Soldat's goals for the future

[DutchFlame]

Im sure players stay longer if the game doesn't fail for example you kill a guy, but oh wait he did not die. ragequit uninstall.
but nothings going to happen by just talking about this.

everyone knows what issues needs to be adressed and it just need to be done or not.

[Clawbug]

There is not a single online game which wouldn't suffer from this "hit a guy and he just does not die", it's been happening ever since Quake days up until now in state-of-the-art competitive games such as CS: GO, although it's  far more obvious and common issue in Soldat. As it has been mentioned before, the next release is supposed to remedy this. Whether it's notable is another question, yet it's still progress for the better.

It's definitely a problem though, there's no doubt about that. But as I've mentioned many times before, it's up to the devs to create content and up to the community to create outreach. It's not the task of the devs to bring in new people, they simply don't have time or interest for it. For example the beta team could do something about this, submit the news of new versions to Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, .... Open topics about Soldat on local gaming forums/websites/communities, do guerilla marketing in other games/steam/xfire even just by changing their nickname to www.soldat.pl(souds like a stretch, probably more effort than it's worth) or something. Whatever gets attention to Soldat can't be bad. But personally I don't see lack of popularity as an issue which you fix overnight; constant effort has to be put into it to make Soldat known and more popular again.

[PsychoHUN]

Back to intros for a little, I think it should be remade completely, and instead of one guy massacring others' with minigun, the intro should show how much faces this game can have. What I mean is putting a nuke strike from TTW, or a guy awarding a serial kill with chainsaw from a zombie server, even some map perviews (ofc the nice looking ones), or just a simple CTF match in the intro.
(and ofc to every fottage we could write out the server's name, so they know what is it)
This would show the newcomers how good this game can be, and I think if they try some of these modes, they will get addicted to (if not all) them. And it would also bring some popularity to less popular modes, its a nice 'advertising' in-game.

About ESC-ing the intro, well, I think it should be like first time you start up the game, the intro should be played but not ESC-able.
Then you can turn it off in the config, or press ESC.

[Clawbug]

(and ofc to every fottage we could write out the server's name, so they know what is it)

This is very problematic because the game modes or the footage should not be tied to any particular server at all. The obvious problem is that what if the server is down/otherwise unreachable(high ping, always empty/full, ...) and such "adverts" would definitely favor the servers in question.

While I understand that for most new players Soldat is more about sitting in bushes like a silent sniper, calling in an airstrike and then ordering your team to rush in to the enemy base, ... for us older players Soldat is more about running and gunning the guts out of our enemies in a split second, pulling off the triplekills and multikills before returning the flag and carrying our flag back to the base. It creates problems with the focus of the game. New players want more tactical, slower-paced gameplay with big maps and emphasis on teamwork like in BF3, while older players want smaller maps, faster gameplay like in Quake series of games.

It's very hard to balance between the two, thus far TW/TTW community has been a huge minority, but frankly I could easily see it becoming bigger than the casual Soldat DM/CTF community, if support from Soldat devs is provided(make TTW an official gamemode with official maps and integrate many of the scripts used as gamemode features). The demand for TW/TTW is far higher than demand for causual CTF games in public. As a regular classic CTF/DM player I hate to admit this, and I believe it's one of the sources of problems Soldat is facing. Players are very distributed among servers and subgamemodes, there are more people playing Zombie/dodgeball/TTW/climb/Hide & seek/whatever than there are people playing the classic CTF/DM. The subgamemodes have taken over the classic Soldat game modes in publics. This is definitely a concern for the future, I believe.

About ESC-ing the intro, well, I think it should be like first time you start up the game, the intro should be played but not ESC-able.
Then you can turn it off in the config, or press ESC.

I think this is a bad idea. There's nothing as irritaring than having to watch an intro when you just simply want to try out the game. The path from clicking the Soldat.exe shortcut on the desktop to spawning in a server should be made as short, simple and straightforward as possible. This means ESC-able intro(if intro at all!) and very straightforward GUI(perhaps just a simple "Instant game" button which redirects to the most populated DM/CTF server with lowest ping).

[Clawbug]

I am not a TW/TTW player myself, so I have no clue about which servers I've recently played on, there has been at least one NA and one European server during the past week on which I've played with a handful of other players.

There have been numerous suggestions to make TW/TTW an official gamemode for the game. Many new players have mentioned that they only play TW/TTW, but there aren't servers around for that. Infact, I think the whole TW/TTW community is mainly formed of newer players(1.4+, thats around when TW became a cool thing). Of course I haven't got any actual proof to back up my claims, as they're mostly based on what I've perceived when trying to find actually sane(no bonuses, normal maps, no bots, no wm, ...) DM/CTF servers to play on.

I firmly believe that the classic DM/CTF isn't as attractive to new players as it used to be for the old players. Perhaps this is because there weren't alternaives back then though.

[Shoozza]

I just had this idea which validates the work on a linux and mac port.
Imagine soldat getting on the humble indie bundle.
That would certainly add new players.

[Ymies]

making some of the inofficial game modes official does sound like a damn good idea

[homerofgods]

If we want a better demo playing as the intro, we either have to get auto-updater so that people have time to get some good demos on the current version. Or we could convert an awsum old demo to the new version.
By the way, I'm in the making of a short soldat movie right now, I have also been thinking about making an 'official soldat trailer' but I don't want to do it alone.

[Wes]

Dang guys.. I haven't played in a year but I love soldat so much I just had to come here and see what's up. The idea of remaking the graphics or updating them is extremely attractive to me. I think it would make the game much more accessible. The GUI as well could be changed. I agree basically, that the gameplay has always been 10/10, Soldat is it's own genre for god's sake! Even small updates such as new maps make this game refreshing for me to play, a major change in graphics would be outstanding.

[eeneku]

We also need more maps for casual players. I do think they prefer large maps over small maps, which are maybe too fast paced and where more competetive players tend to beat the shit out of everyone. You die in seconds. Also I do not like the trend where some loveably large maps have been shrinked to so small shit (ctf_Run, ctf_Ruins) or removed from the existence (ctf_Crashed). I want them back!

But since the main community mainly runs along with SCTFL, all of this is fairly understandable. Why make a map if its never going to be played by anyone because it doesn't fit in SCTFL?

PS. There is no regret in this post. None whatsoever.

[Wolfskin]

 I wouldn't say that maps which don't fit in SCTFL aren't going to be played by anyone. B2b for example is rather rarely picked in clanwars but pretty popular on publics

[eeneku]

I think at least some map makers think like that. If one is in the clan scene, why would he make a large map that good majority of people he knows don't want to play? Also most maps I've played in soldat.modding have been very small and fast paced.

[ginn]

AsDeEspada decides what maps gets in, afaik he doesn't care much about SCTFL.