Bazz Overview
Bazz is a flanker who specializes in stalking and assassinating her opponents. She is at her most lethal when she closes the distance between her and the enemy. Her Scourge Stars projectiles amplify the amount of damage an enemy takes and her Lunging Strike is a melee attack that deals massive burst damage. She is challenged to get close to her opponents while managing her relatively low health pool. She must approach strategically by positioning herself close to lone or weak opponents, knowing when to whittle down an opponent's health before charging in to attack, and utilizing the movement abilities to keep her out of harm's way.
My Responsibilities for this Character:
Establish Gameplay Fantasy to base the kit around
Brainstorm with design team on a kit composition that will fulfill the gameplay fantasy
Create playable prototype
Translate feedback into actionable iteration steps
Drive playtest feedback around specific kit questions trying to be answered
Come up with a plan for what gameplay feedback is needed to properly surface kit mechanics
Collberated with supporting content teams to ensure clear gameplay that supports fantasy goals
Balance Kit
Polish game feel
Create kit Variants used for monetization
Kit Breakdown
Beacon Blade
Bazz is equipped with a small set of throwing knives. Her knives are medium range, hit scan, and deal a moderate amount of damage. On hit, they also allow Bazz to see enemies through walls for a short amount of time.
Gameplay Goals
Allow Bazz to pepper down the health of a target from afar. This puts pressure on enemies to retreat for health which gives Bazz an opportunity to chase down an isolated low health opponent.
Have her primary become an important part of her melee combos to alleviate melee spam and push more precision skill onto the kit. Generally melee in Concord pushes opponents back to try and reset engagement distances to cut down on melee spam and promote gunplay. This is also true for Bazz’s melee and Lunging Strike. The damage combo of Scourge Star > Lunging Strike > Melee leaves just enough health to finish off an opponent with a well placed throwing knife.
Implementation Challenges
Creating believable throwing knife game feel.
We initially tried to not make this hit scan and go for a slower moving projectile. However due to the close range that Bazz thrives in and her high mobility, it made slow moving projectiles extremely hard to land without diminishing the precision requirements of the weapon. When faced with turning knives into hit scan projectiles or giving them a generous amount of homing, we chose to lean into precision. After playtests it was clear that precision hits added a ton to the Knife Expert fantasy due to the levels of mastery it promoted from the player.
The throwing knife is the only weapon with a slight delay between the input to when the projectile is actually produced. This is to give the throwing animation a few frames to set up a throw that looks like it is producing the power of the projectile velocity.
Incorporating the idea of ‘reloading’ with throwing knives.
Reloading is an important mechanic in shooters because it pushes the player to utilize other abilities when dealing with opponents. We knew this is something we wanted to preserve despite having a knife-centric character. We opted to add tech that would allow Bazz to hold a bundle of knives in her left hand. This allows us to present a ‘magazine’ to the player that justifies the need to reload.
Scourge Star
Scourge Stars are projectiles that inflict an enemy with Vulnerability. This status effect amplifies the amount of damage an enemy takes from any opponent. Bazz can carry up to 3, allowing her to stack Vulnerability to strategically take down opponents.
Gameplay Goals
As a flanker Bazz should be able to take on any opponent in a 1v1 fight. By stacking Vulnerability, Scourge Star empowers Bazz to take on high health opponents with her melee combos.
Scourge Stars also allow Bazz to set focus-fire targets when in a team fight. She may seek out the highest health enemy and stack Vulnerability on them from afar. This allows her team to efficiently burn down their health.
Implementation Challenges
Balancing the effectiveness of the Vulnerability against low and high health opponents.
We didn’t want Vulnerability to be so effective that it would allow Bazz to dominate with her melee abilities alone. This creates unpleasant melee spam for opponents and diminishes the feeling of being a Knife Expert with precision-based skills. We needed to hit a sweet spot where it would create the opportunity for high-burst damage that could be used in combinations with throwing her knife.
Character health ranges in Concord can range from 170 for our small characters to 750 for our large characters, if you account for their defensive passives. I wanted the amount of Scourge Stars used to make a meaningful difference for how easy it is to take down various health tiers and what combos you can rely on. For example, our squishiest characters (170HP), Bazz can take them down with her melee combo without using her Scourge Star, while our more formidable opponents (250HP) take 2 stacks, her melee combo, and 1 shots with her primary. Our largest characters (750HP) have the biggest differential with 3 stacks, her melee combo and 6 headshots. This certainly is not as efficient as other matchups but for good reason. We want to respect the toughness of large characters since they are often focus-fired by the team. It drives a sense of caution with how Bazz approaches that fits nicely with trying to keep her out of stomp range. All Large characters in Concord have a Stomp. Stomps do massive amount of damage and could easily kill a Bazz going in for her melee combo. Bazz needs to hang back and whittle down their health before using her melee combo as a finisher or utilize her team to help burn through their health.
Lunging Strike
Lunging Strike is a melee attack that deals massive burst damage to opponents. Bazz lunges a short distance towards the enemy to strike, allowing her to strike before entering into an opponents melee range.
Gameplay Goals
Fulfill one of the most potent fantasies for a knife themed character, a lethal stab.
Give Bazz a satisfying way to capitalize on her Vulnerability debuff.
Establish Bazz as a dominating force in Melee in an effort to fulfill her power fantasy.
Implementation Challenges
Conveying the strike range of two separate melees.
In Concord all base melee’s have a small lunge distance to help sell the impact of a punch. We have UI indicators around the reticle to signal the player that they are in melee range of an opponent. Adding another melee to the kit with a different range meant needing to clearly distinguish to the player the two different ranges. We had planned to add an additional UI indicator around the reticle for Lunging Strike, along with a full screen VFX treatment, but this was postponed due to budgetary reasons.
Keeping track of an opponent after the melee lunge.
A common problem Bazz was experiencing is after using her Swift Strike she was losing sight of the enemy. A solution our design team came up with was to slightly nudge the attackers camera towards the target after a melee was completed. This is a subtle movement meant to indicate what direction their opponent might be in if they are offscreen. More aggressive movement could cause confusion for the player. The enemy player’s camera is also nudged towards the attacker after they have been hit.
Triple Dodge
Bazz’s Triple Dodge is an essential tool for her survivability. It gives her a high degree of mobility that can be strategically utilized to evade danger.
Gameplay Goals
Allow Bazz to be highly mobile mid combat.
Acts as an effective tool to retreat from a fight.
Implementation Challenges
Making dodge an effective tool of evasion against weapon fire.
Dodging in front of an enemy at close range was not as effective at getting the player out of danger as we wanted. Players were still taking enough damage to obfuscate if dodging was the correct thing to do. Our design team decided to buff dodges in general by scaling down aim assist targeting players who are dodging. This gave the player the leverage they needed to dodge a majority of the fire.
Slide Jump
When Bazz is sliding she can preform an extra high jump. This is a great mobility tool with a lot of creativity in how it can be utilized. Its primary function is giving Bazz an evasive way to close on enemies.
Gameplay Goals
Give Bazz an evasive movement ability that she can use to close the distance between her and the enemy.
Hide the sound of your foot steps as you get within striking distance of an opponent.
Double as a tool to flee combat. Can be used to jump over characters or as an evasive tool to make you hard to hit while you retreat.
Implementation Challenges
Budgetary restrictions made it so this ability would not require any extra lift from supporting teams.
To keep this a light weight ability we could not have too big of a delta change from the normal slide jump. Significant changes would cause supporting teams to have to provide additional layers of feedback.
I worked with animation to make her sliding pose imply the affordance of special jump without adding extra work for their team.