A semi-constructive rant about Destruction AllStars
I was really looking forward to this one, folks.
Like, REALLY really looking forward to it.
All the other games that some others have been looking forward to like Spider-Man, Demon’s Souls or even Bugsnax on launch day? Eh, take it or leave it. But Destruction AllStars? This was my jam. From the first trailer, I was on board. But why this game though, and not the others?
Ask anyone familiar with Mario Kart’s Battle mode; they’ll know.
This exuded a quality that few other games amongst the line-up did. A quality that I haven’t seen since the PlayStation console family’s earlier days. It was simple. Unfiltered. Uncomplicated. Unabashedly pure and raw fun. No extraneous complexities or moral narrative quandaries. Just fun. It stuck me profoundly and primordially. This sounds weird I know, but THIS game was the reason I got a PS5. No other game sold me on it more. Not even close.
You can keep Horizon: Forbidden West. I’ll make room for Resident Evil: Village some other day. This one spoke to me. An all new car-combat arena game in a day and age when such a genre was deemed to be condemned to niche retro circles on Steam and indie Switch eShop fare? A rare not-seen-enough-of rough-and-tumble online smash-em-up title given equal spotlight amongst the biggest AAA studio-backed franchise heavy-hitters channelling the raw speed and power of the then-upcoming next-gen console? Made by Lucid Games and XDEV, home to a wide breadth of talent hailing from such classics as Wipeout, Destruction Derby, Motorstorm, Driveclub, Project Gotham Racing, Blur and Geometry Wars? Debuting on the PS-Plus subscription service for the low, low price of zero pennies to join the successful party-going ranks of Fall Guys and Rocket League? Even if it weren’t free, I would have forked over the cash at full price anyway simply for the fact that I just couldn’t wait to play it!
And then I did.
*sigh*
I wanted to enjoy it.
I tried to. I resolved to stick with it for as long as I could. There must have been something I was missing, right? The excuses and deflections kept piling up:
I may be bad right now, but it’s okay if I didn’t pick things up as quickly as the tutorial would have liked; I’m just new to the game! That’s all! Everyone is a noob once, as they say! I had lots of trouble with Snake Pass before it magically started to click halfway through, so this shouldn’t be any different! I’m sure that once I get my footing down with a character that’s just right for me, everything will be as smooth as butter!
I finally managed to main Jian after utterly failing with every other character’s set of abilities, but even when I finally got a surprisingly winning streak going though, it felt like I was cheesing the game’s systems to get those wins. Losing a game gave me seething irritation. Winning a game gave me imposter syndrome. I felt as though I was only playing to the whims of luck either way.
Oh, but that was just the Mayhem mode, though! Surely the other modes have fun to offer in their own ways too, surely?
Every game of Gridfall was tedious when I was winning and a whiplash-inducing anti-climax when I lost. In Carnado and Stockpile, everyone on the losing teams (including my own) kept dropping out of the team game sessions en-masse.
Oh, people drop out of team games all the time when their side start losing! It’s not uncommon! I’m sure it was just a fluke those times and the spirit of fun co-operation will persist on the next few rounds afterward!
I looked up reviews. Like this one. It kept happening to them too. Over and over again, they said.
Microtransactions for minor hero palette swaps? Oh, that’s not unheard of either! Everyone has their own tastes and besides, this is debuting free for millions of PS-Plus members; they have to make that money back somehow! We have plenty of content as is and even more in the future, so I’m sure this won’t be too egregious!
Even exclusive single-player content was locked behind a paywall. Not just any paywall; a paywall that I couldn’t even get past until the three-day countdown timer had finished. I could only hone my skilled and get acquainted with one character in a controlled environment, two if I wanted to fork over some cash immediately and three if I wanted to wait before doing that again.
All these physics and collision hiccups have to be down to easily resolved network issues! Lots of people are bound to be logging in when there’s a free game on offer!
I saw cars clipping into the floor before sliding into a well. I saw them getting flipped over like cardboard boxes in light gusts of wind apropos of nothing. My car was briefly nudged by an opponent so hard that the body of my vehicle completely disappeared and, in a manner befitting of a Looney Tunes short, left behind a lonely set of wheels in its place.
Twice.
In ten hours of play time.
My frustration knew no bounds. A dreadful sense of remorse crept in. “Anti-hype”, if you will. I started feeling bitter and resentful, not just towards the game, but also to myself. I’ve been here before; it’s always the tiny annoyances that keep me from truly enjoying a game to its fullest. It’s like getting a Buzz Lightyear toy for Christmas only to find out that all the batteries left in your house that could be used are running on fumes. The problems add up together, mix, meld and compound upon each-other until they form a thick semi-solid muck around the genuinely fun parts that you actually came here for. The kind of analogy for frustration towards tiny game-hindering ludic details that could only exist in abstract hypothetical descriptive form to be used when some rando on the internet wants to explore complex feelings of anger and desperation in trying to intuit what is effectively a child’s play-thing and is desperate to sound angsty and torn up just so they can communicate how they truly, seriously wished they were able to enjoy a game more than they actually do.
I went in expecting to love Destruction AllStars, and I hated it instead.
And I hate that.
I hate that I hate it.
I hate that I don’t love it.
I don’t want to hate it.
And I don’t want to go on about hating it; I want to reach out. I want to get these petty annoyances down into words so they don’t keep bothering me inside my head. Even if nobody is around to hear it. The developers of Destruction AllStars probably already know enough about the game’s reception from fan comments and review sites. I’m not going to make any undue speculations about what may or may not have been happening behind closed doors leading up to the game’s release; that’s not my place, but I don’t want to sit back and keep my feelings towards the game all to myself either. Also while I’m here stalling for time, I also don’t want this stream of consciousness to read like a tired “this game is garbage and this is why” hit-piece takedown thing, because the very last thing I want is to see this game or this studio fail, especially when there are so few large publishers out there genuinely going out of their way to give stuff like this a chance.
I want to enjoy this game. I want to be able to enjoy it. I want to break away at all the things that stop me from enjoying Destruction AllStars at its very foundations so that the better parts can shine all the brighter for it. And there really is so much to like beyond the damage system and physics hiccups; the art direction and character designs are as refreshingly diverse as they are appealing (Fat characters! Non-binary characters! Mute sign-language characters! Furries!). What little single player content I’ve sampled for myself shows a very wholesome approach to exaggerated wrestling federation swagger that I’ve never seen done outside of maybe King of Sports Japan. The arcade-like vehicle handling and drifting model is intuitive and genuinely exhilarating no matter the vehicle and the haptic feedback coupled with adaptive trigger functions serve to aid in control intuition in addition to immersion. For the incredibly pessimistic starting paragraphs and all the mean things I’m about to say about a game that these people clearly put their all into, the gameplay does briefly reach sensational levels; at least three crashes have sent me flinging out of a previous vehicle and into the seat of a brand new one, exploding wreckages dissipating just before I drove back in the fray to chase that magnificent high all over again (No joke, the first time I actually pulled that off in-game, I felt like a god).
I have been waiting probably my entire gaming life for an experience that made me feel part of an improv Mad Max car chase and I can still easily imagine myself having just as much fun with this Twisted Metal riff on Overwatch as I dreamed I would when I first tuned in to that Future of Play stream in June. The trailers and previews promised something special that clearly still exists in the final game and I’m afraid that if it doesn’t stick now, we’ll never get another chance at something like this again for a long time.
Put simply, I want to help.
If any developer at Lucid Games or XDEV does happen to be reading this then first of all, I want this very first Medium piece of mine (totally not ripping off DocSquiddy’s writing style, no-siree) to read not like a laundry list of petulant demands and exorbitant nit-picks, but a chance at collaboration. I want to try and prove here that I’m 100% on your side, that I want exactly the same kind of experience that you are aiming to cultivate, to suggest some alterations without changing too much of what is already there, not only to preserve the experience that you people are clearly trying to capture, but to help magnify it. Enhance it. I don’t want it to seem as though I, a game design graduate with one year of QA work and a small handful of weird itch.io projects or game jam contributions under their belt, am telling you, an industry veteran amongst a gallery of multiple others with more than 20 years of game-making experience, how to do your job.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you decided to ignore every single one of my ideas here; they may end up playing like garbage for all I know. This game of yours doubtless took years of development, playtesting, iteration and collaboration just to get working at all and the effort is clearly on display in the exuberant graphics and superlative sound design. I don’t want to feel like I’m putting even more work on their shoulders than they likely already have to deal with. I don’t want to simply say “this thing sucked and I want it gone”, nor to suggest it be replaced entirely (though against my own better judgement, I may end up doing that anyway, so sincere apologies in advance); only that it be tweaked behind the scenes somewhat to try and make Destruction AllStars the most fun experience that it can possibly be. I’m going to try and make my language as subjective as possible to speak from my own experience rather than claim to speak for everyone who has ever played this game so far. I can only judge so much based on what I’ve played on a personal level after all. If this game is to continue receiving support for the next year, I wish only for it to be the best year possible, even if it only ends up being that one single year (god, I hope not).
Second of all, holy shit. Um, hi. My name is George. I have a Twitter, hope you enjoy me airing my grievances to be somewhat informative and that my ideas can get a discussion going. Even if they don’t go anywhere, I’m content to just simply have started them at all.
COMMENCE SEMI-CONSTRUCTIVE RANTING SESSION:
First of all: damage logic and vehicle armour. It makes me nervous and unsafe. Not quite like I’m walking on eggshells, so much as I am literally speeding around inside of one. And all the other eggs on the field are hard-boiled. And this is where I abandon the analogy and get on with explaining myself. I had no idea what to make of it initially; at first it seemed to me as though most, if not all the vehicles, aside from the breaker special vehicles, were made of cardboard. I was certainly convinced that there was a very stiff breeze going through the in-game arenas when my car would flip on its back at sheer random.
I even saw it happen to opponents too, all during matches with perfectly stable internet connections for all parties involved. But physics and netcode are far more abstract and take more time to deal with than the gameplay itself. I won’t claim to know anything about that (because I don’t and that’s not what I want to really properly talk about here). What also didn’t help alleviate my initial “cars-as-cardboard” assessment was how easily their hit point count could be reduced after some supposedly minor scuffs. Sometimes I’d just be driving around in the middle of the arena with a relatively sizeable pool of hit points left, casually steering around cars and over minor hills when all of a sudden, I’d notice I’d slowly gone down to one quarter out of seemingly nowhere. Whether I was driving over a slight incline or driving vertically up a half pipe, I’ll have no idea. I even jumped inside a heavy vehicle during one Mayhem match, fresh and brand new with full hit points, drove it off the spawn podium onto the ground.
It lost a front wheel instantly.
I lost wheels more often than I thought I would in fact. From bumps and grazes that didn’t really feel like the impact warranted it. I’d even go as far to say that throughout my early play sessions, I consistently took more damage from lightly grazing walls at leisurely speeds than most other high-impact crashes in any other circumstance. Needless to say, I learned quickly to stay away from walls in just about any situation. In a comparatively more recent session, I distinctly remember being flung 100 feet up into the air after right-stick bashing into (and being bashed into by) multiple vehicles from all possible directions. I emerged upright after landing on the ground without so much as a scratch on my vehicle; I went into the massive pile-up with half a bar of hit points and came back out with…half a bar of hit points. That’s not to say that all head-on collisions were created equal, mind you; I’d get harsh reprimands from direct impacts just often enough that I grew to regard the damage system with immense suspicion and mistrust.
It’s clear from the many game modes which emphasise the interaction that direct and aggressive play is meant to be incentivised, but the near-unpredictable damage system feels at odds with this, at least in my experience. Whenever I did willingly throw myself into the arena for a high score, I did so out of desperation, knowing that I had no other choice in the matter and that even if it would be almost a complete crapshoot as to whether I actually got out intact, it would at least grant me some points instead of none. It makes me weary to try any other character whose vehicle breaker power doesn’t boast some kind of attack measures that also serve to defend them against otherwise serious reprimand (such as Jian or Ultimo Barricado) Ideally, I should be throwing myself into those arenas with reckless abandon regardless of who I play as, because this is “Destruction Allstars”, not…”Hardboiled Eggshells Allstars” (okay I’m done with that analogy, I promise).
In any car combat game (or at least, the ones that I can claim to have played), the most powerful weapon I have, bar any projectiles, will be the front bonnet. It’s the first thing my opponents will taste when I drive at full pelt towards them, since I can only really move in one direction, and that’s were the camera happens to be pointed. On weekends, it will be the side door of my car if I know how to drift, but mostly it’s the front that’s getting full use and reuse. Naturally, it would expect it to sustain several hits before it feels anything at all. A bonnet that gets worryingly damaged after a handful of head-on collisions to me, makes as much sense to me as the reverse-pistol from the Cursed Halo mod.
If I power my car forward and smash into a wall or grind the doors into it at full speed then, yeah that’s totally on me. Take points off for that, but a comparatively gentle nudge should ideally be next to nothing. That leaves the rear-end as my biggest weak spot. So, front bumper: when the car isn’t travelling at mach 10 towards a wall, it’s totally impervious to pain, inflicts even more pain when using the right stick shunt cooldown ability. Same goes for the side doors: seriously fragile however when met with anyone else’s front bumper, to be used only when there’s another vehicle driving along at equal speed to the immediate left or right, keep from grinding into walls at similar mach 10 speeds. Rear bumper: allergic to anything and everything, must be protected at all costs from any and all high velocity impacts. And also, if two cars power towards each-other with both of their front bumpers connecting with each other? Well, that’s like two blades crossing in a proverbial sword fight, isn’t it? It’s rock beats rock. It may not sound realistic but to be honest, I’m not especially too concerned with realism when fun is at stake. I’m sorry, but losing a quarter bar of hit points to a light scrape along a wall at not even a third of max speed doesn’t feel fun for me. Or fair. Also, jumping off of ramps is fun. I don’t want no consequence for getting sick air in a car combat game…except maybe if I screw it up and land on my side instead. I don’t exactly play a car combat game for anything but definite variables and absolute binary conditions when it comes to smashing stuff like a rowdy caveman child.
Tangentially related to the damage system are the in-vehicle instant annihilations and on-foot knockouts from vehicle impacts. These often feel feel like they could happen regardless of how fast the attacker was going, if they were using a shunt cooldown, where they made contact with my vehicle or whether they had a super damaging hero-breaker vehicle ability active. Sometimes (as with the Looney Tunes disappearing chassis example), I get briefly clipped on the rear wing by another car that wasn’t even shunting forwards and my relatively healthy vehicle explodes instantly without giving me a single chance to escape first (or even that I should consider escaping it). Most times I’d simply get forced out of the vehicle just as its destroyed with no input on my part, making survival a coin toss.
It would honestly put me more at ease if every time I was still inside a vehicle right as it exploded it would just always count as an Annihilation K.O. instead of only forcing me out of the vehicle some of the time. That way, I could begin to weigh up my options however briefly, about what I’d want to do before I succumbed to the earth-shattering kaboom. If I were still on two wheels while this was happening, I could quickly aim it at a congregation of vehicles and eject seat at such a point as to send the now highly volatile time bomb careening towards the crowd and disorient them in the ensuing blast, or at least catch them off guard as I find another brand new vehicle to land inside. Total ‘annihilations’ can still happen, but only from a breaker vehicle and even then, I feel like I’d benefit from some forewarning beforehand; something like the enemy turtle shell alarm bell pop-ups from Mario Kart Wii onwards. Because I don’t really like sudden inexplicable death, even when it does have a full and coherent explanation.
Though, even getting run down on foot by another speeding vehicle won’t always be a guarantee as to whether I’ll get eliminated immediately from the impact and be forced to wait six jarring flow-breaking seconds to respawn back at the starting grid, or if I’ll just get tripped up briefly leaving me hammering at the left analog stick to try and get back on two feet. In another recent match, I was tripped up three times in a row between recovery frames, leaving me on the ground for a good ten seconds as I flailed impotently around with my controller. I had no clue how I didn’t get KO-ed from any of those hits, but the fact that I also had no idea if any of them were capable of doing so, meant that I didn’t want to stay running around on foot like a sitting duck long enough to find out.
When I’m run down and tripped up on foot, I’d like to at least be able to press a button to recover more quickly than the pre-canned animations tend to allow for, just so I’m not stuck in a near-endless loop of “I get knocked down but I get up again”. Small running humans (especially when they’re gaily leaping through the air) are otherwise some of the more difficult targets to aim and drive towards at immense speeds and are often seen standing in front of walls waving red flags like stereotypical bullfighters. This means that even when a player does hit them and gain points for the effort, they’ll be left with a ruined front bumper even with an improved damage model. So (and I know I said I didn’t want to propose too many drastic changes so this is just a hypothetical but), what if on-foot players, instead of getting KOed instantly by a shunting car, were to get stuck instantly to the front of the vehicle ‘Death Proof’ style until either, the car slows down enough, the stuck player wiggles their way off the front with the left stick or are slammed into a hard place, forcing a respawn? Their body could act as a “human shield” for the car itself, absorbing all the damage in a burst of colourful fireworks (there we go, totally not violent at all, right?) balancing out the risk and reward of running down the squishy humans and further encouraging more aggressive play, at least from how I can imagine it playing out. Again, there’s only so much that brainstorming can do, but it’s all I really can do to suggest alternatives, so feel free to judge these observations as much as you like.
But what about on-foot player self defence against other on-foot players?
“What about it,” indeed, imaginary interrupting commenter.
Players can use a “barge” to push other on-foot opponents and knock them to the ground but in practice, it’s delayed, inaccurate and doesn’t award points for use without the appropriate breaker ability. The only time I ever used it was once at the start of a match to push an opponent away from a vehicle so that I could get into it first and even then it only just barely worked. I didn’t even know that the barge ability could be used to parkour around more quickly until a member of the dev team tweeted about it in a short but helpful “tips and tricks” thread.
This would INDEED have been extremely helpful to know, as I found the parkour controls themselves to feel floaty and imprecise in my hands. Climbing up small pillars and jumping over large gaps was awkwardly fiddly and overly delicate with seemingly no way to wall jump away from a wall except when running along the wall. I have no idea why combining “barge” with the parkour was never explored in the tutorial, as it almost completely removes the need for double-jumping too, which is the only thing I found the on-foot breakers to be of any use for at all. Most of them only exist to buff up the already functionally lacking barge ability.
This means in my experience, that on-foot breakers largely only affect other people who are also on foot when they aren’t just slightly less effective clones of another character’s existing on-foot breaker. Good luck trying to one-hit K.O. any other on-foot player with Hana’s barge buff breaker when everyone is either driving around in a vehicle or actively trying to find a vehicle to drive around in anyway. During the matches I played, being inside a vehicle is a much more reliable, preferable and infinitely more advantageous way of scoring points. It’s doubly annoying to hear the announcer crone on and on about how I’m “keeping an on-foot breaker in reserve,” practically expecting me to use it at any moment, when I’m already driving around in a car and have zero plans to jump out, activate it briefly to no effect and then hop back inside as if nothing ever happened just to shut them up. Players get next to nothing for tripping up opponents who are also running around on foot as opposed to eliminating them outright and even if they didn’t, nobody is playing a car combat game to pick fights on two legs. Overall, there’s vey little reason to not be in a vehicle.
The only on-foot breakers that I find worthwhile are the ones that either maximise defensiveness against moving vehicles or lay passive traps for said moving vehicles, like Jian’s land mines. The few others that actually do affect vehicles are either scaled down versions of their own vehicle’s specials or only ever whittle damage down, rarely doling out much points for the effort. The vehicle breaker powers are generally better, but I still vastly prefer the ones that cut the pretence and simply stick a blade or a crusher on the front of the car.
Honestly, if we must have on-foot breaker abilities, I’d prefer if players were allowed to choose their own custom on-foot breaker powers for any character from a condensed list. If I were calling the shots (and I’m not, I know I’m way out of my league on this one here), I’d go with the breakers that generally either maximise evasiveness and mobility, increase defensive measures against moving vehicles or lay down passive measures against said vehicles. If you still want abilities that directly effect other on foot players, I’d give one free off charge: activate while looking at the desired on-foot player and you’ll swap places with them via teleport.
I’m also aware that the barge can also be used to dodge out of the path of oncoming vehicles looking to run them down before taking them over, but I generally just see other players preferring to jump over oncoming vehicles with the X button anyway. This is because jumping is much more immediate and far less of a hassle compared to dodging and hastily tapping the triangle button to take over a vehicle that nine times out of ten, is way too heavily damaged to be worth the trouble. Even when they’re given the option to destroy said vehicle, they still don’t think it’s worth it; shaking off an opponents riding on a moving vehicle is also heavily weighted in the driver’s favour as they can cheese the left analog stick inputs far more easily than a slow sequence of quick-time event button prompts, making it much more advisable to simply run around and find a brand new recently spawned undamaged vehicle to drive instead. (For that matter, why does there exist one button to enter a vehicle and TWO buttons to exit?)
While we’re at this imaginary stage of late game development, I’d just get rid of the barge button in its entirety, combine its basic function with the Jump and Enter/Exit Vehicle commands down into one move, since they all serve a similar traversal purpose together anyway. For the purposes of my totally realistic pitch, I’m going to call this combination ability, “Lunge”.
Instead of a quick time event that decides if a riding player gets to take over a vehicle or destroy it on a whim, here’s another alternative: once a player “lunges” onto the roof of someone else’s vehicle being driven, both players get to fight over steering controls. The driving player still retains control over braking and acceleration while the riding player can try to steer the vehicle in a different direction. The riding player cannot take over the current vehicle but can instead try to point it in the direction of a fresh newly spawned vehicle on the map, another opponent vehicle, the nearest arena hazard or failing all that, a wall. The riding player can jump off at any time they wish with a press of the “lunge” button, but the driving player can throw the riding player off sooner by suddenly braking to a dead stop after driving really fast, thus sending the riding player flying forwards like a human cruise missile.
Jumping onto a moving vehicle would only work if the vehicle were going at a relatively pedestrian speed and the on-foot player is approaching it from above. As for dodging an oncoming vehicle and then jumping onto it, we can take a page from Platinum’s book of character action game design and have the player be able to ride it if they lunge out of the way exactly at the last possible moment with a single press of the X button. This could be worked into team modes so that one teammate (or even multiple teammates, perhaps!) could jump onto one vehicle and ride it ‘Transporter’ style to a desired destination (directional waypoint icons could appear for the driving player based on which direction a riding teammate is looking).
Speaking of directional icons…
Usually in a vehicle-based game, even ones that don’t focus even slightly around direct combat or aggressive play, the HUD will give at least a rough idea of where other players are and how close to me they are driving. The best example of this that I can recall is from the N64 racing games Extreme-G 1 and Extreme-G 2: as other racers closed in on the player, their rear position would be marked by a green arrow slowly fading into view from the very bottom edge of the screen to indicate their exact position. This arrow would fade from green to orange to red based on how close they were before angling along either corner of the HUD and up vertically to either side of the screen, indicating which side they would be overtaking the player before it finally came into full view.
A similar arrow system does exist for Destruction Allstars, probably to make up for the lack of full in-vehicle camera control, but these comparatively tiny arrows are instead situated in an initially confusing ring arrangement around the back of the car, occasionally flashing whenever they were picking up speed (I think? They’re usually always red anyway so I never knew for sure) and all too easily blending in with the vehicle itself at all other times. There could be multiple arrows to indicate looming opponents all around a player in any given moment with none of them showing effectively enough which opponent is closest to the player, which is picking up more speed in relation to them or which might be in the middle of activating a vehicle breaker power. As for opponents beyond a player’s range of sight, they show up on the tiny mini map crammed into the bottom left corner of the screen, and it doesn’t always feel natural for me to try and find where the players are by taking my eyes off of the road and let my guard down for a couple of precious white-knucle seconds. Personally, I’d be much more comfortable just having Xander’s ability to see other cars through walls be turned on by default for all characters all the time if it meant not needing to quickly look at a tiny mini-map while other cars close in on my distracted bonnet.
I promise, I’m almost done…and then I’ll leave you alone. I won’t fill the page with talk about the voice chat being on by default, because there was already a fix for that; I’m only going to talk about the four main game modes. I saved those for last.
MAYHEM MODE:
It’s the most comparatively simple mode of the lot; bash opponents, destroy their vehicles, run down on-foot players to score points and climb to the top of the leader board. Carnage distilled, though it too has problems. Players get points based on how hard they hit an opponent and these hits often stack on top of each-other multiple times even if there was only one hit on a single vehicle taking place. So I could slam full force into an opponent with my side door a single time and end up with two medium hits and one heavy hit for seven points in total from one impact. One really hard bump can potentially give me just as many points as an Annihilation (decimating the vehicle with the driver forced to respawn after being trapped in the wreckage). These unpredictably massive score stacks don’t happen all the time with every impact, but it happens regularly enough during particularly massive pile-ups that some players (myself included) can quickly jump up the scoreboard seemingly by accident and stay there for the rest of the game with no meaningful change in play style and no way for others to catch up in time. Remember earlier when I wrote that I felt a greater sense of reservation when faced with driving into big crash zones for points because the damage system was so volatile, even if it was for just a few points? Well, that feeling doesn’t get any better when I don’t even know how many point’s I’ll get for possibly ruining my current vehicle in the process.
As it happens (and I know I’m going to sound like a smug asshole, please forgive me I beg), I’ve been slowly developing a small car combat game of my own on-and-off since last year and I learned that managing collision detection without multiple hit events stacking on top of each-other is indeed as hard as it sounds. What I eventually figured out was to have the box collision on vehicles wait just over half a second after the initial impact on a single opponent and waiting until no more collisions were detected before docking the appropriate number of hit points and doling the appropriate score to the attacking player before looping back to listen for the next overlap event. I cannot deny however, that score stacks are nonetheless really satisfying even if they do feel random to me personally. Perhaps there could be room for a possible score multiplier system that stacks based on how many vehicle attacks are chained together in quick succession and even how long a player stayed in their vehicle while doing so. If they eject and start running, the multiplier resets to one. Maybe the multiplier could simply freeze in place for a brief moment if the player jumped out of a vehicle and “lunged” inside of another one without landing on two feet first.
Also, destroying un-commandeered vehicles for multiple points feels cheap and insincere, even if it doesn’t always guarantee lots of points (sometimes you can still cheese out a ‘wreck’ on an empty car), or even any points at all. I say just default all empty car bashes and wrecks to one point because its too easy otherwise in my opinion.
GRIDFALL:
Shove other players off the slowly crumbling arena, be the last one standing to win. Refreshingly, my opinions are not the only ones for a change; bouts of Gridfall for lone players either end too quickly after they fall into the abyss (whether by accident or at the hands of another opponent) or they drag for too long when the last remaining players are endlessly circling the area until all but one of them finally get bored enough to willingly drop into a pit just so it can end faster.
This is a comparatively simple one to address: give players more than just one life (three ideally) and make the arena itself fall away faster when fewer players are remaining in order to force them towards each-other like every battle royale riff figured out since PUBG and Fortnite. Maybe also introduce platforms of various heights and angles scattered randomly about with each match so it’s not just the same flat arena every single time. (We’re nearly at the end, folks…)
CARNADO:
The first of two team-based games: collect gears by destroying opponents and bank the gears for your team by driving your current vehicle into the carnado. I find the gear chain to be frustratingly slow to build up from the outset, as even the hardest of non-fatal impacts seem to only reward two gears at most. The nature of this scoring system means that once a team starts losing, they will very likely keep losing. Add to this, no general way of strategically cooperating in team modes means that losing team members will invariably drop out mid-match. But the biggest problem is that if you idly decide to exit your current vehicle just once (something that regular players of Mayhem or even Gridfall will no doubt be used to doing by now), you arbitrarily lose your entire gear chain and are forced to build it up all over again from scratch.
I get that the idea is to keep players in their vehicles and protect their score, but the way I see it, there’s a far less inorganic way of getting that across while also encouraging team play with one change; permanently tie the gear chains to the vehicles themselves instead even after a player has ejected from it. Already, this could give players a reason to want to steal (or even wrestle control from) a vehicle from an opponent team member if they’re driving a car with a higher gear score. Fellow team members could then feel more inclined to covet and protect a vehicle with a high gear score before finally banking it into the carnado. To my mind, I should only lose a gear chain when the vehicle is destroyed and even then, have a small portion of the gears scatter around the area like rings in Sonic the Hedgehog. These gears can then be picked up by either opponents looking to steal a win or teammates coming in for the save. On the subject of teamwork, players could multiply the number of gears banked in the carnado based on multiple teammates jumping into it at the same time. Have the carnado change colour briefly depending on which teammate jumped in to indicate when a combo window is open. Opponents could interrupt this combo with their own combo by driving into the carnado with their own vehicles too.
STOCKPILE:
It’s just Carnado again with slightly more obtuse steps; this time, it forces players to get out of their vehicles to collect gears and bank them in designated zones after destroying other vehicles and again, there’s very little that a losing team can do to bounce back from an inevitable defeat, let alone work together. If the idea is to make players vulnerable when they’re trying to collect and bank gears, maybe the aim should be to extend that sensation for as long as possible and encourage teammates to step in and help against opponents while making the rules and logic a little bit more clear-cut at a glance.
So in my fantasy version of Stockpile, players can collect gears and bank while still driving a vehicle but before they can bank them at a zone, it needs to be activated by at least one fellow teammate first, and they will have to stand near it on foot to keep it active in their team’s colour. Driving teammates cannot run on-foot friends over, but driving opponents can, leaving those on-foot players vulnerable to attack if they aren’t protected. Multiple members of either team can stand in a zone to try and contest the bank, but the zone will always change to the colour of whichever side has the most team-members trying to keep it active. If there is a tie between members, or if there are no teammates at a zone (either because they walked too far away or were eliminated by an opponent), the zone deactivates but the gears still remain banked there, waiting for members of either team to contest it and reactivate it for their colour. This could have the potential to create huge conflict and risk to collectively divide on-foot teammates between the three zones, have driving teammates protect them from rivals while also hunting down said rivals to collect the gears in the first place before prioritizing different zones to bank their gears in if they choose. Ditching the score threshold in addition to leaving contested zones open to takeover should help encourage losing players to try and bounce back for a possible last-minute victory, since the banked points could all be stolen by anyone at any time.
I’ve seen fans and reviewers complain about the dearth of modes available to play but in my opinion, a small handful of modes is fine so long as I have enough fun with them. That being said however, there could be some possible room to add team variations of Mayhem and Gridfall, maybe even a solo version of Carnado (though that could be going too far even for me). While I’m adding to what has effectively devolved into a video game Christmas wish list, I believe Skirmish (the single player campaign mode where you take out more fodder cars than your CPU rival) could possibly be worked in as an online multiplayer mode with 1v1 or 2v2 team variants.
One more thing, scout’s honour: while we’re here can I suggest my own mode based loosely around Breaktime and Crash Course with a heavy dash of ‘King of the Hill’?
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: “THUNDERDOME”
Every single vehicle is invincible…except when they’re in…THE DOME. Smashing cars in THE DOME is the only way to gain points. THE DOME has a limited lifespan and once it runs out, it will take three seconds to disappear and reappear somewhere else. THE DOME will keep cycling between different areas of the map continually. Time extenders will appear inside of THE DOME to keep it fixed in one spot for longer, while time minimisers will appear outside and have the opposite effect. Both of these hourglass-like pickups would appear in the team mode variant exclusively and can only be picked up by on-foot players who will find themselves at the mercy of any number of invincible vehicles which may or may not be closing in on them.
I’d also like to see more jump opportunities; throw in some ramps so that players can land their cars on top of others, maybe with a special “downward slam” manoeuvre), lets get in a map veto system at some point too. OH, and a flaming guitar pick-up that transforms players into Jason Statham and a magical pony dressed up as Alice Cooper and…and…
I could let myself get distracted forever. I really could.
That’s how much I love car combat as a genre.
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool fan of BBC’s Robot Wars and a mega-apologist for the Paul W. S. Anderson Death Race reboot series for goodness’ sake. I still have my Xbox 360 copy of Blur by Bizarre Creations. I will never relent until I see it on the Xbox Series Backwards Compatibility list and I MEAN IT. I love car combat so much that I’m still playing ‘Onrush’ warts and all, even after the internal studio staff was cut down by Codemasters because the game didn’t sell well enough…and though I’ve spent so long whinging into the text-edit void, I don’t want the same thing to happen with the developers of Destruction AllStars.
I don’t want this shot at one of my favourite game genres slip back into another hibernation as long as the space between now and the last Twisted Metal game in PS3. I want to see this game not just thrive, but to become a franchise in and of itself, up there with the big Sony line-ups old and new. I want to love this game in the way that I know is absolutely possible with all the updates and patches soon to come.
AAA gaming is at its best in my estimation, when I’m blowing stuff up and Destruction AllStars could end up being the best possible outlet for the kind of refreshingly dumb fun that I’ve missed for so long. I don’t want it to be the last.
I want to have fun with car combat again.
(If you’re still here and you made it this far, thanks. ❤)