Taking something from a completely different context, If you think about GTA 4 e.g., there you don't have checkpoints on the missions, and if you fail, you restart by spawning at a hospital or police station depending on how you failed, and getting back to the mission takes some time, you can even choose another mission if you want some variety. That's perfectly viable system, and I don't remember getting my blood pressure exceptionally high because of it. I just knew that the next time I get back to the mission, I'm going to try something different. There was no option to start using an AI controlled friendly once Nico would be wounded, and even if it would've been made to work with the story, I don't think it would've needed such feature.

Obviously, this discussion won't go anywhere by taking several successful games and trying to prove something with the system they use.

It comes down to the feel of the game rather than how convenient something is. Stuff can be always made more convenient but it isn't always for the better, at some point it starts to fight against the feel of the game that was supposed to be delivered. It's the same thing that happens with cheats. Sure you can have a lot of fun with cheats, but while using them the game isn't quite what it was made to be. I remember playing Civilization with money cheat when I was a kid, and it was fun as I won every time. Nowadays I like losing too.

Back to the point, if you can just continue fighting the war with multiple guys in your team, it detaches from the single soldier perspective. Taking this perspective to the extreme would mean that you can't respawn in the game at all, you truly have one life and one soldier, now that would be hard. Actually, if that could be somehow made to work as a normal game, so that you could actually beat the game with ever controlling only one soldier, and it wouldn't need any fake solutions in single player or cooperative, that would be something I could change the game into.

M&B does it so that you can't die, you get wounded, and the enemy sometimes captures you as a prisoner or you manage to flee after the battle losing your horse and whatnot. I could dig something like that in RWR too. Even if it would mean letting go the current die-or-don't damage system, I might still consider it. Or, if not for RWR, maybe for a spin off project after RWR..

Cannon fodder is a completely different case in my opinion, there you control the whole team all the time and the fellow AI is just dumbed down to shoot if they see an enemy. It was fun, one of my favorites, but copying ideas from Cannon fodder to RWR might be the worst idea ever. There you don't really move around a single soldier (although you can do that by splitting a single soldier out from the team A), you move around the whole team. This is not the case with RWR. If you think that, you've got the wrong impression.

Btw, there's a new Cannon fodder also out there, it was released this year I think. Anyone tried it?

Replying to myself here, but it's good to have all the ideas out there.

Call of duty single player uses the checkpoint system, which is pretty much the same as an automated quick save/load allowed by a lot of games out there.

It would be really easy to add such a feature on RWR. When you die, you could just choose to re-play the situation by loading back to your last save, instead of starting over. It would also work in the lines of single soldier perspective. I personally think it's quite close to cheating, I used to play Doom 2 with a lot of quick save/load as I just wanted to play it at too hard difficulty level.

Jason9mm, this would pretty much solve your problem of running from the base and my idea of controlling a fresh soldier each time.

The only problem here is that it won't work well with online.

Anyhow, I really think the base positioning is the key to solving this problem. If you think about PvP adversary team match, the same running-from-base issue is there and there are no AI soldiers which you could possess even if it would be possible.

Yep, the GTA4 comparison is pretty far out there, as it's a fundamentally different game. It's character centric and story centric, and I see none of neither aspect in RWR so far. Also GTA4 has a very slow pace compared to RWR, plus wildly more complex interaction all across the board (so throwing the player way back after dying is not an issue, as the player gets to do fun stuff immediately after respawn anyway, it just may not be the exact same stuff that lead to his death. In RWR, there is only one "stuff", and it's good.)

I also see were definitely looking at this very differently. For me, in any war game, characters are fundamentally trivial. War waits for no man. Especially when dealing with lowly footsoldiers. Cannon Fodder got it exactly right, right down to the name. Soldiers are just cannon fodder, and a dozen of them dies in a blink of an eye. I find it very silly that nearly all "war" games center on some epic story how a single soldier not only heroically participates in a dozen key battles, and just so happens that this same guy also is the deciding factor in every single battle. This has absolutely nothing to do with war whatsoever, it's a Hollywood power fantasy. Not a fan of those (although I do appreciate a dramatic story as much as anyone).

Therefore, an autosave solution would be one of the last things I'd try. True, it would make the game flow much better, but it'd throw away the classic concept of very mortal soldiers as far as the player is concerned. No, I think soldiers should drop like flies, like they do now, and after they're gone they should stay gone. Whoever runs out of soldiers first loses (... locally, in this case). Besides, quicksaves have always been a dirty hack to make lazily designed games tolerable to the player

Yep. If you haven't noticed, they also allow you to continue instead of restarting, if there's something about restarting that you don't find pleasing It's just a cheat, like it would be if soldier swap would be allowed in RWR.

Actually, it's funny that you find running back to the attack zone boring, as when I'm running there, I'm all excited "Fast, fast, go go go! We already got that side breaking in, there's an opening now" and I see others running there too, I'll join them, and in a couple of seconds we are fighting off the enemy flankers and reinforcements or arriving to the main zone. That seems to be a very different way of viewing the little pause that happens after you get killed. Well, maybe I'm just a little crazy myself. The only exception being here the West Trench - Center Trench line, it's just too much and hard to move even due to trenches.

The whole premise of RWR is being a single measly private, dying is a fundamental part of it, and it would break if soldier swap would be introduced (cheating!). The game is a sandbox game yes, but in gaming that means non-linearity and free roam areas. It doesn't mean literally that the game works exactly like a children's sandbox where you control everything.

The way I see it, there is only on source of fun in RWR, and it's the combat. Removing the player (prematurely) from the source of fun just doesn't seem right to me.

Sometimes the travel back to action is short enough to not be a big issue, it even sort of works as a tension creator and contrast provider. But to me, there's way too much periods of a few minutes when you die, travel 10-20 seconds, die again from the very first shot fired, travel again 10-20 seconds, get to spend 3 seconds shooting one enemy, then die again, and back to traveling you go. Just a few unfortunate incidences like this makes you travel for minutes and fight for seconds. It's an absolutely horrible ratio. Sure, one could argue that the player should advance more carefully, but in effect that means more slowly, which only works to make the travel time even longer.

How about spawning the player at the attack staging area? This would make the staging area a sort of checkpoint, and it'd be another reason for the player to start the attacks from a staging area. As far as I can tell, the staging areas are always closer to the action than the next base? There's even a military analogy to this, every attack must have at least a little reserve to stand a chance of succeeding.

Another minor help might be if the player was given the control of a previously spawned soldier who has already run part of the distance from spawn base to staging area or combat.

I still don't see why the player must the measly private furthest away from the action, as there are other identical measly privates closer to it (...controlled by the AI, which has no ability to enjoy the action, nor ability to get bored by the travel)

20 seconds is too much, and it's less than that in some places and it's supposed to be less everywhere, but the map isn't finished yet.

It sounds to me that you may be playing the game a little too arcade-y if you get such a ratio of fighting and moving, so you are probably just running around guns ablazing - no wonder you get killed often. I know it's probably useless to try teaching anyone to play the game, they just won't listen, but: when you get to a block with a battle, the first thing you need to do is listen to the sounds where the battle is going on and then take cover instantly. Work your way from there to shooting distance and stay cover as much as possible. Also don't hesitate to use suppressing fire, the AI does flee away from it. Don't act like you are the big hero here, be humble.

Also, don't hesitate to lower the AI accuracy, if it's too much. I mean, I play with -1 usually.

Spawning to the attack start point or changing to a soldier there doesn't make it less cheating, and besides, it anyway wouldn't change anything when you die while defending a base, so it sounds like a bad design idea to me really. Most probably, there are guys at the attack start point yes, those are the reinforcements that have been traveling there from nearby bases, like you should when you respawn at a base.

Also, if the soldier swap would exist, you'd have to apply all sorts of hacks when changing the soldier as you have a rank. Rank currently affects only the amount of AI followers, but there's pressure to expand it on being able to carry more grenades, having new weapons and other abilities. Now if you'd change to a soldier that has a higher rank, what would happen? Would he drop the extra grenades that your rank doesn't allow? Would he throw the weapon away and you'd only have a knife as you haven't got the training for the weapon? Sounds to me this REALLY isn't the way to go.

No, you'd only switch to a equal or lower rank soldier. This would be an automatic consequence of you being able to switch only to the squad following you. And only when the squad is wiped out you'd be forced on the walk of boredom. (and if you retreat to wait for reinforcements before your squad is wiped out, there'd be no walk of boredom at all, except when moving on to another location)

I see zero difference in the "cheat" aspect if you'd be spawned closer to the action. Spawning is the cheat, the location where it happens is just convenience (or lack of it).

My playstyle is somewhat aggressive, but not to the extent it seems to dictate how things play out (especially regarding time spent travelling). I frequently die from a single shot fired from some edge of the screen milliseconds after coming into range of an enemy I haven't even seen yet. Sometimes I die because missing my first two shots and the AI doesn't when returning fire. This seems to happen pretty much as easily whether I have the cover advantage or not. Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is something that would be best investigated automatically. For future tuning needs it might be worth the trouble to enable some statistics about how long the player spends with no enemies on screen, how many kills the player makes per spawn, how long intervals there is between the player firing, how many shots are taken at the player before he dies and so on.

Why only within the squad? Why should you be able to control that only? Why leave it there if you've already come so far as to being able to change into a soldier in your team in the first place? If you can change the soldier, there's no point in keeping the single soldier perspective anymore, so you might as well change to any soldier at any location at any time. This is why the suggestion is against the whole game idea. It also wouldn't work at all if you formed the team with human players only, so it's a useless feature really. Good as a cheat or debug tool, but not much more.

It's like playing EA Sports NHL or FIFA with normal settings (you control the whole team, switch to any player) versus Be a Pro. The fundamental difference here is that people get killed, so you need to start with a fresh soldier after you die in my way of RWR, not someone who has been used by another player/bot. Fresh soldier is someone who has arrived to the area in the game as a new recruit, someone returning after completion of special training, returning from vacation, whatever, use your own imagination.

Sure, this system means that you aren't always there when the battle ends, but you don't really have to be there. Battles go on without you, that's a fact of the game. It isn't like this is something new, in M&B you may have participated in a big multi-team battle on a single spot and at some point lost the battle, became wounded, and the allies would keep on fighting without you. You did your part as well as you could and took away many enemies with you, and the outcome of it was that the battle was won. The moment of battle victory isn't even anything special really, there's one man against many in most cases. The joy of playing comes from something else than being there when the area is declared yours, you need to see a bigger picture. I see nothing wrong with this.

Also in M&B, you can't really jump into action right after you lost, as you are still severely wounded. You need to do something else for a while, go find reinforcements to your team and heal, instead of taking control of your healthy companion hero and split from the main group and continue fighting immediately. I think this is important for the pace of that particular game. Respawning in a base in RWR works for the same goal, the pace, in addition to other obvious reasons that support the game idea.

I don't want to end up maintaining a plethora of modes, one allowing quick save/load, the other allowing soldier change, etc.. and all possible combinations of those as it's a lot of work and needs a lot of testing.

Having said that, actually, I might've thought of something that could fit in to the game idea, and still allow you to find yourself closer to the attack area after you've died, but I haven't yet thought of how to balance it to work with the rest of the game without creating too much advantage making use of it too frequently.

Parachutes. After you've been killed, you would have the option to jump off a plane (as a fresh soldier, maybe with bunch of other soldiers) to somewhere in close vicinity of the attack zone. This would ruin the game if you could use it constantly, so something needs to be done to limit it. A 30 second time limit or something wouldn't help your (Jason9mm) particular agenda much, now would it? Anyway, that's just a rough unfinished idea for someone to elaborate on.

Of course, the enemy AI would use it as well within the rules that has been set for the players as well.

I could also see this having a connection to the Airport base, if tactical bases concept would be applied with this.

For plenty of reasons:

1. It would be a reward for earning a high rank. Higher the rank, bigger the squad, the more "lives" you'd have.
2. Your squad is yours to command, other people's squads are theirs to command. A rifleman squad is, after all, supposed to fight as a unit towards the squad's common objective.
3. Monitoring the number of men left in your squad would be a natural throttle control on how big risks you'd feel comfortable taking. If you've got 7 guys left, why not attempt that risky flanking manouver and potentially win the fight? If you'd have just two, maybe it's better to focus on survival for a while. After all, taking risks and reaping the rewards if all goes well is a central part of any adversarial game's attraction, and currently there's never really a situation where you'd have any reason to assume you're in a good position to take even a little bigger risk than at any other time.
4. If the control switching isn't limited to the player's controlled squad, it would likely lead to conflicts (like some other player losing a member of his squad to someone else's control because he wasted his squad).
5. If the player was able to control every character near a battle, he would be able to get them all killed. Some players would do so, and that might be giving a single player too much (negative) influence potential for his side.

There could be more reasons, but these are the ones that I can think of right away. Though, since the idea clearly isn't in vogue and we don't even agree that there is an issue to be fixed in the first place, the reasons are quite irrelevant

I also still fail to see what's the difference in the player controlling guy A or guy B. Both are identical faceless grunts, both are just as fresh from where-ever, both get killed just as easily, both are respawned just the same... The only difference is that the guy A would be where the action is and the guy B is some distance away. The only difference is location, and to me the only entertaining location is where bullets are flying.