Recently it was pointed out to me that you can see all the infected on the radar as a survivor, and it’s been kinda dampening my experience with Virus lately for two reasons.
First, it just feels unnecessarily overpowered, you no longer have to be aware of your surroundings because you can just check the radar for anything within a pretty big radius.
Second, staring at a radar is just a lot less fun, I wanna be focused on the actual stuff on my screen. It’s like playing an open world game and navigating only via the minimap. Plus I find it a lot funner, and makes me feel smarter, looking for the green light zombies emit to prevent ambushes rather than looking at the radar.
Lately when I’ve played Virus I often find myself trying to divert my eyes from the radar so I can try to enjoy the game to the fullest, but it’s kinda been difficult to enjoy it lately especially since now I can be pretty certain the survivors top scoring are probably abusing the radar.
Survivors are already kinda overpowered but to me it always felt like that was sorta the fun of it, trying to ambush and outsmart people, but it really feels impossible to do that when theres a minimap telling the survivors where every infected is.
Personally, I think the radar should only show survivors where other players are, and maybe show the red dots only when they’re the last survivor. I think this would make a lot of sense, considering survivors can already see teammates through walls but not infected, while infected can see both through walls. But that’s just my personal solution, I just felt it was important enough to bring up the problem because it really has made Virus less fun lately despite it being one of my favorites.
Hmm… I would argue the radar is a rather key component to a fast-paced arena shooter like Virus. Due to the speeds everyone moves at there are many situations where it would be impractical to constantly spin around and make sure a path is clear. Even with the radar there are quite a few situations where even veteran players will struggle to keep an eye on it due to how relatively small it is.
Ultimately there’s an element of needing to practice and learn how to read the radar while still keeping a close eye on your screen. And with practice it can be incorporated into strategy, like knowing that an infected is running in a certain direction so you can have a plasma alt-fire charged and ready with their green glow showing when they’re about to come around the corner.
I’d say the key problem you might be seeing actually stems from problems with infected balance as a whole. Since currently the situational awareness provided by the radar allows for 1 or 2 infected to be hunted like dogs due to broader game balance issues. The radar is very important when enraged is in play because they’re so fast that pre-aiming where they’re coming from greatly increases the odds of personal survival. But against 2 infected, currently they have little recourse to do anything except try and get people to tunnelvision on one but not the other.
Perhaps a compromise in this case would be to have the radar “ping” people, with infected who are further away taking longer to have their radar positions updated. This means that on maps like Subway, infected on the other side of the map have their position updated every several seconds, while upon them getting close their position is updated in real time. However this will probably be a pain for the developers to implement and if other suggested changes go through, might make it unnecessarily difficult for survivors to get a grasp of the situation.
Also, welcome to the forum!
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I think that’s a clever compromise, it’d make it less easy to abuse the radar while still keeping it somewhat relevant.
You’re right that the issue is the balance, I had thought about other ways to buff the infected like giving them a small speed boost or something and maybe they should have one, but I think nerfing the radar is the safest bet considering I’ve played the game a lot before I even knew the radar existed and it was a lot funner and felt a lot more fair before I knew about it. I don’t think turning around is impractical, personally I find it sort of fun to actually look around my surroundings and even if you see the infected sorta late you’ll probably have more than enough time to react (obviously depending on the situation). It’s just been a lot less fun for me as infected, knowing that I can’t ambush anyone unless they don’t know about the radar or there isn’t a horde already after someone, and it’s also been a lot less fun for me as survivor, cause using the radar to track down all the infected feels like I’m cheating and making it unfair for them. Which really sucks cause Virus was one of my favorite games to play on Tower Unite.
Also thank you!
Staring at a small portion of the screen can definitely be boring but when things get more chaotic it’s quite handy to have. After all, situational awareness is key.
As for game balance, these two threads might be worth a read (totally not shilling previous write-ups I’ve done):
Another Zombie Enrage Suggestion
Some Rebalancing Tweaks