Andrés Alarcón
Combat\Gameplay Designer
Outer ring
Overview
Outer ring is a MMORPG with shooter and hack and slash elements, set in a futuristic world. This game is being developed in Unreal engine 5.
My focus areas were Weapon design and Combat Design. Were I designed all the current weapons within the game, for which I designed guidelines and pipelines. I also helped defining the pacing of the combat.
I worked on weapons through all stages, including concept, prototype using GAS, final implementation of assets and balancing.
Combat philosophy
For Outer Ring we worked into achieving a middle point between an RPG and a Shooter, doing research analyzing multiple games in the MMO market like World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV, Wildstar and other third person shooters like Fortnite, Gigantic, No Man's Sky.
We decided to create a fun and casual experience for players while trying to improve the simple gameplay that MMO Shooters usually have. For that reason we tried to implement small rotations or combos into the weapons.
By extension of that philosophy we tackled weapons like RPG classes and roles, the main focus was weapon personality, weapons needed to be very different between themselves and have a lot of visual clarity attached to them so players could easily recognize that "class" they had in front of them.
We also wanted to show diegetic UI whenever we could, an example of this was showing the resources of the weapons and updating them in real time in the model.
We treated bullets like resources of a RPG class, and weapons could have different resources like, heat, bullets, clips, or energy. This also enabled us to work on a generic system that we used for all weapons.
Assault Rifle philosophy
The assault rifle(AR) was our first weapon and the idea behind it was to create a simple weapon that appealed to shooter players. It had medium range, some recoil, was fast and provided a classic shooter experience.
One weakness of guns in general is area of effect(AoE), this was an intentional design choice, a weapon that did good AoE had always some type of restriction, it could be it's range (Melee weapons), how inmediate it's damage was (Projectiles) or low single target damage.
For that reason the AR had two abilities that deals small AoE damage, but never good and consistent one. It was a single target weapon.
The Assault Rifle had two abilities.
-Spy bomb: A small grenade with low damage and utility, as it enable the player to see through walls.
-Electro-torrent: A big burst of damage to two targets that dealt double if the target was revelad.
We decided that we only wanted double damage in case the first target was revealed so players needed to take the decision to prioritize targets over just dealing passive damage. Risk/reward was something we always took in mind.
These type of combos were present in all weapons, for example the pistol could detonate early the slow areas if they were shoot with a powershot.
These combos ended up becoming the foundation of all our weapons design, since provided huge moments of satisfaction to the players and tactical choices.