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Other worms games / So I uninstalled WMD...
« on: January 28, 2018, 12:02 AM »
I eventually couldn't take it anymore and uninstalled WMD from my computer. For anyone considering the game (which I doubt many are), here's a few reasons why:
1. Team17 created a 12-month roadmap of planned updates for the game a year ago. Only a couple of the things ever actually made it into the game. The rest were all just empty promises and Team17 was completely silent about the issue for many months until finally one of the community managers basically said that we shouldn't expect any more updates.
2. W:A, while not as active as it once was, is still active enough most of the time to find a game, so why would I bother playing the inferior one?
3. While WMD does add some interesting gameplay elements such as buildings and weapon emplacements, there's also some game-ruining elements added that I simply cannot stand. Vehicles are cheesy and OP in most cases, but they pale in comparison to the crafting system. Crafting ruins the game and is easily the worst element of WMD. Let me explain:
-you start every match with a certain amount of crafting materials, which is determined in the scheme creation screen. you can pick from "few," "some," or "lots."
-every item in your inventory can be deconstructed to give you a set amount of crafting materials, including any items you pick up from crates
-crafting crates also randomly drop, and the amount of materials in the crates is totally random
-there's a new utility in WMD that is basically a drone. It has a few uses including being able to pick up crates. It is thrown like a grenade and then you steer it using your arrow keys. It does have a limited amount of fuel, but the fuel usage doesnt start until you 'activate' the drone by pressing an arrow key. This means you can chuck one all the way across the map and use the drone to pick up MANY crates in one turn, all without having to use any mobility items like parachutes, jetpacks, ropes, etc. You can just stay in your little hidey hole and spam drones on every turn. Also, the drone is very inexpensive to craft so basically picking up just one crafting crate is likely going to recoup the cost of crafting the drone, thus depriving your opponent of the crate.
-you can craft on every single turn, including your own. You just right click and select the crafting tab. Crafted items are available for use on your next turn. What this means is that you can watch your opponent's turn to see how it is going to end and then craft an item 2 seconds before their turn ends... the perfect item for whatever that situation is. It is unbelievably cheesy and basically acts like a handicap system. Why bother getting good at roping when you can just craft another jetpack? Why get good at making long-range zook or nade shots when you can just craft some "point and click" noob weapon?
I personally don't think that crafting adds any skill or strategy to the game whatsoever. All is does is make it luckier and more unpredictable.
4. There's a glaring lack of scheme and game customization options.
5. There's many weapons and utilities missing from past games that I consider to be essentials. (just from W:A - dragon ball, battle axe, bungee, petrol bomb, skunk, girder starter pack, freeze, mole, etc.)
6. There are so many stupid, OP weapons in the game, and many weapons that are utterly redundant and/or useless... to the point that there's several that I have NEVER seen anyone use online.
7. The rope, while better than games since WWP, is still kinda crappy. The only way you gain momentum from the rope is by pressing up. You can't bounce yourself off of walls/terrain/ceilings/etc to gain speed. In fact, that often deadens your momentum. There's lots of tricks that simply cannot be done in WMD with any of the 3 rope variants.
8. The map randomizer function doesn't seem very random at all, and we lack the ability to quickly edit a map with paintbrush tools. Also, no random girders appear on randomly generated maps.
9. User-created content is mostly garbage.
10. Fire is very weird in WMD. When a barrel explodes, it explodes into globs of fire rather than an even spread. A worm can be not far away from a barrel when it explodes and literally avoid taking any fire damage at all. Also, there's no persistent fire in WMD, so petrol bombs are just a fond memory. (Team17 claimed that persistent fire was causing FPS issues in WMD so they scrapped it.)
11. There is no concept of rules or etiquette at all. Hardly anyone knows what KTL or ABL means, and those that do are an extreme minority either informed of the rules by myself or a handful of other people. Friends will often join game lobbies and work together as a team even though they aren't the same color. Of course, you usually don't realize this until several turns in and by that point they're either completely silent or actively taunting. Also, randoms will often team up together to take out players that they deem threats, or simply just because they annoyed them one time. I might as well wear a bullseye hat in WMD because I get focus fired on in almost every game, and I don't mean just when it is convenient, either... these people will literally kill off their own worms and waste all of their resources to kill you just to troll.
12. The ranking system is flawed, the ranked scheme is flawed, and there's only one ranked scheme, which is the "Pro" scheme. (It's a bit different than in W:A.) Newcomers have 0% chance of ever getting in the top 20 even if they grind all day because they never reset the leaderboards and it basically just comes down to grinding out the most games. There's some people who do nothing but play like 10 ranked games a day every day since the game came out.
13. Starting order is randomized in response to people complaining about first turn advantage. While a lot of people really like this change, I don't... whether that is a 1-on-1 match or a 6-player match. I don't like it because it forces you to pick suboptimal placements. If I *know* that I am going second, I can more wisely select my spawn points... same with going first. When it is randomized you basically just have to play it safe, which I personally don't like but whatever.
14. There is so much mobility in the game. Even though the maps are huge by default W:A standards, it's still really easy to get around because you have teleports, 3 types of ninja ropes, parachute, a combat parachute (that lets you basically ignore wind), jetpacks, jetpack eco (which basically halves fuel consumption), party balloons, plus you can manually activate parachutes at any time... so someone could flagpole up, then activate their chute and float to the other side of the map. On top of that, many vehicles offer a lot of mobility. The helicopter is like an unlimited jetpack. The Rocket League car is fast and can double jump really high. The mech can glide really far. The drillboat can float on water. The only vehicle with shitty mobility options is the tank... but it's a tank and can take loads of damage before blowing up. Mobility is problematic in WMD.
15. Fall damage is very forgiving compared to W:A. You can drop much further than before without taking damage or losing a turn.
16. It's difficult to predict exactly how far away you need to be from an explosion to prevent taking damage. There's like an invisible shockwave that goes beyond the actual bounds of the explosion that damages worms which look like they should be safely far away. The only way to prevent taking damage is to put as much space between your worm and the explosion as possible.
17. Hardly anyone chats, voice or text... in game OR in the global lobby.
18. There's only maybe 6-7 terrain themes. The themes themselves look great, but it gets stale fast.
19. Lots of scheme types simply cannot be played in WMD due to lack of options.
20. The player base is divided between Steam, GOG, XB1, PS4, and Switch. Most days the Steam version of WMD feels about as active as W:A, but it's probably a little more active.
21. Lack of previous gameplay features that were excellent and added nice dimensionality to the game, such as dynamic water, worm classes, physics objects, etc.
blah blah blah
I can go on and on but anyway I just wanted to share some insights. WMD could have been a fantastic game but Team17 dropped the ball once again. I think that casuals and noobs would love WMD, especially for local multiplayer and whatnot, but for serious competition and deep gameplay, it's a stinker.
1. Team17 created a 12-month roadmap of planned updates for the game a year ago. Only a couple of the things ever actually made it into the game. The rest were all just empty promises and Team17 was completely silent about the issue for many months until finally one of the community managers basically said that we shouldn't expect any more updates.
2. W:A, while not as active as it once was, is still active enough most of the time to find a game, so why would I bother playing the inferior one?
3. While WMD does add some interesting gameplay elements such as buildings and weapon emplacements, there's also some game-ruining elements added that I simply cannot stand. Vehicles are cheesy and OP in most cases, but they pale in comparison to the crafting system. Crafting ruins the game and is easily the worst element of WMD. Let me explain:
-you start every match with a certain amount of crafting materials, which is determined in the scheme creation screen. you can pick from "few," "some," or "lots."
-every item in your inventory can be deconstructed to give you a set amount of crafting materials, including any items you pick up from crates
-crafting crates also randomly drop, and the amount of materials in the crates is totally random
-there's a new utility in WMD that is basically a drone. It has a few uses including being able to pick up crates. It is thrown like a grenade and then you steer it using your arrow keys. It does have a limited amount of fuel, but the fuel usage doesnt start until you 'activate' the drone by pressing an arrow key. This means you can chuck one all the way across the map and use the drone to pick up MANY crates in one turn, all without having to use any mobility items like parachutes, jetpacks, ropes, etc. You can just stay in your little hidey hole and spam drones on every turn. Also, the drone is very inexpensive to craft so basically picking up just one crafting crate is likely going to recoup the cost of crafting the drone, thus depriving your opponent of the crate.
-you can craft on every single turn, including your own. You just right click and select the crafting tab. Crafted items are available for use on your next turn. What this means is that you can watch your opponent's turn to see how it is going to end and then craft an item 2 seconds before their turn ends... the perfect item for whatever that situation is. It is unbelievably cheesy and basically acts like a handicap system. Why bother getting good at roping when you can just craft another jetpack? Why get good at making long-range zook or nade shots when you can just craft some "point and click" noob weapon?
I personally don't think that crafting adds any skill or strategy to the game whatsoever. All is does is make it luckier and more unpredictable.
4. There's a glaring lack of scheme and game customization options.
5. There's many weapons and utilities missing from past games that I consider to be essentials. (just from W:A - dragon ball, battle axe, bungee, petrol bomb, skunk, girder starter pack, freeze, mole, etc.)
6. There are so many stupid, OP weapons in the game, and many weapons that are utterly redundant and/or useless... to the point that there's several that I have NEVER seen anyone use online.
7. The rope, while better than games since WWP, is still kinda crappy. The only way you gain momentum from the rope is by pressing up. You can't bounce yourself off of walls/terrain/ceilings/etc to gain speed. In fact, that often deadens your momentum. There's lots of tricks that simply cannot be done in WMD with any of the 3 rope variants.
8. The map randomizer function doesn't seem very random at all, and we lack the ability to quickly edit a map with paintbrush tools. Also, no random girders appear on randomly generated maps.
9. User-created content is mostly garbage.
10. Fire is very weird in WMD. When a barrel explodes, it explodes into globs of fire rather than an even spread. A worm can be not far away from a barrel when it explodes and literally avoid taking any fire damage at all. Also, there's no persistent fire in WMD, so petrol bombs are just a fond memory. (Team17 claimed that persistent fire was causing FPS issues in WMD so they scrapped it.)
11. There is no concept of rules or etiquette at all. Hardly anyone knows what KTL or ABL means, and those that do are an extreme minority either informed of the rules by myself or a handful of other people. Friends will often join game lobbies and work together as a team even though they aren't the same color. Of course, you usually don't realize this until several turns in and by that point they're either completely silent or actively taunting. Also, randoms will often team up together to take out players that they deem threats, or simply just because they annoyed them one time. I might as well wear a bullseye hat in WMD because I get focus fired on in almost every game, and I don't mean just when it is convenient, either... these people will literally kill off their own worms and waste all of their resources to kill you just to troll.
12. The ranking system is flawed, the ranked scheme is flawed, and there's only one ranked scheme, which is the "Pro" scheme. (It's a bit different than in W:A.) Newcomers have 0% chance of ever getting in the top 20 even if they grind all day because they never reset the leaderboards and it basically just comes down to grinding out the most games. There's some people who do nothing but play like 10 ranked games a day every day since the game came out.
13. Starting order is randomized in response to people complaining about first turn advantage. While a lot of people really like this change, I don't... whether that is a 1-on-1 match or a 6-player match. I don't like it because it forces you to pick suboptimal placements. If I *know* that I am going second, I can more wisely select my spawn points... same with going first. When it is randomized you basically just have to play it safe, which I personally don't like but whatever.
14. There is so much mobility in the game. Even though the maps are huge by default W:A standards, it's still really easy to get around because you have teleports, 3 types of ninja ropes, parachute, a combat parachute (that lets you basically ignore wind), jetpacks, jetpack eco (which basically halves fuel consumption), party balloons, plus you can manually activate parachutes at any time... so someone could flagpole up, then activate their chute and float to the other side of the map. On top of that, many vehicles offer a lot of mobility. The helicopter is like an unlimited jetpack. The Rocket League car is fast and can double jump really high. The mech can glide really far. The drillboat can float on water. The only vehicle with shitty mobility options is the tank... but it's a tank and can take loads of damage before blowing up. Mobility is problematic in WMD.
15. Fall damage is very forgiving compared to W:A. You can drop much further than before without taking damage or losing a turn.
16. It's difficult to predict exactly how far away you need to be from an explosion to prevent taking damage. There's like an invisible shockwave that goes beyond the actual bounds of the explosion that damages worms which look like they should be safely far away. The only way to prevent taking damage is to put as much space between your worm and the explosion as possible.
17. Hardly anyone chats, voice or text... in game OR in the global lobby.
18. There's only maybe 6-7 terrain themes. The themes themselves look great, but it gets stale fast.
19. Lots of scheme types simply cannot be played in WMD due to lack of options.
20. The player base is divided between Steam, GOG, XB1, PS4, and Switch. Most days the Steam version of WMD feels about as active as W:A, but it's probably a little more active.
21. Lack of previous gameplay features that were excellent and added nice dimensionality to the game, such as dynamic water, worm classes, physics objects, etc.
blah blah blah
I can go on and on but anyway I just wanted to share some insights. WMD could have been a fantastic game but Team17 dropped the ball once again. I think that casuals and noobs would love WMD, especially for local multiplayer and whatnot, but for serious competition and deep gameplay, it's a stinker.