Elephant in the room (combat mechanics)

ArchivedUser

So back sometime june or july last year i pointed out the combat mechanics need somr work to make this game really stand out... I received alot of flak from the community, however now that we have seen somd pre alpha gamr play MOST streamers and youtubers are criticizing the same thing..... 

Your thoughts?

ArchivedUser

Combat is pretty much at the same stage as it was in June last year, it's pretty much all placeholder and they're mostly testing tech and systems at this point.

The game is still pretty early in development, it probably won't look very good until animations and character movement are worked on.

If you're expecting combat and animations to all be fleshed out during a pre-alpha then I'm not sure what to tell you.

ArchivedUser

Maybe we should say most of their systems have elephants in the room. Why because there not finished or working in progress. Like I keep saying, if we still see stuff in a beta as we do in the current alphas we could say there are a herd of elephants in the room.

Just relax and let them do there thing.

ArchivedUser

Thats the excuse i hear all the time allllll the way till release.. The engine they are using plus the slow paced old school way of combat is the problem here gentlemen...

ArchivedUser

Flatline said:

Thats the excuse i hear all the time allllll the way till release.. The engine they are using plus the slow paced old school way of combat is the problem here gentlemen...

What do you know of the engine. Have you used it before. Have you played with the engine in development. Your just using throw away lines, you present no facts just speculation.

ArchivedUser

Seriously though, everyone is waiting for meat on the bone. You will just have to be patient until they are further into development. Hopefully with enough time remaining to consider feedback.

ArchivedUser

Flatline said:

Thats the excuse i hear all the time allllll the way till release.. The engine they are using plus the slow paced old school way of combat is the problem here gentlemen...

There are a lot of people who will want a slow paced combat.  There are many people who dont care to play street fighter while playing an MMORPG.   This is why I dont play BDO.   

ArchivedUser

I understand both sides of the argument here. And while I'm erring on the side of it's only alpha, I will say that I have seen a lot of mmo's in the past keep things in game that many thought that they would change prior to launch.  The early siren calls from alarmed members who would be attacked for questioning the game mechanics, would often wind up being right, much to the chagrin of the knight's protecting the product. 

All of the failed mmo's has taught me that we should always question design, at every level, because if you wait, ultimately it will be too late when you finally do speak up. 

ArchivedUser

NightshadeRaven said:

Flatline said:

Thats the excuse i hear all the time allllll the way till release.. The engine they are using plus the slow paced old school way of combat is the problem here gentlemen...

What do you know of the engine. Have you used it before. Have you played with the engine in development. Your just using throw away lines, you present no facts just speculation.

I know a lot about both Unity and Unreal. I work in a game studio. Everything combat related in AoC comes canned in the stock Unreal engine.

What other throw away fanboi lines do you have?

ArchivedUser

I think it's at least fair to ask about early design concepts. We haven't heard word on how they are going to implement combat. We know the combo system was something that was at least a spark for the idea of fighting in AoC. I would love to see more about their philosophy going forward, even if it is just early concepts.

The primary reason is to generate feedback from the community. Balanced playloops for using your abilities are incredibly complex, and the primary draw for many MMO players. I'd like to get their ideas in front of the community as early as possible so they can begin iterating on it to get it as close to "right" as they can.

ArchivedUser

nscheffel said:

I know a lot about both Unity and Unreal. I work in a game studio. Everything combat related in AoC comes canned in the stock Unreal engine.

What other throw away fanboi lines do you have?

Well this makes it worse, to be honest if you claim you work in a game studio you should know better. I dont believe you have worked on/with either engine. So now show me some proof or you have confirmed my suspension.

Btw I am not a fanboy of the game. If you have read my post you would see that. 

ArchivedUser

nscheffel said:

NightshadeRaven said:

Flatline said:

Thats the excuse i hear all the time allllll the way till release.. The engine they are using plus the slow paced old school way of combat is the problem here gentlemen...

What do you know of the engine. Have you used it before. Have you played with the engine in development. Your just using throw away lines, you present no facts just speculation.

I know a lot about both Unity and Unreal. I work in a game studio. Everything combat related in AoC comes canned in the stock Unreal engine.

What other throw away fanboi lines do you have?

Then you should know precisely why they are using assets from the base engine and the asset store for what equates to a tech demo.

There is absolutely no point in them wasting time on developing interfaces, animations and assets that will almost certainly be replaced further down the line.

Using premade assets and other placeholders means they can continue testing other systems and mechanics without having to wait for asset completion by other teams, this means both the art teams and the programmers can work independently from one another without impacting on each other too much.

ArchivedUser

This is Alpha 0 and I think I know when I say this being part of it and all. The focus is the back end right now as was pointed out before me.
Networking and such since this is the biggest downside of the unreal engine. It doesn't support player counts on the scale that Ashes wants to be at all.
Let's talk about this when the more public alphas hit and continued to exist for 2 months, when there should be an actual focus on the game play and not so much of making sure that the game is running at all and smooth with large player counts as well as server communication, launcher versatility and so on. <war flashbacks of a certain windmill>
Sounds like a plan?

ArchivedUser

I can understand the concern of the OP. And while the game is not only in pre-Alpha and they have noted that much of what we have seen is placeholder the question on its own does have merit.

That being said, I would agree that right now because they can use out of the box assets and programming from Unreal 4 that means that they can examine how they are going to navigate problems that the engine is not designed to handle (Networking to name one).

It would be nice to hear about HOW they plan to deliver on the mix between tab/action gameplay even if they have not presented it in finished form. 

As for elephants and concerns I would actually not have any in regards to combat or any other major system until we hit Beta. Since Alpha basically translates to working with puzzle pieces there is no need to panic unless we find ourselves in Beta trying to put those pieces together and find we have out of the box Unreal 4 combat. 

That is the time for Elephants.

ArchivedUser

@AragaI agree with

Araga said:

It would be nice to hear about HOW they plan to deliver on(...)

insert any given topic at the end.
 That is my personal biggest issue with Intrepid Studios "open development". Maybe I am just to pampered by Star Citizens way of doing things. I wouldn't expect them to go even near the scale of information they provide (after all it still takes up time), but I would love to hear more about how they at least imagine given topic X to end up/right now.

The, theoretically, great thing about open development is to have an early first response from people. It doesn't always have to be up and running and playtest ready. I would like to hear more about the theoretical planing stage.
As an example.
"You know in crafting we want to have a lot of inter dependency between crafting disciplines. Let's say you want to craft a breastplate, what we are thinking right now is along these lines <insert a grafic that shows a scematic overview of the process from gathering to crafting the final piece with it's theoretical steps in between and talk a bit about it>
What do you think? "

Some sketches of a class with some skills and proposed class enhancement to get an idea of what they plan those "flavors" to be.
"We call this the shadow lord class because we think we need something really edgy for people to play around with"

Stuff like that, throw in some early w.i.p. to keep the information flowing. Even if it doesn't actual end up like that, it's exciting to see what is actually worked on or what the creators think.
My greatest memory of Ashes happened a year ago when Steven came into the discord Voice chat (announced) just to let people fire questions at him about whatever they had in mind. Sure we still have those, kind of but it's seriously not the same anymore since we already asked a vast majority of what we can ask and expect to get somewhat of an answer too(I can still rely on this one voice chat event to answer a greater part of questions). So having Intrepid take the initiative with what they work on would be, in my opinion, the better step.
Seeing the vision come to life from it's earliest steps is what I would call open development. I appreciate what Intrepid is doing, but I think they could gather more benefits if they went that one step further.

ArchivedUser

NightshadeRaven said:

nscheffel said:

I know a lot about both Unity and Unreal. I work in a game studio. Everything combat related in AoC comes canned in the stock Unreal engine.

What other throw away fanboi lines do you have?

Well this makes it worse, to be honest if you claim you work in a game studio you should know better. I dont believe you have worked on/with either engine. So now show me some proof or you have confirmed my suspension.

Btw I am not a fanboy of the game. If you have read my post you would see that. 

What proof do you need? The combat we see in AoC is the same combat implemented in every blueprint tutorial on the internet. 

Do you need me to link a dozen tutorials?