Hey everyone – Kevin here again with another Dev Diary! This time, we’re diving deeper into one of the core gameplay mechanics: Cover.
Since launch, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback about how cover works in the game – especially around our decision to make it 1-sided (offers protection in only one direction) instead of 2-sided (protection from both directions).
To be honest, most of the feedback has leaned critical, or at least confused. Outside of our dev team, not many players have spoken in favor of 1-sided cover – and even within the team, there are folks who’d prefer the 2-sided approach.
These kinds of design choices are always tricky during development, so I wanted to share a bit of insight into how we made the call, and what the pros and cons of each setup look like.
1-sided Cover
Pros:
- Encourages more strategic positioning – players need to be mindful of where enemies are coming from.
- Promotes level exploration, as players move around to find cover that works based on the direction of threat.
- Gives players a tactical advantage – enemies are much less likely to benefit from cover.
- Cons:
- Doesn’t always make sense visually – why would a wall only protect from one side?
- Can be frustrating when a seemingly good piece of cover becomes useless just because enemies show up from the "wrong" direction.
2-sided Cover
Pros:
- Feels more intuitive and realistic – a wall should offer protection on both sides.
- Makes cover more universally useful, which could help reinforce it as a core mechanic instead of something players forget about.
- It adds to the tactical challenge – if enemies use cover against you, that’s on your positioning. You either take the cover yourself or deny it to the enemy by repositioning.
Cons:
- Players might end up dancing around a single block of cover depending on enemy spawns, rather than moving around the map. (see diagram below).
- If cover takes damage from both sides, it could get destroyed really quickly. That might balance things out and make players move around the map more, but could also make cover feel weak or temporary.
We have started to prototype 2-sided cover and discovered a couple of bugs so far but generally the bulk of the work would come from going into each level and making sure:
- Cover isn’t too advantageous if it suddenly became 2-sided, and possibly therefore stripping some cover out or moving it around.
- Cover isn’t too weak now it takes damage from both sides and needs a further balance pass on each level (or again some rearrangement).
As you can probably tell, we’re still torn on which direction to go. We’d love to hear your thoughts to help us decide!
In the meantime, we’ll keep testing and share more updates in the next Dev Diary.
Thanks for reading everyone – and enjoy your weekend!
Kevin