Freighttrain wrote: ↑Fri Aug 06, 2021 3:38 am
Thank you GM Custom, yes it looks like about that, though I suppose we will just have to twiddle thumbs until someone over there notices the demand for a realistic
Gundam game.
Because it really depends on what you call realistic.
Very little general players will like highly realistic games like the Orbiter simulator. I don't even know how popular the game Kerbal Space Program outside of the physics/astronomy community has.(there are kids who enjoy playing it, but I don't see it going into top games range of popularity)
Most of the general public Gundam fans are basically looking for a cool, fast, easy to learn fighting game with their favourite mecha in it. They want to experience what the pilots in the anime do.
If you have anything semi-realistic about it, you will end up having mainly gun fights with beams going at speeds faster than most players can react since you can still see the beams in anime, I guess we won't go into the Sentinel description of a few ten thousand kilometres range of realism, but consider 08th MS's GM Sniper beam does hit a Zanzibar at least a few km high and rising with less than a second delay, no one should be able to dodge sniper rounds.
You might be able to go for Char's way of dodging, if the game intentionally made the MS move slow(for example, PS2's Zeonic Front and PS3's target in sight) but a lot of your standard players will complain about it(just like a lot did in those two games), and if you stick with the settings, you likely will have no way of hitting Gundam with a Zaku, and still no way to dodge the beam rifle, which will loose you a lot of Zeon fans as players.
On the other hand, sticking to the settings will make the Dom VERY overpowered in an open field if you have any reasonable help in aiming. Gundam's top land speed is 205km/h, Dom's top speed is 380km/h. At these speed difference, you really don't stand a chance. Not to mention Dom's method of movement is hovering, Gundam is running. So the terrain is going to have more influence in Gundam's speed, while Dom will be more stable and easier to stay at top speed. Most of the current games don't have that problem because they never let the Dom go that fast AND you don't have a field that big.(Most likely due to resource concerns, they don't want to use that much processing power and memory for the map, instead of having any idea of reducing the effectiveness of the Dom.)
If you ignore the specs and just do whatever seems to be intuitionally realistic to standard players with a fairly large base of people who will buy the games, you basically get what we have now. Yes, it is not realistic, but it suits what the general public wants. Considering how every time they did it a little bit more realistic you ended up with less sales, they won't be jumping into the realistic route too far..
So, in summary.
For Orbiter class realism, you won't earn money out of it.
For KSP class realism, you might get a cult follow. Not really worth your development money if you pay for the license of Gundam and only make a half decent graphics and claim heavy game out of it.
For specs class realism, it might be worse because people either can't dodge or can't hit. You will have one or maybe two MS extremely overpowered, and people will have no way of winning with other machines, rendering your player base even worse than maybe KSP class.(and likely more claims)