The game already kinda plays like that with the spawn systems in place. Both KF1 and KF2 do. That's kind of a thing with horde games in general: the spawns play by some randomization rule.** But randomized enemy spawn types don't necessarily make the game unwinnable by chance, although that can be a contributing factor, though that is more due to badly designed enemy types (QP spam) than the idea itself being bad.
What I'm referring to is reducing KF2's tendency to spawn entire clusters of monsters five feet from where players can currently be, not so much the spawn pool itself. The spawning system in general lies at the heart of the game's meta tendencies. When spawns can cut players off during any sort of kite by random chance via spawning five feet around the corner and bodyblocking players, good players will just play the game by shooting well and not bothering to kite: why run circles and leave your success up to chance when you could just kill everything and basically guarantee success if your aim is competent?
(By the way, this is the exact same frustration players expressed when Scrakes and Fleshpounds could teleport if you broke line of sight with them for too long: there's no point in trying to reposition because the Scrake would be around the next corner ready to Dark Souls your face off.)
From a simplicity perspective, fixing
that part of the game at a backend point would be a more ideal solution than the stuff you've proposed in your OP (randomized status effects?, even more dynamic difficulty on top of the preexisting randomization, etc.). I say this because based off what's been in KF2, I don't see those proposed ideas doing anything but making the game more appealing to spam perks and Zerk/Med stacking, i.e. stuff the current KF2 and future installments need a lot less of. They don't mesh with how the game functions at a base level. Allow me to provide some examples:
- Spawn intensity levels directly dictated by the players' actions
- KF2's Game Conductor already handles this to a point. The very long story short is that chaos teams and uncoordinated players get punished less by the rubberbanding of the Game Conductor than headshot teams, and headshot teams are already harder to play in the first place. It needs to be reworked for future installments.
- Random objectives
- The part about side objectives/quests is what gets my goat here, because given KF2's track record with that, it would only stack the deck further in favor of spam-oriented teams.
- As an example: let's say the spawn intensity gets harder if you refuse to do the Stand Your Ground objective in a wave:
- Most of those are suicide except for Zerkwalling teams because they are randomly assigned to spots in the map that, frankly speaking, no team with any sense would try to camp.
- So you don't do a SYG because it's in a bad spot and nothing besides a dedicated Zerk/Med/Firebug/Demo wall would have a reasonable shot at surviving the spot.
- Whoops, you didn't do the bad spot SYG and the game penalizes you by bumping the difficulty up a whole other difficulty level on top of missing out on the SYG rewards. Game randomly decided to punish you.
- The stuff like "seal the vents or the next round gets areas filled with poison gas that hurts you over time" comes across as a variant of this: if you don't do objectives like, say, repairing fuse boxes in the Airship level, you get punished by having zones that will kill the players in the following round(s).
- If the fuse boxes are in a really bad part of the map, you're faced with a situation: try to repair the boxes and possibly get killed, or get punished the next round by risking your holdout zone now be lethal. If your holdout zone is bad, you have to pick a worse spot (also possibly lethal) or risk kiting on a map that is absolutely not friendly to it (ditto). Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
- I could see potential in this but it would have to be given lots of deliberate attention so that it's not completely frustrating.
- Which leads me to my next point of yours:
- Randomly assigning players debilitating status effects
- Bad aim? As in inhibiting your ability to do the one thing this game is based around (shoot stuff good)?
- How would you even implement this in a manner that didn't feel completely frustrating? The one thing you're supposed to do in these games is shoot Zeds. You don't win a round until everything dies.
- Why punish precision players even more than the game already does by periodically rendering them completely useless? If your team's one Sharpshooter or Commando gets the "uncontrollable recoil and massive spread" debuff, guess what: they are now dead weight. Literally and metaphorically.
- Why make status effects that can be ignored by certain classes in the first place? Firebug gets punished with increased spread and recoil? Too bad they can just shoot the floor and not care.
- Crying
- Why?
- Why?!
- Is this supposed to serve a mechanical purpose something? Or just because? Weird.
- Scrake-inflicted "panic"
- So a Scrake hits you and disables your ability to do anything other than run away?
- Again: how would you make this not completely frustrating?
- Especially from the legendary perspective of "Firebug lights up Scrake, Scrake takes out its frustrations on the local Medic, Medic is now useless and can only run for five seconds"?
I also don't see how these would solve camping (assuming that camping is a problem to solve in the first place; one can of course interpret camping as an expression of skill that forces players to hone their mechanical abilities, as opposed to kiting that tends to ignore that aspect of the game).
Really, the best way to fix a lot of KF2's problems would be to bring things closer to how KF1 handled it: make the spawns manageable but lethal. Rework Fleshpounds so that they are manageable but punish misplays, rather than a random force of nature. Ditto with Scrakes: make them a threat again so that they're lethal if handled poorly, but also maybe not spawning five feet from players.
I don't see the need to bring status effects and CC that gets inflicted on players. This isn't Overwatch and I'd rather not deal with that.
**The only horde game I've played in recent memory (and this is an admittedly very loose interpretation of "horde game") that relies less on randomization for enemy waves is Team Fortress 2's Mann Vs Machine mode, which relies primarily on premeditated spawns and mixes in random counter force waves (Sentry Busters, spies, snipers) based on what the player team is doing to force players to mix up strategies from time to time. This could be a separate mode from the standard Survival wave mode, but given neither mainline Killing Floor entry has worked like this, it would probably have to be limited to a seasonal thing where new wave setups are introduced periodically; make them harder than the standard game but keep them consistent so players can formulate a working strategy.
I'm still trying to figure out what you mean by "adrenaline drugs" are you saying that you can administer these drugs into the syringe.
What I
think OP is getting at is an option to replace the health injector syringe with a cure-all that undoes negative status effects and/or gives beneficial statuses if there is nothing negative effecting the player when it is used. But as far as I'm concerned, as I mentioned above, that's bringing in a whole slew of mechanics that KF doesn't really need.
The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is how Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 handled adrenaline: you have a counter of 100 that needs to be filled, either by picking up pills around the map or by by accomplishing objectives (kills, capturing objectives, etc.). When you hit 100 adrenaline, you can input key combinations to burn the meter for different effects that last a limited amount of time:
- Booster (regen health and shield above normal values, but slowly over time to encourage players to pick their battles wisely)
- Invisibility (pretty obvious)
- Berserk (higher RoF on your weapons)
- Speed (pretty obvious)
But UT works a little differently in movement and other mechanics from KF2, so you couldn't quite do the same thing. It's not the worst idea?
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