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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.
Action Targeting Can't Include Bows & Arrows, Right?
Tyranthraxus
Member, Alpha Two
Because of the hitboxes, correct?
Apoc seemed to include this, but the character model selections were very limited. The Orc races are supposed to be "significantly" taller than the tallest of the next-tallest race, once the game launches. Doesn't this mean that any Action abilities have to be limited to things like AoE and Cone attacks?
Otherwise, there'd be an inherent advantage to having the smallest character possible - for the smallest vertical hitbox. Or am I overlooking something?
Apoc seemed to include this, but the character model selections were very limited. The Orc races are supposed to be "significantly" taller than the tallest of the next-tallest race, once the game launches. Doesn't this mean that any Action abilities have to be limited to things like AoE and Cone attacks?
Otherwise, there'd be an inherent advantage to having the smallest character possible - for the smallest vertical hitbox. Or am I overlooking something?
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But yeah that's kind of the conundrum of SKILL based action combat in mmo's with diverse races and character creators where you can further refine how big or small your character is. In the typical MMO action combat where near everything is an aoe, and there's some kind of soft target lock system, it doesn't matter as much.
Apex Legends ran into the problem with their fat characters and skinny characters. They had to make their fat characters take less damage bullet for bullet to balance it out. And the harder to hit skinny characters took a bit more damage bullet for bullet.
Edit: It does matter though, even in strictly tab target games. Smaller characters are almost always better. Visually you attract less attention. And a highly skilled tab target player only uses tab to target situationally. In many cases of high level play in tab target, you have to manually click the enemy player to target them efficiently and quickly. Harder to do against smaller characters.
At the end of the day, how much it all really matters is debatable. But if you're looking for every advantage you can get, you go small.
There is a middle ground between a tab target combat game and a true first-person shooter experience.
Just make there be a consistent area that if you put your targeting reticle over it, you are aiming. That doesn't remove skill from the equation; you can still use cover, you can still dodge out of the way. Jeffrey Bard suggested that might be the way they are going.
"More than likely we'll have some sort of unified or unified-ish hitbox. But again it's going to probably have a unified hitbox with some exceptions or some special sort of collision rules based on them as opposed to kind of just making it smaller for one and not the other."
We know we're not going to have hit location as a factor, where you get critical strikes from headshots. That was never how action combat was advertised. Steven ruled that out some time back.
"We don't have separate types of hitbox categories, for example. There's no head hit box in the MMORPG like there was in APOC. So from a critical standpoint you're not going to see a greater risk of critting for a larger hitbox."
As for how they would do it, I say you figure out the maximum possible dimensions from character creation in all directions (height, width, depth) and apply that to every character. That might mean you can aim above a character's head and hit them but so what. This isn't Counter-Strike and was never meant to be.
You'll find a lot of people disagreeing with this, for some reason, the idea of trying hurts their heads... "This isn't an FPS, I shouldn't have to aim my magic or bow!
That’s ok. Let them disagree.
This isn’t an FPS, just as it isn’t a flight simulator or a reskinned Candy Crush. For those who think it’s an FPS, read the dev quotes again.
Action combat will, however, require you to point at the thing you want to attack. You’re not aiming like a game of Halo but you’re not targeting by hitting the tab key until you focus on your desired enemy before spamming the attack key. It’s in-between.
Examples of action combat games that might be comparable (that you can try out now, for free) would be Neverwinter Online and Secret World Legends. (I use these as examples because I’ve played both extensively.)
I was hoping more in line with New World, but at least you understand it doesn't mean high-fantasy Call of Duty. For some reason people have a volatile reaction to the word 'aim' or 'manual targeting' in the MMO crowd.
Animation locking destroys a players sense of control and hurts skill, it doesn't matter how quick you are at reacting to things if you have started an attack that is locked until the animation is over you're dead.
I mean, if they find a way to make a more-unified hitbox, then that's ideal for allowing single-target Action-combat targeting. It's just hard for me to imagine the largest and smallest characters possible both having the same vertical hitbox; Wouldn't you have to be able to hit the shortest-possible dwarf by technically shooting an arrow over their head?
In such a case, wouldn't you have to aim lower to hit the absolute tallest character, while a direct "headshot" would then be a miss?
Not bagging on Action-combat - yours truly does like the idea - it just seems to me like it should be relegated to cone-and-area attacks on a group of targets, rather than a 1v1 attack like with a bow. That very much falls towards a FPS type of gameplay.
No, you wouldn't miss by doing a headshot on the tallest character. Not if, like I said, you just make the universal hitbox be the largest dimensions characters can be. There are simple ways to make it work. I don't know how Intrepid is going to do it, but it's not that difficult. They're working on something.
Wait a minute. What dwarf are you shooting at?
He wasn't aiming at your back...
A true ninja would hide in the dirt with their bow and wait for you to walk over you so they could shoot you in the #$@ for a critical shot.