigns not deathmatch game play (even if it’s possible to play against other people).
Gavavva is kind of right, Some Co-op games like Army of two force you to work with at least one other person(or bot that is). They may be few in numbers, but it has been done before. Tanks and Rogues does specifically require one other person, so i guess it is kind of different.