New Warframe Trailer - What Em-8ER is and is not.

[RaZoR]

Going just off the trailers.
Well I thought Warframe was a bit bland and outdated. Brainless Orcs. If they just sprinkled a few different ingredients into the clone-atron, they could spit out more varieties of melee opponents with half a brain of putting up a challenge. No... we'll throw 20 -30 of them at a time into the mix, to keep everyone busy for a while.
Battlefield is great classic warfare, only played pc, not online. But the cinematics and action of air combat looks to be a great challenge of skill.
PlanetSide 2 has to be the best of the 3. That plane jumping was a great insight into gameplay (if it's possible in-game), reminded me of the Avatar battle. But the ending got me with the hero getting his final hoo-haa, from whatever phased in. They seemed to have more than half a brain, with a sense of needing eyes in the back of your head, or your dead. Good stuff.

I know it's expensive and time consuming to come up with a plethora of AI's to battle, but if using the same characters with a bucket full of intelligent AI configurations, each individual having a random setting of stealth, melee, weapon mods or full on in your face, we will not know what characteristics each one has, and will make it that more interesting, without us knowing eventually how they will react. Let the Tsi-Hu evolve I say.

 

[McDuff Man]

Eh, i prefer this version of that BF1 trailer:

 

[Jag]

This is great to see, certainly clears up some questions that I know I have seen pop up.

Thanks - great post.

 

[Picho]

All I could think while reading this was YEEAAA!! and can't help but to feel the excitement of pushing back the Chosen. I am an avid Warframe player and spend a lot of money with them but it never gave me the rush Firefall did when logging in, or waiting for the attack countdown and seeing everyone running around and getting ready. People dying and being revived and people coordinating to take out the cannons, it was the best time I've ever had in any game.

 

[q4TEKS]

Em-8ER will not be joining that fray. The genre of 4 player co-op and questing is going to be well served by the above titles. Em-8ER stands apart. By focusing on large scale shooter battles with hundreds of players fighting at a time in MEKs and vehicles, against a shape-shifting invader armed with giant Kaiju, Em-8ER is much more like PvE Planetside 2 or a massively multiplayer and persistent version of Battlefield 1.

So can u explain how hundreds of players will work in one server instance with UE4? Maybe I am not up to date but i can remember this:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...4-Max-AI-supported&p=5144&viewfull=1#post5144

It sounds like a PvE Planetside 2 will never work with Unreal Engine.

 

[Estender]

So can u explain how hundreds of players will work in one server instance with UE4? Maybe I am not up to date but i can remember this:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...4-Max-AI-supported&p=5144&viewfull=1#post5144

It sounds like a PvE Planetside 2 will never work with Unreal Engine.

"There isn't a hard-coded limit to the number of players. The player count achievable with good performance is a function of the complexity of your player meshes and animation graphs, level collision, AI, and network bandwidth available." - from your link.

IIRC first map is gonna be around 6-8 km, so battles are gonna be spread out, which should help with server load, + snow blizzards can hide the farmost parts of the map. (and places you don't need to look at)

 

[q4TEKS]

"There isn't a hard-coded limit to the number of players. The player count achievable with good performance is a function of the complexity of your player meshes and animation graphs, level collision, AI, and network bandwidth available." - from your link.

IIRC first map is gonna be around 6-8 km, so battles are gonna be spread out, which should help with server load, + snow blizzards can hide the farmost parts of the map. (and places you don't need to look at)

you misquoted sweeney, quoted out of context because you took out the important part. selective perception by your side?

"..If you keep things simple (say, at the level of Unreal Tournament 3 from the UE3 days), I could imagine 50-100 players in a multiplayer game."-he said.

I think his statement is based on an arena fps with low enviroment effects so em8er will need more performance on this side. ok his statement is 3 years old, but i dont know any UE4 game that runs performant if there are more than 100 players on one map.

 

[Estender]

you misquoted sweeney, quoted out of context because you took out the important part. selective perception by your side?

"..If you keep things simple (say, at the level of Unreal Tournament 3 from the UE3 days), I could imagine 50-100 players in a multiplayer game."-he said.

I think his statement is based on an arena fps with low enviroment effects so em8er will need more performance on this side. ok his statement is 3 years old, but i dont know any UE4 game that runs performant if there are more than 100 players on one map.

Unintended ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Game not gonna be like crysis and filled with pc melting effects anyway,
as Grummz said: still stylized but more realistic.

 

[SomeUnregPunk]

Game not gonna be like crysis and filled with pc melting effects anyway,
as Grummz said: still stylized but more realistic.

stylized? so like cell shading? Does games with cell shading do better in this type of environment that the other style?

 

[Estender]

stylized? so like cell shading? Does games with cell shading do better in this type of environment that the other style?

Cell shading is a rendering technique. Art style is a different thing, about which i was saying earlier.
Games there models are less detailed for the sake of said art style are, of course, tend to run better on older PCs.

 

[NanoTechnician]

@q4TEKS & @Estender, I've had concerns with networking and server implementation, after all fluid gameplay is paramount.

Spoiler: Type of implementation

1. Implementing a completely custom MMO back-end framework handling all gameplay logic including object movement, and interfacing it with UE through networking: The client purely runs in UE, and the server purely runs outside of UE, and they are coordinated through a custom networking layer using either UDP or TCP. This approach is generally best for MMOs looking to support thousands of players per server, where UE's high-precision approach to player movement and collision are overly-expensive compared to tile maps and other simplified techniques.

2. Using UE's built-in functionality for implementing both the client and server components of an MMO, and extending the networking and level streaming code to support new features such as simultaneous connections to multiple servers responsible for separate streaming levels, and coordination between servers to allow seamless movement of actors between them.

NCSoft took approach 1 with Lineage 2 and various other projects, while Sigil Games took approach 2 with Vanguard. For a small project, I'd recommend approach 2, as it's easy to get up and running in a prototype prior to making engine-level improvements needed for scalability.

- Tim Sweeney. Unreal Engine Developer.
Sauce: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?2562-Atlas-MMO-Framework

With Planetside 2 (14,000 playerbase at launch) it uses client side detection (Tim Sweeney's first point) which lowers server activity as well as enables up to 2000 players per continent. Ever since beta SoE now Day Break Games has been reducing the costs of servers to an optimal level so that the cost of maintenance and bandwidth are reduced. I think even if we have 32 players per map UE4 can use chunks of sublevels and add level streaming to overcome this issue as well as multiple servers streaming levels (Sweeney's second point). So it comes down to level design as well as map/networking being done well so that rollout is easier.

 

[Anrothan]

I loved Warframe, but after U13.. the game lost its Pizzaz

 

[DropnLock]

Hi Marc,

Thank you for your insights on Warframe gameplay and their design. It was actually Warframe that I turned to once I had to let Firefall go. It provided me with that constant first person shooter fix that I craved and longed for in Firefall. It will be a worth while substitute until Em-8er comes out.

I know we are FAR and away from Mek load outs and designs, but I really have to ask, Basion and I think it was Electron were my FAVORITE frames in Firefall. With Bastion and the multi-deploy loadouts, I was able to single handly run from Watchtower to Watchtower fending off Chosen. Electron was great at Sniper type gameplay for an Engineer.

So the question is, will there be an Engineer type of playstyle in Em-8er. Again I know we are far from that phase and that question does not even need to be answered right now if there is no thoughts on Mek play designs yet.

 

[DropnLock]

Yeah. It does seem like a rather less intense form of gameplay then what we'll eventually get.

Jetting around and idlying about a pretty landscape is all well and good, but we're going to have is something that's a fair bit larger and more involved in scale. Nevermind that anthem and warframe tend to be tailored more to people who want their hands held.

We on the other hand, we're literally going to be pioneers. Fighting a war, mining resources, building bases, towns and colonising and entire planet. Its practically out of the old west, i'm going to have to get myself a six-shooter and a ten gallon hat when em-8er launchers.

I never really thought of Warframe as a hand holding game and find it to be more solo sentric than grp based( it allows option for solo or Grped) The landscapes of Warframe I found to be ok, but what draws me to it is the First person killer and for some missions the endless spawns of mobs. It will never be on the scale of Firefall or Em-8er but it really aint all that bad either if you need that first person fix.

 

[DropnLock]

Been meaning to try war frame for a while, might try it out now.

Warframe does take a bit of getting used to, the story is not as linear as other games.But s I have been saying it will give that first person or even 3rd person shooter experience.

 

[DiBBz]

ive always been a massive fan of warframe for alot of reasons. one being core community focus on developer talk on forums as well as common interactions with their community either on forums or in game. being apart of that game early november of 2012 and finally getting into the beta. after a week of playing it was just a game that clicked. unlike other games coming out at the time, i never bought my way in. but didnt stop me from buying a founders pack weeks later.

never in my day did i ever see that warframe would go open world. even tho there was a high density of discussions about the topic late CBT and early into open beta. never would i have thought the engine would be capable. but here we are mid 2017, still playing and enjoying the game. with a plethora of new features and a massive expansion on weapons and warframes and QOL, customization improvements.

it somewhat reflects *hopefully* on the experience that il soon have with ember. providing quality PvE content that will give plenty of gameplay experiences and hopefully with more in depth systems like crafting etc. as well as experimenting and not being afraid to implement features into the game. but most importantly of all. not being afraid of the community and actually talking and participating in discussions, concerns etc.

(forgive my lacks of capital letters. It's nearly 5am and I'm not in the right mood)



Looking at the past in my entire life, I have never seen the truest form of "open world" after Star Wars Galaxy. It may be vertical progression. But code and mechanic wise in the term of "open world", it was superior compared to modern games.

star wars galaxy will always be the pinicle of true open world sandbox. sure its tab targeting and heavily stat based and as you said vertical progression. but if a modern take was done on it and allowed for a more action oriented gameplay etc i think it would be a hit once again.

some would argue that its still a decent game to play even for the emulator. but its a genre that appeals to a very small minority of people.

 

[Silv3r Shadow]

I hope this will iron out all wrong assumptions of the expectations of Ember having a similar progression system as Firefall. (After closed beta)
Such as quests, jobs, missions... in the sense are fun, dont get me wrong. But, XP progression for ember won't be doing wow quests like fire fall tried to do, that takes years of content creation. I'm glad that mark is tuning everyone to what Ember will be and its so much better. Sunken harbor invasion all day with giant kaiju Accourences.

 

[Funamish]

thank you for the info mark.

 

[Djepetto]

Sup, Grummz. Thanks to this post I was introduced to Warframe about 2 weeks ago. Thanks, man. I'm having a blast.(no pun intended) Makes me even more excited about Em-8er!

 

[SinergyX]

I'm a .. well I was, a founder for both Firefall and Warframe, in the initial year of both games, I'd put my money on Firefall to become the better one. On paper it had the co-op open world, Warframe initialy was 4man instanced. Boy was I wrong those years later.

But as games go towards a 'hub' open world, I got a huge flashback to Tabula Rasa, if anyone remembers that NCsoft game. Where a active open world could be attacked (and taken over) by aliens, it was up to you to defend or take back the hubs.