WipEout Future - ship handling

[lunar]

We`ve got threads about almost every other aspect of future WipEout, but as yet we don`t have one dedicated to what is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of the game, the one that underpins the whole lot and makes WipEout a unique driving game experience - handling. It`s the reason people love or hate Pure, usually, and it has to be right. We were talking about all this on Kai last night, I think it`s time for us to say what we want - at least then we can say we tried if the next game doesn`t give us what we hoped for, though I have faith SL will do a terrific job again.

There are mentions of this elsewhere, but I think quite a few of us would regard the decision about how the ships should handle to be the most important one that will have to be made, so it deserves a thread of its own.

This is about the handling/physics, and the mechanics of controlling the ship in Wipeout 6. What can we learn from the latest game in the series, WipEout Pure, about how things should change? Should Wipeout 6 play like Pure, or the older games, more? If so, which one? What should be kept, and what discarded from the handling of the PSP WipEout? Should the game be faster than Pure when it comes to the PS3? Should barrel rolls and sideshift be included next time around? Would anyone like to see the return of hyperthrust? What game model should be followed when you crash into a wall?

This is about the basic piloting experience, how the ship behaves and what you can do with it; not about weapons, tracks, AI, menus, customization, teams, game modes and any "surface" things, however important they are, and they are important. But if the basic handling/piloting experience isn`t satisfying, in a truly WipEout way, then all of these things are irrelevant (remember Fusion).

There are, of course, people who have rejected Pure for reason of the handling. Now that the next WipEout is (probably) in development, it would also be interesting to hear from these people, to see what they think should be done, as well as from the Pure-lovers who are just looking for improvement and refinement, and those who have never played it all. :)

[Mad-Ice]

I have played all the WipEouts on D-pad and two month ago i had my first experience with the NeGcon (It's superb!! Now i have got 4 new WipEouts lol).
Fusion is not a real WipEout experience for me because of the anti floatyness.

The original WipEout is great in handling, only the wall banging come to a complete stop is frustrating.
They solved this in 2097, the best handling so far i think.
Wip3out is cool with Hyperthrust but i rather see barrelroll and sideshift back. WipEout 3 SE has got good handling too.
Pure for me, is the greatest game in all the aspect of handling and looks together with 2097.

[rdmx]

One thing's for certain! Fusion's handling was rubbish!

I've gotten used to sidestepping and everything - I'll be broken hearted if I have to learn the tracks agian with different handling. PurE FTW!

[Shem]

hmm, what I personally would like to see in future wipeout, as far as handling goes ?

a mix between 2097 and w3o. Fusion is out of the game for known reasons, and I haven't played Pure (yet), i can't tell how it feels. The thing is that 2097 had great handling, it was really smooth, but very bouncy. I'd call it 'jelly handling', cause that's how it feels like. There were drawbacks of that handling - bottoming out at lower speeds (very annoying), not much precision. w3o had very precise type of handling, but was lacking the 'jelly' aspect of it, so it didn't feel like 2097. So i guess a mix of these two handlings would be the best option. 2097 handling, almost 'organic' handling if you catch my drift, but with w3o precision. I'd love to fly Qirex with a handling like that (in 2097 it felt wobbly, in w3o it was a literal flying brick).

Oh, and as far as the Original handling goes - i think that W'O"'s handling would be like that in reality if there were jet engined AG crafts.

[Sausehuhn]

Haven't played W'O'' and WO3 yet, so I can't say anything about these. Played WO3:SE though, so I can guess what WO3's handling is like (drop down the floatation).
There's one thing I have to say about all handlings I know so far: every handling has a few good aspects. Yes, even Fusion.
I like 2097 a lot, it simply feels most real to me. Like a real floating ship. WO3:SE was good as well, but often the ship turns up too much at small hills (it floats away) and the bouncing (from side panel to sidepanel) is definetely too heavy. Also bouncing from the track to the ceiling should never come back again. And then there's also "crashing with the front of your ship into the track when it goes uphill". Wah I hate that. It takes away speed and it's no fun to play.
Same goes for 2097 sometimes. Not that often though.
Pure doesn't feel very floaty at all. Ok, you can jump a lot better than you can do in Fusion (as the ship was really glued to the track) and sometimes your ship is swaying, but that's all. I also don't like going up side down as you can lose a whole race with that (it takes important seconds you can't control your ship in and you can just can look at it without the ability to change what happends).
I really don't want to see that again.
hah! Now Fusion!
Hm... what's good here. Not much at all. It's definetely the handling for zone mode. It just fits.
Then I do like the damage simulator that effects the handling. Maybe something to bring back, but most people don't like it as far as I know.

Sooo:
I would like to see a mix between 2097, WO3 without the things I mentioned above. And something new of course (which was also a result of cut out some parts of these handlings).
Then I also would like to see more speed. Pure wasn't fast enough. And maybe the old games aren't as well.
Fusion handling for zone. Or at least something close to that handling.

Barrel Roll and Sideshift? I dunno. Not yet.

[eLhabib]

if you ask me, a middle between purE's handling and w3o's handling would be perfect.

oh and use the PS3-controller's tilt function for the nose pitch (but NOT the steering)

[Dominator]

Has been so long since i played the old installments of WO!!
I did love the handling progression from WO to WO3SE then Pure, Fusion sucked!!
I will leave my faith in SL's capable hands, don't let us down guys;) :D

[Zerow]

I have to admit that I find the handling of 2097 best of all. It feels more accessible than the handling of any of the other WipEout's. And by that, I mean that I managed to get to grips with it quicker than I did with the other games.

Return of 2097 handling? Yes, please! :hyper

[Airrider]

Hey, why not? Take the best and make it better!

[Asayyeah]

That topic is absolutely legitimate. I share your opinion stephen handling is the main thing that could leed to a brilliant or a crappy Wipeout.

My point of view after practising on the whole versions is a mix between 2097 & Pure. I wanna see the wall scraping from 2097 back, the feeling to slide for free the walls without beeing slowed down. I like the floaty thing too but should be balanced like it is in Pure : i really like the difference between each ship with their own weight and how they react due to their mass of inertia.
I like very much the new adds like sideshift & barrel roll and i wd like to have those in the next wipeout.

[andy]

I personally didn't like the barrell roll and sideshifty thing on pure. If it was up to me, I would definately go back to Wip3out. To me it felt so real and very easy to use. I dont like arcade handling or frankly rubbish handling (here's lookin at you fusion!!!). Hyperthrust should come back and ships should be so much faster.

[Rapier Racer]

I’ve gotten very used to Pure now and wouldn’t mind seeing handling similar to that in the next game, it’s been said already but I also don’t like on 3SE when the nose of your ship can smash into a hill on a steep climb no more of that crap please. They should bring pitch control back though and as elhabib said make use of the PS3 controller’s motion sensor, forgot all about that feature actually, I want vibration :mad:

[Wolfen]

On a slight tangent, I've never played Fusion, could someone in the know please elaborate on why/how the handling sucked? Was it too floaty, or not floaty enough?

[Dominator]

Check out *10 things i hate about Fusion* and *The Bugs* both threads in the WipEout Fusion Forum.
Really feel you should play Fusion before forming an opinion, alot of us here don't like the game (me included) but some do!!

In a nutshell though Fusion just didn't look or feel like a WipEout game!!:-

[Hellfire_WZ]

For me, 2097 was the best handling system in the series. It felt so natural, just the right amount of bounce and enough leeway on wall scrapes so as not to constantly stop the flow of the race. Wip3out/SE was just too bouncy for my liking, I remember some of the classic tracks being a bitch to race because of the extreme bottoming-out that frequently wrecked my craft.

[Captain Q]

Yes, but those bouncy bits were often due to track construction, not the way the ships handled, which I think was close to excellent. For me WO3SE had the best handling.

As for Fusion... well, basically the ships felt more like mini-hovercrafts with ditto dodgy handling. The graphics of the game were spectacular though.

[lunar]

Here are my main points to sum up my long post here:

The next wipeout, in my opinion, should have:

- Much faster acceleration
- Less bottoming out
- 2097 style wall-scraping

I think that Pure`s handling, physics and top speed should largely stay, with just a few modifications, because it is user-friendly, which allows casual players to enjoy the game (which in turn makes commercial sense) and also allows a lot of subtlety for enthusiasts like us.

Handling/Flying Sensation

For a big-screen PS3 game, all the ships should feel floatier and be more inclined to take off, like the Goteki and Icaras in Pure, or even more so. To balance against this, the amount of pitch control possible should be suitable to the controller. If we don`t have simple, independent control of left –right/ up-down, like with a Negcon, then this should not be too much of a factor. If a lot of pitch control is necessary for the ships and tracks, but is difficult to achieve with the controller we have, then it would be a potential problem. The amount of float/aerodynamics on Pure Phantom is about right for the control method, though the slower classes could do with more of a flying/floating feeling.

To also help bring back some of the old-school feeling, ships should accelerate faster (which would help reduce the effect of heavy weapons too) and bottom-out less than Pure, with a greater feeling of being cushioned underneath. All the banging on the track surface can get a bit annoying, especially in Zone Mode. Landing off jumps would be much more fun if it was bouncier, rather than hitting the track surface all the time. I love the “wobble” or “swaying” at speed in Pure, such as you get on tracks where the camber throws you off line, like the back straight at Mandrashee Classic, and in lots of other places. One great thing about Pure, which should be preserved, is the fact that there is an almost random element to the handling. Your ship reacts to every gradient in the track surface. The older games were “on rails” at times, by comparison. In Pure you seldom fly the same lap twice, which adds a lot of fun and makes you react. I know a lot of people won`t agree with this, but the fact that you can end up on your roof if you overcook it, in places, is a jolly good thing in my opinion. Witness Arnaud`s amazing somersault on Chenghou (see ingame videos thread). The fact that this sort of thing is possible is fantastic.

Speed

I don`t think another PSP WipEout should be any quicker at top speed, it would just be too difficult for too many people to play. As for PS3, it may be a different matter. :rock

Walls

Walls in Wipeout have to be just right. In the older games, the punishment for a wall hit was so great that it put off “casual” players. You had to achieve something close to ninja skills to really feel like you could play the game properly at all. In Fusion it was sometimes faster to ride the wall around a corner than to be clean, which is against the whole idea of what Wipeout should be, and rewards lazy play. Pure did the best job yet with walls, in my view. The walls in Pure are great because they slow you down just the right amount: enough to punish you, but not enough to frustrate you completely. Unlike in Wipeout 1 to 3, they don`t bring you to a complete stop unless you make a real mess of it, but they almost always slow you down enough to make it very undesirable to hit them. However, if it could be done, I would like to see the return of scraping in something like the 2097 style - this really adds excitement - though not the dreaded turbo-scraping of Wipeout 3, please.

Barrel Rolls

Barrel rolls in Pure are somewhat overdone. There are too many opportunities to do them on some tracks, and sometimes a multiplayer race or TT can be mostly a Barrel-Roll contest, which is fun but slightly ridiculous, in my opinion, as well as not a particularly smooth experience. So I think there should be less Barrel Rolls, generally, either through a longer animation to complete them, or SL should only allow them to work off certain big jumps. To compensate for less Barrel Rolls, the basic speed of a ship without turbos could be a bit quicker.

[eLhabib]

100% agreed.

concerning BRs: how about having certain BR pads at the edge of the bigger jumps, which you have to fly over and then do the barrel roll. So basically the pad activates the BR, and the controller input triggers it.

[lunar]

I think it could work, yes. :beer to that one. But please make the pads nice and big, BRs are hard enough and I`ll probably keep missing them otherwise. ;) That could be a great solution.

[Hellfire_WZ]

Yes, but those bouncy bits were often due to track construction, not the way the ships handled, which I think was close to excellent.

To me the craft actually did feel a lot lighter than in 2097, I frequently found myself having to pull the nose up to stop it from going into a bounce. Also, the classic tracks from 2097 were pretty much identical between the games and the craft in W3O/SE had much more difficulty getting round them than the 2097 craft. I think the handling went from one extreme to the other between two games, too light in W30/SE and too heavy in Fusion. Just in the middle is perfect.

Definitely bring back the gradient effect though, loved the extra dimension it added.

[Sausehuhn]

Don't like the BR-Pad that much as it was making the same result as speed pads in the end. The challenge of a BR is to make it in the right situation, with a good bunch of energy and of course skill (especially in difficult situations).
Adding a pad would kill all these things.
I'm also not sure about BRs yet, but if there're BRs again I'm definitely not for a BR-pad. Add a few more speed pads and delete the BR or just leave it as it is in Pure. That would make more sense.

One thing that - imo - is also a part of the handling is the view. At least I control the ship differently depending on the view.
So give us more views back. I like Fusion's selection a lot.
Even when I now got more or less used to Pure's cockpit view and want to stay there in future there're a lot people out there using different views.
And Pure's outside-cockpit views are definitely placed to high above the ship, which makes the game feel slower and changes your handling.

[lunar]

maybe the BR pad could be a strip right across the track - unmissable. It could contain weapon pads and boost pads within it. In this case it is just to let you know that you can BR in a certain place. Don`t know...... it seems the best idea to get rid of the barrel rolling off molehills that we have at the moment, if there are to be BRs in the next game. It does bug me, sometimes, the way some tracks are just BR - BR - BR - all the way round. As you suggest though Max, they could just make it quicker and do away with them :)

[Lion]

I like that there are red-herring molehills to try to BR off.
in pure there are places where it looks like you can br, but you can't quite make it. or if you hit them with enough speed you can, but otherwise miss out.
such as if you use a turbo up the right hand side of the sharp right hander before the squggles on sebenco climb, you can get sufficient air to fly OVER the squiggly bit, and BR on the way.
same applies on citta nuova, turbo up from the bottom of the last bend in the tight windy bit, you can fly over the chicane and BR before landing in the hard left. it's possible, I've done it a few times, but extremely risky
that incredibly rewarding experience would be entirely lost if a BR activation band was required.

[Sausehuhn]

The problem of turning the BR off is also the shield-absorbing.
With no BRs you just lose energy when hitting the wall or beeing bombed. But most of us make several BRs per lap, which means losing energy.
With BRs turned off you would have a lot more energy per lap/race so the whole absorb-thing would not effect the game that much anymore.
The races were easier and were losing tactic ("should I do a BR or better stay with my energy?").
The Wip3out thrust would bring this tactical effect back if BRs weren't used anymore.
It is more felixible (can be used everywhere) and doesn't need that much skill to use, though.

[lunar]

Good points, and I do mostly agree with what both of you say, because I do enjoy Pure very much.

I`d just like the racing to be a little smoother at times, perhaps, which means faster ships, with better acceleration too, when they are not boosted or have a turbo. A Classic 2 Tour, for example, is just BR - slow down - BR - slow down - BR etc practically all the way. It gets a bit wearing, puts too much emphasis on the special BR move, imo, and also means shield strength is too big a factor. On Porta Kora, for example, you can be out of the race if you take a rocket hit even, not because it slows you down, but because you can`t then do enough BRs to catch up. You could still have shield strategy with BR pads, but it might just all be a bit more balanced.

I think it could be better, but then I wouldn`t be broken-hearted if things stayed as they were either. :)

[Lion]

I've found that if there's too many BR points on a track then the benefit of using them gets negated to some extent.
eg: on vohl sqare I can do 6 or 7 per lap, but I get similar or even better times if I only do 2 or 3
I haven't figured out why that is yet

[Asayyeah]

due to time you waste in the air if you take off too much and also because you may have your nose pitch up for no reason loosing speed again...

The BR is tricky to use perfectly , it's a long knowledge to acquire and we are only at the start of it.

[q_dmc12]

What about those of use who only use d-pad? My controls are lateral all (if not most of) the time.

Woooossshhhhh.........