@Elite-Team-Killer said in Breakdown of the July 11th GIF:

But your team will have the exact same advantage. I think having some cover, rather than completely blocking off any and all ability to attack the spawn would be a decent compromise, but making them eternally blocked off already raises problems, like with Team Death Match, where someone can just hide. Not to mention it would remove some very hilarious moments.

I assume you’re coming from Mordhau then. Traditionally, in Chivalry, the team deathmatch and last team standing maps do not have protected spawns, which worked fine. The maps that feature protected spawns are the objective-focused ones, so that hiding in spawn accomplishes nothing. (Now, there are some exceptions to this, but they only show that protected spawns are generally fine even in TDM and that accessible spawns in team objective really don’t work. Citation: Argon’s wall, Coldfront, and Outpost)

As for how their inclusion would interact with the quantity of funny moments, I really don’t know what you’re talking about having not played Mordhau.

Edit: Whoops. After reading your other posts, you definitely have played Chivalry. You tripped me up by talking about TDM. Really any of my opinions about map design are going to be TO-oriented.

But if you are talking about Chivalry, what hilarious moments are you talking about? Spawncamping in TDM? That’s all I can think of.

https://forums.tornbanner.com/topic/22346/looking-for-new-moderators-admins
Post here and delete this thread before people judge you

@Elite-Team-Killer Well, given Steve’s comments on #questions in Discord yesterday, it’s starting to sound like there isn’t going to be protected spawns after all; I had better start emotionally preparing for that eventuality.

But while I still have hope, I might as well talk about them a bit more.

I value protected spawns for a lot more than just their impact on second-to-second gameplay, but since that’s what you’re talking about, I’ll elaborate on what they offer.

If enemies are close enough to your spawnpoint to hit you, then they have a large, unfair advantage. It isn’t as simple as whether or not you’re afk when you spawn. The enemy knows exactly where you’re positioned and in which direction you’re facing. You, on the other hand, do not know in which of the infinite directions is your enemy or even if there is one attacking you at all. Those are not fair conditions. It’s comparable to the situation of a surprise attack, except instead of earning the surprise by using the layout of the map, the enemy gains it by exploiting the fact that this is a video game and you need to appear out of nothing at some point. It’s extremely jarring to be thrown right in a fight immediately after floating around in spectator cam.

Besides, people do just stand there after spawning. Chiv matches last upwards of half an hour, and people often play many back-to-back. It’s unreasonable to expect them to be 100% alert 100% of the time. Deaths and their subsequent respawns serve as down times between hectic fights for players to rest and type in chat. It sucks to kill players that are afk typing; protected spawns are spaces in which people can use chat out of sight and mind, thus not braking gameplay for anyone else. For a game to have good pacing, it needs to oscillate between high intensity and low intensity. Deaths give the FPS genre there moments of low intensity, and protected spawns go one step further in empowering players to choose how long they wish to collect themselves before engaging in the high-intensity gameplay again.

Again, this is only getting into the hard, primary-loop gameplay benefits of it; they do a lot more in TO. I could genuinely write ten full paragraphs about them, no problem.

Oh man, you’re really going to do me like that? If I had known TB were locking ideas so early I would have been writing a list since the announcement. Oh well, let’s see what I can come up with off the top of my head:

• Bots/way to launch maps offline
  I’m aware that TB has stated that there will be no single player content at all, but that does not preclude bots in multiplayer. Of course, the server might have a bit of trouble running 32 v 32 bots, but just a couple might be nice to even out the teams. Bots in Chiv had a lot of trouble navigating, which I suspect has to do with the drop-down at spawn, but the bots in Mirage worked pretty well, so functioning bots in Chiv 2 are a reasonable possibility. Plus, bots will be obligatory if anyone wants to make horde mode.
  Along the same lines, if it isn’t too much to ask, I’d like to be able to open maps offline, even if it’s just with the console. I think it’s important to have some way to experiment with the game offline with full admin power.

• Recording match data
  I find myself wondering what my overall win rate is when playing Chiv. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve been on a nice winning-streak, but there’s no way at all to verify this for myself. Really, the results of your past performances are completely lost to the ether as soon as each map is unloaded. Do I win more often on attack or defense? Mason or Agatha? What was my longest match ever? Shortest match? How many times have I topped the leaderboard? I’ll never know the answers to any of these questions, but Chiv 2 doesn’t have to be the same.

• Inaccessible spawns
  I’ve talked about this a bit before, so I apologize for repeating this request. If there’s anything that I’m passionate about to a weird extend in Chiv, it’s the spawns. I get a dopamine rush every time I drop down from one for some reason. I think it’s because the protected spawns give breathing room and a sense of protection, and consciously choosing to leave that in favour of fighting is exciting. On the flip side, if I’m pushing the enemy, it’s reassuring to know that they are guaranteed to spawn outside of the playable area, meaning that I’ll never be pushed so far that they’ll spawn behind me. My favourite thing about them is that they preserve my immersion; seeing an enemy spawn takes me right out of the game, but seeing enemy assaulters run out from around the hills in Stoneshill is awesome.
  This isn’t even mentioning the intended purpose of protected spawns, which assures that players won’t be killed before they react, which imho is no fun for both parties.
  The lack of protected spawns ruined the third objective of Outpost for me. I always want to flank on Mason, but then I wind up right in the middle of the Agathian spawn. On Coldfront second objective as Agatha, you want to destroy the Mason catapults, which are right next to their spawn. If you get that far with no resistance, you can just sit inside their spawn and jump on anyone who appears, which I have done on occasion. It’s really unfun to wait around for cheap kills like that.

• Bit of a revision to TO
  I’m almost scared to ask for any changes to TO because it is really, really good, but here goes. The weakest part of TO is the lose condition. A timer feels so arbitrary when the rest of the gamemode is rooted in the context of each map. On defence, it feels really nice ticking down those last couple minutes, but on offence, it sucks if you die with 30 seconds left and you know you’re guaranteed to lose to the timer.
  That being said, I have to say that I disliked the joint ticket/timer system of Mirage even more. Sure, it’s more contextually appropriate that each team has a limited supply of soldiers and lose when they run out, but it really stressed me out knowing that every time I stepped out of spawn I was actively giving my team lose-points. On top of that, the max kills became nearly impossible to reach if it wasn’t a 6v6.
  In my perfect world, TO would be set up such that both teams had a goal that was unique to each objective, while it still somehow remains clear who was attacking and defending. I really don’t want to give up the epic shield wall defences of Chiv 1, but it would be nice if there was another layer to them other than the attacking team throwing themselves at it one-by-one. This might seem like a crazy idea, but this is my fantasy wish list, and I can say what I want.
  At the very least, I’d like the map being lost to be a bit more climactic and cinematic rather than just fizzing out as the timer hits 0.

• Maps referencing each other, at least in lore
  This is really cool in Chiv and Mirage. Please bring it back. Maybe I’m just a sucker for lore, but nothing screams “well-built world” louder in a game than the environments referencing each other. This was omnipresent in Mirage, but in Chiv, the only example I can think of is Darkforest and Stoneshill. The maps are too far apart across Agatha to physicallly reference each other, but at least having them all situated on a map and timeline would do wonders for the story.

• Objectives being more competitive, but still flashy somehow
  Torch-throwing objectives do not work. We’ve seen why on Battlegrounds and Castle Assault. You can’t defend against a flying object. On attacking, it sucks to be caught out holding a torch, and your best strategy is to just keep running while taking the hits to hopefully land the torch throw despite dying; that’s boring whether you succeed or not. There’s really no room for thought on torch objectives, you either land the throw or die.
  Similarly, “hitting-the-wall” objectives are exactly as boring as they sound. You need to do reverse hits in order to keep watch for enemies, and if an enemy does challenge you, you’re helpless for a moment because you’re hitting a wall. At the end of this objective, it usually becomes “everyone run at the wall and get one hit in before you die” rather than actually strategically displacing the enemy team outside the objective’s range. I wish the objectives were set up in a way that you aren’t unable to fight while completing them, or that you can disengage with the objective quickly if an enemy spots you.
  Well, my wishes were answered in Mirage. Each objective was designed with teamfights in mind, no more immobilizing players. Yet, this went way too far on the opposite end of the spectrum. The objectives were samey (twin captures on all three maps, pushable on two) and they felt divorced from the story of the maps. (The objective rooms were clearly designed with gameplay in mind foremost, which should be perfectly fine by gamer logic, but they didn’t make me feel like I was interacting with the world.)
  I have no idea whether it’s possible to design objectives that are fun, competitive, and feel like they are actually objectives of a raid, but if it is, it would be well worthwhile.

• Team balance somehow
  I’ve been playing Chiv a lot recently. The most anti-fun these days comes from when the teams get occasionally unbalanced - I don’t mean in terms of numbers, but in terms of high-skill players going on one side and vice versa. Whether it’s the attacking team or defending team that’s stacked, it really turns the game into a waste of everyone’s time. I’ve been typing this line out a lot today, but I don’t know how you can make teams balanced without angering players. I know I don’t like it when I get moved away from my friends for the sake of team balance, but there has to be some compromise. I’m just throwing my observations of what’s frustrating to me out here.

• Cosmetics tied to rank - this was cool in Mirage
  That’s it. It was cool. (And I mean more often than helmets every ten ranks, but that was cool too.)

• Campaign mode
  linking maps together. This is my fantasy wish list, remember? Anyway, enough people have written on this topic.

• VoIP in game
  Hey look. Something else that is necessary and at the same time impossible to implement easily. Imagine that. If there is any sort of competitive queue in Chiv 2, players are going to need a way to communicate quickly. 31 Chiv players yelling racial slurs at me sounds like quite a lot to bear though.

• Voiced, map-specific characters
  Characters are another vital way of enhancing the story. Malric and Feydrid should have had their own voices; it would have helped sell them. I only thought of this because I was imagining a map for Chiv 1 in which the last objective revolves around protecting a lord/lady of a city. And I thought it would be neat if they had a custom voice.

• Voices for each objective/commander voices along with generic lines for future and custom maps
  This goes with the last one. In Chiv 1, pressing x5 made your warrior talk about each objective, which was really ambitious. In addition, in each spawn, you could hear your commander yelling about the current mission. Of course, this couldn’t be kept up after the first five maps. I would like to see its return in Chiv 2. Maybe this time around, some generic lines could be captured for when the future. Generic pushable, generic point capture, generic regicide, etc.

• Score system that is more representative of contribution
  In Chiv 1, objective points were broken. In Mirage, they were slightly less broken. Hopefully this trend continues into Chiv 2, and looking at the leaderboard will actually inform you how well each player is doing.

• Stats on all the weapons and characters available in the menu like in Chiv pre-UI patch
  This goes a long way to making the game fair and accessible. No one wants to read up on a wiki how much damage their weapons do to each class.

• Clan symbols
  This is a dangerous game. Maybe clan symbols could be enabled only on private competitive servers.

• Secrets are fun

• Edit: My friend is a quarterstaff main, and asks for it to return

Looking back, a lot of those aren’t really content suggestions, but they might still be important to consider early on in case they influence other design decisions. Idk, I’m not erasing it now.
I was going to reorder the points based on length, but I realize that I sometimes referenced previous paragraphs, so now it has to be in this weird order.

tl;dr Out-of-combat stuff that would make the game feel better imho.

I still have quite a few questions about Chiv 2, and these GIFs are our only primary source, so I went frame by frame to gleam any information I could. Here are my findings:

The first question is what kind of map it is.
I’m guessing that it’s a team v team symmetrical map (TDM and LTS). In the image below, there’s a clear axis down the middle of the map with the two wooden structures on either side. I’m hesitantly assuming those structures are the Agatha and Mason spawns because of all the blue on the left one and the orange-brown colouring on the right one. The issue with this is that there’s actually blue flags on the right structure as well, which would be strange for a Mason spawn. It could be possible that the entire area is an Agatha-controlled arena of some sort (see the Agatha Lion emblem in the middle), but then that raises the question of why there are Masons there in the first place?

You might notice that it isn’t perfectly symmetrical. There are some low stairs directly in front of the large door on the left. There’s also a block that’s partially covering the door on the right, which isn’t present on the left side. However, as we saw with Mirage, TB considers maps symmetrical as long as the objective is the same for both sides.

Secondly, consider the wooden barrier in the middle:

It’s a wooden fence that’s about as tall as that Mason MAA. This reminded me of a jousting field, which contain a similarly proportioned fence. We already know that horses and getting pushed down are mechanics, so combine those together and suddenly jousting is a gamemode. There’s no real evidence for this one; it’s just a thought. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It would support my idea that this map is a tournament arena, and it might give a clue of how TB is desiging maps for horses.

Thirdly, moving on to the real question: Is Chiv 2 going to have protected spawns?
I’ve looked for anything that looks like an obvious drop-down in the trailer, but I couldn’t find anything. This is either really bad news, that there are no protected spawns, or really good news, that the spawns are hidden and baked into the sides of maps. I’m likely not going to get any comfort about this until 2020 when I can actually get my hands on Chiv 2, but I’ll continue searching for them until that point.

Like I said earlier, this structure looks very spawn-y to me, and it does have quite a bit of verticality. There could be a drop down somewhere on the second floor. The fact that nothing appears to be blocking those stairs leads me to believe that the entire structure is accessible. The end of those stairs being covered by that wooden wall would make for a very Chivalry-esque spawn exit. Just saying.

Speaking of potential spawn exits, check out this doorway:

There doesn’t appear to be anything blocking access to it. Could it be another spawn exit, with a dropdown inside, or another entrance point to the structure? This is assuming it isn’t just a dead-end. There’s nothing I could see above it that would indicate a way to get into the hallway below, so maybe the structure is deeper than it appears.

Lastly, (at least lastly on the topic of spawns) there’s another staircase that leads to the ground on the opposite side.

This means that this map is actually symmetrical in all four quarters. Neat. Anyway, we all know how much TB loves that symmetry in their spawn exits; it’s all too poetic for me to see that structure as anything else.

The next section is looking at some of the weapons. There’s no real analysis here, just grabbing the right frames to make the weapons visible:

The Agatha knight is holding a longsword, which we also saw in the trailer.

The Mason knight is holding what I assume to be Chiv 2’s version of the messer, going by its curved blade and hilt.

In the back, this vanguard is holding a polehammer.

This sword has the same hilt and size as the claymore from Chiv, which means both it and the greatsword are confirmed. (We saw the greatsword pretty visibly in the trailer. There still hasn’t been any sighting of the zwei yet. Gulp.)

Now, for the problem:

The shield disappearing upon death has been pretty glaring in Chiv 1. It’s not like shields are small and easy to miss. I’m kind of disappointed it’s making a return in Chiv 2. Is it just a limitation of the Unreal engine, like voicelines being client-side? I hope this is something that will be polished up later. But hey, at least the head came off on the right frame, right?

Lastly, something else I noticed:

That chain texture is looking a bit too familiar. This isn’t really a problem though. Why fix what isn’t broke. That being said, it is looking pretty pixelated and polygon-y (at least, when blown up from a tiny GIF). The texture on the Agathian arbiter actually looks better to me, but that might just be the lighting.

Also, can I just say, making a long post on the Chiv forums again is a real treat. It’s so much nicer to write with the real time preview and actually being able to embed images. Reddit needs to step up its game smh.

@Deakir If you’re NA, we generally get on TO once every night. You likely wont find any servers populated during the day.

@bubyoz said in Customizations (Cosmetics, FOV, Camera Views etc..):

Well i played 5000+ hour in 3rd View in the first game. Every Torn Banner game had 3rd view and high fov settings. If they remove 3rd view and customizable fov they lost me as a customer. and i played chivalry 1 more than all of you almost. I made some art for it too… i was literally addicted to 3rd view… So dont tell me 3rd view should be removed lol…

Yeah okay, fair enough.

IT IS A 3rd person view game more than a 1st person one…

Aaaand, too far.

@Knifelegs said in How to beat Mordhau - FEATURE REQUESTS:

If you’re going to implement a matchmaking system, there needs to be a fair and balanced mode that is able to determine a clear winner with one map play through. Making the game unnecessarily long because you have to play a map twice will turn a lot of people off.

Speculation time: A goal that they were aiming for during Mirage’s development was making the objectives more competitive. This included making them quicker. It’s not out of the question that the objectives in Chiv 2 could be significantly shorter than their Chiv 1 counterparts, which would allow for halftime switches to be more reasonable.

@Bandit-Hadron said in Lore Speculation Thread:

@Killer-Crabs Definitely through gameplay and map design. Let the game tell the story naturally - Chiv 1 was pretty good for it. Especially if you set map rotation on official servers to follow an official chronology of some sort.

Aye. This one. Major plot elements should be told directly to at least make the motives clear, but the majority of lore details should be shown through map design.

It’s really not even worth saying though; we already know Torn Banner are masters at this.

And more specifically, how to activate it. It was the one that always followed your head movements, so it lagged behind where your actual first person camera was supposed to be.

I remember it was some console command, but I can’t find the old thread that talked about it. It’s killing me trying to remember.
Thanks

Edit: Never mind, it was found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOX7WIDraBc by @AmishInsurgent
I don’t think it works any more though.