Coop Missions - Revive or Respawn

[weaponsfree 46]

In making coop missions for the public, I'm wondering what the comunity prefers in terms of getting back into the fight : Revive or Respawn.

I'm not asking about permadeath since I prefer to always have an option to keep playing when with friends.

[gstoetti94 4]

Revive - your team has to work together to find a way to get you back to life. Not always that easy (during a firefight) but much more rewarding
​Respawn is the "easy way" in my oppinion and should only be used if for instance all Players died

[weaponsfree 46]

For revive, bleedout time... 60 seconds too difficult?

[fn_Quiksilver 1633]

Revive/Incapacitation opens up interesting gameplay moments where your buddy goes down and you have to protect them or get them to medical support.

 

Respawn = none of these experiences

[domokun 515]

What would be brilliant, is if the mission designer offered mission hosters a choice via a drop-down menu, e.g.

 

Player death

Realistic: permanent death (once killed, characters stay dead, stone, cold dead)

Semi-realistic: revive (characters can revive critically injured victims but only within a limited period) <== the host should be able to define this either via pre-defined suggestions (30/60/90 secs) or user-defined value (max 1000?)

Arcade: respawn (dead characters return because their will to fight is stronger than death itself)

[Freghar 73]

I've seen some missions use a dual approach of stabilization (before BIS revive was implemented). One would have to stabilize the dying person (~200secs) and that would give the others unlimited time to find a medic with medkit to revive them. Alternatively, the player could respawn (on a nearby point / vehicle), but the respawns were limited per mission.

Overall, this is the best (as in most fun/challenging) implementation I've seen in Arma and most of the time, we were actually just 2 people playing (one of us medic) and it still worked out great, so it scales well.

(At one point, I left the medkit in some crate and, after stabilizing, would embark on a 20-minute journey of looking for it, hehe, fun times.)

[Goro 21]

Definetely Revive. It brings fear, tears, and makes Rage Mode automatically switch to ON. Especially if the respawn if disabled, then it brings immersive gameplay.

 

What would be brilliant, is if the mission designer offered mission hosters a choice via a drop-down menu, e.g.

 

Player death

Realistic: permanent death (once killed, characters stay dead, stone, cold dead)

Semi-realistic: revive (characters can revive critically injured victims but only within a limited period) <== the host should be able to define this either via pre-defined suggestions (30/60/90 secs) or user-defined value (max 1000?)

Arcade: respawn (dead characters return because their will to fight is stronger than death itself)

I agree with Domokun on that. Semi-realistic is the most suitable for Arma.

[weaponsfree 46]

Pretty unanimous. My public missions will be keeping Revive. Although my buddies tend to be of the Battlefield tribe, so for personal matches I use respawn.

[bad benson 1733]

i feel like the choice is not that binary.

 

i personally prefer a mix of both like in l4d. so you can be revived but if you bleed out you spectate. but once your team "unlocks" the next checkpoint you respawn. that is how i did it in a mission i'm working on and it worked great when testing so far.

i use my own systems but i think BIS spectate also supports 1st/3rd person only spectating. i prefer the latter over the free camera. kind of cool to watch your team mates try to complete the objective and rooting for them hoping to get respawned.

 

there's a lot of variations and combinations possible. i feel like it depends a lot on overall pacing of the mission. if dying/specating means you are being inactive for atleast 30 minutes then it doesn't make much sense to me personally. i launch a game to actually play it. i get the hardcore approach too and i used to prefer that but these days i feel stuff needs to be well paced and crisp so no one feels like they are wasting their time. it's either a general age thing or just me having racked up too many hours on foot since ofp. :lol: i always get frustrated when it's very obvious that i'm only walking due to bad mission design.

 

also the last thing you want when making something for the general public is a system that makes randos insta quit, when they die because it's not transparent about how long they might have to wait and if they will ever get back into the action and stuff like that. arma itself is notoriously bad at communicating these things and so are many missions.

 

i was also thinking about having the option of doing recon with a drone or similar things as a spectator so you can be a little active while waiting.