Patchwork Solution to Poor Stage Design

[OnePotWonder]

The more games of Anarchy Battle I play, the more snowballs and lockouts I'm forced to endure, the more I believe in this one idea.

The stages in Splatoon 3 do not favor defenders whatsoever. The average stage leaves each team with a only tiny strip of turf over a ledge that enemies are physically unable to reach. Some stages don't even have that, and let enemies go wherever they please. Even if enemies don't push up that far, there are no useful routes for the defending team to use to flank. Nearly every spawn area in the game has multiple ledges that players are required to drop off of, and ledges in general favor players camping beneath them. Spawn camps across most of Splatoon 3 are as bad as the worst spawn camping maps from previous games, because players spawning in literally can't go anywhere, while the attacking team can go virtually, or in some cases literally everywhere.

Fixing this overarching issue of stage design is impossible at this point. The developers would have to change nearly every stage in the game, massively extending spawn regions or moving objective goals further away from each team's spawn, removing ramps that let attackers push up to the enemy spawn or replacing them with defending sponges. The fixes won't happen. They will likely never happen.

So, we're left with the need for alternatives, and the only alternative that will definitely work to resolve this issue is the simplest one available: Handicap the attacking team, and give benefits to the defending team.

Spawn armor is completely unbreakable​

This change is obvious enough. Spawn armor is pathetically weak. Even if it's an advantage, attacking players can easily beat spawn armored defenders with their own advantage of the ledges in each team's spawn. Not to mention that the armor can be pierced by special weapons like Trizooka, Ink Vac, and Reefslider. Spawn armor being completely unbreakable means players that just spawn in are guaranteed to win any fights the enemies try to take in their spawn unless they're able to wait it out. But that alone isn't enough. Not nearly.

While the team with the lead is in control of the objective* (or a team is in Danger in Turf War):

The leading team loses 65% of their special gauge when splatted​

The other team loses 35% of their special gauge when splatted​

The leading team cannot activate special weapons​

*This does not apply until the first checkpoint has been cleared in Tower Control and Rainmaker

​

This change is what I most desire to happen in Splatoon 3, after invincible spawn armor. A team that is definitively winning should not be able to use special weapons. Too many times I've had to deal with Inkjets, Ultra Stamps, Trizookas, Crab Tanks, Big Bubblers, Triple Inkstrikes, Triple Splashdowns, Reefsliders, Ink Vacs, Zipcasters, and Kraken Royales while already barely scraping together a defense in a spawn area comparable to a sinking ship. My team certainly doesn't have specials. So why can the other team, the winning team, use theirs? No justifiable reason. Don't even try.

With these fixes in play, the game would feel infinitely better. Spawn camping on the whole would be dead in the water. Pushing would be more difficult and require more advantages. Choke points would actually do their jobs, limiting progress until a team decisively wins a fight, and not just serving as a barrier that requires specials to break through. Failed pushes would be punishing, giving the other team more room with which they can still use their specials while counter-pushing. Winning in the moment comes at a cost.

Feel free to discuss these changes if you want. They may sound mad, but I'm certain they'll grow on you.
Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful day.

 

[sevenleaf]

i’m not sure yet if i agree with all your proposals but i do desperately want to see them in action. what kind of strategy would come about, especially in higher-level comp, if being in the lead came with such heavy disadvantages?

 

[DzNutsKong]

Not often I comment on these kinds of threads but I like a lot of what you have here and feel the need to make an important note.

Spawn armor is completely unbreakable​

While the team with the lead is in control of the objective* (or a team is in Danger in Turf War):

The leading team loses 65% of their special gauge when splatted​

The other team loses 35% of their special gauge when splatted​

This much I was completely on board with. Splatoon is known for being pretty snowbally and this would be a pretty big help in mitigating that, or at least gives enough promise of that for it to be something I'd want to try out. Makes the gap in map control not have quite as bad of consequences and allows the losing team to play to an important part of the game faster and the winning team to play to it slower. Plus spawn armor being breakable was kinda not great in general. However...

The leading team cannot activate special weapons

...this I'm not a fan of. It technically could help games end up more even but not in a way that would make the game more fun in practice. Kits in Splatoon are already a lot more limited than in other games and making players feel even more restricted for winning the game would straight up feel lame to have to play around, especially since there's literally nothing the winning players could reasonably do to let them use their specials again.

Technically the winning side could end up dangling the objective juuuuust below whatever point would make them lose their specials but that sounds so much less engaging for the attacking side. The special gauge depletion changes already work towards the exact same goal that this would. Maybe you could also give a slight nudge for special charge instead of (or in addition to) depletion to guarantee that the effects come into place.

You mention game feel in this so it's important to mention that "comeback mechanics" are a common trope in especially newer fighting games that I immediately thought of when going through this thread. I'm not the most invested in fighting games but even I can tell you that they have a horrible reputation there and need to be handled very carefully. An improperly-handled one can make it feel worse to be in winning situations, can make certain points of a game (the start, for example) feel less important by default, or can lead to some losses that feel undeserved. I could see locking a winning team out of specials feeling like any of these three in practice, especially the first.

Big reason I bring this up is that something I've noticed pretty consistently is that the subtler a comeback mechanic's effect is, the better-received it will be. The special depletion stuff would fit this bill while truly feeling more like levelling the playing field than giving the losing team a straight-up advantage. It'd let losing players comparatively do more with the lesser parts of the stage they can safely access. As long as it's not to the degree that the entire losing team is constantly spouting out specials from all four team members the whole time or something like that it'd be great.

So tl;dr, just remove the last bullet point and this thread's suggestions are good.

 

[youre_a_squib_now]

I would say more, but deez made a lot of my points already (better than I would have) so this will be short.

I like the idea of giving the leading team more special depletion and the not-leading team less. Being killed in your spawn means that you only have 25% of your special (ignoring special saver) even if it was fully charged beforehand; you lost half from the death you're respawning from, and half of what was left from dying again. So charging your special is nearly impossible, especially without any sort of spawn protection after the armor is gone. This change makes that much less of an issue, without making anything feel more unfair for either side.

What I very much do not like is restricting special usage entirely. That puts the attacking team at such an extreme disadvantage that it would very likely be a viable strategy to, in many situations, intentionally not push simply to avoid being in the lead. It should never be advantageous to take less space. At worst, you have a situation where neither team wants to attempt to succeed at the game because the other team will get an advantage and immediately take the lead back (or maybe they wouldn't because even that would put them at a disadvantage). At best, failed pushes will be punished much more than no push at all, which encourages not playing the game until you're absolutely sure you're going to win. Winning in the moment should only come at a cost if the cost doesn't exceed the benefit of winning; otherwise there's no reason to win in the moment at all.

However, thinking about this gave me my own idea. Thread coming soon, maybe.

 

[OnePotWonder]

The complete removal of special usage could in fact be a big issue, you bring up solid points that I did consider, but ultimately ignored because the post was already long and I couldn't exactly tack a pros and cons argument onto the post itself without it getting ridiculous. I do think you shouldn't be able to use specials deep in enemy territory, though.

If I find the time, I'll eventually make a thread marking out "home turf" zones on each map where enemies wouldn't be able use their specials or super jump to teammates. Definitely a big project that will have to wait until after I'm finished with my finals.

 

[Smash Arena]

The stages in this game feel like they were made with the developers at gunpoint, because I don't see a method of rational thinking to design stages in such a asinine way. specially after the great stages of Splatoon 1 and 2! Not to mention neutering or outright butchering stages like Flounder Heights or Hammerhead Bridge when it would have likely been easier on the development load to just recycle8 their Splatoon 1 designs with some minor changes.

As for your suggestions, I agree with the spawn armor and special gauge changes, but definitely not the part about preventing the leading time from activating specials. I think that is taking it too far and overcomplicates the game flow. A counter-suggestion I would give is potentially giving the defending team some extra Ability Points in abilities like Sub Defense Up and Ink Resistance Up to increase their survivability in a disadvantaged situation.

 

[Cephalobro]

Alongside what Smash Arena said, I think that the losing team should also have it so their special gauge depletes less depending on how far they are losing, the more a team is losing, the less the special gauge depletes after a splat, this gives them the chance to push back against the winning team without forcing a devastating disadvantage on the winning team, as for the special gauge change for the winning team, they don't need one as the losing team having special gauge advantage already takes care of it.

 

[OnePotWonder]

You know what? No. I'm bringing this back up.

If you are winning a game of whatever and have control of the objective, you do not need to be able to use specials. Especially when said specials are all ridiculously overpowered by design.
Trying to cap a zone when an enemy can just maintain it with Tri-Strike feels infinitely worse than not being able to cheese said zone as the player on the winning team. Being able to push with Big Bubbler on Tower Control when you already have the lead is unnecessary and feels terrible to fight. Same with pushing ahead of the Rainmaker with Ultra Stamp or Kraken or protecting it with Vac. Same with using Trizooka or Inkjet in literally any mode or scenario.
If you take control of the objective while you have the lead, you should not be able to use special weapons until you lose control of it.

The main reason I bring this back up is because I figured out a way to expand on the idea to remove some of the problems. Make it only apply to pushes started while a team has the lead, and not when a team gains the lead during a push. That way decisive pushes aren't hindered, but trying to gain more points while in the lead is signficantly more difficult (as it should be).

Until we have a game where the maps are actually decent (by which I mean significantly larger, and with 10% of the map being spawn area inaccessible to the enemy team for each team) this fix would make the game significantly less of a headache to play.

For now, I'm going to compile a list of routes into enemy spawns on various maps I would outright remove.
Have a wonderful day!