Asymmetry
One of the first enormous hurdles to achieving good gameplay balance on any Frontline map is that every Frontline map has either asymmetrical map layouts, asymmetrical objectives, or asymmetrical map layouts and objectives.
It’s hard to un-ring the bell on these design decisions, but it’s important to recognize that when both the layouts and objectives are asymmetrical, it’s significantly more challenging for designers to achieve what feels like (to players) a fair set of challenges for both teams.
On maps where the layouts are close to symmetrical (e.g. Mountain Peak), it’s important to ensure that the final stage objectives feel like they require a similar amount of time, effort, and focus to complete. Of course, Mountain Peak’s final stage objectives don’t require a similar amount of time, effort, and focus to complete, so whether your team wins or loses once pushed back to their final spawn can feel like a tooth-and-nail struggle (pushing the ram to red) or like you suddenly lose out of nowhere without even seeing the final objective fall (burning tents in blue).
To compare these two objective types, we can look at how they work in games like Overwatch or W:ET. The ram at red is like an Overwatch payload and other than the fact that it moves, it’s not much different from flag objectives in Frontline. Blue players stand around the ram and it moves – unless red players stand in the area and/or kill the blue players in the area. Unlike an Overwatch payload (or the train car on W:ET’s Rail Gun), the defending team cannot reverse the direction of the ram once it starts moving. They can only stop it (reclaiming their nearest flag will also halt forward progress). The ram is easy to track and players from both teams can try to dogpile onto it (or the nearby flag).
In contrast, the tents that blue has to defend are spread out over a relatively large area. A single red player can throw a torch and light up a tent and there’s not much blue can do to stop it. Of course, red can just forget to do it, which is a real and separate problem, but all of these problems contribute to making the final objectives feel massively different in terms of the effort and coordination required to accomplish them.
It would probably be easier to change the objectives on Mountain Peak than to try to use map layout as a balancing factor. On maps like Grad, where the layout is so totally asymmetrical, making the final objectives more symmetrical could help a lot. Even if both red and blue had to destroy three carts, the layouts of the final objective zones are so fundamentally different that the experience would be inherently different. And that’s really the goal, right? That it feels different winning as blue than it does winning as red? I believe most players would rather have symmetrical objectives that feel more balanced for each side than to have asymmetrical objectives that feel massively lopsided in execution.
Map Refinement
This is related to asymmetry, but is a separate issue. There’s a lot that could be edited out or changed on each of the existing Frontline maps to make gameplay more enjoyable. A relatively minor, but significant, change on Taiga’s layout made a huge impact on the viability of blue taking the central flag. There are two types of map refinements that are important: large scale and polish.
Large scale issues are things like Grad’s subterranean dungeon. I would argue it doesn’t need to exist at all, but a reasonable argument could me made that having another path into the castle is valuable for red. Still, it could be cut in half in terms of overall complexity/size and it would still accomplish the same goal.
Another large scale issue is the distance of blue’s spawn from the center of Crossroads relative to the distance from red’s spawn. Blue’s is quite a bit farther away and their path is obstructed far more than red’s. Additionally, red horses can (and do, nonstop, every match) run circles through blue’s spawn. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that the base spawn of each team should be blocked from continuous horse access.
In general, looking at each team’s spawns relative to the capture point between them, consider if each team has a similar burden to access the capture circle in terms of distance, obstruction, and vulnerability to enemy harrying tactics (i.e., prior to even entering the circle). If they don’t, address those as part of large scale map changes.
Polish issues are things like the myriad small collision hangups that exist on almost every map. E.g. on Crossroads, overhead clearance between the ground and stairs in the central fort, the chunk of debris on the ground just around the NE corner of the base of the central fort, and red’s ramps over the palisade wall. Making movement collision accurately model every bump and nook and cranny produces frustrating experiences for players. Smooth out the collision to produce walking surfaces that don’t stop player movement because of minor, almost imperceptible height differences. If smoothing the collision out makes it differ too much from the world geometry, change them both.
Catapults, Trebs, and Similar Instant Death Machines
Speaking personally, I don’t think these add any value to Frontline. When I get killed by one of them, ¾ times I had no indication that danger was imminent and in many situations there was nothing I could to avoid death. E.g. on Grad, it’s easy for red to launch catapult shot over the wall into the smithy, giving even players who are looking in that direction less than half a second to react (i.e., realize they will die) to the enormous stone sphere as it crests the wall.
If these siege weapons continue to be a part of Grad, Camp, and other maps, please give players an audio/visual cue - regardless of where they’re looking - that death is inbound.
Airstrikes and artillery in W:ET are preceded by colored smoke and distinctive sounds that give players a window of opportunity to get out of the way. I’m not saying there should be smoke where they will land, but a better audio cue would go a long way to making siege weapon deaths feel less random and arbitrary. Yes, silent death from a catapult is realistic, but it’s obnoxious from a gameplay perspective and can instantly change an objective from being threatened to being completely cleared.
Better Audio Cues
Players have a difficult time focusing on Frontline. It’s just human nature. There’s a reason why Overwatch focuses everyone toward a single payload that they stand on.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory used voice of god-style announcements to indicate when major map-critical events were occurring and to tell players what they were supposed to be doing. At the start of Fuel Dump, the Axis announcer says, “Don’t let them construct the bridge! Construct the command post!” When the Allies construct the bridge, the announcer yells, “Bridge constructed! Destroy it!” The announcer keeps track of every major game state and constantly reminds the players where they stand on the map. When dynamite is planted on an objective, everyone in the game is made aware of it and it focuses their efforts on defusing it / ensuring it goes off. Critically, there is a window in which the defending team can rush to the objective and stop / reverse what has been set in motion.
In Frontline, when enemies are attacking a flag, players on the defending team don’t get an audio cue until the tide has turned in the attackers’ favor. But by that point, if a player is not already involved in the defense of the flag, it’s unlikely that they can reach the flag in time to make a difference. Better and more audio cues about the state of an objective would help focus players more on the objectives than they currently do (not much).
Audio cues can also apply to player-initiated barks being broadcast across the team. Yes, spam can be a problem, but muting players should be an easy process in any competitive online game. Mordhau already has a robust set of voice barks, but they’re only heard in proximity to the player and most of them aren’t useful in any practical sense. Being able to yell for help isn’t that appealing when it’s limited to a 15′ radius around you and everyone in that radius can already see someone feint morphing a maul into your face.
However, being able to call for help or reinforcements and having it broadcast to the team with an on-screen indicator of your location or the nearest active objective – that could be quite helpful. Arguably one screen of the commands could be reorganized to only and always be team-wide barks: Hold, Follow Me, Help, and Charge. Need Healing or Need Repairs could also be added to the list.
Point Scoring and Display
Even players who elect to play Frontline are often awful at actually focusing on the objectives. A lot of players go into it as though it’s TDM. How many times have you seen Crossroads end and the losing team has a proud player at the top of the leaderboard with a 50:3 K:D due to running down the enemy team’s spawn with a horse for the whole match?
K:D is a fine metric for success in DM or TDM, but it’s not the point of Frontline – at least, it isn’t when it’s away from the objectives. I think there are a variety of changes that could be made to scoring and to the display of scores to help focus people on the objectives.
First, killing and, arguably, dying on or near an active objective should be weighted as more valuable than killing random enemies 75m away from an active objective. Players currently accrue points for neutralizing and capturing an objective, but if the needle isn’tmoving, they don’t earn any points for fighting on the objective. This discourages proactive defense and doesn’t motivate attacking players to push fights into the objective unless the odds are already heavily in their favor.
Damaging blockades (with anything other than firebombs, anyway) and repairing them are tedious, often dangerous activities that arguably do more to aid/hinder access to the objective than killing an individual unit. Since firebomb damage is being tuned, it may be worth considering increasing the score bonus for damaging or repairing blockades to encourage more players to prioritize taking down barriers before entering melee with people in the general vicinity.
For Frontline, consider highlighting score in a lighter color (vs. K/D/A) and either adding additional stats (healing, capture, and repair/destruction score contributions) or only showing the player’s K/D/A (no one else’s) to de-emphasize the importance of K/D/A. I’ve seen a lot of posts online where players post screenshots of someone “scandalously” at the top of a Frontline scoreboard with a poor or mediocre K/D/A. Yes, it’s not DM/TDM, it’s Frontline. The point is ostensibly about pushing objectives and helping your teammates do that. The way points are scored and displayed should emphasize that, with K/D/A only being one element.
Supply Boxes and Their Placement
I have pretty mixed feelings about deployable objects in games of this type, but rather than advocate removing any of those things, I’m going to suggest rethinking the inclusion of supply boxes and, if they stay in the game, where they are placed. Supply boxes are the easiest way to build ballistae and for that reason, where they are placed can have a huge impact on the defensive capabilities of the team controlling the space around the supply boxes.
If the developers’ intention is that ballistae should be used mostly defensively, supply boxes should be placed primarily away from central objectives, and not close to lines of sight that point toward central objectives. This promotes back-and-forth gameplay across the center, rather than entrenching the dominant team’s position at the center.
Transparency and Tuning in Objective Capture Mechanics
It’s not currently obvious to most players how the capture mechanics on an objective work. What changes the objective from Attacking to Capturing? What ratio of attackers vs. defenders are required? Some UI changes could help highlight exactly what’s happening.
Finally, I urge the developers to think about the timing of captures and how that works with spawning mechanics. It’s common for a defender on an objective to die, be unable to respawn before the objective is considered “Losing” and, after respawning, be able to reach the objective before it is fully captured by the enemy.
Is this the desired pacing of objective captures? I would guess that something more forgiving is desired. Once an objective is “Losing”, if it’s technically impossible for respawning defenders to reach the objective in time to prevent it from being fully captured, it can be extremely frustrating. Tuning the pacing of objective captures can help make the back and forth feel less hopeless, more satisfying.
Thanks for reading.
