Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Pitfalls to Look Out For When Testing The Combat Revamp and Split Body Attack Animations
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Hi all, you may know me from the other combat related threads where I post huge walls of text to explain things. As you can see, this is another, but I've chosen to put this one in its own discussion because it is technically a derail of every other thread. In order to keep this shorter, I'll be leaving out a lot of priming or 'relating' language. I'll try my best not to use too many examples that reference fighting games, but it will be unavoidable.
This post has a very precise purpose. There are things that some members of the community may not understand about exactly why certain implementations of combat are likely to have issues later, and the Split Body attack style has many pitfalls because it's going to be extremely subjective and controversial in feeling. This post isn't to discuss alternatives, please please please discuss alternatives in the other 'Combat Discussion' thread, even if just to save Toast or another CM some compilation work.
Please do use this thread to ask questions of me, or any other developer/programmer level community members who have input, or just watch us debate over the content and see if it helps your understanding. With that said, let's begin.
Premise:
The dev team has implied that they intend to test 'split body' attack animations. Your legs can move in any direction as if you were running normally, while attacking with the upper body. As implied, this has a lot of pitfalls to it, but most importantly, it is a system that can feel good while unbalanced, while sometimes becoming very clunky or unpleasant after some iterations towards balance. This is the single most important thing to keep in mind, if you remember nothing else from this post, remember that I said THIS:
"Split body will probably feel good to play at first, but as bugs and imbalance are fixed, it will change and possibly feel worse.
What the Devs probably need from you:
I'll try to explain what to look out for, because, unfortunately, the fact that it feels good at the beginning means many people will be supportive of it, possibly hostile to those who have complaints, especially since those complaints will sound like nitpicking. It's also really hard to quantify or put into words what the exact problems are. I'm going to attempt to give you a framework through which to understand 'how to give feedback that is specific to this implementation'. Even if you worry that my framework is wrong, consider it to be a lens that both you and the devs can use.
You can think of it as the equivalent of a bug reporting template, except it's just for expressing what you are viscerally experiencing. The ability to go from 'the combat just doesn't feel good', to 'the predictive model keeps causing people whose weapons have a wider attack cone, to have a potentially unfair advantage over me', is huge for developers. I say that, as one. So with that, let's get right into it. If you are familiar with how 'ping' and 'netcode' work, you can mostly skip to the sections after it.
Ping and Netcode: Why Lag Exists To Kill You
"I dodged that!" "Why didn't that hit, he was right in the line of it!"
Many of us are familiar with these moments. Those feelings. We're not all as familiar with where they come from. I'll talk about it specifically in terms of split body animations and movement speed though.
The devs told us that people complained that combat felt 'floaty' the last time they did this. Here's why. A character on a screen has a 'vector' that it is constantly sending to the server. "I am moving in X direction at Y speed."
In order for a game to feel 'responsive' to most people, that Vector has to be the exact same from the moment you press the button until the moment you release it. This is, however, also what makes combat feel 'floaty'. In single player games, we'll accept that our characters have to build up some momentum to start running, or that they can't change direction on a dime, sometimes. Usually even in these games, we want it to be instant.
The problem with an online game is that this means, if your opponent moves, on the server, and you have 200ms ping, they have moved 'however far they move in 200ms' before your client updates, and your targeting reticle is therefore 'wrong'. For many games this is a problem enough with just a few characters on the screen. For MMOs it's a nightmare sometimes. And for those of you who don't know, 200ms is about 12 frames. So your FPS matters even more.
Depending on the implementation, the time it takes for you to react (usually 18 frames for most people, 12-15 for experts and superhuman eSports people) adjust, and sometimes, for the server to receive your message and the timestamp of your message (so that they can rollback the opponent's position in the calculation of whether you hit or not), can be almost half a second. I won't go into an explanation of 'rubberbanding' or 'rollback netcode'. This is just to prime an understanding. If your pinpoint abilities keep missing, watch to see 'if your character starts moving at full speed as soon as you press a direction'.
Movement Speed And Camera Spin
Due to the way ping works, higher movement speeds in these types of games, especially when the player can rapidly change direction or stop, result in more and more issues with lag. There's actually a really specific calculable threshold based on 'the size of a standard character 'hurtbox', the cone 'hitbox' of an attack, and the speed a character can cover in 0.12 seconds when either standing still, or 'if they were traveling in the other direction'.
This threshold is quite low for Ashes. Other more Action combat oriented games solve this by changing the 'Cone hitbox' of attacks in their calculations. Their attacks are these wide sweeping things with big cones. Among the best known is BDO, which I can explain by simply saying that Rangers have a single bow shot ability that has 'Maximum 7 Targets' on it as you level it up. That's not an arrow shot. That's a shotgun that looks like an arrow shot. Think about a game you have played other than probably Monster Hunter/Dark Souls where you don't get a huge sweeping hitbox for your attack. This is done to support this playstyle. If that's what we want, great. Just understand that it's actually giving you the illusion of being precise and skilled and cool by making it harder to miss. They don't do this just so that you feel good though, it's actually moreso to make the combat look dynamic and impactful and involve a lot of motion. The issue is that it forces that larger amount of motion, making larger MMO styled battles look... interesting.
If you notice that the Spiit Body combat is causing PvP to be a whiff fest, or if you find that everyone suddenly prefers spears, this may be why. Expect a change to either attack cones (personal preference if you like what I outlined at end of last paragraph) or your movement speed being lessened. And I don't mean 'while attacking'. Because I promise you, that if it is slower 'while attacking' but fast when not, this will become the equivalent of a fighting game. And as far as I know, most people don't want that. I don't want that for others, I know how hard it is to learn those. Believe me.
Animation Cancels And The Philosopher's Stone
Another way to solve this is to have either 'attack strings that move you around' or animation cancels, something that action combat veterans will sing praises of. That's because they're great. Even in MMOs they're great. If the team implements them right, they'll be incredible. But Ashes isn't built on the framework for them yet, and doing them right is harder and constantly pushes on the two issues above. If your opponent can 'cancel their attack or movement into a bigger movement', in lag, how will you ever know where they are with certainty unless you know that the ability is on a cooldown?
From the other side, if your 'teleport cancel' takes 200 ms just to start, for 'fairness to other people', will it really feel like a 'cancel' to you? Fighting games get around this by generally only allowing the player to 'cancel' when their ability makes contact. The enemy knows you're in range because you hit them. The move that they 'cancel into' normally does take between 48 and 112 ms to start. Shorter ones have massive vulnerability, and in fighting games you generally can't lose track of your opponent completely.
In MMOs, you can, and depending on the 'recovery time' of the ability, this gets annoying really fast. An action player that complains that they 'don't like feeling animation locked' isn't really 'wrong', but the thing they are complaining about is a huge pitfall and balance question across an entire genre of games, technically three different genres of games. When it starts to become one in an MMO too, you're adding a level of complexity that most fighting game developers take months to balance and get even close to right, and they are almost always taking the easy way with their 'single peer to peer connections' and 'moves that are generally vulnerable to counterattack for a whole 100 ms before they can be used to escape'. I have many examples.
The Pitfall Itself, In General Terms
Split Body animation requires floatiness because it requires that the player character change direction instantly in order to feel 'responsive'. You're not going to get a 'less clunky' result in the long term from this, what you will get is freedom, and battles that involve a lot of 'running around each other and swinging weapons trying to get out of the enemy attack cone' in melee. Alternately there could be a 'startup to movement' or 'inability to change velocity instantly', but more mouse movement and faster attacks is already the direction they are planning to test. Be vigilant.
If the movement speed is high, those weapons will need to be given increasingly larger conal swing arcs, but since in Ashes, you damage everything in your cone, this could become a problem. If the movement speed is low, it will probably be fine, but then the people who are often advocating for more mobile combat will just be upset anyway. In other words, it's possible that no one is actually getting what they want, but both are within grasp of it. The compromise is ruining the experience of many, but they are too 'able to see that it could be good' and complain about it, to give up. In the Alpha testing, this will probably be the main source of contention.
I'll leave anything further for responses, as I don't want to make this even longer. I must 'arrogantly' ignore any poster who just claims 'nuh uh, it won't work like that, you don't understand', without being able to cite why, possibly even at the 'personal experience with game development' level. I'm sorry about this, since I know it comes off as elitist, but we as a community... probably really just don't have time for that, our CMs do enough work as it is (Hi Toast and crew, thank you for everything you do!)
If your feeling is 'well why don't we use an alternate system', you can find the current form of one in the "Combat Discussion" thread somewhere in this forum. This post exists because I promised, in that thread, to make it. So as I said before, please discuss 'alternate approaches' there, or just in your own thread. This one is for whatever education on this matter I can give from my experience, to help others 'realize or articulate why things don't feel right' in any upcoming 'Split Body' based combat reworks.
I really want this game to be great. I am not saying that they can't navigate through all of these, I just want to raise the awareness of them for those giving feedback. Thank you for your considerable time, if you read it all.
~Rae
This post has a very precise purpose. There are things that some members of the community may not understand about exactly why certain implementations of combat are likely to have issues later, and the Split Body attack style has many pitfalls because it's going to be extremely subjective and controversial in feeling. This post isn't to discuss alternatives, please please please discuss alternatives in the other 'Combat Discussion' thread, even if just to save Toast or another CM some compilation work.
Please do use this thread to ask questions of me, or any other developer/programmer level community members who have input, or just watch us debate over the content and see if it helps your understanding. With that said, let's begin.
Premise:
The dev team has implied that they intend to test 'split body' attack animations. Your legs can move in any direction as if you were running normally, while attacking with the upper body. As implied, this has a lot of pitfalls to it, but most importantly, it is a system that can feel good while unbalanced, while sometimes becoming very clunky or unpleasant after some iterations towards balance. This is the single most important thing to keep in mind, if you remember nothing else from this post, remember that I said THIS:
"Split body will probably feel good to play at first, but as bugs and imbalance are fixed, it will change and possibly feel worse.
What the Devs probably need from you:
I'll try to explain what to look out for, because, unfortunately, the fact that it feels good at the beginning means many people will be supportive of it, possibly hostile to those who have complaints, especially since those complaints will sound like nitpicking. It's also really hard to quantify or put into words what the exact problems are. I'm going to attempt to give you a framework through which to understand 'how to give feedback that is specific to this implementation'. Even if you worry that my framework is wrong, consider it to be a lens that both you and the devs can use.
You can think of it as the equivalent of a bug reporting template, except it's just for expressing what you are viscerally experiencing. The ability to go from 'the combat just doesn't feel good', to 'the predictive model keeps causing people whose weapons have a wider attack cone, to have a potentially unfair advantage over me', is huge for developers. I say that, as one. So with that, let's get right into it. If you are familiar with how 'ping' and 'netcode' work, you can mostly skip to the sections after it.
Ping and Netcode: Why Lag Exists To Kill You
"I dodged that!" "Why didn't that hit, he was right in the line of it!"
Many of us are familiar with these moments. Those feelings. We're not all as familiar with where they come from. I'll talk about it specifically in terms of split body animations and movement speed though.
The devs told us that people complained that combat felt 'floaty' the last time they did this. Here's why. A character on a screen has a 'vector' that it is constantly sending to the server. "I am moving in X direction at Y speed."
In order for a game to feel 'responsive' to most people, that Vector has to be the exact same from the moment you press the button until the moment you release it. This is, however, also what makes combat feel 'floaty'. In single player games, we'll accept that our characters have to build up some momentum to start running, or that they can't change direction on a dime, sometimes. Usually even in these games, we want it to be instant.
The problem with an online game is that this means, if your opponent moves, on the server, and you have 200ms ping, they have moved 'however far they move in 200ms' before your client updates, and your targeting reticle is therefore 'wrong'. For many games this is a problem enough with just a few characters on the screen. For MMOs it's a nightmare sometimes. And for those of you who don't know, 200ms is about 12 frames. So your FPS matters even more.
Depending on the implementation, the time it takes for you to react (usually 18 frames for most people, 12-15 for experts and superhuman eSports people) adjust, and sometimes, for the server to receive your message and the timestamp of your message (so that they can rollback the opponent's position in the calculation of whether you hit or not), can be almost half a second. I won't go into an explanation of 'rubberbanding' or 'rollback netcode'. This is just to prime an understanding. If your pinpoint abilities keep missing, watch to see 'if your character starts moving at full speed as soon as you press a direction'.
Movement Speed And Camera Spin
Due to the way ping works, higher movement speeds in these types of games, especially when the player can rapidly change direction or stop, result in more and more issues with lag. There's actually a really specific calculable threshold based on 'the size of a standard character 'hurtbox', the cone 'hitbox' of an attack, and the speed a character can cover in 0.12 seconds when either standing still, or 'if they were traveling in the other direction'.
This threshold is quite low for Ashes. Other more Action combat oriented games solve this by changing the 'Cone hitbox' of attacks in their calculations. Their attacks are these wide sweeping things with big cones. Among the best known is BDO, which I can explain by simply saying that Rangers have a single bow shot ability that has 'Maximum 7 Targets' on it as you level it up. That's not an arrow shot. That's a shotgun that looks like an arrow shot. Think about a game you have played other than probably Monster Hunter/Dark Souls where you don't get a huge sweeping hitbox for your attack. This is done to support this playstyle. If that's what we want, great. Just understand that it's actually giving you the illusion of being precise and skilled and cool by making it harder to miss. They don't do this just so that you feel good though, it's actually moreso to make the combat look dynamic and impactful and involve a lot of motion. The issue is that it forces that larger amount of motion, making larger MMO styled battles look... interesting.
If you notice that the Spiit Body combat is causing PvP to be a whiff fest, or if you find that everyone suddenly prefers spears, this may be why. Expect a change to either attack cones (personal preference if you like what I outlined at end of last paragraph) or your movement speed being lessened. And I don't mean 'while attacking'. Because I promise you, that if it is slower 'while attacking' but fast when not, this will become the equivalent of a fighting game. And as far as I know, most people don't want that. I don't want that for others, I know how hard it is to learn those. Believe me.
Animation Cancels And The Philosopher's Stone
Another way to solve this is to have either 'attack strings that move you around' or animation cancels, something that action combat veterans will sing praises of. That's because they're great. Even in MMOs they're great. If the team implements them right, they'll be incredible. But Ashes isn't built on the framework for them yet, and doing them right is harder and constantly pushes on the two issues above. If your opponent can 'cancel their attack or movement into a bigger movement', in lag, how will you ever know where they are with certainty unless you know that the ability is on a cooldown?
From the other side, if your 'teleport cancel' takes 200 ms just to start, for 'fairness to other people', will it really feel like a 'cancel' to you? Fighting games get around this by generally only allowing the player to 'cancel' when their ability makes contact. The enemy knows you're in range because you hit them. The move that they 'cancel into' normally does take between 48 and 112 ms to start. Shorter ones have massive vulnerability, and in fighting games you generally can't lose track of your opponent completely.
In MMOs, you can, and depending on the 'recovery time' of the ability, this gets annoying really fast. An action player that complains that they 'don't like feeling animation locked' isn't really 'wrong', but the thing they are complaining about is a huge pitfall and balance question across an entire genre of games, technically three different genres of games. When it starts to become one in an MMO too, you're adding a level of complexity that most fighting game developers take months to balance and get even close to right, and they are almost always taking the easy way with their 'single peer to peer connections' and 'moves that are generally vulnerable to counterattack for a whole 100 ms before they can be used to escape'. I have many examples.
The Pitfall Itself, In General Terms
Split Body animation requires floatiness because it requires that the player character change direction instantly in order to feel 'responsive'. You're not going to get a 'less clunky' result in the long term from this, what you will get is freedom, and battles that involve a lot of 'running around each other and swinging weapons trying to get out of the enemy attack cone' in melee. Alternately there could be a 'startup to movement' or 'inability to change velocity instantly', but more mouse movement and faster attacks is already the direction they are planning to test. Be vigilant.
If the movement speed is high, those weapons will need to be given increasingly larger conal swing arcs, but since in Ashes, you damage everything in your cone, this could become a problem. If the movement speed is low, it will probably be fine, but then the people who are often advocating for more mobile combat will just be upset anyway. In other words, it's possible that no one is actually getting what they want, but both are within grasp of it. The compromise is ruining the experience of many, but they are too 'able to see that it could be good' and complain about it, to give up. In the Alpha testing, this will probably be the main source of contention.
I'll leave anything further for responses, as I don't want to make this even longer. I must 'arrogantly' ignore any poster who just claims 'nuh uh, it won't work like that, you don't understand', without being able to cite why, possibly even at the 'personal experience with game development' level. I'm sorry about this, since I know it comes off as elitist, but we as a community... probably really just don't have time for that, our CMs do enough work as it is (Hi Toast and crew, thank you for everything you do!)
If your feeling is 'well why don't we use an alternate system', you can find the current form of one in the "Combat Discussion" thread somewhere in this forum. This post exists because I promised, in that thread, to make it. So as I said before, please discuss 'alternate approaches' there, or just in your own thread. This one is for whatever education on this matter I can give from my experience, to help others 'realize or articulate why things don't feel right' in any upcoming 'Split Body' based combat reworks.
I really want this game to be great. I am not saying that they can't navigate through all of these, I just want to raise the awareness of them for those giving feedback. Thank you for your considerable time, if you read it all.
~Rae
Y'all know how Jamberry Roll.
1
Comments
Edit: Also Apoc had it
Actually, a really useful method I've seen in a game somewhere (I honestly don't recall... LoL?) is having a "miss" animation arc that is actually a smidge smaller than the actual "hit" animation & hitbox --> so the server determines hit/miss and the larger animation for hit is more likely to overlap with the client's hitbox, and smaller animation less likely to overlap with the client's hitbox. This also doesn't feel cheap to the player, because the "miss" animation is what they see when they swing at nothing, so it feels normal if they miss. ( but they'll never know the truth
I have a question: What would happen if skills could be cancelled only during windup, but locked-in for hit and follow through?
It could be implemented in interesting ways, but the animations in general would have to be much slower. In general, it's neither specifically a good or bad idea in action-y games, but based on cursory analysis, it would be terrible in Ashes because it would get too hard to define.
Most games that allow this have extremely specific and set 'rules' as to 'what can cancel into what else', and those that don't usually have some exploitable behaviour that pops up and then there's controversy. BDO has entire balance passes that are viewed as 'significant buffs' where the only change made to a class is 'can now cancel X into Y'.
e.g. if you could cancel Fireball into a wand attack, but then cancel the startup of the Wand attack into Blink, you could 'give the opponent the impression that you were going to do a fireball' and then end up behind them, and any server-side authenticated outcome just becomes increasingly more frustrating and complex for the defender.
You could set it to 'only allow one cancel in a string' but then, again, you're getting really close to fighting games/BDO, which is alright for people like me, but prohibitive for people who either don't have those skills or don't live close to the server they are on.
It's an unfortunate and well known fact, if you live further from the server in a fast, server authenticated game, you're almost unequivocally worse than someone who lives closer.
A lot of requests for the Action half of the Hybrid combat are likely to focus around this sort of thing. We've seen it already, but building a system starting from 'We don't want animation cancels' and then taking a lot of feedback from people who insist they're important, could be really derailing.
Either way, that's going to be important to know during testing, because I actually think that I wouldn't have assumed that to be a bug, at all. If necessary, we can poke for clarification when we see the new build.
TLDR, you write with a lot of fluff and meta statements about your future statements. Not trying to be rude
Edit: this is about the first couple paragraphs of the original post, most of it reads fine though! Good write up.
Partially comes from my career too. Telling the CEO that his idea of how to run his development team is stupid and incorrect doesn't go over well.
Gotta start with a full explanation about how you aren't trying to be insubordinate, undermining, or 'think you're the boss around here', before you say how stupid it is.
I'm willing to take a hit on how the game feels if it means pvp doesn't end up being a game of jumping joust.