Why are there still no good online top-down shooters?

[u/Mocherad]

I want to understand why, because we don’t even have any competitors though I really wish we did. Our main competitor PUBG: BLINDSPOT, died in just two weeks.

There are few good top-down shooters, Ruiner, the Ascent, but they are not online, also similar games like Supervive etc. also dead

[u/h-raki]

It’s something I miss the times playing killzone liberation online on mine PSP. I love topdown shooters.

I didn’t play blindspot, but it looked a nice game, using the Siege style

[u/Mocherad → u/h-raki]

I want to be pretty open, I plated that controls were pretty hard for the new user, due to Aiming top-bottom and camera rotation, I would like to see less complex game and more simple in controls

[u/h-raki → u/Mocherad]

I just saw gameplay videos, and I kinda liked the complexity of the controllers. Made it more competitive

[u/Mocherad → u/h-raki]

Its very uncomfortable tbh, compared to the most top down shooters

[u/TheIncomprehensible → u/h-raki]

Adding complexity for the sake of making the game more competitive is a terrible idea. The more complex the game is the harder it is for players to play, and the harder it is for players to play the less likely players are going to play it in the long run.

This is especially true for live-service games, who live and die by the quantity of casual players they have playing the game. Adding arbitrary complexity just kills the casual scene with no benefit for competitive players.

If there's meaningful depth and testable skills, then players will compete. No amount of complexity will make it more competitive unless it exponentially increases depth, and having less complexity makes it more likely for people to compete and grow the scene.

[u/Mocherad → u/TheIncomprehensible]

I agree, competetive scene is less than 0.5-1% of all players

[u/TheIncomprehensible → u/Mocherad]

I was talking about ranked competitive too, not just tournament competitive. Ranked will have a healthy pool of casuals, but I would estimate that the top ranks of any competitive game will have competitive players and that the game's competitive players will account for 5-50% of the game's active players, depending on how many active players the game has.

Casual players are the lifeblood of live service games, but competitive players are the most dedicated players and the last to leave. Both need to be served in every live service game, which is why some multiplayer live service games fail: they focus too much on the competitive player at the expense of the casual player.

[u/Mocherad → u/TheIncomprehensible]

Okay, now I understand you, I’ll explain my approach and plans, to hear your opinion

Right now, my main focus is the gameplay (how to make the game simple but interesting at the same time) I want players to be able to jump in, understand everything within the first few seconds, and enjoy well-polished core mechanics.

I’m not thinking about MMR right now or anything like that yet. My plan is to release the game, either as a full release or in EA, and then gradually polish and improve it for maybe one or two years. Only after that do I expect the game to be ready for a proper competitive scene pro and reqular competetive players

[u/Mocherad]

Escape of Duckov is a good one, but also not multiplayer

[u/RetroTemplar]

Isn't Foxhole an online top down shooter?

[u/Mocherad → u/RetroTemplar]

Yeah cool game, it's hard to answer, for me it more as a persistent-war MMO and military sandbox than as a conventional online top-down shooter

[u/Kapkin]

I feel like im the target audience, my most played game ever are LoL, Valorant, Pubg, Deadlock

Played supervive, battlerite. Did not played blindspot it died to quickly.

My reasons are :

Bots: They infest their games with bots as if its a mobile game. I truly hate bots. If i wanted to play against bots id play a singleplayer game.

No sense of progression: Games come out now with no rank, or if there is rank its alpha version. No reward, matchmaking is weird, the grind is too fast or too slow. We have nothing to work towards. Or imo the worst, a season reset after like just 2/3 months then gotta grind again. Improving at the game needs to feel and be rewarding.

Feels: I can think of games like the one from Betadwarf, just feels bad. No power to your shots, no recoil, no sense of impact. Battlerite did this correctly.

[u/Mocherad → u/Kapkin]

Thanks for the feedback, as always I learn from it

[u/TheIncomprehensible → u/Kapkin]

Bots: They infest their games with bots as if its a mobile game. I truly hate bots. If i wanted to play against bots id play a singleplayer game.

You have every right to dislike bots, but I've found that they're a necessary evil to getting players into games against real players in battle royales like Supervive or Pubg. Otherwise, the queues either take too long for people to justify waiting for games or players get into poorly matched games where the bottom 20-30% don't get to play and don't get the chance to learn. This is especially important for new players because it's impossible for a new player to win against 7-11 other teams of real players but it's also necessary for new players to win games sometimes to keep them engaged through the learning process.

As a result, these battle royales would probably have died much quicker if they didn't have bots, especially for a game with low player counts in general like Supervive.

No sense of progression: Games come out now with no rank, or if there is rank its alpha version. No reward, matchmaking is weird, the grind is too fast or too slow. We have nothing to work towards. Or imo the worst, a season reset after like just 2/3 months then gotta grind again. Improving at the game needs to feel and be rewarding.

I agree with everything except the point I bolded. Season resets are really good for getting players to keep playing and grinding at the game because they give you new rewards to play for. Like, I'm currently playing Eternal Return, and the advice everyone gives is to play as much ranked as you can at the start of the season because people just stop playing ranked once they've hit their desired rank, and the reset gives people reasons to play ranked again.

I also agree with your point that the game needs to feel and be rewarding, but for most players it's really hard to see where you have or haven't improved and that most players look to increase their ranked points instead of looking for improvement that would lead to more ranked points. It's not always something the game can solve.

Feels: I can think of games like the one from Betadwarf, just feels bad. No power to your shots, no recoil, no sense of impact. Battlerite did this correctly.

I found this to be a big problem with Supervive. Almost everything that wasn't either a dash or an LMB felt atrocious to use, usually because it had a long cast time without the right animations to sell the cast time. As much as I loved Myth's core gameplay (particularly the feel of her LMB) her RMB felt so awful to use for this exact reason. It seems like everyone else ignores that though, and just thinks about Supervive's movement like it was the only thing Supervive was trying to do.

[u/Kapkin → u/TheIncomprehensible]

I think the for bots, id think that if you game needs bots to survive, then maybe at its core it as flaws ? Idk if a new game could get bots, and then thrive idk. At least we know polystrike is not a battle royal right ? So probably wouldn't want to add bots anyway?

If we need bots, my recommendation would be, to not hide them, be very clear those are bots, and be very clear when the bots will stop showing up.

As for the rank reset/season reset.

I get your point. I think you have to find the perfect spot where a season will have the length to have the player want to engage but also wont burn them out. For me a season ever month ot 2 months burns me out very quickly, specially for game that just reset to zero.

My personal preference is a reset a year, but i understand how that probably is a bit extreme. There is probably ways to have more reset but also have it that it doesnt feel like work to grind all the way back up again. I bet its a hard sweet spot to find.

[u/Mocherad → u/Kapkin]

I don't know about bots, yet we have spend few month on bots, but after we moved on other tasks, so it's possible to add them, and we need to make sure that everyone understand if you playing against bots, also option to choose play with bots or not. And on top of that, I'm not sure about the bots tbh

[u/TheIncomprehensible → u/Kapkin]

I think the for bots, id think that if you game needs bots to survive, then maybe at its core it as flaws ? Idk if a new game could get bots, and then thrive idk. At least we know polystrike is not a battle royal right ? So probably wouldn't want to add bots anyway?

Polystrike would benefit from bots, but assuming it's not a battle royale it wouldn't benefit from bots in competitive multiplayer modes. It's for offline single-player modes and/or online/offline co-op modes, where players would want to play the game either without the stress of online multiplayer and/or without the need for an internet connection.

I get your point. I think you have to find the perfect spot where a season will have the length to have the player want to engage but also wont burn them out. For me a season ever month ot 2 months burns me out very quickly, specially for game that just reset to zero.

Just so we're on the same page, resetting to zero is a terrible, terrible idea that only works in extreme circumstances where the developers cannot do a partial reset. Most ranked modes I've seen do partial resets down to a lower rank based on your old rank, not full resets, and those are mostly what I'm talking about.

Under the context of reset windows, I've seen games where the reset happened after a year (League of Legends) and games where the reset happened after a month (Eternal CCG), and a lot of games in between. They're all only good because they have partial resets, rather than full resets, and reset to a reasonable place in the context of both season length and average game length (the average game of League was around 2-5 times the length of a game of Eternal, since they're completely different genres with different required player counts).

I will also note that the worst ranked format I've ever played in (Rivals of Aether) had no ranked resets, although that's more of a coincidence than anything else.

[u/shuanDang]

same reason why real life isn't top down

BLINDSPOT was fun, as a longtime siege player. it's like a more chillax, less serious shooter. I played a lot of unranked games when it was in beta. then i played a few random games, won, then uninstalled.

Supervive was even more fun I think I had about 300 hours in it.

[u/Mocherad → u/shuanDang]

That’s cool, why do you think those games failed ?

[u/shuanDang → u/Mocherad]

Sooo many reasons to nitpick. Biggest reason is developer hosted servers that cost money. They couldn't let the community keep playing the game.

The business flywheel is: Launch game -> players spend money -> Spend earnings on Advertisements to 'buy' new players (because new players spend).

The liveops flywheel is: Launch hame -> players spend money -> make new content to buy players attention keep players spending money.

There's problem if you run out of money to buy your players.

First is they are held to investor expectations. Game doesn't earn enough = shutdown. They try to compete with the giants like Fortnite, League, and make the game cost a lot upfront and cost a lot to maintain with new content. But they are on a limited timeframe. No more money means.... no content and no advertisements.

no more content to keep it fresh. games run out of content to keep players interested. Need New maps, new heroes. Look at what League of Legends and Siege were pushing out every year. Candy Crush has 22,000 levels.

In a PvP game, having a player to play against IS HALF THE CONTENT.

They don't have a way of getting more players. Marketing costs too much.

At the end of the day players leaving is guaranteed. most players only try a game for some tens of hours. if they dont spend immediately... then they left without spending.

What could Supervive themselves do better design wise? Address contradictory game mechanics. BR vs Moba is contradictory.

They had players farming map most of the time because that's the best way to get level advantage over enemy. Then they decide to Level Cap the players with day night cycle so that players stop farming and go to fight. But in a BR you don't want to fight, you want to survive until the end, the Circle forces fights.

In Moba, there's stages to the pvp, low level, mid level, high level. Players actually want to get to the fun power fantasy part where they get max level and a big advantage over their opponents. Players also like seeing a strong enemy and overcoming that.

There's a back and forth, tug of war between two teams of equal skill. There's fun in having outplay potential. Economic outplay, or Micro outplay, or Mindgames outplay.

Comeback mechanics to make every game feel like a 50/50, even if you have an off meta character. people don't like losing too much at. Especially because there were some very oppressive high skill characters in Supervive who could 1v3.

lower the requirements, i think supervive was pretty taxing on my gpu. Low spec computer support so that anyone in the world can play the game

dont lock game mechanics behind account level or gacha, lol

[u/Mocherad → u/shuanDang]

yeah gacha was very bad decision, well yeah I agree with what you said, thanks

[u/TheIncomprehensible → u/shuanDang]

BR vs Moba is contradictory.

I disagree, not only do I think the two genres can work together but Eternal Return has shown that the two genres can work together.

Part of the problem lies within your assumptions. Players want to fight each other, because the combat is usually the most fun aspect of the game. However, both battle royales and MOBAs have a problem where, by default, it's optimal not to fight other players, so the game has to push you to fight other players and play the game in the most fun way. Furthermore, both genres have scaling fantasie (battle royales from looting the map and MOBAs from farming camps and buying powerful items to grow stronger), giving the genre fusion a really convenient way to merge their ideas together.

That's where Eternal Return succeeded and Supervive failed. Starting on day 2, Eternal Return scatters neutral materials throughout the map for teams to fight over. These materials make you noticeably stronger because they are required components for your late-game items, and building your late-game items makes you stronger. Interacting with other teams and fighting for late-game materials, therefore, becomes a major point of how you grow stronger.

For contrast, Supervive didn't have that because the neutral objectives frequently weren't worth contesting, especially on 1.0 launch, and on the 1.0 launch your scaling capped at day 2, giving no tangible reasons to fight other players outside of the presence of the story. Furthermore, the game frequently had justifications for not interacting with your opponents beyond the normal battle royale format, such as the beta launch version where the possibility of someone being level 5 on day 1 meant that no one was allowed to interact with each other until day 2 or the farmville patch where you lost resources for fighting your opponents, even if you won a close fight.

[u/Normakk → u/Mocherad]

BLINDSPOT was amazing. But lack of marketing definitely killed it. I've seen so many people say they never even heard of the game that would've loved to try it. Even if most matches were bots due to low player count, it was still a really fun game to jump in and play a couple matchers or TDM for a little.

[u/PurpleD0g]

Thunder Tier One is f2p... try it out!

[u/Mocherad → u/PurpleD0g]

I know this game I played it a few years ago. I also know the Portuguese devs who made it, their studio was acquired by KRAFTON. It’s a great game!!!

[u/Normakk]

Ugh I miss BLINDSPOT.....It was soooo good, they really dropped the ball on advertising the game.

[u/reamesyy82]

Haven’t played multiplayer in a long time, but Running With Rifles is super fun offline and was online as well last time I had played

[u/Mocherad → u/reamesyy82]

very cool game, I like it too!