Vale Overview
Vale is a highly mobile sniper that utilizes tech to rapidly change position and sightlines. Along with her sniper rifle and sidearm, Vale is equipped with trip mines and bionic legs that enable her to leap several meters in the air. She has a passive that increases her reload speed on headshots and another that lets her see low health enemies through walls. With good precision and clever positioning, she can dominate long range combat while keeping her flank protected.
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
Monarch Long 52 Sniper Rifle
The Monarch Sniper is a bolt action rifle. With one bullet to work with at a time and a long reload, it is crucial that Vale is highly accurate to be effective on the battle field. Utilizing her mobile abilities she is challenged to hunt down players and land multiple deadly blows on them to take them down.
In Concord, we didn't want any weapon to be able to one shot players. This is because of how jarring and frustrating it can be on the receiving end. Vale needs to land at least two shots with her primary to kill most opponents. This creates a strong sense of bloodlust as you are anticipating landing your second shot. It also allows for the one shot fantasy to still come through if Vale is capitalizing off damage done by her teammates.
Gameplay Goals
Dominating in long range combat
Make the player feel highly accurate while executing mobility abilities
Two shot kills
Implementation Challenges
Instill fear of being stalked by a sniper despite not being able to one shot
To fulfill the fantasy of being a sniper, it is important that other players fear your high damage output. They should feel like they have to be mindful of the snipers positioning, and know that they are a threat that can not be left unattended. To help build this fear in Vale, we gave her the Critical Eye passive that lets her see low health enemies through walls. This gave weakened enemies a sense of fear that Vale might pop around any corner at any moment.
Convey that the sniper does not have good accuracy when firing from hip
Many games allow snipers to fire accurately from the hip. In Concord, we didn’t want to go this route so we could keep our weapon archetypes feeling as crisp and distinct from each other as possible. In order to convey to the player that they shouldn’t expect accuracy we relied on the hip reticle and animations. The hip reticle is not a tool used for accuracy, there is no part of the design that lets you accurately line up a head shot. Instead it is designed so the player know how they are orientated with the ground. The jog and sprint animations also help convey this by not having Vale carry her weapon in the ready position. Originally vale ran with the sniper facing straight froward, but we changed it so it was pointing down towards her side. This made it so if Vale shot suddenly while sprinting, she would quickly move her gun to face forward. Creating the sense of a more wild shot.
Monarch Sidearm
The Monarch Sidearm is designed to deal with opponents at close quarters. The pistol has a high rate of fire and does moderate damage. This leaves it as a good back up weapon when finishing off enemies at close range or dealing with flankers.
Gameplay Goals
Give Vale a close quarters weapon she can use when the sniper rifle is too difficult to aim
Moderate damage output.
High-rate of fire
Implementation Challenges
Finding a balance between art team explorations and gameplay clarity
Concept Art was excited to explore a pistol design with a magazine that loads in front of the trigger. Though there is a precedent for pistols to load this way, we were finding that it made the gun read like an SMG in the early explorations. This was made worse by how Vale was holding her gun, where she had one hand on the grip and the other around the magazine. Gameplay, Art, and Animation worked closely together and aligned on the solution of minimizing the size of the magazine and having both of Vale’s hands around the grip. This allowed the familiar body language of holding a pistol to inform the object in her hand.
Leap
Vale uses Bionic legs to shoot herself into the air and gain vertical sightlines on opponents. Leap also helps Vale to traverse the map quickly, take special routes, and reach locations other players can’t.
Gameplay Goals
Give Vale a way to gain the positional advantage she needs to set up sniper shots
Game feel that conveys the thrust of bionic legs shooting the player into the air and the impact from landing
Implementation Challenges
Figuring out how to incorporate another jump ability into our movement model
In Concord’s movement model, most characters have a jump and a double jump. Which mean depending on how Vale executes her leap, it is possible to gain different heights based on if she utilizes both her jumps first. This became a question on if we should ensure she always gains the same amount of height regardless of if she used her other jumps, or if we should reward player expression and allow them to build the biggest jump possible. The big win to standardizing the height of leap was making it really understandable for what is needed to do to get to higher locations on the map. If I saw a sniper nest, I knew all I had to do was leap up towards it and I would make it. Without the standardization, it would take the player a failure or two to understand they needed to use their other jumps first. Despite this, we ended up going for the non-standardized jumps and leaned into the player expression of being able to build up bigger jumps. I really liked what this did for the player when they looked at the map; it gave the sensation of looking at things like a playground. This encourages the players to think creatively about how they could utilize various parts of the map to build up the biggest leap as they can.
Trip mine
The Trip Mine is a deadly explosive that Vale can plant in the environment. It waits for enemies to walk in front of it and detonates immediately. Depending on the angle, Vale is looking when she plants the explosive, it will orientate itself differently. If she is standing on a sniper perch looking down, it will be perpendicular to its attachment point. If Vale is looking up as she throws it, the orientation will face towards her. This allows her to use Trip Mines above doorways, tilting them down to catch any opponent running through.
Gameplay Goals
Give Vale a trap she can use to protect her flank
Create a projectile that is efficient at area control
Encourage creativity by placing Trip Mines at different angles
Implementation Challenges
Creating space for the feedback that the Trip Mine is about to explode with out allowing opponents to escape
When an opponent walks into a Trip Mine, there is a quick beeping sound that happens as the Trip Mine arms. This creates a clear moment for the opponent to recognize their mistake and fear the impending explosion. This was a critical piece of feedback we wanted to preserve. However, it was causing issues where players would be able to sprint through the base of the Trip Mine trigger and take more minimal falloff damage. To remedy this, I made the explosion slightly bigger than the trigger and lessened the amount of falloff damage. Making it so our fastest characters would not be able to sprint through without taking serious damage.
Discourage players from using a Trip Mine like they would a frag grenade
During the early prototypes of the Trip Mine, if you threw one directly at an enemy it would attach to them. If you threw one at the ground in front of you it would tilt forward, creating a horizontal trap that was much easier to catch enemies in. Both of these qualities incentivized players to think about trip mines in the same way they would a frag grenade. We wanted to discourage players from precisely throwing them at enemies. Instead, we want players to build the skill of considering the environment and how it could be used in conjunction with their mines. By making it so Trip Mines bounced off opponents and planted perpendicularly when thrown at the floor, the Trip Mine was better able to distinguish itself amongst the other grenades. This pushed players to use it for area control instead of a direct damage dealer.
PEak Performance
Peak Performance is a passive that gives Vale a stacking Handling bonus when she gets a head shot, allowing her to reload her next shot faster. This passive is meant to be an expression of Vale’s focus narrowing on her enemy as she is moments away from finishing the fight. This aligns nicely with the two shot to kill nature of the sniper, giving Vale plenty of opportunity to quickly close in on her enemies.
Gameplay Goals
Re-enforce the power of head shots in a world where one does not automatically kill an opponent
Give players a palpable feeling of being on a headshot hot streak. This was especially important for a sniper character since landing headshots is such an important part of the fantasy
Implementation Challenges
Scaling the reload animation to be nearly twice as fast without losing animation integrity
When Vale first had this perk, we only had one version of her reload animation. This animation was about a second long, making it difficult to speed up without losing readability. As Design and Animation came together to look into the issue, it began to shed light on a more global problem. Given the sandbox nature of our game, any character could experience a high amount of Handling buffs and get into a similar issue with their reload readability. It became clear to our Animation team that we would need an additional perk reload animation for all characters. This animation was quicker and designed to be scaled up by the maximum amount of Handling stacks the player could have.
Critical Eye
Critical Eye allows Vale to Track low-health enemies through walls. This passives triggers for enemies, regardless of if she did damage to them or not. It allows Vale to instill the fear of being hunted down into her opponents. Tracked enemies will remain visible until they heal or are eliminated.
Gameplay Goals
Ensure Vale has an ominous presence despite not being able to one shot kill her opponents
Give Vale enough information to make an informed decision about if and how she can track down her opponents to deal the killing blow
Implementation Challenges
Giving Vale the power of knowing where enemies are without weakening the anticipation of the hunt
When we first gave this passive to Vale, she used to be able to track enemies through the wall the entire time the effect was active. We started getting feedback that this was actually diminishing the stalking fantasy because it made it too predictable for when enemies were about to turn a corner. The passive was feeling too powerful in a way that made it feel cheap. We updated the effect to work on a loop. The enemy will be visible through the wall, then the effect turns off for a few seconds before flipping back on. This gives Vale a lot of information about where an enemy is going, while still building moments of anticipation for when the player will appear around the corner.