anon474

That will be tough to balance, and mechanics are hard to switch on and off (and balance). Maybe the devs can think about creating advanced startup options where you can change enemy patrol frequency, enemy squad size, how quickly enemies get better weapons or how slowly. I think difficulty settings are already a given. But the number one thing I'm concerned about is making sure JA is ready and developed, adding more features is great but, you want to make sure it doesn't come at the expense of derailing development.

loot and bobby ray's, that's it. there are some shops in arulco but they suck big time, they're really not good, they sell like revolvers you get at level 1 in wherever you land, meduna was it. bad shops. if shops were better it'd be a better system, but its mostly bobby rays and whatever you can get lucky with taking off enemies in loot.

I mean maybe they come with good equipment when you hire them, as per usual (I especially liked the JA2 1.13 addition of allowing yourself to buy multiple loadouts for mercs and hiring them sometimes with VERY (or not very but a bit) overpowered weapons. I'm ok with a halfway measure where bobby ray's exist but its nerfed and there are shotgun specialists on the map, revolver specialists, sniper rifle specialists, and you have to camp them everyday to see which good items they have for sale, etc. A GOOD IDEA FOR A MECHANIC IMO: what if traders got better gear or allowed you access to full range of gear and best gear but only if you had good relations with them, and having good relations with them wasn't easy, you'd have to bribe them, etc. that can be a great little mechanic that's similar to how repair mechanic is a thing, and it's not obvious that you have to keep items repaired but you do, obviously.

I don't think you need to modernize it at all, aside from maybe making it more complex, not less. JA2 was already pretty complex back then, different ammo types, item durability as a mechanic, multiple slots for gear on the character, multiple characters, multiple stats. If anything in modern gaming people made a lot of titles a LOT dumber, especially on console (no offense to console crowd, but I'm also not looking for any kind of mechanical complexity in a console title).

Noooooooooo I completely disagree. If there is no way to tell % to hit, i.e. not a JA2 type bar that fills up OR a number %, then this is possibly one of the WORST decisions anybody could make for JA. This would be a CATASTROPHIC decision. If you want to play something that unpredictable go play the lotto or go play casino lol. Again, if people want ot hid ethings, lets start hiding stats and you have to guess which soldiers is better than another soldier. Do you want that?

I actually think bobby rays is not the strongest game feature, and the reason its not, imo, is because it's something that's availible off the bat, instantly, and you dont need to unlock it (already lost potential for progression here), and you don't really need to find it, and it's also singular, which means, imagine if there were 5 shop keepers, and one was the best, but also the hardest to find. That's great mechanics imo.

I don't mind hitman looking like hitman, I mean in pictures for JA2 he looked like a guy from miami vice anyways. It's just 1 guy. Basically the dresscode should mostly be: either jeans and some top to give mercs that tacticool look, or it should be soldiers. Tex I think works, especially if you can put some armor on him.

colourful personalities doesn't mean ridiculous or comical, colourful can be a WWE wrestler. is stone cold steve austin not colourful? colourful just means not muted, not toned down, having a emotion, looking cool, sticking out. Colourful isn't just a clown, colourful is a muscled tank-top wearing guy with a 6-oclock shadow carrying a grenade launcher. Colourful just means not boring, not beige, having a personality of any kind, sticking out in any way, and that way can be comedy, but it can also be looking very cool and interesting. There should be a wider conversation about what constitutes colourful mercenaries vs comedic ones, I think. Also a lot of colourful mercs are unintentionally comedic. Maddog isn't comedic on purpose, he's just a bit crazy and very weird, you find him in a weird location. Maddog isn't comedic because writers wrote him as comedic, he's comedic because the idea of a random guy you find in a junkyard who then joins you and always says weird things undermining the seriousness of the plot is inherently hilarious and funny, but not intentional. Predator, the schwarzenegger movie, was an IDEAL example, in my opinion, of how a cast should be made to look colorful. They don't get that much playtime, but look at how predator has all of these characters, they have a guy in a boonie hat who's hispanic or native american looking, has a huge face, looks really crazy, they have jesse ventura who has a minigun, they have appollo creed actor who also has a unique hat and look. Everybody has different guns and preferred weapons that gives them character, there's a lot of different ethnicities and backgrounds and things you can infer about their background from their ethnicity and personalities, they presumably have different motivations, they have very different personalities, some are serious, some look criminal, some look unhappy or realize how tough the job is in front of them, others just want to finish the deployment and go eat a sandwich. This is a great example of characterization where there is differentiation between characters based on: clothing, color of clothing, camo pattern, type of clothing, weapon type and preferred fighting style, ethnicity and background, hat choice, personality.

I had the king of all ideas (or maybe worst idea in history of JA) Make Elliot a merc in JA3 🤣 Maybe he's like matured and has a little goatee and longer hair, like he's gone through his winter soldier arc or whatever (basically where a character we know comes back from some crazy long battle really far away, similar to how future Trunks is portrayed in DBZ) and a period of self-discovery. Alternatively maybe he's like a wandering NPC who has lost his memory of who he was and when you call him an idiot then he remembers who he is and gives you a special item.

But as far as I know there will be no way to tell the likelihood to hit at all. Like there won't be either a hit % or a bar that fills up like in JA2. I like precise hit percentage, because the basic essence of all RPG mechanics is this: big number go up. The more number go up, the more dopamine you get. It's that simple. So I want to see precisely how much one merc's number is, vs another merc's number, vs another merc's number. By this logic maybe we should start hiding stats, and then you just have to guess which merc is better than another merc. It's the same principle, and I bet people wouldn't like it. Devs say this is to make combat exciting etc, however, I don't think it makes combat exciting, it in fact underwhelms combat by taking away any kind of certainty in this combat, it takes away your ability to make good decisions in combat, you don't know all the variables of combat. I don't hate the dev team, but, this may be a case of a dev team that's very like confident and is like "Yes, I want to add something new to the formula", but it ends up being a "reinventing the wheel" type of thing, where you just screw up already a perfectly fine or balanced formula and genre. I think you can iterate on JA2 formula, but there are other types of iterations that are elsewhere, like how LBE works and so on, and how stats operate. This is very much "fixing what isn't broken" (and messing it up in the process).

Elliot?

I do not know how exactly % to hit is implemented in JA3, but, if all the press is correct, there doesn't appear to be ANY WAY to tell if you can hit somebody or not, at ALL, and I think this is a very VERY bad idea. If there is no way to tell the likelihood of hitting a target, that will just make everybody extremely risk averse and make them all go into shotguns and close proximity loadouts and specs. Not knowing whether you have a 50% or a 70% chance to hit something, even at medium range, will be terrible for people's ability to strategize adequately and know whether they have a good shot at the target, whether they should move in close, if they do hit the target was that hit a 1% chance they have even at long ranges, and they should change range and location and move in closer? If the system is similar to JA2 which just left out specific numbers but still had a UI bar you could fill, then that's fine. But leaving out ANY knowledge of your likelihood to hit is, in my opinion, a terrible terrible idea. There should at least be an option to turn that percent on in the options somewhere, but I think this option should be default on. Yes it may not be realistic, many things are not entirely realistic, being hit with more than one bullet is not entirely realistic. Stats like in any strategy or RPG should be front and center not behind the screen, the point is min-maxing.

Um, if its a journalist it's because he was given access. Lots of journalists are given access before release to increase hype.

You were the one talking sh now you're mad. OK buddy. Sorry man, most people don't play console in this corner of the industry and I'm pretty sure controllers aren't superior to mouses in a lot of genres.

That's a nice idea. Sometimes crowdfunding campaigns don't work. ATOM rpg worked because it's a fallout derivative, and people know fallout. Wasteland worked for the same reason. The way marketing works is that even people who are fans of RPGs need to first be familiar with the genre or sub-genre of RPG to want to buy or show interest in the title, and then they need to be familiar with the franchise (for all intents and purposes wasteland was a fallout equivalent). We already had a crowdfunding attempt for JA, it was with flashback, and it netted only 200k or so, not really enough for a big studio that may require a few years development. Xenonauts also didn't have a huge crowdfunding campaign afaik. A lot of your comments are positive, but delusionally positive, naively optimistic and energetic, agitatory. "Yea guys cmon! We can do it! We can just get a million dollars! Cmon!" that's neither how that works, and nor do you want it to work that way (I mean, if JA gets a million dollars or more in budget it should do that for the right reasons not because people think money falls out of the sky for no reason). I want to live in reality, and in reality, getting a title like JA going is very very tough, both on the development side and coming up with actually good ideas, systems, understanding how RPGs work, etc, and on the front end of marketing, getting customers on board, and getting investors/financiers on board. It's a very very hard job that I think you're a bit simplifying in your responses, it's not just a matter of "wanting it bad enough", in fact that kind of attitude blinds you to the nuances of life and development.

This is interesting and I was wondering if somebody would pick up on this. What if I told you that a lot of these photographs and media of women in the military especially on front lines is doctored footage, and intentional photo ops created with the purpose of boosting recruitment and swaying perception of the conflict to be more positive? The only time there has been a significant contingent of women fighting as soldiers has been in ww2 by USSR, and it wasn't because they were particularly feminist, it was because they ran out of almost all of age-eligible men and were down to drafting 14 year old children. USSR lost something like 80% of men from one generation in ww2. TL;DR a lot of sniper women in uniform, these recent ukranian girls in uniform dancing on tiktok, they take off the uniform as soon as the photoshoot is done and go back to doing whatever they were doing before that. It's purely a photo op or low-level propaganda designed to affect perceptions and PR.

I doubt it'll have too much woke propaganda in it, they already kind of made fauda a bit mary sue-ish by making her some super elite OP middle eastern sniper (because that's what that region is known for, gender progressivism and female soldiers), and giving her very masculine angular features, giving her a very masculine wardrobe, and giving her a permanent smug expression on her face (basically she's an extremely OP character for no reason), but aside from that I'm sure there's not gonna be too many shennanigans. Or not any more than there has to be. Definitely living in interesting times gentlemen.

AND. Bro being passionate 1 doesn't give you license to attack things for no reason, and 2 why do you think devs hearing lots of hate towards the work they're doing is going to help them make a better game. All it'll do is make them discouraged knowing that this is the kind of reception and audience they'll receive/already get, and they might even leave the industry altogether. People should want to support dev teams, assuming they're motivated by the right thing and most dev teams are with very minor exceptions, and then if you think they're going in the wrong direction sincerely, you give feedback in a definite but non personal and non insulting way. "I dont know, how the devs are doing this, but with some games, not speaking for JA3, it feels, like devs lived in a bubble." That's what I mean. This is the whole idea that the devs are like these laughing greedy men in suits smoking cigars in a closed room. Developers are usually over-worked extremely passionate people working on tiny amounts of resources. If they do make a mistake, or compromise on the depth of an RPG, it's not because of a lack of trying, it's usually due to outside constraints like their publisher telling them to make the mechanics more mass-appeal and simpler. Do you think back in action flashback devs were living in a bubble? if so why. All of the systems from JA2 are in JA:flashback, and a lot more, they have unique versions of most weapons afaik with slight stat boosts, and they have tons of attachments (although not as much as I would like ofc, but that's another matter). And they remarkably made the game feature complete despite having no budget of 200k or whatever it was, which is not enough to run a 2 year minimum project. What about back in action. Back in action people were another clearly underfunded team of devs who didn't even have the resources to make the merc faces look different who also went out of business promptly after the release of the title. The biggest mistake of back in action was to make the action real time, which turns it into some kind of SWAT simulator. I don't know if they were trying to make things more or less complex with that, or what their decision was governed by, whether it was their publisher saying "this genre is too complicated we need to make it mass appeal", but I can say that even that I wouldn't necessarily go after the developer I'd just be like "ok well, I'm probably not going to buy it, I would suggest maybe putting in turn-based instead...". The only project that I can clearly paint as exploitative was JA online because it had very clear P2W elements and even then I can't say that they didn't do it for the right reasons of creating a financial foundation to use for a "real" jagged alliance single player title later on down the line. And that's not this project, and not this dev team, not anywhere close, nor is it most dev teams who took a shot at JA series.

It's true, you don't want to make a saints row game where you're flying around on jetpacks and you parachute icecream vans down from the sky and everything is comic relief 24/7. But humor is very easy to scale back, just take certain lines out of characters. At the same time, in JA2 almost every character was funny, or at least so exaggerated that they ended up being funny not on purpose. Deidranna, elliot, lots of mercs, lots of characters. You could argue mercs like Dmitiri despite being a serious character is also very exaggerated, has a heavy accent, has questionable English because of his accent and english not being a first language. But maybe you could argue Dmitri is a good example of a colorful vs a comedic character, or an unintentionally funny character. The best way to do tone for JA is to remember that JA still takes place within an action based universe. The tone oscillates between cool action, lots of muscled dudes shooting cool guns yelling cool sounding commands into their radios...and then more ridiculous characters and moments. Die Hard (the movie) had a blonde norwegian who I think yelled something with a heavy norwegian accent when he was shooting John McLane (and for that matter the main villain was a german or norwegian or something), and despite having a heavy accent, and being very exaggerated as a character, wasn't necessarily light hearted or comedic in nature. So the devs should perhaps consider being sensitive to this so they do have very colorful characters but maybe not necessarily comedic, sometimes villainous. btw, earlier somebody said something about shadow not being a colorful or exaggerated merc but he definitely was. a guy in full camo, quiet, spec ops specialist? how cool is that?? he's mega colorful. being cool is a feature of a character.

So basically, this is a very complicated topic but: 1 there's no nice way to tell somebody "their ideas are wrong" or something equivalent to that, which is why I try to never criticize, I merely try to give my opinion on the matter that I clearly label as my opinion, and try to provide alternative options that I imply would be better, without trying to force or insult the person making the project into doing what I think they should do. 2 a lot of criticism isn't just "this decision is bad" it's "this decision is bad, and the person making it is stupid for making this decision" or "this decision is bad, and the person making this decision is bad for making this decision, and they are only led by money, and somebody else should have their job". therefore the best way to tell somebody you disagree with a particular decision for a project, is to do just that - make it about the decision, about the thing that's being worked on, not about the worker. De-personalizing and de-escalating any kind of conflict or antagonism between you and the person making the decisions is the best way to persuade them if you do think you have a better way of doing things, and it's the best way to avoid trying to create this kind of "us vs them" dynamic which is combatative, and is bad for objectivity (people who are in a combatative situation often will not leave their side even if their side is clearly wrong, and this can go both ways, because they're dug in and their self-respect is on the line, because a lot of criticism is insulting and disrespectful), or it's bad because the developer has best intentions and all he hears is angry yelling, dismissal bullying from the critics/haters. being passionate about a field like strategies is good, being critical and criticizing, even with all of its negative connotations is good BUT, it's good until you meet the person and if you have to talk to them, you're not going to get a normal conversation if you attack them and tell them that they should be fired or have an energy in your conversation that's similar to that.

no idea, and the attitude on the official forums is better but not free of hate. for example there was some guy talking about how "cosmetic MTs shouldn't be implemented but they probably will" again implying developers have immoral greedy intent, dismissing the project, dismissing developers, etc. My comments are primarily about social media in general, which is not solely contained to the official forums (and in fact official forums might be more important in some respects, but they might also be less important in others, like judging everyday public perception).

Don't get discouraged by hate comments if you see them devs, a lot of people have this idea that if they're passionate about something that leaving super negative hypercritical comments on social media will "make the dev do the right thing" but often the criticism is unjustified or stupid, and the comment isn't like "I think it would be better this way" it's more like "devs are money hungry predators and vultures eating our wallets" and super personal, vitriolic, designed to insult people personally as much as possible. I saw one guy on steam go off and write a mega critical review saying the game is dead because they ruined one of the mercs' look and they didn't even ruin the look they just changed it (I think it was steroid or something), it was some random merc he was attached to and basically said "oh because this merc is poorly designed the game is over and finished" basically writing the entire game off right off the bat, which is really bad for developers to listen to because they might get discouraged by somebody freaking out over a very small change which is not even negative, and think "whats the point to even trying" if this is the kind of audience and reception they're going to get, who freak out over 1 merc's slight redesign and ignore all other work or changes done at the heart of the title. As a likely future customer and a fan of the series, I would just like to say that we are not all like this, and at least I am very supportive of your efforts, and don't believe in attacking dev teams over mild BS (or at all, as long as the dev team wants to make a good game which i think is a lot of teams, maybe most teams in the games industry).