So I'm guessing everyone knows what a hero shooter is, but if not, it's something like Team Fortress or Overwatch, where players play heroes with unique abilities rather than the standardised shooter character in something like Halo.

So I had an idea (that I won't go into too much detail on, for your sake and mine) for a hero shooter with the idea that rather than pre-set heroes, people would make their own.

The idea is that when they wanted to make a new hero, they'd pick a class-type thing (as otherwise any semblance of team composition would be impossible) which would limit the equipment they could choose from based on role, and then they could choose from weapons, abilities, passive abilities, set things like health and speed (obviously there'd need to be some form of point system to balance it), and also decide the name and the appearance (using a character creation system, obviously).

Does it sound like a good idea at all? Like, obviously it would have issues (would need a lot of testing, people find ways to abuse create

able things) but I think it sounds like a cool idea. Am I just blowing smoke out of my arse?

It's a question of balance. What makes a hero shooter work, imho, is that it allows a high degree of competitiveness and strategy and skill mastery, which relies on expert balance. This can be very difficult, even with 10-20 heroes. When you have an open system like the one you're proprosing, you're essentially going to try and balance hundreds of different heroes, some with very similar builds. That would be pretty frikking awesome if you could pull it off, but otherwise, just as you learn to abandon strategies in a Hero Shooter, you may need to learn to abandon characters in an unbalance Hero Shooter, which isn't very fun when you've invested a lot of creativity into one.

You also rob the players of stepping into a personality, but having to create their own, and if those created personalities aren't as vivid and interesting as those of other Hero Shooters, the freedom won't seem as compelling to those who are playing alongside and against them.

So, it's a high bar to clear, on top of the normal challenges in creating a hero shooter, but if you could pull it off, that'd be pretty sweet.

It's a question of balance. What makes a hero shooter work, imho, is that it allows a high degree of competitiveness and strategy and skill mastery, which relies on expert balance. This can be very difficult, even with 10-20 heroes. When you have an open system like the one you're proprosing, you're essentially going to try and balance hundreds of different heroes, some with very similar builds. That would be pretty frikking awesome if you could pull it off, but otherwise, just as you learn to abandon strategies in a Hero Shooter, you may need to learn to abandon characters in an unbalance Hero Shooter, which isn't very fun when you've invested a lot of creativity into one.

You also rob the players of stepping into a personality, but having to create their own, and if those created personalities aren't as vivid and interesting as those of other Hero Shooters, the freedom won't seem as compelling to those who are playing alongside and against them.

So, it's a high bar to clear, on top of the normal challenges in creating a hero shooter, but if you could pull it off, that'd be pretty sweet.

Yeah, the balance is something I'd have nightmares over if I got a team together to make this. Now, if I could get the team, I'd more than love to make a regular hero shooter, I just thought this was a good twist in the formula people would enjoy. But yeah, it'd be hard if this did get made

Optimized killers?

This sounds like fun for me which means it is a bad idea. Just imagine a group of guys completely optimized to perfectly irritate any unfortunate soul they come across. If you were to attempt this I suggest you keep everything in very limited scope else otherwise spawn point killing might become a thing.

Balancing powerups, rather than characters, might be better. Standard characters could defeat "monsters" or each other to loot something useful, diverting time and resources from fighting enemies, with a steady rise of power during a game.

If different characters profit differently (and in different ways, and through different methods) from picking up weapons and items, they can become as varied as custom built characters, but the advantages are transient and negative feedback mechanisms to "punish" temporarily overpowered characters can be a welcome challenge.

Improvising given a set of items would be another additional challenge compared to ossified custom character optimization.

It's also very hard for you to quickly access your teammates and enemies. A lot of the strategy is understanding what you are up against and react accordingly. That blue sniper guy? You know how he works and how to not be pwned by his ulti. You learn how to face each hero. But if each enemy you encounter will have a hidden set of abilities (and ulti!) as well as a random appearance, what will you do? Also, players will create strange looking heroes just to confuse and annoy.

Jump into a new match: again all enemies could be anything. Have any combination of abilities and appearance. It will just feel random and frustrating.

Seems impossible to get this down well. The initial idea sounds fun of course, but i fear it's not very doable, unfortunately.

^That's an even better point. The amount of freedom and complexity int he character creation system directly translates to how 'readable' the battlefield is.

I did plan a sort of solution to that.

Rather than just total freedom, the characters would be one of a group of classes, so at least team composition would be doable (as it could tell you if you needed more healers or tanks or whatever), but yeah, reading the enemy would be an issue