Dev Q&A

[DR.]

Not really a strawman though is it, because it is in-fact contributing to proving that many of the posts you make are useless, thus showing that giving you a forum account was either; the biggest regret, or an effort to increase the shit-posting on the forum.

It Is. You said and I quote "The biggest mistake undoubtedly was giving an Australian a forum account on the 07/08/2013." 

When DragonFire (speaking for the devs) said it was something else... By definition, this is slander. You are a random person In the grand scheme of things that would have no idea what truly is the biggest mistake given you are not a dev let alone talk to them about this stuff. 

My posts do no harm... You don't need to read them yet a lot of people still do. Why are you reading this If I'm the "biggest mistake undoubtedly" If you value your time you would do something better yet youre here like the rest of us.

Even the web development team think it, with the tag "Low Quality Posting Freak", even jokes need a certain amount of truth in them to be funny.

The joke Is on you because I asked Xen to do this.

[Kriegstofu]

"What do you believe was the greatest mistake over the years?" 
Barricades spawned the camping mentality and the ranged dominance playstyle, uberpowerful legendaries made the game too easy as more and more people got them so naturally the bots were buffed to compensate but then their damage had to be buffed as well which leads into having enemies kill you in one hit which deters infantry from open fighting the bots which circles back to having barricades and ranged dominance.

This so much. Legendaries have turned the game upside down. A heirloom system like CRPG had would be pretty fine aswell. For Example starting from lvl 52, using a Heirloom point on your favorite Bow (Kings Will) to get +3 damage/speed/missile speed and start at level 1 on that character again.

[Swaliant]

100% agree with DragonFire1. Also I personally love large maps although they slow down the game. Discovering, running around and fighting in multiple fronts in large maps were so much fun. Things like these made me feel like I was in an RPG. Ancient Bastion back in 2014 was a great example of one the large maps. Plus large maps provide opportunity for kiting.

So I think we need large maps, kiting maps (or kiting servers if devs think kiting ruins the mod) in addition to some small and fast maps and definitely a more infantry-oriented playing style. And traps! Traps were really funny.

[Terath]

Kiting:

Kiting, over the years, has always been a really tough thing to embrace on my end because it went against the core gameplay that I believed the development team wanted to establish. Different developers have had vastly different opinions on kiting ranging from "it shouldn't be a thing at all" to "create a new gamemode to house the kiting players". A long time ago, I believed that kiting was dumb because it was pretty far removed from the intent of the core gameplay. Instead of shielding in the corner of a map, you traverse the map to kite enemies; instead of being safe, you are in constant danger; instead of relying on a plethora of teammates, you often have to use your wits to survive. Funnily enough, you could argue that kiting allows a player to use more of the map than the standard gamemode, showing one of many major flaws in the standard gamemode.

Most of the arguments against kiting were against certain players that were kiting - individuals that would ask other people to leave the server and join another if they were currently kiting. I still see this as disrespectful, as those players likely came to play the standard gamemode. While I cannot blame people for wanting to kite, I cannot blame somebody for wanting to play the intended gamemode as well. A lot of kiters asked for private servers or solo house events so that they could kite on their own, but we turned them down, as it didn't fit the gameplay we wanted players to play. Doing so would house a gamemode that doesn't have any in-game support or changes from the standard gamemode. Since certain kiters were treating players joining the server they were on unkindly and unfairly, kiting was seen as a net negative on the community to us, and mappers started to make and change current maps to reflect a no-kiting stance. This, unsurprisingly, pissed off all of a large portion of the playerbase, as the mappers had effectively attempted to remove probably the only fun they were capable of having on the mod. Since then, we've taken no steps against kiting as a whole, if I remember correctly, and only punish players who are being assholes by telling people to leave. We punish people not because they are kiting, but because they are being an asshole. Kiting has nothing to do with it.

The current gamemode, if you ask me, is holding kiting back. One-hit-to-kills (1htks) are another one of the major flaws in the standard gamemode, item and enemy creep raising numbers higher and higher, until the bots became strong enough to kill players immediately. I believe that 1htks in any game are just bad game design. In the standard gamemode, it's annoying, but fixable thanks to team coordination, barricades and tomes. In kiting, it's an instant, unfixable death if you're playing solo. I don't kite, but I don't need to kite to know it's bullshit if I die in one hit and there's nothing I could have done about it. In addition, the map changes specifically against kiters ruined a lot of maps kiters considered good or enjoyable, which sucks. To kite at the harder gamemodes, you need late-end game gear to get anywhere far (in my opinion). This keeps new players out, and new player experience is something I take very seriously.

In addition to this, kiting presents skill; the current gamemode does not. Success through skill and success through knowledge are two different things. You don't need to skill to play the current gamemode, you need knowledge - knowledge of the map, knowledge of barricading spots, knowledge of your class, knowledge of the game. If you have all of these things, you can succeed. You don't need skill to play; a monkey could do it. But to kite, you need some degree of skill in addition to knowledge - jump shooting, avoiding enemies, aim, split decision-making. These are all skills. You can use these skills in the current gamemode, behind barricades (and likely you'll be higher on the leaderboard), but it isn't necessary at all. Right now, you can just craft a cheap repeater, build cades, sit behind a wall and clear the hardest gamemode. To get far kiting, you need to be good at it. I like to believe that's what makes it enticing. It's difficult, so it is fun through difficulty. It's different gameplay, therefore it's fun through being something new. Hard to blame players for wanting something difficult not through the health of an enemy but through technical ability to perform.

If it were a gamemode, though? From a game design standpoint: 1-4 player wave based survival gameplay, with maps tailored to fit the style of gameplay. Here's the catch, though - there wouldn't be any dedicated melee class. It's not necessary. This is one, if not the major reason why we didn't overtly support kiting. It made one class entirely unusable. If you were a commando, and joined a kiting run, you were seen as worthless, because you were. Melee combat is infinitely more risky than ranged. There's often no amount of movement you can do to avoid melee strikes, but movement as ranged is paramount. It's why people choose to wear lighter armour (or no armour at all, because armour is worthless if you die in one hit anyways!). I still find melee combat in Warband more enjoyable than ranged, but not in NI. In NI, ranged combat is the undoubted king of combat, because of how easy it is to not die. In a way, ranged is the true tank, not Juggernaut.

Cavalry was a step in the right direction. There are no cades, big open maps, and the servers are locked to 8 players. It's not necessarily the same, since gameplay on horseback is notably different than gameplay on foot, but you can still play it solo and get some degree of enjoyment out of the difficulty. Unfortunately, the gamemode is very clearly unfinished, as some enemies are way too strong, some too weak, some too fast, some too slow. I do still think being able to choose horse armour is pretty cool though, even if nobody uses the horse armour because the horses are downright unkillable.

To summarize: Yes, I believed that kiting was dumb because it was far removed from the intent of the core gameplay. I was right - it is far removed, but it's not dumb. It's a byproduct of a stale gameplay loop, and players just wanted different gameplay and some unpredictability. You can't really blame people for using your product a different way because of how boring your current product is.

In the future, if the modding tools are good and not much is hardcoded and everybody has the time to start up developing again in Bannerlord, I'd likely push to explore gamemodes completely different from what we currently have. A gamemode tailored to 1-4 players, built around skill, hopefully balanced enough to allow melee to participate and flourish, support new players, and encourages small-form teamplay and communication, perhaps. To be quite honest, I'd play it way more than the current gamemode.

Most of the flaws that the current gamemode had are visible through hindsight. Previous developers weren't able to tell what barricades would do when the system was expanded in 2012. Believe it or not, before barricades became the game, the gamemode WAS kiting, in a form. Very open maps with no barricades and no cading spots, on what we now consider Normal mode. Tomes and barrels may be cool items that do special things that no other item can do, but over time, the game was adjusted to fit these items instead of the items adjusted to fit the game. Beating Ragnarok without tomes or barrels is pretty difficult, not to mention unrewarding and often times aggravating due to 1htks.

Legendaries locked the best items in the game behind chance instead of it being something a player could feasibly work towards. It may provide a large dose of dopamine when you get a really nice drop, but the legendary item tree and the house craftable item tree stand parallel, against each other. Winter attempted to combine the two item trees through the legendary upgrade system, which is fine - but it ended up providing even more powerful weapons for player to use, further devaluing crafted weapons and armour as it was left in the dust for end-game players. I would solve this in NI2 by scrapping the current iteration of legendaries and opt for lootable sidegrade materials that you can input into your crafted weapons so that they can provide a focused desired effect; not making them better, but allowing for refinement of a build and personalization of an item or character.

So, basically: People kite because the standard gamemodes are flawed and boring and mindless, and kiters just want to have fun and a challenge while also not being reliant on a full team to succeed. Kiting with a few other players is STILL COOPERATIVE PLAY. In the future, I would support solo / small team gamemodes wholeheartedly.

On other topics: If the Bannerlord mod tools ever come out (and they seem really comprehensive), I'm going to dive right in and start learning immediately.

This is all my opinion. The opinions and experiences of other developers and players may be vastly different than mine.

[Kriegstofu]

This was a very interesting read Terath, I wonder how the other Devs thinks about this

[DR.]

Now this is why I made the thread.

This is interesting to see it from someone else's point of view that didn't like kiting at the beginning.

Cool stuff

[RookCW]

"scrapping the current iteration of legendaries and opt for lootable sidegrade materials that you can input into your crafted weapons so that they can provide a focused desired effect; not making them better, but allowing for refinement of a build and personalization of an item or character."

God, I love this idea so much!

[Fendi]

Woody, I have to apologise for calling this thread useless.

[DR.]

Woody, I have to apologise for calling this thread useless.

All good.

Calling the concept of a Q&A useless for Ni would actually be retarded or in nicer words it dismisses that it's almost a common practice in the gaming industry that your developers talk to the players about what they what to differently/what to change.

Ive suggested a Q&A but really I've only given a handful of questions here and some of them are well pretty obvious as I just said them in the moment. If people really thought about what questions they should ask I'm sure we would see an actual interesting thread for once emerge.

[DR.]

I guess I've thought of one question I've brought up a few times but that's never really been answered.

Why don't you just use old models as place holders or well just new items altogether.

Just to name one out of many... old Nobel steel was a model I and a lot of others preferred. I would like to see it back in game as a new item or at the very least maybe a place holder when you find a model you like better.

We have so many arguably good models that we've just chuck in the trash/replaced... I can understand you have an art style you want to keep to but shouldn't the enjoyment of the player valued more than your subjective view on a model?