Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
Super Mario Strikers would like a word...
Ack! Please don't start Dygz up again, we just got done with whatever tangent...
The thing you're responding to is just another 'truthism' with no meaning to this, on top of being opinion.
OK, Ms. Pot.
I think i remember the point of my post. Popular = losts of players. But a lot of the "players" in Lost Ark are bot. I think people estimate it to about 20-25% of the players. 90k-160k. So the game is less popular than it seems. Plus the game is f2p, and some feel like they are missing a mmo to play
It's ridiculous.
That's not the point. The point is just to have good combat. Lost Ark and AoC aren't even comparable games purely from camera pov.
An RPG is a Roleplaying game which includes combat. An RPG is not a Combat game with no time to Roleplay during combat.
And done.
Have a great week.
I agree, Lost Ark, while having a good combat system (though I absolutely hate it in PvP), and great Raids, lacks in everything else. It's pretty much a mobile game. I had some fun, but I'm glad I quit.
ESO on the other hand has really good content (as far as I remember), but its combat is just awful. Animation canceling, weaving attacks, floaty, doesn't feel impactful, having to swap weapons to keep your buffs active every 10-15 sec, it's just terrible imo. The only reason I'm not playing the game right now.
So yes, combat has huge impact, but without the content to support it, the game can't really last for long.
I actually love ESO's combat. It's extremely fast paced. I just wish the game wasn't so neglected by Zenimax with all the millions of bugs and lag they have ignored to address since launch.
What I don't know is whether that can be accommodated in an open PvP environment without making the game substantially less enjoyable for the majority of players who will want faster combat.
Will enabling slow combat in effect nerf fast combat by making it unnecessary or sub-optimal?
I would not want to be accommodated at the expense of the vast majority of the player base.
Those that did not enjoy Lost Ark's combat: What classes did you play and why did the combat in those classes feel unsatisfying to you?
Except Lost Ark isn't mobile at all. It's only available on Windows. Did you confuse it with another game?
It's as much a mobile game as the Diablo series, which it resembles in many ways,
They will also not be making combat as fast as a Hack & Slash game because Ashes is an Roleplaying game and the devs want people to be able to roleplay during combat.
The devs plan to accommodate Action Combat, but if it comes down to a choice between Action Combat only or Tab-Target only, Steven says he will choose Tab-Target.
Second, yes, if I am to play Ashes (and I understand that might not be possible), I may need slower builds. I have arthritis in my left hand, and my experience with fast, positional combo oriented fighting games has been poor. I was not able to handle Elite Dangerous with a controller on a PS4, as I could not sustain rapid accurate control for long.
Third, while my only MMO experience is original EverQuest a couple decades ago, my impression from watching YouTube is that modern games are expected to be substantially faster. Further, it seems to me that a player who takes pride in their skill at PvP will want to distinguish themselves through superior positioning and tactics, and this will involve rapid play. I find this heartening.
I am not entitled to play, but I would like to. I also suspect that there is a large potential market of older, more cerebral players who would bring value to the world, but whose reflexes are much less sharp.
Another thing is that there will be a lot of flexibility with the way we make our characters. There will be plenty of skills to choose from, and then there will be a lot of augments that change the way that skills work. I would be surprised if someone doesn't come up with a build that makes things as easy as possible for folks who don't want to dash around a lot and deal with rapid abilities.
My guess is that if you play a ranged character (like a Mage or a Ranger) and stick with mostly tab-based skills, it won't be too hard. You might not be the most efficient or powerful character ever, but you might still have a ton of fun blowing up monsters and exploring the gorgeous game world.
Ashes is not going to be Hack & Slash fast.
The plan is to be a hybrid of Tab Target and Action Combat. Which means you would be able to choose builds that are slower than Action Combat.
Steven has said that if they can't achieve a hybrid, he will choose Tab Target - which is the "slowest" of the two.
But, slow is subjective.
And the reason for "slower" combat is not going to be because the devs want to accommodate players who "need" slower combat.
You may very well be able to find builds that are a comfortable speed for you, regardless of the reasons they were designed that way.
Very aware it isn't a game available on mobile. But it's designed to be mobile friendly. You can't place Ashes of Creation on the app store. But with Lost Ark, you actually could. Which is why i don't agree that you can compare the two. And to be honest, Lost Ark is one completely poorly designed game. The UI is horrendous.
I don't think the vast majority of players want fast combat. Loud players want fast combat, but the majority I think wants something more in the middle.
Mehhh I'm not sure professional gamers would give us a combat that most players enjoy. There's a wide variety of types of players and people who play any game and the professional gamers make up only the top 1%. I think the players in Alpha 1 and 2 will be a better variety of players to test combat and help offer feedback that will ultimately turn it into something more mainstream than what pro gamers would give us.
I think you have to look at combat speed in multiple parts to get a useful answer: interaction speed, decision making speed, input leniency, and average animation speed.
Others might disagree, but I find souls games over all combat speed to be quite slow (medium as a whole), but not tab target slow. I think I would be ok with that pacing in AoC as someone who skews towards faster games. Its decision making speed is quite slow compared to what I am used to save for two bosses(and even those are just medium.) It's interaction speed is low medium to me. It's leniency is mixed. And it's animation speeds are definitively medium speed to me on most if not all weapons (daggers are iffy.) I usually compare it against monster hunter and 3d fighting games when I make my comparison.
Adding to this something that seems to come up really often in design these days but isn't usually directly addressed (though I think we talked about it in a prior thread), the Time To Move after an action has recovered (because the game has a startup to standard movement that isn't buffered into the animation recovery). It's this which causes certain games to end up being a bunch of 'roll to move', because people roll just to get out of the 3-5 frames of 'inertial startup' that would otherwise result in difficulty or damage.
streamers can literally make or break games on release with just their input and opinions, so from the marketing side, i'd say it'd be good to for them to like the game. the most popular games in general are heavily occupied by major esports titles. professional gamers just like good games and get really good at them. casual players have no clue on how most of their inputs matter. as long as they can kill a mob, they're not going to have issues. There's a reason why popular content creators are good at their games. people like watching that stuff and mimic'ing it, casual or not.
Doesn't matter how popular esports are.
A roleplaying game is not a sport.
funny how every major mmo has had esports leagues while not at all involving esports somehow.
It's okay to not like esports but ur objectively wrong, especially when a major component of AoC is competition. MMORPGs are just a bunch of games combined in one, and gatekeeping types of players, especially ones that are combat focused, kinda defeats the purpose of the game
Games with rules inherently have gatekeeping.