Now that we've gotten dretch pounce in, I'm in love with it. The style feels like it fits the dretch perfectly. It seriously enhances the play style of the dretch while allowing it to deal with several situations that formerly screwed it over, and at last I feel like the dretch is finally a match for the rifle in terms of usefulness.
The question is, what other sorts of movement would we like to play with? I feel that movement, and potentially movement-based attacks should be an integral part of the alien team. There's just something so bland about standard melee attacks. What is interesting about walking up to somebody and holding down your mouse button a few times? New types of movement would not only enhance the alien play experience from a stylistic viewpoint, but would also be more friendly to new players while allowing for greater diversity in play style. It would present new uses for aliens that were not previously possible.
Take, for instance, the dretch. Before, the dretch was limited to hiding in shadows and carefully sneaking up on players. If you were spotted or made the mistake of going down a long hallway, you were instantly dead. Nothing was going to save you from being shot at, unless you had the benefit of cover to run into. This made gameplay extremely frustrating for new players. I myself can confess to avoiding aliens for a while when I first began Tremulous, and I know I'm not the only one. Everyone wants to play humans when they start out, but I feel that new movement types can be what we've been searching for all these months. With the dretch pounce, you now have not only a means of quickly leaping into safety, but a way to trip up human opponents by rapidly moving around, and even over them. The lethality of the dretch has not been altered, but its survivability has been improved drastically. I am very interested in seeing what this turns into as we continue our gameplay modifications.
Now, let's consider other alien forms. I feel that the two best alien forms are probably the marauder and the dragoon, at least from a design standpoint. In terms of gameplay, they feel very complete. Both of them can survive and deal great amounts of damage, but why? Look at their special movement types. The marauder can effortlessly jump around walls and make it exceedingly difficult to hit with most weapons, while the dragoon can leap over pretty much anything and rapidly close gaps with its pounce. At the same time, let's consider the other two aliens we haven't mentioned so far, the basilisk and the tyrant. Both of them have been plagued by gameplay issues for a long time. The basilisk is considered one of the more difficult forms to play as, while the tyrant has been subjected to nerfing that has removed much of the fun of playing it. Granted, the tyrant trample was possibly overpowered in the past, but I feel that a strong trample is kind of the point. It's meant to break up crowds of weak humans. Take that out, and it just turns into a walking sack of hit points with a strong but boring melee attack. Trample takes too long to charge up to escape from any meaningful close-range combat.
While we revise the gameplay roles of the basilisk and tyrant, let's factor movement into our considerations. What can we give them? Or, if they already have a special type of movement, how can we alter it to be more useful? Perhaps we can swap it out with something else? Also, think of the two other aliens, the granger and the vulture. Obviously, the vulture is entirely new territory, considering it did not exist in Tremulous. What we do with it remains to be seen.
