Ammo Pt:3

So here's my take on the matter from what I know about psychology and game design. I'm by no means an expert on either so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I'm majoring in one and I read as much as I can about the other. I'm convinced they're very deeply connected though, since games are designed to be used by humans.

However, when it comes down to it, christina norman said exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time. I'm paraphrasing but it went something like this: "The ammo change was implimented to stop people from playing in a boring and strange way." (She said that during the xfire stream on the 22nd, where she was a vanguard. I can find a link if you want.) I take this as encouragement that at least I'm partly on the right track here.

It's human nature to want to do things in the most effective and simple way they can. If they can have both then they will do both. It's bad game design to make the same playstyle allow both at once because the majority of gamers will never play it any other way.

Sure, you COULD load up with explosive rounds, or dual rail extentions and then go around shooting for a little while and take cover while your long overheat time ticked down. But you would be killing things more slowly and you would understand that you were weakening yourself for the sake of making the combat more interesting.

For example, I ran around with an explosive round laden sniper rifle for a while on insanity mode. I struggled with it for several fights on virmire and then did the math. It went something like this: "Okay, took me like 20 hits to kill this krogan instead of 30, but it took me more than twice as long between shots, so technically I'm reducing my dps by about 20%. Also, I spend most of my time listening to an annoying overheat klaxxon. There's no way my shepard would want to fight like this. I think I'll go back to my frictionless inferno/snowblinds now..."

Then I realized that with a single medical interface slotted in my armor, I could perma marksman with my pistol and kill things about 3 times faster. It was really hard to justify doing anything else at that point, since whenever I did, things never seemed to die. I was bored when I nerfed myself by using the worse system because things didn't die, and I was bored when I did things the right way because the right way was boring.

Good game design is about choice. But for most gamers, a choice between being more effective and being less effective is not a choice at all. (And if you think about it in roleplay terms, what shepard wouldn't choose to be as powerful as possible at all times? The fate of all life in the galaxy is at stake!)

Now (ME2) you have to choose. Do you want to play in a complex and effective way and be more successful, or do you want to play in a simple and less effective way and possibly die? It's essentially the same choice as in ME1, except now there are actual consequences for playing in a simple way. (Less strategy in what guns you use and when and what powers you use and when.)

Now, why steer people away from the simple route? Because the less things you're doing the more easily you can get bored. If most players are being encouraged to play in a way they find boring, then they are going to have a less enjoyable experience than if they played in a way that was fun. The flip side of this is if you are rewarding players for playing the boring way through combat effectiveness, then by definition you are punishing the players who want to play in a more complex and strategic fashion for playing that way.

I think I also know why you're seeing a lot of players who have shooter experience say negative things about the fighting system in ME1: They know how much more interesting and complex a game with shooting elements can be. They know how interesting it can be to look at a battlefield tactically and make real gameplay decisions based on the surroundings, the situation, and their remaining resources. (Be it ammo or grenades or fuel or what have you.) They see that these changes are things that worked well to reward interesting play in other games they have played, and can see how it would work well to fix what was wrong with ME1.

Anyway, when it comes down to it, no one is forcing you to play in the way that is most effective. (In a way, this is like your same argument, where you were saying nobody is forcing me to put frictionless materials in my weapon.) You are the one who wants to continue playing the same way even though it won't work as well, and it is on you to adapt.

But I've said it before and I'll say it again: You could always move to an easier difficulty setting and play the same way. It sounds insulting, but in no way am I intending any insult to your skill. I'm only trying to suggest ways to glean fun from the new system. In fact, I did the very same thing for my last ME1 run. I lowered my difficulty from insanity to hardcore so that I could use a slightly more reckless and simple strategy and still be successful, and I had more fun.

Ammo: Part 2

Part 2: The gameplay reasons why an ammo mechanic was a great idea for ME2.

This is an amalgamation of three different posts, so I’m sorry if they don’t flow together very well. Keep in mind that I’m a gamer, not a game designer, but here’s how it looks to me. :D

Post 1: To stop players from ignoring their powers completely and just running in with a gun and popping marksman or overkill constantly, they had to make the enemies take a really long time to kill. (Boring) To stop players from just standing there trading shots with that slow to kill enemy, and you know, actually use cover, they had to make it really easy to kill you. One shot snipers, rockets, and even krogan elbows! (Boring AND annoying.)

With ammo in, they can challenge the player to actually be accurate. They can send in more enemies and have them die more easily because we have another limiting factor besides the health of what we're fighting. We can't be too cautious or we won't kill enough things to get ammo, but we also can't be too Rambo-ish because we need to aim.

Having limited ammo also makes it more important to switch weapons, which also makes things more interesting to the player. (I don't know about you, but most of the time in ME1 I had one (2 in case of infiltrator) weapon that I never switched from. However, if you like using one gun all the time, you just need to be careful not to waste it's ammo.

Lastly, it lets them ramp up how often we're able to use our powers. If our weapon use is more limited, that lets us use biotic and tech powers more often without overpowering us. (And it's good not to be overpowered, because then they don't need to make enemies cheap to challenge us.)

Quote: Posted 01/04/10 00:17 (GMT) by Satanicfirewraith
If I only want to use my AR weapon, then I should be able to do just that not end up running out of ammo for it and being forced to switch it now.

The problem with that is if you can just keep firing indefinitely, there is no reason to use any of your other guns or any of your abilities. Especially with how enemies seem like they will die faster in this game. Being encouraged to run around with the same weapon and never use any powers is really boring. Overly simple and boring gameplay styles should be less effective than more involved and complex ones. If it weren’t for that, we’d still be playing turn based menu-driven D20 rpgs!

People say that ammo management makes the game more shooterish and less rpgish, but if I remember correctly inventory and resource management has been an rpg staple since before RPGs existed on video games. Do you remember going into town and stocking up on potions in old final fantasy games? How about collecting arrows in legend of zelda games?

If anything, the fact that mass effect 1 had no ammo (and very little resource management) was one of the biggest departures from rpg form that game had.

Post 2: Being able to spam fire from one gun constantly to solve every problem (albeit REALLY SLOWLY) was a boring and uninteresting way to play the game, but also very effective. Because you never had to stop shooting, the enemies had to be tough not to get wiped out quickly. Because we were super tough too, most fights were just a bunch of people ignoring cover and shooting each other in the face until they fell down.

The only way to challenge us on harder difficulties was to ridiculously ramp up damage so that snipers and rockets insta-killed us. It was cheap and annoying and our infinite guns and activated invincibility had to go in order to fix everything else about the gameplay. For ME1 the devs basically had to balance the game around cheat codes, and it made a lot of other gameplay features kind of suck.

Switching guns is interesting. Using powers more because you're running low is interesting. Sniping something and having it ACTUALLY DIE is interesting and fun.

Don't get me started on those times I was on a world, sniping krogan from outside of their aggro range. They just stood there and took it. 10 shots to the face, they pop immunity, 15 they pop shield boost, 25 they fall down and then get back up at full health, 30 they die. UGH. I'll take a sniper that actually kills stuff and runs out than one nobody will use on harder difficulty modes because it blows.

One more thing: Complaining that mass effect 2 is trying to appeal to shooter fans doesn't make any sense to me. The fact that mass effect was -a shooter- is what attracted shooter fans. It's always been a shooter, between the dialogue and collecting a million guns. It was a shooter with some interesting and creative mechanics to it, some of which worked well and some of which was really clunky and bogged down the game.

Of course they're going to look at other shooters and try substituting things one at a time until it feels smooth. It only makes sense to do that. Because, perish the thought, shooter games have been doing something right to stay interesting all this time.

So anyway, the gameplay and in world science explanations have both been covered. The only argument left is that "I liked firing constantly without ever having to aim and I don't mind the janky and slow gameplay that came with that!" In which case, nobody took away your mass effect 1 disk. Go play that.

Ammo: Part 1

I posted a lot of stuff in the old ammo thread that I think should be brought up again here. I apologize in advance for the incoming wall of text, but I think it’s still as valid as it was then. There will be some old quotes from that topic in here, but I’m not including them to pick on you, I just included the posts I think would help me illustrate my point and put my argument in context.

Now, the argument against the new ammo system is twofold. Thus, I will split up my argument into two segments, one for each aspect.

Part 1: Lore argument

TLDR soundbite!: I think there was a technological breakthrough that allowed shields to improve by somewhere between 2 and 4 times how effective they used to be. Escalation happened, and new weaponry technology was invented to combat the advances in shields. These guns hit harder but generate too much heat for the old passively cooling heat sinks, and so required a different kind of heat sink that works much better with the downside of the gun being unable to fire when they burn out.

Now I’ll go more in depth:

A: Why the old kinds of guns were bad enough to necessitate new technology:

I’m going to split this into two parts. In the first we’ll assume insanity is the canon for how guns worked vs defenses. In the second (and the rest of the argument) we’ll assume an easier difficulty was canon.

Insanity: Remember how in ME1 whenever anything popped immunity, you'd just sit there shooting it in the face for what seemed like an eternity and barely do any damage?

Guns kind of sucked vs shields and armor in the harder difficulty modes. Throwing people off things or using explosive ammo was the only way to quickly kill anything.

Explosive ammo caused obnoxious overheating problems, and thus was rarely used, instead we mostly used polonium/snowblind/incendiary so that we could run around without ever running out of ammo.

Now, imagine that a new kind of heat sink was invented that allowed you to use high powered ammunition without long cool down times, but with the downside of changing out heat sinks?

People who had guns like that would have a huge advantage over people who were using the old kinds of guns, and people would switch over en masse.

(It's kind of like how nobody would use a flintlock pistol if they had access to a pistol that loaded from a clip.)

Easier difficulty: In this case, we can use a similar argument but assume that there was a technological breakthrough that allowed shields and armor to become 2 to 4 times stronger. This would effectively increase the difficulty of normal or hardcore mode to insanity levels where people can stand there tanking bullets, and thus the rest of the insanity explanation applies.

B: How explosive type ammo could account for the new ammo system:

I’ll start this off with an old quote because it feeds right into this explanation. Be warned, it’s mostly math from here on!

Quote: Posted 01/04/10 09:05 (GMT) by Wayward Lone

Well for fun lets say the shield technology jumped so that they are twice as effective now then they were two years ago.

Then take the top of the line weapon such as the Crossfire X that could shoot 81 rounds of ammunition before overheating. So given that weapons are easly upgraded they could kick up the damage it inflicts by 2x but at the same time generate twice as much heat. So thats 40.5 rounds before overheating and still being able to retain a active coolant system for that assault rifle.

But perhaps through side quests one can effectively bring the active coolant system back to the game.

Except maybe it's not that simple. Maybe doubling a gun's power actually quintuples it's heat generation. I mentioned explosive rounds earlier in this thread and I think it's the key to how this works.

Explosive rounds have 500% the heat generation for about 40% more damage. (That’s 12.5% more heat for every percent of extra damage you’re doing.) Therefore if we extrapolate based on this, we end up with an explosive ammo heat increase formula of O/D*0.125=S Where O is how many shots an unmodified gun can fire without overheating, D is the percentage increase in damage the mod adds, and S is the amount of shots you can now fire before your gun overheats.

(Lets also assume for the sake of amusement that if your gun drops below .5 S, your gun blows up in your face and you die.)

( Its actually O/[(D*12.5)/10) = S, Because otherwise we multiply a percentage as if it were a whole number, but because of the order of operations I can divide the 12.5 and the 10 to create .125 without breaking the formula.)

Lets input standard explosive rounds to your gun. We’ll round down it’s O to 80 for math simplicity.

We end up with 80/40*0.125. This becomes 80/5 which then becomes 16. I think that sounds about right, but I don’t use explosive ammo or ARs much so I’m not 100% sure.

If we use that same formula, explosive ammo that adds 80% more damage overloads in 8 shots, 120% in 5 shots, and 160% in 4 shots. At 400% it’s 1.6 shots. Now, the formula isn’t linear, so the higher you go, the less impact more damage causes on your shots before overheat, and at around 5% and below you start making the gun fire MORE than 80 shots before it overheats. ( If it added 2%, the gun would fire 320 shots before overheating! And at 1% it adds 640.) In fact, here's a graph. Click to enlarge.

(X is the amount of shots before you overheat, and Y is the percent damage increase from what the gun would be unmodified.)

Random note: If a sniper rifle takes around 3 shots to overheat and it has the same dps as an AR which takes 80, then a single sniper bullet is around 27 times (rounding up) stronger than a single AR bullet. With our formula, if we had explosive ammo that was powerful enough to make each AR bullet hit like it was fired out of a sniper rifle, it would overload in .23 shots and explode.

Anyway, all that aside, because of how the formula works the AR would never blow up in your face, but it would overheat quickly enough to become completely unusuable at anything past 80%.

Lets try it with a sniper rifle! If the sniper rifle could fire 3 shots before overheating unmodified, regular 40% explosive ammo, it would overload in .6 shots, or in practice 1 shot. (This is how it works in practice, which is encouraging.) 80% explosive ammo puts you down to 0.3, which means the sniper explodes in your face and you die. Dangerous stuff indeed!

Lets assume for the rest of this that we used 80% ammo, doubling the power of every bullet. (They could also have harnessed the energy lost in giving the gun 500% more weapon force by channeling it into more damage. So the 80% ammo could potentially do more than 80% more damage. This is convenient because it can explain away any difference between what my formula predicts and how fast people actually die! :D)

Now imagine that a new kind of gun is invented that is designed solely for this kind of super ammo. Instead of trying to fight a losing battle with the heat generation, it just shunts it right into some kind of newfangled mass effect field powered heat sponge. They absorb all the heat and when they can't take any more and melt, the gun shuts down until you kick it out and replace it.

Now instead of having your AR fire 8 shots and then frantically trying to cool down for 5 seconds, it can fire 40 of these super shots at once before having to be changed out. (Keep in mind that changing a heat sink is a very quick and simple process!)

Instead of firing once and KILLING THEMSELVES, a sniper can fire as quickly and efficiently as if they were using regular ammo, provided they have enough clips.

Now, you might ask, "When we run out of heat sinks, why can't we use the old autocooling system?" Because for most guns, firing without a heatsink would blow up the gun. Even with a top of the line AR, you’d be in danger of damaging it if you did that more than a couple times, so it would be prudent to install safeties into the gun that stop it from firing without a heat sink.

The old model guns would likely fall out of favor fairly quickly, as doing half of the damage (or possibly even less!) your enemy is doing is a quick way to get yourself killed. Bringing a knife to a gun fight, as it were.

Anyway, feel free to go over my math and let me know if I did anything wrong! :D