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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.
Action combat and PVE
234Graph
Member
Lately I've been seeing this sentiment that action combat doesn't suit PVE and I heavily disagree. Neverwinter and especially "Dragons Dogma online" xombat worked extremely well with pve. This isn't a post saying Ashes should lean for Action combat only, I'm just making the statement that Action combat can work well in PVE.
Dragon's Dogma went down so below are two examples:
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxiz4X6JC3jsNLXrTu1duCx9GaJw9iTsGB
https://youtu.be/90FP-yjZmhw
Dragon's Dogma went down so below are two examples:
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxiz4X6JC3jsNLXrTu1duCx9GaJw9iTsGB
https://youtu.be/90FP-yjZmhw 3
Comments
Virtually everyone agrees that action combat is better for soloing, so there is no need to give examples of people soloing in an action combat game.
There's literally group combat in the clips I sent, did you even give it a fair watch?
I got no questions and a 40 person raid can work with AC.
Can *a* 40 person raid work? Potentially, but there is no objective evidence to back this up.
Can a game create enough 40 person raid content to have what any top end player would consider a top end raid game (we are talking 30 or so individual encounters, all of which are different)? No, no it can't.
Fact is, literally no game has ever made action combat work in a positive manner with more than five players present at a time, and even then things like mobility get severely limited.
If you want to learn more, go to one of those discussions you referenced in the OP. All the reasoning as to why is in there. Or, if you want to post a video to disprove the existing claims, find one where action combat is used in a 40 player setting, and isn't overly restrictive.
Posting a video of three people fighting together is not advancing your opinion here at all, because we all know it works well for up to three, can sometimes work ok for up to 5, but has literally never worked well for more than that. It is kind of just proving that it works fine in small scale, but not so much with large scale combat.
Just like you said not long ago, large scale raids haven't been tried out with AC before(to my knowledge at least) so for there to be a sentiment that it "has never worked well" is weird, quite unfair and biased against AC as it hasn't been given the opportunity(or enough of it) to shine in this department.
Moreover, mobility is usually only an issue when the AC is too fast paced like BDO. If it's made slower paced like the witcher 3 then it should be fine, not to talk of the fact that platforms and boses in large raids are extremely wide-range so there's enough space to alleviate such issue
I'm not here to say that AC is as efficient as Tab targeting in large raids(it's not) but that it can work.
Many people don't make that distinction.
Hack & Slash combat negates RP.
That Dragon's Dogma clip seems like it's a bit too frenetic for 8 person groups.
I think the action combat in NWO is great.
Witcher 3 looks pretty good.
There's a sweet spot somewhere.
There's a difference between saying something along the lines of "large scale raids work better with Tab targeting than AC/Action combat" and "Large scale raids don't fit with Action combat". My point is that it can be done with action combat.
Could you please if you dont mind, give me an example of the game that attempted large scale raids with AC but failed to do so specifically because that wouldn't work?
Yeah I dislike Hack & Slash and yeah I'm referring to slower paced Action combat
Feel free to go to those threads, read my reasoning, and then reply.
Perhaps the biggest issue I see in Ashes due to the advantages and disadvantages of action and tab, is that assuming they create PvE content worthy of being called PvE content, tab target will be required. This will likely put raids going after such content at a distinct disadvantage in PvP - which is another area where action combat is more suited.
Obviously developers can attempt to balance around this, but it is hard to balance two systems against each other in aspects where one is inherently better suited than the other.
Either that, or action combat is going to be watered down from what a lot of people would like it to be - which is not something I would want to see happen.
As someone who constantly advocates for tab-target as the best for PVE, especially relating to raiding, I'm curious as to what you'd call a "top end" raid? Can you give examples?
In what context? I assume you mean PVE, right?
It's a problem because the style of combat required for multiplayer action combat beyond 6 people is a style most people dislike.
I don't think Intrepid would choose to make a game that has the types of PvE encounters we've already seen, and then reduce the appeal of the game by making Action Combat a reasonable way to take on those encounters. Not because this is not possible.
But because people would not like it and the game would die. If it would be any help to the community or Intrepid itself, I will argue that point for literally hours, at the micro-level if necessary. A competent designer can learn the entirety of how these things work and don't work, in about 3 years. Intrepid has had six. Even if we cut that down to 'no, really they've only had one', I doubt it would be a problem.
Also, Neverwinter 'raids' seem to 'work' because the mobility is normally equal to or less than most Tab Target games, which is 'Action Combat In Name Only' for some people, but 'perfect' for others. Those others are going to be quite happy, I'm sure.
Ok, let's hear these micro level arguments.
How would action combat reduce appeal?
When an enemy is large (bosses or the enemy from the OP video), this is fine for the overall experience, but that means that if it is not swinging its attack in effectively a 180 degree cone (Elder Dragon of Frost) or raining basically random death around (Elder Dragon of the Wood), all you really need is to put a tank in front of it and everyone else to the sides, assuming its attacks don't constantly cause it to move. No one is likely to be out of range.
If it IS swinging in this 180 degree cone, you need either a bunch of classes that have perfect active block, or iframes, for most people to manage, assuming collision. But perfect Active Block is a sort of weird way to implement Action Combat because it's explicitly 'I stand here and hold a block button', with the 'stand here' part being the important aspect, and this usually applies even if your stamina depletes while blocking.
If it is attacking with the random death shower, the combat you'll experience isn't meaningfully different from a Tab Target game, and if the boss is large and has a large hurtbox, then even targeted abilities aren't hard to deal with. For that to be true, the boss itself must be mobile.
So once you are past 6 people, even with a 60 degree attack cone, you can fairly easily make sure that the boss only hits one person, who is mitigating and taunting, for example, and everyone else just has to CHASE it when it moves. Let's assume for the moment that a large boss does not move a LOT because not only do most not do this, it makes it harder for someone to establish who is actually being targeted.
If we go down to 'small enemy groups' then they too, must be very mobile, in order for the 'action' part to work, because otherwise a large enough group will just be able to cause them to stand in the damage zone. For an enemy to react to any attack and block or dodge, either they need perfect block that covers all directions, or they need iframes. I'm not sure if you'd agree that iframes on mobs suck, but it can certainly be unsatisfying. If there's collision, then you now must possibly 'decide who gets to stand close enough to it'.
When you can't tell who is going to be attacked, you can't 'read' the situation enough to make proper action decisions, and the more people there are involved in this process, the harder that is (unless the game is super simplistic, which is again, Action Combat In Name Only, but I expect people would be happy). When the boss doesn't move or react to attacks, then there's no decisions to be made.
Yet for some reason, many people claim that they hate BDO combat. Now, those people MIGHT mean that they hate 'the fact that BDO open world mobs are easy'. But if we look at the main methods of fighting the few interesting bosses and elites in that game, things which explicitly ARE group content, their Action Combat holds up quite well.
I'm not talking about the sort of people who think BDO combat is good, of course. If one does think that (especially if you've fought Katzvariak, Nouver, Red Nose sorta, doubly so if you've fought them with less than 30 people on them) then that's great. If we believe that there's a majority of people out there willing to accept that as a combat system, then I obviously have nothing to say here and will await the possibility of this glorious experience.
EDIT: For clarity, the above is all just 'verification that we have the same understandings of what it is', since the reason for its lack of appeal have to do with 'what the above things lead to in terms of reaction times and frame data, by necessity'.
This seems like you made up a bunch of unnecessary requirements for an action bosses. I disagree with a lot of your assertions and conclusions but don't think they are relevant to this conversation.
Since you assert that the game would be popular with a tab boss, then I don't think the boss has to change for this argument which is focused on the player's combat mechanics. Correct me if i'm wrong but i believe the devs have consistently defined action abilities as ones you have to aim (free aim).
So, assuming we don't change the bosses mechanics but change players abilities so that they have to aim them instead of clicking on the boss once, how would that reduce appeal?
I would disagree. Vindictus has AC and had raids of 20+.
First question is: If the enemy does not move, does it count as 'aim'? If you don't have to move yourself, on top of that, I wouldn't call this 'aim'. I also wouldn't call it 'Action'. But if that's the definition of 'Action Combat' then sure, I have no valid point.
Second question is: If the enemy does move, and you aren't entirely clear on who they are attacking next, what do you aim at?
From 9:30 to 11:30 in this video, shows what I mean here. At about the 9:33 mark, Steven attacks the boss with a fireball. Now, we all complained about the long windup of that fireball, and it did get changed, but given even a reasonable projectile travel distance, and that boss' movespeed, even a 10 frame startup (which is unreactable to most if not all humans) would not have hit.
But that would mean that Steven would have had to be able to predict precisely where the boss was going to move to, to even have a chance of landing that fireball, and would have had to do that on reaction too. This is beyond the abilities of most people even in a game at Ashes' speed (note that I have no issues with the speed).
In fact, almost ANY ability that wasn't AoE with a cone hitbox 3x larger than a player's standard swing would have missed this, unless it reached that target in 8 frames.
But then the video goes into the 'less active' mode, where the boss is just kind of standing there and players are hitting it. It DOES do some cool looking attacks. Attacks that might even, in an Action style game, encourage the player to backstep or run out of the way of them (11:11) but there's no reason to 'bother' here, as it would just move the enemy and cause other people's attacks to whiff (due to the boss stepping away)
And this is with a 180 degree attack cone on hits. I don't expect a reduction in that, of course, but what 'skill' misses from that range? If this is also sufficient to be defined as 'Action', i.e. 'can stand still and just make sure the enemy is within my line of sight while holding down my Q', then again, I have no valid point.
For an enemy to have an attack cone large enough to hurt multiple players, or an AoE centered around themselves that the players are expected to avoid, those players must be able to react to this happening. But a large enough cone to actually hurt even half of a large group and be any threat to anyone except 'those with poor reactions' must be under 16 frames of startup, and that still means you have a large set of people who get hit either just by lag or by not having fast enough reactions.
If that person is an 'Evasion Tank' for example, the enemy now moves, because the enemy does not necessarily employ a predictive model state, that would be a high requirement for AI. So the Tank/Rogue 'backflips away', let's say, and as neither iframes nor super fast animations are preferable (if they are, BDO is great), this backflip has to take 20 frames to completely animate.
Boss move begins, human reacts 12f later, does evasion, succeeds because boss attack has 18f startup and hurtbox moves out of the way in the 6f required, player is now recovering/finishing that backflip for 14 more frames. Boss recovers after usually another 20f and approaches the player. As long as that player did not immediately mash an advancing ability (and even if they did, since that ability must again, in turn, have at least 10f of startup to not just look like teleporting sometimes) the boss now calculates the player's position 'incorrectly' and moves anyway, and everyone else must adjust.
These are remarkably low frame data numbers. Almost BDO tier frame data numbers, in terms of animation fluidity.
But if one is willing to double these or higher, and still generally call it 'Action Combat', then once again, no worries, I have no valid point.
The difference between Tab and Action is 10 frames, for most people. Tab, you target the enemy, hit the button. and no matter how long the animation takes, no matter how long the projectile takes, you are 10f faster than you are if you must aim it. At one point, that boss moves 2 character 'widths' in 10f.
If it's fine for a hitbox on an attack to be 2 character widths across in order to make the Action Combat work, then I'd say that's 'Action In Name Only' personally. Even BDO has to do at least 1 character width, which is why their attacks seem so big and flashy.
Because I would be trying to stack Snare and Root, in any case.
First question: Technically yes but as you can imagine, it's not extremely difficult and there isn't a lot of adjustment needed. I don't think anyone wants a boss fight to be OSU. Similar to how in a tab system, you aren't requiring the user to constantly select new targets, i don't think you need to require a person to constantly re-aim in an action system.
Second question: Not sure if the boss changing target is a call for confusion. Yes, if the boss changes direction towards you then you would do the same thing you do in a tab system and go defensive as the tank taunts it.
He doesn't need to predict where the boss would be if it's being tanked in one spot, like it is at the times you mentioned. If it was moving, you could predict where it's going, the same as people do in other games that use projectiles. I also don't see the chance of someone missing as a problem. The projectile speed could be a tradeoff for the skill. I'd also consider hit scan skills to be action skills and they don't require you to lead the target.
You can call it whatever you want but i don't think a game has to play like a musa in BDO for it to be considered action combat.
Sounds like we agree. Thanks for giving me the chance to talk about it, though, for those who don't.
Thanks!!
Vindictus is a great example of why action combat in a large scale doesn't work.
Thanks for reminding me.
@Azherae what you said was fairly interesting but for ranged classes only and there is nothing stopping an action system being more forgiving by making things be homing when cast near and also an mmo always be friendly towards ranged classes (maybe a mobile and slender enemy is prioritized to be melee players advantage or some other tactic).
If you don't have a break down/conclusion/"in a nut shell"/"Amazon delivery box" for your thesis and simply refer people to probably 10,000 words+ from yourself of back threads with no order in discussions and replies then why should we and especially people new or who barely visit this forum respect your view?
Link your own thread, with the 1st post being your most polished view.
Literal cringe-bumps on my body right now.
What proof, do you have of ANY decent mmorpg combat system working in the favour of "RP", in real time what system other than turn based is completely biased in favour of maintaining "something" that people have completely different standards and expectations of???
If I start another thread on this topic, I'd expect the mobs to merge it in to an existing thread. That would be the proper thing to do.
The OP said they have seen posts about this - and since those posts are almost definitely from me, they have no reason to not have read them before posting this thread.
I don't really mind if things like 'Homing', 'wide hitboxes', and 'auto-aim assist' exist in a Combat System.
I don't care if we call it Action or not either. It is what it is.
If somehow other people start to like the faster stuff, or designers start making the 'less ridiculous flash' BDO/Vindictus equivalent, that's fine for me. And, again, I don't think that it can't be done. I don't even think it prevents most of the things people want from a game. But some people have very strong preferences, and I respect those preferences, so I hope that two great MMORPGs are born within the next few years, one for each style of player.
The only point being made in previous threads was 'the more people you add, the less you get to play the 'Action' part. And similarly, the only point being made in this one is 'If you try to design Action Combat that actually tests skills it will be closer to BDO, which about 50% of people say or imply they don't like'.
I've got no reason to ask for an MMO that tests spacing skills other than a personal preference, and they usually manage to at least test timing skills and synergy, even if most of them don't manage to do that at the level I'd enjoy, I have other games for that.
So yeah, sure. More forgiving, easier, lower skill ceiling, I'm happy to support all that too if it's balanced. Even moreso if it's actually interesting, since I don't think that it has to be boring just because of those factors. Clearly Intrepid also believes that they can make Action Combat PvE, at least right now. My only hope is that once it is done, that if I look at it and think 'This is the greatest combat system EVER as the icing on the cake of the greatest MMO ever thank you Intrepid', that there won't be a mass exodus of people going "wtf is this twitchy spammy casual-unfriendly crap?"
Cause that'd be terrible, y'know?
Aren't we all sinners?
I dont cosider aim assist to lean towards or be tab targeting in any way, it's just a support system to make it easier to aim; it doesn't(in most aspect) make your shots automatically hit your target you have to control it. Aim assist has been a staple in action combat.