gametechmods
Robot Arena => Discussion => Topic started by: Mr. AS on August 03, 2019, 10:50:05 PM
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(https://i.imgur.com/0Tp7dw3.png)
What went wrong?
(aside from "game sux lol" which we all hopefully know by now)
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Robot building, lost the 2000 vibe of the original which for me was what made the og so appealing to me, and the combat/arena selection sucked
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better question, what went right?
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What went wrong?
As the guy who (possibly) played RA3 the most here... grab some popcorn, this is gonna take a while. :popcorn
- The parts list was barely larger than stock RA2. At the time it came out, DSL, Ironforge, RWRA2, and Retooled were all somewhat popular, and all had parts lists that put RA3 to shame. Literally the only parts RA3 had that I wish RA2 had were the bi-directional burst motor and the chain drive.
- An update broke chassis wedges by increasing friction to the point that if part of your robot's chassis was touching the ground, it just wouldn't move at all. IIRC, they fixed it, and then broke it again in the very next patch.
- The physics and damage systems were terrible. The only highlight was that you could get torque-reaction thwackbots working.
- The AI bots in the lower weight classes were pathetic, and a lot of the HW ones were overpowered (Gluttony, OctoDie, Emergency, Savage...) There was also no indication of each AI bot's weight class on the selection screen, so you had to just make an educated guess.
- The AI itself was terrible. Robots would just blindly drive into your weapons, some would tip themselves over if they stopped too hard, and invertible robots didn't invert their controls when they were upside-down, so they just drove backwards into the wall and got stuck there.
- The game was horribly unbalanced. Ram plates were the most damaging part, there was no torque/RPM trade-off for motors, the larger batteries were pointless because the smaller ones were more efficient and easier to work into a design, the 80kg grinder wasn't nearly as durable as it looked like it should have been (though admittedly, it would have been completely broken if it did), wheel casters weighed 180kg instead of 18kg, I could line the front of my robot with 5kg forklift brackets and destroy everything I drove into...
- The lack of component intersection, lack of a hard weight limit, and limited support for IRL designs meant there was no challenge to building stupidly-broken robots, and no incentive not to do so. Everything became either a ramplate-covered battering ram, or a spinner even more unrealistic and broken than the 36HSes you get in stock RA2.
- The paint system just didn't work.
- The glitch where your robot would just ****ing explode in the botlab and become unusable
- The glitch where you could enter an overweight robot into a tournament, but it wouldn't let you fight with it, and you couldn't withdraw so it was just stuck there forever
- The fact that every tournament could only be entered once, whereas RA2's campaign goes on and on forever until you get bored
- The fact that the devs could have solved every single one of these problems during early access or even before, but instead chose to release the game as it was, add miniscule amounts of content, and then just vanish into the aether, because they clearly did not give a **** about the game, its players, or anything other than fat stacks of cash.
better question, what went right?
The chassis builder (it's still, IMO, even better than RR2's), the ability to freely move components after you've placed them, the ability to delete an entire chain of components in one go rather than having to go through and delete them one at a time... the music wasn't too bad... and that's basically it, I think.
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Biggest issue for me was that there were no rules in the bot lab. Components could go anywhere. The fighting was glitchy. The online play still sucked. Nothing seemed to do damage, and if it did you couldn't tell.
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It was a sh**ty half-finished alpha and they asked money for it, that's what went wrong.
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It was like RA2 but worse, you couldn't even build a wedge. The ground clearence was low though, R0B0 would be proud.
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About what you said earlier in regards to components, DSL and Ironforge and all other mods were exactly just that, mods. Nothing official. The only change that would've been great (if it was perfected) was the chassis building.
We should've known nothing can beat RA2