3 vs 3

Team play continues! We had a 3 vs 3 team match the other night, and I finally have some time to write down how it went.

The play session

The play session included friends who had never played the game before (or only the very old version of it, which amounts to the same thing). To avoid making things too complex, we decided to stick with the rules with which we played our first 2 vs 2 match.

One of us took on to write a detailed log of the game. I thus have a full table that records all moves for everyone on each of the 18 rounds of the game. We can get many other stats from this document, but I'll publish them in the next post.

On a very high level, the main points are:

• We won :)
  
• Our team clearly focused the attacks on one person (12 targets on 11 rounds, against 13 on 17 rounds for the other, and 15 on 18 rounds for the last one). He was also the first target of our Energy Blast (the most powerful move), which led to its death after 12 rounds.
  
• The rest of the game led to similar conclusions as last time. With one less player (and already behind in terms of life totals), the other team could not do much. So the question as to how to deal with this kind of situation arose again.
  
• Nevertheless, it was still fun. The fact that a dead player can't do anything in the game anymore and has to wait until the game finishes is a negative point, but I hope that the changes we'll bring to the gameplay will help with this.
  

Post-game discussion

Once the game finished, the main testers and I sat down to discuss the points to be improved. Our main concerns were:

• Give teams to avoid being reduced to fewer players than the opposite team, or at least let them come out of this situation with decent fighting chances.
  
• Avoid "the more you win, the more you win" effect.
  
• A couple of balance issues.
  

Additional dynamics

One thing we wanted to do was to help teams adopt different kinds of strategies. We have thus designed a specialization system, that allows a player to specialize in one of the three main areas (damage, control and support). Basically, Control allows player to interrupt other moves more often, Support will earn more charges for the team and Damage is rather self-explanatory :) With each of these specialization will come one additional move, that will replace the standard strong opposite move. For instance, someone specializing in Damage will replace the "Instant Guard" with a new "Dragon Punch".

Limited charges

When a team is gaining the upper hand in terms of life total, it often comes hand in hand with an advantage on the charges. While this may be disputed (you already do damage to your opponent, AND you get additional charges??), it works fine for now as is. However, what the winning team was really gaining was the freedom to strike whenever they wanted. As soon as you have accumulated enough charges to fire your boosted Energy Blast, the opponent is one the defensive. They know they can get hit really hard at any time, so they must be cautious. Which means that as long as the winning team doesn't fire the move, they have an additional advantage. The issue here is that waiting to use the move has no drawback. Take a game like Street Fighter IV: you can get a power bar to fill up (depending on the moves you do and the damage you take), and once it is filled up you can launch a devastating move. If you fire your move immediately, you can hope to get a full bar again later on in the fight. So in this case, the cost of waiting is a potential loss of a second move later in the game. We have decided to apply a similar limitation on The Five Orbs. The charges will now be limited to (4 + 1 * number_of_players_per_team) charges per team. This will not only force team to fire their strong moves if they want to keep on winning charges, but hopefully will also force them to decide on a strategy to get the appropriate charges (you wouldn't want to be stuck with 2B, 3G and 1R while wanting to fire an Energy Blast).

Small adjustments

In addition to this, we will try some small adjustments:

• You gain a charge as soon as you fire the move, regardless of what becomes of it (a blocked attack will earn you 1R now)
  
• Instant Guard is really underpowered, and Interrupt should be a bit stronger. Not decided on what to do with them yet.
  
• The Block additional effect has been removed (it was useless as it was). Might add a new effect to bring some power back to the Block.
  
• Still no combo
  

So quite a lot of new things coming in the next match :)