Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Problems in combat philosophy
ArchivedUser
Guest
After seeing a glimpse of combat I would like to give my two cents on the issues faced in the future. In intrepid's descriptions of their own combat system, they say that they want combat to be strategic, however I think they placed the strategy of combat too close to the actual occurrence of combat instead of the preparation and tried to mix two antithetical concepts causing neither good action combat or good strategy combat. I will be using 2 example MMOs to explain. In Anarchy Online (its dead now btw), the complexity and depth created by the character builds made thought out build decisions very difficult and impactful. This created the thrill of Planning or what i will call strategy. Strategy is primarily fun due to the skill and background knowledge required to create contingency plans for foreseeable events. Strategy heavy MMOs are usually tab target based, and rely entirely on intricate player builds, the preparation being fun and the combat simply being a simulation to see if your strategy was well built to the information. On the other side of the coin would be a game like For Honor. For honor relies far less on planning and more on your spontaneous ability to react appropriately. I like to call this action combat. A form of combat where it is necessary to react accordingly to a situation since it is highly unpredictable (most evident in pvp games and with monsters with random move sets). The primary design cause of these kinds of game-play are the amount of information available to players and the depth of ways you can plan for events before hand. The less information there is, the less planning can be done effectively and the more time sensitive your decision become assuming there are no turns. The more information there is the less you need to adapt in the moment. This makes action combat and strategic combat ANTITHETICAL at any one defined moment in a game. Action combat during combat should be purely action combat with high player skill caps. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case with AoC. intrepid decided to make the game tab targeted instead of locked camera with player response, or free camera with aimed ability hitboxes. Because of this it cannot have adequate action combat. Some might say that it lends well to strategy game-play, but they focused int he wrong area when they implemented strategy game-play. They should have worked on complex stat, item and ability systems with an extremely wide variety of player decision integrated into progression paths. This is the source of strategy, not the actions you take in combat itself, but instead, before combat. In this sense, they have fallen short since they have a very finite amount of progression choices players get to make. Unfortunately, while I respect them bringing the multiplayer back to MMO, I think their base combat is a serious issue they need to fix and return it to the drawing board. I by no means hate the game, but it worries me since it means that the game will not last me as long as a subscription game should want to considering that continued patronage makes up a large portion of the game's income. If you have any critiques of my thoughts please post them below. Any general combat comments are welcome as well.
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Comments
Firstly, IS is aware of the combat drawbacks and will be changing how it meshes.
Secondly, they style of gameplay they are going for looks like it will be more heavily edited to having a large skillset available for you to choose from, but having a limited amount of abilities on your skill bar at once. At least based on the demo and such where there were fewer abilities, but we know there will be a good range of skills.
Both tab target and action combat skills will have their pros and cons, it will come down to personal preference as to which skills you will slot. Will they be able to pull off this sort of system at this point in time there is no answer to this question. Alpha0 is one month away that will give us our first real consistent taste of combat and while it will be under NDA I expect combat will be a very hot topic on the alpha0 forums, lol I don't expect it I know it
People have many concerns about the combat system, it needs to be smooth, reactive, yet tactical in when and where some skills are used, feel impactful when skills hit, skills need to look good with animations matching the skills intent. There are so many variables that will need to come together to make combat fun*.
*Here is the kicker what is fun combat for some will not be fun for others, it does not matter what combat is like in ashes some will like it others will not, there is no making everyone happy end of story.
Over the many months/years of development yet to come we will see many personal opinions on what combat should or should not be and no one persons opinion is any less valid than someone else's so long as it is put forward in a constructive manner. So strap yourselves in this combat ride is going to get bumpy.
But at the end of the day IS has a vision of what its combat system will be and that will be the first iteration of combat put in place and it will be up to us as a community to provide constructive feedback to shape combat into a strong enjoyable, impactful system that the majority can enjoy.
This is definitely something that will be difficult to balance but they are acutely aware of this and is a major focus of alpha/beta testing.
Also you didn't really answer my question as to why you believe there won't be in depth stat and item systems that make a difference to character ability outside of not trusting devs on their word as they've touched on this quite a bit. Don't get me wrong I think it's a good idea to be a bit skeptical in situations like this but a lot of your concerns are speculation based on very little available information, and it may be a bit premature as several of these systems have yet to be shown in any form. Intrepid has been clear from the beginning that they want to make their own unique combat system and like any other system as Varkun mentioned some will enjoy it and others will not but their main goal as gamers themselves is to make combat skill based while being as fun as possible.
Say wut !!
over analysis galore .. ! once combat is mastered by everyone when game is out, you will adapt, graphics in this game is seductive, I hate lag btw. For some, lag is more an issue than combat ... Believe me I will find ways to kill your corrupted ***, that's strategy for you. PVE, it will definitely be strategy like every other mmorpg. HOpe you won't define strategy for me now. Every game has different rules, never compare one attractive park to another. Every game has there own flavor you get accustomed to. We will inform devs of in-balance. It will get solved eventually. Bottom line is their not even in Alpha-0 yet and you made a judgement of AOC combat?? Weird ... it's almost as if your critiquing a game before it's even matured.