POWER COLLECTION RE-WORK
-
To begin, I am going to talk about my main problem with power collection and then give you my idea for a re-work and then finish with why that would work.
Power Collection has some major problems at it's core and the first one for me being the pace of the gameplay. Bleeding Edge by design should be a more fast paced game with a strong sense of team-play to guide you to victory, combat is one of the main draws to playing the game with the 'brawler' tag being heavily advertised and pushed in the gameplay but in PC (POWER COLLECTION) team-fights are sparse and a lot of the game is just walking around beating up power cells. Obviously you do meet but that's only at delivery points and that stage is short meaning that after you win a fight and deliver it's back to beating up power cannisters and the slow loop continues. Zone Control works so well because your team is constantly kept on their toes, forced to make game changing decisions like "shall we defend" or "do we push A and risk losing B", It makes the fights fun and makes things so much more intense and unfortunately that level of decision making just isn't there with PC. I've already explained the loop that it sets so how does that get fixed?
Lets put Aquaducts (the map) in our minds, imagine it with points ABC and I'm going to use that map to say how PC should be re-worked.
- Four big cannisters should spawn where objective B currently is and they should drop Five power cells on destruction,
- Point C is renamed Point B
- Only one Point can be active at a time. If one team is severely losing then both Points open for ONE round,
- Collection lasts 3:00 Minutes, when all Cells have been picked up it ends,
- Delivery lasts 3:00 Minutes, when all Cells which are being held are delivered the phase ends,
- After delivery phase, both teams have 20 seconds to rush back to the spawn point of the cannisters,
- If anyone dies right after delivery phase ends then they have a 5 second respawn,
- If anyone dies after collection then it's a 5 second respawn
Why would this work?
It would work because team fights are encouraged at every stage of the match and it brings in that important decision making I mentioned earlier, you would decide whether to give up the cells and wait at the delivery point or whether to challenge them at the cells but risk losing and giving them the upper hand; You could come up with some yourself, the possibilities are endless. Fights would happen all the time at every phase and it would bring that same level of intensity to PC that there is in Zone Control, and I believe it would become more fun to play, delivering power cells is already nail-biting so these changes would make things a whole new level of competitive.
Thanks for Reading!
-
I really liked reading this post and while I don't think the Power Cells game mode is perfect nor is it as fun as Objective Control, I do disagree with a lot of the solutions you proposed.
Firstly, I don't actually think Bleeding Edge by design is "fast paced". I don't think it's super slow either though. The current TTK is a good example, it's extremely long for every character. There is quite a lot of downtime in both Power Cells and Objective Control too, the former more so as you mentioned.
In terms of the Cell placements, I think the design behind the current version is that both teams have the opportunity to collect Power Cells every time the Cells spawn. Therefore every time you get into a team fight, you usually have something to lose. There is the same risk vs reward in that regard as there is in Objective Control with deciding "shall we defend" or "do we push A and risk losing B" as you mentioned as your example.
Having just 4 big canisters in the middle of Point B as you suggest would have the potential to ironically feel slower and a lot less engaging. Both teams will have that initial team fight at the start for the cells, and the team that wins would just scoop up all the cells and be waiting to drop them in at the drop zone(s).
-
Maybe what I suggested is a bit overkill but I hope that my intention of wanting PC to have more action and more reasons to fight made it through, and I really think it does need some changes. You've actually brought up a really good point and it's made things harder for me to think about better solutions.
Maybe if the Cannisters spawn closer together? Or respawn times are tweaked?
Anyway, Thanks for replying!
-
Lacking the brain power right now to theorize how this mode could be changed, but I definitely agree it should be considered. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the standard objective mode and the long transitions between the delivery and collection phases seemed to break up the action too much.
