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Rainbow VFX / Other VFX from recent siege footage - Feedback Thread
Tranquillity
Member
Hi AoC,
Love the game and wish you to keep up all the hard work as you are onto something very special.
However spell visual affects look a bit over the top. The one I have the biggest complaint about is the rainbow skill littered all over the battlefield. It's very over the top, stands out too much and lets be honest - rainbows? If this is a healing/barrier spell I suggest we tone it down to just a holy gold sort of colour and make it bit more transparent without a shimmer - seeing rainbows all over the battlefield is kinda ridiculous.
I think if you asked many people if they liked seeing so many spell effects they would agree.
See picture:
(I know it's alpha and WIP, but RAINBOWS!???) What do you think?
And many other skills make it hard to see what is going on in the pvp. This is something that it's important to address during alpha.
Anyway keep up the great work looking forward to seeing more in the future.
EDIT: Someone below helpfully pointed out that you cannot tell between friendly and enemy spells. So that is also an issue worth noting.
Love the game and wish you to keep up all the hard work as you are onto something very special.
However spell visual affects look a bit over the top. The one I have the biggest complaint about is the rainbow skill littered all over the battlefield. It's very over the top, stands out too much and lets be honest - rainbows? If this is a healing/barrier spell I suggest we tone it down to just a holy gold sort of colour and make it bit more transparent without a shimmer - seeing rainbows all over the battlefield is kinda ridiculous.
I think if you asked many people if they liked seeing so many spell effects they would agree.
See picture:
(I know it's alpha and WIP, but RAINBOWS!???) What do you think?
And many other skills make it hard to see what is going on in the pvp. This is something that it's important to address during alpha.
Anyway keep up the great work looking forward to seeing more in the future.
EDIT: Someone below helpfully pointed out that you cannot tell between friendly and enemy spells. So that is also an issue worth noting.
2
Comments
Spell effects cluttering the battlefield might become a bigger issue too, especially as the game advances and people get better skills and more abilities. In some places it looks a little confusing and I wasn't able to tell exactly who was doing what.
It still looked good though.
But I agree that on a massive fight it may make the fight unreadable or chaotic in many aspects
Can any testers confirm if they have trouble knowing if they are enemy or ally abilities?
Now, should they grant people the option to turn off those effects? Sure. At the very least those of your teammates.
This games is just getting started.
This games is not supposed to be finished before 2023/2024.
If I know a tidy bit about UE4, adressing and changing particles effects on animations is simpler that 99% of things suggested in this forum.
The game can move forwards while visual and sound cues can be changed at any time without compromising the rest of the game.
With this assumptions, I hope they keep experimenting with visuals until they find their own style.
I don't have strong emotions about it, I just want them to grow artistically.
This issue occurs because the same classes and races will be on both sides of the combat. It can be difficult to discern what is going on when everything is the same.
I have been playing Cleric a lot in the recent Alphas. This skill reminds me of some FFXIV skills that healers have. It lets you know as a non-healer that this AOE is good for you to be in. Which it is, It does damage to foes and heals allies at the same time.
The rainbow has a holy magic feel to it that makes sense with my head cannon for "most" clerics. That being said, I would love if you could augment it to a darker god or something. Seeing as in D&D, clerics are one of the most versatile classes in the game when it comes to flavor due to their ability to develop a relationship with "any" god.
An augment that turns "Hallowed Ground" into "Unhallowed Ground" with maybe some dark energy. Would be an example of both good character customization and a cool way to use augments.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
I know why it occurs. I'm just suggesting the way to fix it is color code the enemy AOE spells different than the friendly ones. This is how WoW handles this issue.
If the scale is 250 vs 250, then effects should be toned down to the point where they don’t over power the game play. For a single player game the effects look fine.
Another option, since we’re talking about magic, is to have effects be visible only to the caster or their immediate allies. Have the magic effects visibility based on the proximity, and beyond a certain range not visible at all. But big hitter spell effects should light it up.
1. The rainbow effect is on the 'top' in field of view. It's not going to distort the view of combatants except maybe at the edges, but if you need to see in the edges you are probably close enough to see the enemy vs friend icon anyway and IS has specifically said silhouettes are important to their design philosophy. So lack of clarity from that range would mean silhouettes need tuning in this case given the rainbow is fairly translucent.
2. Rainbows can be easily tied to 'positive' effects. The purpose here is obviously a cleric spell. It's obviously benefiting SOMEONE in the bubble.
3. It'd be really easy to change the gold part of the effect to be a reddish brown/purpleish black, without changing the rainbow part that signifies it as a clear 'positive' spell type, making it subtly tell you who benefits from entering this aoe.
4. You want positive aoe spells to be visible to players BECAUSE it can get chaotic in a siege. Rainbows with a clear marker, and a shimmering enemy vs friend effect is in my opinion subtle while still being clear. And you definitely want this type of thing to be seen in the sky rather than on the much more chaotic ground (where a lot of mage spells have 'harming' aoe particle effects.) I don't think the gold shimmer would be as clear a marker in the heat of combat or low frame rate situations.
5. Obviously rainbows look freakin cool.
I don't think I'd change the gold shimmer, but rather, the central skyline beacon, that's currently reddish. This way, there's less confusion when two different opposing Clerics put the skill in the exact same spot. You can immediately look for the 'upwards shaft of light' and move toward 'ally colored' light, away from 'enemy colored' light, and still be able to tell if the two are in almost the same space due to how thin the light column is.
I don't have a strong opinion on the amount of rainbow shown, but I do like the prismatic effect itself and would hope it stays. I can't see how to lessen it and it look good still, either.
So that's my suggestion part. Maybe have those red lines be green or gold for allies, purple/red for enemy.
Both look friendly.
If you remove the rainbow and focus on the AoE "bubble" let's call it.
Then you can have a holy gold/yellow bubble for friendly versions and a red bubble for enemy versions of this spell depending which side you are on, you will see them as such.
Thus instantly solving the issue of which spell is from which team with just ONE glance. Which is the most important thing from a VFX standpoint to be thinking about when you're going to be in a 250v250 pvp situation (when they up the numbers to the planned amount).
I would also worry about colourblind players and how a rainbow might affect them. Versus sticking to just one colour for the spell where they can easily make adjustments for a colourblind mode.
The most important thing is knowing what that spell is from one look.
And also not cluttering the screen with lots of colours for no reason.
Because when there is going to be large scale like 100-200 player combat. Having a rainbow on every square meter of the field is silly. That picture above has 5 and it's hard to see anything. Imagine when the battles get larger.
I can only speak from my experience but when there is too much VFX going on at once It's extremely distracting.
Finally in response to point 5. Rainbows I would argue is a subjective preference. Not everyone will like rainbows. Same as not everyone likes Unicorns.
And I would hope that speaking as a guy here, that if I wanted to play a Cleric. I would not be forced into using whips and rainbows.
Same as if I wanted to play as a "corrupted" player that happened to be a healer. I think being a 'bandit' healer and casting rainbows when I am attacking caravans is really the effect you would want to strike fear into your enemies right? Haha
Anyway regardless I respect your opinion. In return all I ask is you respect mine.
Removing the rainbow to make the enemies look less 'friendly' misses the nuance of needing to denote something as a positive effect. An aoe positive effect needs to indicate two things: 1. that it is a benefiting area 2. who it is benefiting.
The current design can easily shift to this. If you take away the rainbow corona and focus on the 'shimmering aura' you lose a. the visibility aspect I discussed in my own first point b. a clear indicator that the bubble is having a positive effect. Sure a golden sphere looks positive for you, but when your trying to differentiate for the enemy a glowing red bubble for the enemy makes it much less clear that it's a spell that is benefiting the enemy not harming you. You could just go 'fine both are gold but use the pillar to differentiate'. Could work but in the heat of battle finding that thin light pillar is slightly harder. If any other effect also uses the light pillar now you are relying solely on the golden corona and then 'checking it has the right pillar'. That's an extra processing step.
I strongly disagree with you that it is difficult to tell what is going on. It doesn't look cluttered to me. I don't say this because I think your opinion is invalid here. It is very relevant for the devs to know that you think it's cluttered. It's just also relevant that it is very informational and not cluttered to me. I'm sure they'll get some statistical focus testing for that.
Lastly obviously 5. is subjective. But so is you thinking of rainbows as girly. If you wanna be a cleric bandit that strikes the fear into others, that's on your play ability and sense of theatrics. For me it would not detract from your 'manly intimidation' if you are trying to rob my stuff. I'd be too busy thinking about some dastardly fiend trying to rob me of my stuff, not your particle effects.
This is why I suggested removing the rainbow. Focusing on using a single colour, as a friendly you would see your sides spell as a yellow/gold dome that is transparent. As an enemy the same dome would be red transparent.
Yellow/Gold being positive and red being negative. Heck even green could work.
Most games abide by blues, greens, golds as friendly and oranges, reds, browns as negative.
The shimmer does not help with clutter or help with seeing through the bubble, so I would have said remove that too. It's unnecessary. I think that someone else was talking about the pillar. But again unnecessary imo.
(It's more important to see whats going on through the spell than making the VFX look special).
By using one colour, it will be far easier to implement for colourblind mode. Which is very important for modern human computer interaction. When there will be potentially 50 of these on the screen in a 250v250.
It's important for colourblind accessibility to not just rely on colour. But to also use things like symbols, numbers or patterns to convey the information.
As for knowing that seeing a red spell is benefitting your enemy, well that can be achieved in other ways. Such as seeing their health numbers going up.
But for the most part I believe one can also argue that seeing an enemies spell that has a rainbow above it can be confused by your side for being a positive spell. The argument applies both ways.
The rainbow however confuses this for both sides. Hence why in my view it's problematic from a functional standpoint. Disregarding that I am not fond of rainbows being eveywhere lol.
I will say that I never called rainbows 'girly'. So don't put words in my mouth as the saying goes.
All I meant was that speaking from my perspective "as a guy that wants to play a Cleric" they do not appeal to me.
And that rainbows are not scary are they? (This was a joke hence the "haha").
This part is fully subjective - however I tend to focus more on the functionality of VFX anyway.
I think when criticizing spell effects we should focus on individual spells for the most part as a large scale battle will always be a bit crowded and overwhelming at first glance for any new player, I think toning down the epic-ness of it for the sake of maximizing skill ceiling is the wrong choice. We have arenas and smaller scale PvP for super skill driven players, large scale PvP should naturally emphasize tactics and macro-decisions and this amount of visual clutter does not take away from that.
The biggest problems with spell effects have been and continue to be how individual spells you cast take up a lot of your screen with movement and particles. You know what spell you are casting, you'll be casting these spells thousands of times, you don't need super obvious visuals to remind you what button you pressed 0.2s ago. Make visuals more subtle and use color and sounds better, players should and will learn these cues to understand what opponents are doing. Stable animations are the best for this, a 2s cast should have the same animation throughout and not too many moving parts (someone posted Dragon's Dogma casting animations, those are great and clear, the spell effects are meh but casting is great).
Visual effects should also have maximal 'effects' on the target they are hitting so as the caster you get that visual feedback and feel the impact/weight of their abilities. When you cast fireball you don't want to watch your character do a backflip, you want to watch the fireball hit your enemy with a bit of flare/sparks. We should not have the mage laser be that freaking big on top of the caster, have it show mini explosions on the targets hit or something though.
Lastly the scrolling numbers for combat needs work. They currently simply appear at their max scrolling velocity. I think only AoE/ground effect damage should show up that way, otherwise have direct damage done to you linger or start slow then accelerate to terminal scrolling velocity. Small stuff like this won't be obvious but our brains will learn to differentiate and extract the information of "am I just standing in fire or is someone directly targeting and attacking me" very efficiently. The numbers look good on crits, maybe could get a bit larger even... can't tell if it has audio too but that would be nice.
If a backflip is what helps telegraph the casting of a Fireball, I want to see the backflip.
I think the levitation wind-up is a better telegraph for Fireball, rather than a backflip, though.
I don't really even pay attention to the scrolling numbers. I know I'm doing some damage and I know I'm getting some healing, but I'm really looking at my opponents' health bar and my own health bar and mana bar.
You don't need to explicitly pay attention, your brain extracts information implicitly. Even if you think it doesn't though, numbers also play an important role on impact and feel of combat. The way a big crit # pops up at you when you hit something can be very satisfying.
There is a lot to unpack here. So let's get right into it.
The primary thing I feel you seem to be missing is the 'why' of the current format. When critiquing a professional designers work you must start with 'why did they do it this way.' Without doing this it's harder to give proper feed back because you might be trying to solve a different problem than the designer in question or you may have a valid critique but won't be able to 'reach' them because they don't know they are trying to solve the 'wrong problem'.
In this case the why of the design for the cleric spell in question is fairly clear and I have already alluded the main points in my original post so I'll be brief. 1. it must convey that the effect is an aoe buff (and is therefore of vital strategic importance) to people gathering. 2. It must cut through the clutter of war while simultaneously 3. it must not disrupt close quarter and midrange combat 4. it must somehow indicate it is friendly or foe 5. it must feel cohesive with the clerics other spells.
These are the problems the current iteration are trying to solve all at once. It's current only short coming from that list is that it lacks a clear indicator of friendly or foe. I do think IS needs to consider accessibility and add it to the list above if it isn't already. Unless you are personally colorblind, let's not get into an argument about whether or not a rainbow would even need an accessibility shift from that direction as it's not something inside of our domain so to speak. If you are, I sincerely apologize if you have been trying to explain to me that 'yes rainbows are hard to see in a dynamic environment as a person with colorblindeness'. It wasn't clear to me and I hope IS hear's your opinion on the matter.
Your proposed solutions fail to answer at least one of these questions.
A solid transparent dome has a higher chance of obscuring from a distance for example(1 and 3). You would need to increase the width of the current dome to make it more obvious to see in a crowd (a game balance issue.) The current effect serves as an artificial outline allowing it to look bigger than it is. It could also make different gear color harder to balance in a way that allows for good twitch movement tracking if you want to make it visible enough in a clash from a distance. The shimmer was a compromise between visibility, not obscuring too much, and making it clear where the effect starts from at midrange.
Making the enemies sphere a singular color addresses quick judgement of if it benefits you or not but it fails to tell you at a glance if it benefits the enemy you may be thinking of approaching (4). Relying on seeing numbers or symbols also fails to answer (1) especially in a crowded environment.
Particle effect design is a complicated task, isn't it?
I don't see how a rainbow is confusing as 'positive for your side' when there is a clear pillar of light that could easily be colored to indicate that it's not on your side. Is there another way you can think of that would clearly indicate both 'this is a buff area' at a distance as well as 'this is an enemies/friends'. I certainly can't. It doesn't have to be a rainbow, but a rainbow certainly fits in with a cleric's 'light based' thematic over all. A pale corona of whitish yellow maybe if statistics are really on the side of not liking the rainbow. That'd be a lot of asset rework given rainbows are used in a lot of cleric particle effects though.
I will say that I never called rainbows 'girly'. So don't put words in my mouth as the saying goes.
All I meant was that speaking from my perspective "as a guy that wants to play a Cleric" they do not appeal to me.
And that rainbows are not scary are they? (This was a joke hence the "haha").
This part is fully subjective - however I tend to focus more on the functionality of VFX anyway.[/quote]
In one legend a rainbow was literally the sign of 'God feeling satisfied/slightly bad for smiting everyone but one dude's family in a boat'. I personally don't have a connotation for rainbows being scary or not so your joke was lost on me. Pale yellow light on the other hand, would definitely be way less scary to me yeah.
Seeing that damage number pop as you make someone in game take a dirt nap is what drives a lot players to gear themselves in the first place.
Especially when we may not even see HP numbers, it's an important part to have a tangible sense of getting stronger.
Just chiming in really quick to say that if you're expecting a 100+ person battle to not be chaotic you might want to alter your expectations lol
This is only 3 Archetypes in the alpha test, each with ~10 abilities, so around 30 total.
In the finished product, you're going to have 250v250 battles with countless abilities firing off from the full 8 Archetypes with their full spell lists, most which will probably be augmented and look different.
You might have 30+ different spell effects in your vicinity instead of just the two types you saw in the footage (meteors and rainbow)
Definitely expect chaos.