Community thoughts on movement and physics

Hi friends,

New here, have been following for years. Love the content the team has been releasing. After watching this morning's new update, I really wanted to raise a genuine question and see what the community sentiment was. Visually, the game looks amazing, the mechanics and game systems are great. I love the premise and the look, having been an avid ArcheAge player myself. The spell animations, and even most character animations are well developed and grounded.

However, I continually find myself upset - maybe annoyed is a better word - by the weird character movement and apparent lack of physics. I don't understand how a game can be so far into development and not have addressed such a structural issue, the focus appears to have moved way beyond this point. I can't be the only one who finds the character movement rigid, or far from fluid. The way the characters slide against the floor, the fact the top half of the body sometimes appears to be detached from the lower half. As I said earlier, there is a weird lack of physics, there is a weight missing to the characters. Hell, the fact a dwarf can jump six feet in the air is so weird, their animations/physics seem even odder.

I know this may seem like a small thing but I want this game to succeed, and I can't see how a game with poor movement like this could ever survive, it is by far the most core mechanic.

Would appreciate hearing some further thoughts!

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Comments

maouw

You're not the first to raise this concern.
The general response I've seen has been along the lines of "physics aren't a core to MMORPGs - instant response to input is more important. WoW movement is good"

I think there's a general misconception about the fluidity that physics brings to a game - people think it will make everything slow, clunky and annoying.

At this point, I can only hope it's added as polish.
With or without, I'm still going to give AoC a good play though.

Valic

You understand this game is just about to hit Alpha right? There's details that are very easy to implement later on in the game such as sheathing a sword and shield on your back, turning someone's head towards someone else and etc.... They don't even have some of the races developed yet, why would they work on something so mundane when they don't have the models all finished first? As for the dwarf thing... welcome to why I never play small characters in any game.

They have a whole world they're still developing, both sea, sky, and land... dungeons, more races, the base classes that yet to be structured, guild systems, etc. This game has a LOT to focus on first before it considers how fluid movement should go. They have unreal engine too so this isn't something I'm worried about at all.

maouw

@Valic
I think you underestimate how difficult it is to implement physics in hindsight.
But you do have a point - I'm sure the engineers have their hands full.

Reklaw

Good to read some of these replies. I wanted to hear the differing thoughts of the community.

@maouw I tend to agree with your points, games like WoW and ArcheAge are examples of amazing character movement with fluidity and weight. Poor physics/movement as much as people want to overlook it will be the main reason a lot of players say hey this game feels weird, I don't want to play.

@Valic Appreciate your comments, but I have to disagree. Core movement mechanics are not something games tend to fix up later. This game is about to hit Alpha, the developers are happy to a degree with that aspect. It appears a lot of the focus seems to now be on building the world and mechanics. Today's overview was about mounts and swimming, although I believe they can easily fix something like swimming animations. Animations aren't an issue, the more central physics/movement component is.

My point is simple, I am worried they have run past a pretty fundamental issue and are off polishing a beautiful game. But if they dont track back and address this there will be a major issue. Although purely anecdotal, I have never seen a game hitting Alpha/Beta go back and change the whole movement and physics component.

Valic

https://youtu.be/fH5Ux9qmnE0?t=356

From this footage alone, I think it all looks fine for where they're at right now. There's not this awkward auto straighten out movement when you stop somewhere, your character actually has a small stagger where they stop running. Walking speed seems about right, there's a nice strafe animation when moving just left or right.

They also have to keep in mind aim based skills as well as tab target skills, so being able to have your character face a direction and turn their body is something of a challenge presented in many games.

https://youtu.be/CyoYYp2IayA?t=513

This to me as far as doing combat in a dungeon looks fine.... And again, it's not even polished yet and is far from it tbh.

ZeekMystic

I would disagree that it isn’t something that can be fixed later weight is easily something that can be added with polish alone, and I guess I haven’t seen the same glaring problems you have. I will say this and I say this whenever someone brings this up. You CAN NOT have the smaller races have a shorter jump height in an mmo, especially when they have shown they will have jump based obstacles. If you set the difficulty to short jump height/distance than the majority of the other races will not find the obstacle challenging, if you set it to the higher one you’re punished for wanting to play a smaller race. That is something that I agree is emersion breaking but for the sake of the video game needs to be a thing.

Tacualeon

I have noticed the same. I did ask in a live podcast and I submited lack of physics as a question for the last video.

maouw wrote: »

"physics aren't a core to MMORPGs -

Are you sure they said that?

There is 0 chance of me playing without physics.
I'm actually learning UE4 because I fucking love physics, is the best thing ever.
With the basics of UE4 and youtube, I'm making tornados with inverse circular force, sucking 3D objetcs and is awesome. I only need to learn a bit of animation and I think I can do some crazy things.

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