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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
[Feedback] Split Body vs. Root Motion Combat
Vysci
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
From my experience I think free action combat is the correct approach, combat no longer feels frustrating with the root + forward momentum. It really makes you feel like you have more control over your character.
However, it does still feel a little clunky, this stems from the fact it’s awkward to hold q and move at the same time. When in action combat it feels much better since you can hold left click. A similar option for tab targeting would make it feel much better
However, it does still feel a little clunky, this stems from the fact it’s awkward to hold q and move at the same time. When in action combat it feels much better since you can hold left click. A similar option for tab targeting would make it feel much better
5
Comments
- I wish we could hit the jump key while in combat. I always love Jumping before and during attacks in WoW it gave it some flare.
once i was close enough to the target I would hit my lacerate attack and then hold down the "Q" attack button to damage the enemy every once in a while I would move around the target to try and dodge some of their attacks, but if I was in the previous root mode this would not be possible. so having the ability to move around is good.
- I noticed when trying to time my attacks one right after the other there seems to be a delay between hitting your 1st choice attack and then trying to time the 2nd choice skill attack. To make the attacks flow better there can be no delay this ruins the timing of hitting the keys and not being able to execute the attack then having to hit it again.
- I also noticed that the Attack skill timers I cant see most of the time its way too dark.
- The attack speed needs to be sped up
- The attacks still seem to have no weight or effect when an enemy is hit.
- still feel like my character has no power. I wanna feel like a strong hero. But moving around seems very sluggish and blocky I want my character to flow through attack to attack like a dance,
- when one attack is done I want to be able to flow right into the next skilled attack and it should look epic but also minimal at the same time but once it hits I need to feel that i did some damage, I'm always trying to check the damage numbers to see if I actually hit the target, but the numbers don't feel right either, not sure if its the numbers animation or if they are too small but they aren't impactful or feel good either.
- Might be cool to add some war cries when attacking might add some umph!
- Melee is also about stance, and right now our characters have no stance. Wow is really good with stance. Look at how a blood elf hold his sword in an non movement ready for combat stance, and then look how he stands in no combat they lean to one side. Stance gives a style to the character and also a style to the combat and right now non of the characters have any style.
- I think both system are needed it gives the player a choice. It is very situational sometimes i used root and sometimes i used non rooted it depends on the situation and what skills you are using. Tab targeting is good when your in a huge mob and need to target quickly, action combat is good for gaining control of your character in boss fights when trying to avoid attacks and gaining back control its also great for just moving your character around the world.
to summarize : Style, Stance, War Cry, Flow, Timing, Weight, Power, Speed, visibility, and leap into a better melee dual combat system
member of Gray Sentinels
Split motion appeal
The main reason that makes people prefer split motion over root motion is due to the freedom of movement. Not everyone likes to be stuck in a motion after pressing a button and realizing it was a bad decision.
The other reason is that when in a fight, you want to use your skills on the correct target and you want to be able to dodge enemy abilities. Having a weapon that locks you in place or forces you in a direction adds complexity.
Why root motion matters
First, I don't think anyone thinks split body animation is immersive. Watching any weapon martial art video will give you an idea of the complexity of human muscles and how they all work together to make weapons deadly.
Using the full body animation, you then commit to an attack to make it impact. Since the player has to be locked of movement when doing the attack. since each weapon and combo will do a different animation, the player is forced to understand how his weapon works and how to use it efficiently in different situation. While turning off some split motion partisan, this will add depth to combat which will make a lot of perfectionist PvPers engaged.
When using split combat, it doesn't matter if you hold the weapon attack button or not. It is just better for players to just hold it to increase the damage output. Split combat is then giving up on meaningful weapon attack to allow the player to focus only on class skills for engaging gameplay. However, when combining both class skills and weapon martial arts, you add a new layer of variety for players to experience their class.
This is where weapon choice becomes very meaningful. Using a higher mobility weapon would make someone build his class differently than a lower mobility weapon just like when choosing between range and melee.
Root motion solutions
You could make root animation directional. So if no movement key is pressed, no momentum should be given to the character. If forward movement is applied, a forward momentum should apply. Sideway would be sidestep animation. Like Black Desert Online basic attacks, you could have simple animation for the sidestep and only make combos when using forward momentum and/or standstill attacks.
Another element that can be added to help players choose the gameplay they want would be to adjust the level of commitment to the weapon choice. For exemple, in alpha, some weapons move you forward more than others. The duration of the animation should depend on the weight of the weapon or the move used. In a combo, the first move shouldn't be the longest. A lot of tuning is needed but the effort is worth.
First attack - less damage, unhindermovement
Second attack - more damage, movement becomes a direction side step.
Third attack - most damage, rooted in place to put in most effort, perhaps a small stumble for enemy if connected
This is just a quick example. you could also change out more damage for crit chance or whatever slight benefit works the best.
Essentially this would give you the decision to just wack someone once and keep moving or bear down and leave yourself a little exposed. Adds more decision making within an encounter. The same principle could also be applied to ranged attacks. The ranger/mage hits will small stuff while moving but if stood inplace gets greater effect through crit, accuracy, damage, whatever. Weve got some similar ideas though. Id love for some combat iterations on this so we can feel how it plays
Following this thought it may make sense to have split motion a high mobility option with reduced damage. You can move all you want, but you're just running in circles swinging your weapon madly. Perhaps we all come through the portal like this. Arrogant adventurers all too sure of themselves as they face a ruined world.
Rooted animation combat could be offered as an alternative through learned stances. The stances could be unique to a weapon, and weapons could have multiple stances. While in a stance you would do significantly more damage than when you are just swinging your pointy stick around. Further along this line you could have combo chains for the stances that increase in effectiveness and or have added effects based on weapons/stances the further into the combo you get.
Imagine being in a fight and everyone is just limp slapping eachother with swords and maces. Suddenly, one of your opponents leaps forward, plants their feet, and just barely misses you with a sweep of their greatsword. They take up their stance and start moving towards you. You want nothing more than to get away from this person.
Stances would be the higher damage option at the cost of reduced mobility and greater commitment to each swing. It could feel good to master, and imagine being the best at a sword stance few people use because it's seen as too difficult to land. Some stances could be stronger through a massive barrage of quick strikes, and others could be slow 3 swing combos with huge damage payoffs for landing them in their entirety.
If it turns out that everyone requires stances in their raid party then you could start to play more heavily on the trade off of mobility. If you MUST have stances to be allowed into a group, then perhaps players move slower in combat while in a stance... or to avoid ruining them perhaps you only move slower for a moment or two after your most recent swing.
The dragon is about to breathe fire, Jimmy the Fighter doesn't notice because he's going ham on that big toe. By the time his raid leader says his name a few times Jimmy the Fighter realizes he's about to become a chicken nugget. It's too late, Jimmy the Fighter won't make it out of the AoE in time because he just did a full splitting stance combo and he's not ready to sprint for safety. Top of the dps charts tho.
I'm sure there's other ways to balance this sorta stuff, but this seemed like it could be a fun thought. It would also give more options to the players.
Nao
I assume that the desire is to have the basic attack be an active button-press with the action combat/tab target hybrid gameplay in mind, so I will try to focus my feedback on that in general. I think that with clear indicators of global cooldown and spell/ability queueing, I'd have a better idea of what the feel for a rotation would be like in regards to mobility. A big part of the skill-cap in many other MMOs I've played when a caster is the ability to stutter-step and time your movements to maximize your casting uptime. This is something that melee players tended to be immune to, so I like the idea of movement being something that all players need to keep in mind, whether that be animation locks from their basic attacks or abilities. Again if the desire is to have basic attacks be a bound skill, I think adding a downtime between animation locks (ideally one visually telegraphed in some way) would add some smoothness to the gameplay and give players the ability to feel like they have more agency around their mobility in combat.
Another piece of feedback I have is that the target-locking/forward momentum of root motion combat makes it quite a bit more awkward to position yourself when fighting multiple mobs to hit as many as possible. Split body combat doesn't have this problem at all, which feels way better in that sense, but again lacks any real purpose to there being a button. In root motion, using RMB/LMB to move while attacking gives you some ability to choose the direction you attack in, but something that I think would reeeeeallly make it feel so much better is if you had a bit of downtime between animations, and instead of having forward momentum your movement keys allowed you to sidestep/backstep/step in between animations, with your camera positioning (via RMB) controlling the direction you swung.
ETA: I do think that if split body is the way that ends up being chosen to go with, I'd like to see some animation locking for melee class abilities at least.
I do like the idea of different stances, but I feel like I'd still have the same gripe with there not really being much of a point in a weapon swing ability with full-on split body combat if you choose not to go the route of using stances.
With that said, I think there is value in root motions. The biggest problem for me with the current motions, is that they fling you SO FAR forward. Countless times I overshoot a mob and miss because of this, playing with the current root motions feels like the game is: "stand in front of something to prevent you from zooming along with your basic attacks"
I think we need another A/B test with new root motions that only move us a single step forward...or not at all. I also think being able to make micro adjustments while holding down the attack button would be a nice mix. (maybe the last X frames of every attack animation is free movement).
1 problem I have with the split motion as of now, is that you can not cast skills while also attacking...and I only have that problem because it FEELS like I should be able to do that, since I can already move however I want.
- Split Body 100% !
I speak for all my guild members testing A1 when I say split body feels 100 times better than root motion. Feels like a different game... I see a lot of people that play ranged classes sharing their thoughts on this, but they have no idea how frustrating it is to be Tanking a boss with body-locked animations where you can't hit the boss while moving back. Ashes is an MMORPG, not a Souls-like game with your basic attacks locking you and pushing you forward to increase the difficulty... It was terrible before IMO.
You also get a huge disadvantage playing melee, with ranged classes being able to move freely while melee is locked and that is also very annoying, the combat just went from mediocre to quite enjoyable with that simple change. Please, keep it and remove root motion completely from our basic attacks.
The "immersion" argument for root motion makes no sense to me... we get immersion from graphics, music, world design etc... combat needs to feel good, and giving us control of movement during combat is so important in a PvX game because that's what gonna bring the hardcore and dedicated players that will stick to your game for thousands of hours.
The truth is; people who want animation locks and root motion in combat because it looks good and feels immersive will still play your game if you don't do it because they still have a game with good graphics, world design and all the roleplaying things. People that want good combat won't play your game if the combat feels clunky and restrictive despite everything else looking good.
I also don't want to have both options available since this would only make it harder to balance and extra work would be required. Only split body IMO
As several people point out the root motion should be put in accordance to the directional input from the keyboard, and making it more of a little skip and not a full blown barbaric leap, making you think about the attacks you do, but not displacing you to the point where one single basic attack could lose you an entire duel due to misplacement to an extreme degree.
Fuck root
Using directional keys, you could do sidestepping attack by using A or D while attacking and you would have a sideway root motion animation. You then wouldnt get out of position but if the ennemy is running away, using W would give you the attack momentum to gap close, making the weapons with a lot of momentum a powerful tool without hindering your ability to stay in place or move where you want
why should they trust you'd put thousands of hours if you are ready to quit because melee basic attack have momentum? Don't try to bully them into submission.
Immersion is one of many arguments, I think split body is restrictive because you can only do one thing : run. Makes the whole gameplay experience of using a melee weapon generic and meaningless. Could catch range classes faster with a forward momentum like a forward thrust compared to running until in range to whack a sword.
I feel like if you don't want any gameplay for melee weapons, you could choose a class that doesn't need it or use the most basic of melee weapon with the least animation duration and momentum. You could still enjoy the rest of the game too.
MMORPG don't have to be like a 2000 game like WoW, it can be more modern and have its own style. Black Desert will always be back in here to show how root motion can be really deep and interesting making each classes very diverse. But even without the extreme BDO mobility and flow of skills, you can still have a good weapon flow and allow the player to orient that flow with directional keys to not commit when they don't want to.
What if they won't play it because running around when a weapon has a 200 degree attack cone anyway feels like it doesn't matter other than movement for the sake of moving?
Ashes is literally built around risk vs reward, it's already not catered to the more casual player.
Does the fact that weapons basically cover the entire space in front of them with their full force/damage, matter to you, or is it good enough that Split Body 'looks good and feels engaging'? If it doesn't, what degree of attack cone will you ask them to change it to once people get tired of 'I can hit an enemy directly to the side of me and slightly behind me'?
I also really feel like they need to try to mix the root motion/split body together and base it off of inputs. Make forward input while auto attacking cause the root motion attacks that move you forward, let strafing/backwards movement slow you slightly and cause a basic reserved auto attack motion with a bit less damage than the root motion, no input can be like the root motion with no/less forward momentum/less damage. I just think input directional changes to your auto attacks would feel/flow better than manually switching between the two. By adjusting speed and damage you give more depth to your movement decisions.
I also agree with the jumping and using certain abilities. You definitely shouldn’t be able to jump while using any ability that roots you, but if I can strafe and cast, I feel like I should be able to jump and cast. Mages fire ball being a perfect example of one that I’m regularly trying to jump and cast unsuccessfully because it just feels like I should be able to.
Personally I prefer the split-body mode and look forward to the continued development.
Even with root motion some weapons have combos with 360-degrees... and this is irrelevant, character movement and weapon cones are separate mechanics, with the way it is now, if we are fighting and you move to the side you won't be hit, if I follow you and move to the side I will hit you, it's not complicated a million games have done it before. It does not make the game easier, it gives you more control = increases the skill gap between a good player that knows how to move and someone that stands still, root motion moves your character for you...
this dude gets it
Ah yes, the 'people who don't agree with me on how the game should be played probably aren't serious/good at it'. Classic.'
I suppose I should respond in kind... let's see...
If you think moving to the side at the same time someone else does in a game where neither player gets any actual advantage by being out of range of the other, is 'increasing a skill gap', then you're about as good as I expect you are.
This ain't World of Warcraft. They said they were fairly confident on doing hybrid and root motion is not necessary for action combat. Split body is still action combat when you can aim with skills. AoC is its own game and doing root motion doesn't make them trying to be someone else. You could argue doing tab target is trying to be FFXIV or WoW which are already on top of the market. Black Desert is used as an exemple because they did ground breaking action combat but obviously AoC is not trying to be Black Desert, it doesn't mean they can't take some of it's very engaging gameplay into consideration. Ashes is doing ground breaking hybrid system and just like Steven is, I am also confident in their team achieving it. What they won't achieve is making a better tab targeting than WoW and FFXIV.
If you read my first post, you see that immersion is a very small part of it even if it still matters, no matter what gameplay you like. There is also other fair arguments :
And I argued before that for me and other players that actually tried to get good at action combat, root motion momentum is a tool that gives more power to the player to achieve high mobility when it is done right.
Most people who argue for split body also are willing to have root motion skills for weapon on top of it as a choice. I think that allows for gameplay variety, follow the risk reward philosophy and as for balancing it doesn't really add that much more complexity than class skills balancing, it just make your choice of weapon another choice on top of your class choice which is nothing else but a good thing since it allows players to enjoy more gameplay variety.
I think that's exactly why we have the ability to switch between tab-target and action combat. I think action combat is a hybrid system that basically takes tab-targetting and enhances it to a much more satisfying level. I use the action combat system almost all the time and I feel with a little bit of polish, it's going to be one of the best systems in the world that all other MMOs will copy.
To fix the q problem, I have a really easily solution I made a video about here:
I like what you have to say. I think your system would work, I personally don't really care about the level of realistic immersive combat you're talking about.
But I do like the idea and tactical depth of being locked into a certain type of attack animation and forward momentum but I think that should not be an auto attack. I think it should be a skill that committs you to some kind of tactical decision.
I'm all about making good tactical decisions, but when we're talking about an auto-attack, I think that the forward movement is really frustrating.
I personally like the fact that right now we have the ability to switch between forward movement or not forward movement.
That said, I really like your idea where if you're holding forward you get forward momentum, if you're not holding forward, then you don't have forward momentum. So you're talking about a semi-root system which is also really cool as well.
You should be able to auto-attack and back up at the same time or strafe for that matter.
Even if I disagree personally with the point that immersion from attacks doesn't matter as long as the rest of the game is immersive enough, I will agree wholeheartedly with the tactical perspective TeamVASH pointed out as that is definitely more important to me. I enjoy playing both melee and spellcasters in all games I play, but a consistent theme with melee in many games I've played is that it tends to be much more face-smashing with no regard for movement or positioning (outside of the occasional positionals in FFXIV, but even those are just positioning and not movement). I'd love to see AoC break the mold here with utilizing the unique hybrid combat style to add a degree of critical thinking for movement when it comes to melee classes.
Regardless of the inevitable decision, I just want to strongly suggest that melee classes have some sort of animation locking even if it is only with certain abilities and not the basic attacks. Tactically, it adds depth to the gameplay. It also adds weight to your abilities in a way that animations alone can't. Regardless to how stupidly broken of a trinket it initially was, ask anyone who played Warrior during Legion in WoW how good it felt to pop Draught of Souls during a fight. Sure, you'd sometimes die because you used it at the wrong time and couldn't get out of a mechanic, but it was just such a satisfying button to press.
I have this same concern. I've discussed most of my thoughts in another post I made about the whole concept of auto attacks. I think Ashes is in a great spot to innovate MMO combat (even if it is just a little bit), so let's take the time and churn through some ideas!
I was on vacation during this testing phase unfortunately but I am pleased to come back and see exactly my thoughts already spelled out. Thanks!