Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
This system wouldn’t feel good (in my opinion) because combat shouldn’t be based on an outright RNG chance. And this type of system would be very un-immersive too. Swinging a sword and very clearly making contact with an enemy but “missing” because of stats and RNG is frankly terrible.
I’m fairly certain what I presented prior to this is the most fair system we can get for both sides. It’s not as if tab players can’t be bothered to press a dodge key or move to the left or right. I think they hear “dodge” and start freaking out like this is some kind of epilepsy-inducing barrage of attacks that they have to dodge within a millisecond. Not the case.
I don't think that's quite what is being said.
For example, a Tab Target player is already going to having to dodge things like Ground AoE and telegraphs. So there's no direct argument to be made for 'well I don't want to have to move', so that's a thing. There isn't currently a 'stat that protects you from Hallowed Ground' other than 'getting off the light show'.
More accurately it would mean that a certain type of ability would need to have a different startup, or indicator, to tell the player 'you need to do something to move your character so that this person does not have perfect line shot to you', which reduces the 'snappy' and 'speed' of certain combat.
That's where Action Combat players would have to meet TT players in the middle, actually. If TT players are going to be forced to 'move to increase their Evasion against Abilities', they will need more indicators that this is necessary.
Game already mostly has these (except Javelin sorta). What's harder is 'exactly how much', 'what players will think of it', etc.
EDIT: Also, some Tab Target fans want exactly that. Depending on the complexity of the requirements, it's less boring, if you're a person that isn't bored by a lack of kinetics in your games.
Ah but in this case, most of the time if you 'very clearly made contact', RNG won't result in missing.
That part is subjective, for example the attack cones in the current test are sometimes greater than 180 Degrees so 'clearly made contact' is 'yeah that guy was basically somewhere in my line of sight'.
Agreed. I think that’s the feedback Jahlon is sending onward as well. Folks will forgive a good tab target combat system, and will destroy a crappy action combat system.
Totally fine with all players being able to clearly see what’s coming most of the time. (That even opens up the potential for blinds to be a real threat). It’s very clear if a fireball is coming your way. Perhaps arrows will have a very noticeable trail behind them. Sure they travel pretty damn quick so you’ll probably be hit by the first one but after that you’ll be on the lookout, that’s just an advantage an arrow has over a fireball. It’s harder to see coming if you’re not looking for it but does less damage. This is one example but can be carried over to any attack in the game. So many abilities are so flashy and there’s usually a wind-up by the user so you can see something is coming. Plenty of cues already exist and I have no problem with it. Players, bosses, mobs, all of them can and should indicate what they’re doing so you can react. This is also yet another way of being able to make a boss fight easier or harder; rather than adding more health or attack damage to make an enemy harder, you make their attacks faster or give less obvious cues that the players have to learn.
Yeah, there is a misconception among many people that haven't played good tab target games that you can just stand still all the time, this is obviously not the case. It isn't as mobile as an action game, but that is by design, and is what defensive stats are a thing.
Where something like what you are talking about here would fall down though, is when you have 3 or 4 people all attacking you at a time.
It would work really well in 1v1 situations, and perhaps even when you have two people on you. However, as soon as you have more than that, it simply wouldn't cope as a system - despite the fact that a tab target system still allows you to defend against 3+ other players effectively.
Either way, the point as the design is laid out to us now is that RNG will never be completely gone, and there are reasons why that is technically fine, as long as you can influence it, as both the attacker and the defender.
Mainly because if you can't, then the game almost has to turn into a battle of iFrames. Just think of RNG evasion as 'iFrames that the player didn't actually need to do something specific to activate'. In the example given, therefore, if they do less, they 'proc their iFrames less often'.
No one's going to build an Action Combat MMO of this type without iFrames if you don't add some RNG evasion score, and if you do add them, games rapidly devolve into 'why are you building for defense anyway? Just don't get hit, nub'.
The only other path is usually GW2, big telegraphs, high-to-extreme mobility, targeting of that specific type.
I won’t forgive a “good” tab target system as I don’t think those words can go together.
Broken record time:
(Based on what George Black said) If it has: dedicated block, light and heavy basic attacks, hit boxes or at least the need for dodging/moving/blocking based on what the mob/boss is doing, etc then it’s not a tab target game. At that point it enters hybrid territory, just skewed toward tab still without a few additional features.
No, that is still perfectly possible to be in tab target territory, you just haven't played enough tab target games to know.
All of these things are present in EQ2, a 17 year old unapologetically tab target game.
Tell me what you consider a good tab target MMO. I’ve tried about 3, maybe 4 tab games so I’m curious. I’ll save some time in case one of them is FF14 because the movement is barely needed, it’s tacked on through glowing stuff on the ground telling you to wake up from your coma and move a few steps over. I spent most of my time in that game (and WoW) standing still and pressing through a long list of hotkeys unless the spot I was standing on started to glow.
Alright, do the RNG in the form of crit chance vs crit resistance. Maybe go as far as a balance stat which determines how big the window of possible non-crit damage you do with each attack.
Let me explain that better:
Let’s say your stats allow you to do up to 100 damage to the opponent with a basic attack. If you have a balance stat of 90 (which literally means 90%), then your attack will do anywhere from 90 to 100 points of damage. This becomes more noticeable when you calculate your DPS. Say you can output up to 1,000 DPS. If your balance stat was really low, say 70%, then you would be doing somewhere between 700 to 1,000 DPS.
With this stat we would probably say 50-60 balance is the minimum possible stat, and either 99 or 100 balance is the maximum possible, but extremely hard to get a full set of gear that good. And perhaps impossible to do if you choose to go with a high DEF build or a high Crit build or whatever.
This could give you the RNG effect without taking away actual true hits.
And for some people, depending on how much they had to think about the situation, that is enough, they don't care about the movement. Sometimes harder enemies require more movement. Sometimes you spend the 3 seconds of spell casting or autoattacking watching and thinking through the next 4 moves like a chess game.
That's just what some people want from MMOs. But regardless of that, there's 'tuning and dials' to think about again. You can't give bigger telegraphs a lot of the time because between the ping and the average human reaction speed, it becomes unplayable for over 60% of people. Or rather, if you do give them, the game slows to the point where a certain aspect of it becomes unpleasant, or people go 'you might as well tab target'.
The difference between a person with 320ms reaction time and one with 170ms reaction time is so meaningful in high octane action gaming and fighters that one has to literally build systems from the ground up to give players with slower reaction times fair ways to compensate, that can't be easily utilized (or aren't worth it) to fast reaction time players.
And so, Evasion Stat or iFrames. Faster players get the same benefits as slower ones within an acceptable range, and then they capitalize faster and harder on mistakes, tilting their playstyles toward riskier plays. Win-win... sorta.
WoW is the worst example of a tab target game I have seen.
I don't begrudge people that bash tab target games when that is the experience they have, I bash WoW instead.
The thing that is most misunderstood about tab target games though, is that the interest present is not in the combat system - it is in the content. If you tried to judge a tab target game based on how the combat system performs on trash mobs, you are not getting a good representation of the game.
Where an action game may put 75% of what players are doing in the hands of the combat system, and 25% of it in the hands of the content, tab target games reverse that.
This does mean that tab target games are very boring on base population - or trash mobs. Honestly, they can be mind-numbingly boring here.
However, when you get to actual boss encounters (or any encounter that is actually designed to be difficult - which doesn't need to be a boss), they are every bit as difficult and involved as an action combat system.
The reasons this means many people prefer tab over action is it means developers can create more varied content. When you are doing content that is 25% the content and 75% your combat system, every encounter is still 75% the same and only 25% different. In tab target games, those encounters are only 25% combat system, and so are only 25% the same. This allows for more varied combat in tab target games than what is possible in action games.
However, all of this only applies to PvE.
One of the other things I have been saying for a long time on these forums is that action combat is far more suited to PvP than tab target is, and most of the players that are more keen on PvP than PvE are also more keen on action than tab. This is obviously a generalization, but it is accurate based on my observations.
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Keeping the above in mind, the best tab target game I have seen is EQ2. It has a combat system that is fairly in depth, but a character customization that is ludicrous at this point (in a good way). It also has the content to back all of that up.
If Intrepid did have to go to a tab target system (which again, is their stated fallback if hybrid doesn't work), my suggestion/hope would be that they take EQ2 as a base, and add in a little more in to the combat system to encourage movement (as opposed to relying on the content to encourage this) as a means of modernizing a decades old combat system.
I mean I wouldn’t like it but at the absolute very least if it was the way you described before with having the general attack cone still matter in addition to an evasion stat it could work. I’m just not willing to make massive concessions when I haven’t seen any tab players give anything up or meet in the middle. I haven’t heard a single tab-only player say they would be willing to even tolerate the simple proposals I made today about blocking and light/heavy basics. Best I’ve seen was George say a pure tab target game with blocking and movement.
EDIT: so I looked up some EQ2 gameplay and I unfortunately can’t see the difference between it and other tab games.
But in the end, that's not really an argument you need to make at all. Present Intrepid with the best possible way of doing what you're asking for, and they're already at least considering it. The goal would be to 'get to a system that has no obvious flaws', not 'negotiate aspects', per se.
So, on that note, I point out something you're familiar with. Vindictus has moves that range from 10 to 15 frames (EDIT: of 'startup', before they hit) on average. These are, by most standards, borderline unreactable for the average person, actually unreactable for about 20-30% of people, and 'normal or slow' to a superhuman few. Learning or knowing the moves does not change this much. At least, not more than 'random biology'. Did you drink enough water in the last hour? No? Unreactable.
This means that to a nontrivial portion of the population, there is actually no skill involved in them playing Vindictus. It's mashing and guessing the whole way. And for a similarly sized portion of the population, it's nice, pushes on their mind, makes them feel engaged and active.
But it means one other interesting thing above all that.
For some people, they are never actually dodging based on seeing something in Vindictus. Not even 'guessing, expecting, then seeing and reacting'. Because biologically they cannot.
Some get caught up in the flashiness and think it's super fun and play anyway. Some don't, label it silly and don't play. That's not something that optical processing biology decides.
But those people need their Evasion Stat, because 'skill' only goes so far when you see things 4 frames slower than other people and the game is tuned to feel good rather than 'be completely fair' (potential Ashes problem, not talking about Vindictus)
From the perspective of videos, you wont. Tab target games are not made to look good, they are made to play good.
Remember, back when most tab target games were made (especially the ones that formed the style), YouTube didnt even exist. Action combat exists in no small part to make it more attractive to watch, rather than to play.
This is why I do agree that a compromise for adding more movement to a tab target game is a good way to start modernizing it.
It's precisely because of 'aiming for 50-50' that things are getting complicated. It's probably been harder to see it directly, thus far (because as pointed out, it's not really 'visible'), but when Action Combat fans talk about the combat, they talk about the 'wrong side' of the Combat.
A designer needs to know almost nothing about what you want from the Combat in the personal sense. They need to know what you want the actual moment-to-moment interaction with a specific type of enemy to be.
One of the best principles of game design I've ever heard/come up with (I can't be sure, I might have dreamed it, and if I dream it, then technically I came up with it?), is that you should start from the experience of a player or group of players fighting the game's mid-boss.
Starting from cool endgame leads to problems, as does starting from early progressions.
Action Combat has a secondary problem on top of that, the fact that people know what they experience by feel and not by numbers. Designers can translate the numbers if there are two actors in the scenario, but you can't really do it from one.
Basically, to the Tab Target side, it can sound like you're saying nothing at all. Their mindset is attuned to 'what they had to do against a situation and mechanics of a boss', whereas what you generally end up expressing is closer to 'explaining how chess would be cooler if it was played in 4 Dimensions with Time Traveling Pieces'.
Response: "Sure, it's interesting, but what does it feel like to solve problems in this space?"
I haven’t had issues with reacting to enemies, including other players, in Vindictus. Or heard of any before. I think there’s a flaw in your data, kind of anyway. The initial strike might be super fast, but that’s not the full picture. In Vindictus, to do any reasonable amount of damage to your opponent you’d have to land a smash attack (a heavy attack, at the end of a combo). For the example, I will use Fiona who is a tank and is very easy to describe the combos for and we’ll also say “L” is a basic sword swing while “R” is a smash. You do these one after another, not at the same time (so longer strings take a lot more time, spamming the buttons will not make it go faster).
You could do L,R which would be a swing and then a fast spin with an upward slash. It’s quick but it’s still not a lot of damage.
You could do L,L,R which is two swings and then a shield bash. More damage than the first, took longer to do.
Let’s skip ahead to L,L,L,L,R which is 4 swings followed by a windup into a very powerful kick. This does the most damage but at the cost of getting through 4 uninterrupted swings, all of which were opportunities for your opponent to get distance, stagger you which would make you have to start from scratch, or be damaging you with their own attacks while you’re trying to get through your swings to your big hit.
So sure, each individual basic attack is very fast and borderline uncounterable, but you’re not looking to counter basic attacks, you’re looking to avoid or block or counter your enemies heavy (smash) attacks.
I hope this was enlightening, I didn’t mean to make it so long but I figured we were overdue for getting into some of the details of that game.
EDIT: typo with the LLLLR example, it’s 4 Ls not 3 but I’m super tired
Hi, thanks for your feedback!
I dont believe that a full tab target or full action combat system would be a good idea for this game. What i suggested, was that make only the basic attacks action combat, and all the skills tab target, wich doestn require them any additional wokr on the combat, since they have all those features in the alpha right know. I love the feeling of running around and swinging my sword wherever i like, and i like the feeling of tab targeting mobs and using skills as well. The two can co-exist, and should co-exist, much like in the current state, with some tweeking of course wich i prsented in my writings
I prefer tab in mmos, but I play the hybrid/action ones too. I've loved some and hated some, same with tab mmos, loved some and hated some. WoW was incredibly boring to me. I had never played it before until the WoW classic relaunch a couple years ago. Raiding killed it for me. It was hours of standing still casting frostbolt over and over, until occasionally you have to go stand somewhere else and cast frost bolt.
It was like country line dancing, best analogy I can think of. I enjoyed the 5 man dungeons more than the 40 man content.
I understand it actually, but that's kind of the point. Ashes abilities aren't likely to be 'third hit of a sequence that gives you a hint of what is about to happen'. Tanks are going to Javelin you 'right now', and your ability to do anything about it might just be zero.
Also, in a way you might have missed my point, but I'm not sure. If you are saying 'I can respond to the third strike, that's not a problem, the design is fine', then yeah, I can see that easily., because the third strike in a Vindictus combo is quite late. Were you saying that the data on reaction time itself was flawed? The data on 'the reaction time's likely effect on Vindictus'?
Conceded entirely, that was a poor way to make the point and derailed from it, since I was trying not to go directly into fighting game stuff again.
Where do you want me to elaborate on this, from? Vindictus is, technically, too slow of a game to be relevant, I guess.
Everyone talks about combat being the most important thing in an mmo, but it's kinda not. The content is.
Hi there, thank you again for making such interesting feedback to me. I see that the general discussion switched to the defense side of things and blocking at some point, wich i dont want to dive into deeply.
Regarding ranged attacks and miss, if you use tab target as a ranged attack and can “miss” your attack, then the real benefit to using aiming, is to hit all the time when you hit, without any damage bonus. If they make tab target missing more often, players will use action to hit all the time, thats the reward of using aiming in ranged attacks. This is a more balanced approach than giving them damage boost i believe. It also creates a situation where players will move from one way to the another to force ranged attackers to use tab target wich has a high chance of missing. The more you move the higher the chance you have to “dodge” a ranged attack, just like in real life.
I also dont want to make a tab vs action fight here, my main point is that the two can co exist in a balanced way, if you make melee basic attacks action, and the skills tab target. (Excluding aoe and such) I just wanted to say this because i saw some radical toughts regarding it wich i dont think is a good idea
Hi there! People say its important, because combat is what you will have to do in order to level up your character, and acces end game content, wich also depends on the combat system. It is a content in and of itself. You want it to be good, because if it sucks, it will ruin the whole game. The main point is the Node system wich rely on PVP (250 versus 250) to make the world dynamic. Its a core part of the game, apart from gettin from point A to point B, combat is the second most used “system” or content.
Understood. Based on some recent testing I have other concerns about their implementations for now anyway, and I'm similarly not particularly interested in discussing the 'basic attacks Action, skills Tab' concept, so I'll refocus on the appropriate thread.
Edit - Alright I'll grant that individually the combat is the most important part. Combat being good is more important that just pirating in Ashes, or just attacking cities, or just attacking caravans - those things individually. But cumulatively, those 3 things and more, the content as a whole, is more important to me than combat by itself.
Personally, the only tab-target MMO I ever truly enjoyed was ArcheAge. There are so many things about it that made me forget that it was tab-target, not only did the game have a great setting, interesting life skills and a ridiculous array of content, the tab-target felt good. It was the small things that made it feel more action oriented than it truly was, such as gap-closers traversing height/plane differences, general attack animations feeling quite weighted, etc. But, even after saying that, I loathe it. Because no matter what gimmicks they put into those games, they always end up as you said, a "standing still and pressing through a long list of hotkeys unless the spot I'm standing on starts to glow" simulator.
I don't know about that, no matter how well they're made, most tab-target games feel like garbage. They're the definition of mindlessly spam space while running your 1-5 attack rotation. I had fun with them, as I mentioned above, but they don't come close to action games in the slightest.
Take the most basic part of an MMO, a boss fight and just look how half-assed they are in tab-target MMO's. They will either turn them into some puzzle piece game like in FFXIV or just a "move out of the circle to not die" like in others.
ArcheAge (tab-target) -
DDO (action combat) -
Hi, thanks for your feedback. I believe that the main design element thats gonna determine this game’s feel of combat, is that you can hit multiple enemies with one swing. Also, bossfights will not be like in ArchAge, because this also applies to monsters as well. If you throw in some knock back mechanics and such (Like in that DDO bossfight) its gonna be a mixture, and i believe thats the way forward.
I think the main disadvantage of an Action Combat system, is that it have to rely on some sort of active blocking mechanism. If you look closely without byas, this DDO gameplay is about pressing a button for block, waiting for enemy attack, than attacking when the enemy is vulnerable for a short time window. There were not that many skill uses, and the focus of the gameplay is constant motion. This too could apply in the system Intrepid is trying to make, just take out the blocking, and add in multiple skill uses and attacks.