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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.
Comments
I meant no insult. Was just trying to set the stage for a mental exercise.
I'll look into the fight and return with ideas.
The flipside would be, a small fast mob jumping around you making you target it properly and dodge its attack actively. In tab that shit would be the dullest thing ever because you just target it, press "def/evasion buff" and unload, while in action (I would assume) this is a fun active gameplay.
At least that's how I see it as mainly an outsider of hardcore pve. Also, the first example works in the context of dps maximization, where you have to look at the target to constantly do top lvl dmg so you can't just be looking around with your camera.
If a player is supposed to know the attack is coming then moving the indicator or changing how it's telegraphed isn't changing the mechanic in my opinion. It's the same mechanic, you are just making a slight change to how the user is being warned. Making players be aware of their surrounds or covering different angels for each other can also be an intentional way for the mechanic to function.
Yes, if you want to make a mob feel like it would in a tab scenario, then you could have it function that way, even if it's visually jumping around, it's hit box could be in the area it's jumping.
At 5:30 in this video the dragons make a dash. There's no indicator where the hit will happen and by the looks of it the aoe is pretty big. I dunno if their order is randomized and obviously this is a non-combat mechanic of the fight, but there's a few such dashes earlier in the video where they dash during the fight. As you can see from the camera pov, the visibility is huge so you can see where the dragons stand and can figure out where you gotta stand. In action, I'd assume you'll have a much narrower fov so it'd be more difficult.
And if I was trying to do a difficult encounter, I'd randomize position and order of these dragons, so player have to react on the spot. Yes, you can have this kind of stuff just in the player's vision, but then it limits the design possibilities a lot. It also brings down the difficulty of the encounter because you're still just staring in one point, while 360 dangers would require you to pay attention to the entire screen.
You could also say "just let shotcallers call those dangers out", but I'd imagine a 40-man raid will have a tooon of things to call out, so a randomized mechanic on top of all the other difficult mechanics would make it really difficult to call everything out correctly w/o making VC a mess. Ideally you'd have personal responsibilities on top of raid-wide ones, and I'd say that being completely aware of your surroundings should definitely be one of those responsibilities. Mm, I'm not sure if I understand what exactly you're saying here.
You can zoom out with a action camera as well btw....
Btw, @Noaani I was thinking about this and got curious. Back in L2 no one cared about raid videos because the fight was super easy and you just needed people and gear to win. In FF14, from what I've heard, no one cares about showing their clears because the game is so difficult mechanically that it doesn't matter if you know the mechanics, cause you still need to execute perfectly in order to beat the encounter (I believe WoW's raiding races are similar). So I got curious where EQ2 was on that spectrum, considering that you've said multiple times that people didn't release videos to prevent others from clearing some raids.
Was the reason for that some super secret mechanic during the raid that you had to figure out? Was it a particular party setup? Was it particular actions that players had to make? All or none of the above?
As i said, i don't think having a large POV is part of the encounter or adds to it.
The dragons are very easy to see. The dragons start an animation before doing the dash and it looks like you want to move into the area where dragons have dashed to avoid the future dashes. Doesn't seem like a hard mechanic to do with a smaller pov. They have even backed out of the fight
If it's really a reaction mechanic, in an action system you also have the option of making people dodge to do it.
The shotcaller thing was an idea on another way you could design the mechanic, not necessary how you would do it.
The last comment was just saying there are ways you could make that add so that it was jumping around like you mentioned but still easy to hit in a free aim system.
As a side note, i've entertained this small Pov argument but many of the action games mentioned here can have similar POVs. I prefer being closer to my character but if you think encounters need this, then it is an option. You could also see in the ashes combat video where he zoomed out.
This happens partially because in older games, 'special' or 'secret' team/group compositions can be a thing, moreso than FFXIV which is intended to be much easier.
Note, I am unsure whether or not it is easier, only that it was explicitly intended to be easier than FFXI. It's probably harder by now... or the two are even.
When mechanics are random, your group may be able to find a way to mitigate something an entirely different way than another, so it's multiple groups trying out things and not sharing 'the optimal group with which to mitigate X problem'.
The Meta-shakeups you often talked about for L2, within Raiding, can happen in that way specifically.
E.g. since I've provided the point now... One might expect that the sensible way to defeat Jormungand was to get a lot of Ice defense to reduce damage, but while the fight is POSSIBLE that way, it is definitely not the easier way to do it, and the easier way to do it is not particularly intuitive.
So you might want to keep your group's 'special technique' secret.
Raid content in a game that is trying to support a raiding scene is the aspirational content for the game - at least for PvE.
Content that is cutting out aspects of the combat system will not be considered aspirational content.
An honest question for you - do you see any game developer creating a combat system, and then having to disable aspects of it for their marquee content?
I mean, you may be right from a literal perspective (note; *may* be right). However, from a practical perspective, I don't think you believe what you are saying here yourself.
Content in both action and tab can be developed past the point where it is possible to kill. Developers even do this on purpose on occasion (and then slowly tone back mechanics to leave the encounter on the cusp of what is possible).
So, logically, this means that the greater the gap is between what the combat system requires and the cap of what is possible, the more levels of difficulty the developers can place in to the design of the encounters.
Since you agree with me that tab is easier than action (in general), this leaves developers with more room on tab target content to create those varying levels of difficulty.
Yes, i'm approaching this from a literal perspective but also believe that if they were to practically implement the variety of content you are asking for, they could incorporate action elements without compromising that variety.
The reason you didn't want your guilds strategies to be made public is because of the open world boss content. They dropped the best gear, and so they are the encounters you want to kill. As such, you don't want to give any rival guilds any ideas on strategies that they could potentially use on one of these bosses, and more to the point, you don't want to assist those rival guilds in getting geared up faster, as that would give them a better chance at killing one of these open world encounters should they be able to get a raid together for them faster than you.
Where L2 could be described as the information not being worth sharing, FFXIV could be described as the information can't be conveyed in a video, for EQ2 it was more - the information is propriety IP belonging to the guild.
You aren't getting it, it means more variety of content for them to use and add to mechanics. They can layer on dodge and utilize that aspect if they want to, they can utilize damage to certain spots on a mob with certain skills. They can use any elements on action combat to spice up more types of encounters where it normally would be as fluid to do if you faked it with tab.
Again if they don't use everything that is fine nothing is being taken away, players control and use their characters how they want and do the content. If content has certain mechs involved players will simply do what they need to, if that means not moving and standing still then they will do that. If the raid has you moving at a certain part as part of the mech for a group of people they will use more of their dodge mobility.
If the devs want to make a stupid insanely hard encounter where only the best people can accomplish it with good knowledge on all systems they can do that.
Tab is easier because there isn't as much involvement from a combat stand point, that doesn't mean by throwing more mechanics you make a better experience. Nor does it mean by throwing more mechanics does it make it any harder for action players to do all those mechanics any more than a tab player.
Ashes is a hybrid game. That means you will not be playing whack-a-mole click-and-afk style fights. You’ll actually have to pay attention, and that is a good thing
If I was trying to design a "true action top lvl boss" I'd be using all of the action features to their max. You gotta aim properly, even as a melee character. The bosses would be way smaller and way more agile. You have more verticality gameplay than any given tab game (or even wildstar/tera). You gotta almost constantly be aware of things to dodge, those things being horizontal dangers and ground hazards (with some of the hazards accounting for verticality, so you might need to duck under or jump over them). You'll have to actively parry/block some attacks too.
That is what I think of when I hear "top lvl action combat pve content". All of the prominent features used in one encounter. And then you'd have to somehow design dozens of such encounters over the years, with tangible variability between all of them.
And in the case of all those mechanics, you'd need camera to be way closer, so that you can properly dps the boss. And when the camera is closer, your fov is narrower and anything that comes from behind you will feel unfair to the battle (at least I'd assume people would call that unfair).
Now again, I'm not saying that you have to have 360 view in order to have an engaging fight. I'm saying that a 360 view brings quite a few benefits to the design variety of encounters. And due to properly difficult action combat (again, as I see it) limiting your fov, you won't have that variety. I might be wrong in that assumption and I'd love to be proven wrong by some game devs, but, until that happens, I think this is the thing that action can't do (that being the utilization of all 360 degrees of space when designing an encounter w/o it being unfair to the players). But that goes against the whole point of the encounter being top lvl. The context of the discussion is the attempt to prove that either sides have features that the other side can't do. The ones I could come up with is the 360 design in tab and the verticality precision gameplay in action.
Raiding - in a game that is attempting to support a raiding scene - is the games marquee content. Not only that, but it is where developers introduce new mechanics, which then often filter down to group content.
You can't really have marquee content if that content requires players to not use a portion of their class kit.
Trying to use raid content to trial a new mob mechanic is also not going to work if raids aren't reasonably able to use all the games combat mechanics - though this really is a minor point.
Since the compromises people are talking about are not small - they are things like just not having dodge - it isn't really appropriate for the top end content of the game to be generally absent of these mechanics if they are present throughout the rest of the game.
With players going from solo to group to raid, there should be an addition of layers, not a retraction of them.
Ice protection wasn't the answer there either
Sure some people might want more action elements but most people understand how a mmo should be. At this point it is just assuming what people want, which doesn't really relate to doing dungeon content in action combat on a larger scale.
The thing is, that adaptation of the content is the issue. It will require adjustments in a negative fashion.
Every single adaptation of an encounter in this scenario will be a downgrade to it.
When you talk about the scale of a game like EQ2 (currently sitting at very nearly 1k raid encounters), what you are going to end up with is a whole lot of encounters that play the same, because the uniqueness of them was adapted out.
I should point out that I am not even necessarily talking about any singular specific mechanics. To me, the issue is more in relation to the total number of mechanics players can manage, while still being able to perform actual combat. If an action game were to throw the number of mechanics at players that top end tab target games do, they would have to compromise by not requiring the same level of attention be paid to actual fighting vs dealing with mechanics.
And obviously it doesn't have to be the only content that's in the game. Afaik that was one of the reasons why Wildstar died. But it should be present if Steven really wants to appeal to high lvl raiders, and in the past he has alleged to want that (mainly with his mention of encounters only beatable by <10% of players).
All i have been arguing here is how you could implement tab mechanics in action games since people are more familiar with them. Yes, there are things you can do with an action system but I don't think every fight needs to leverage all of those features. If people enjoy certain tab fights as is then i don't see why you need to mess with that too much.
I don't think the FOV brings the variety. All it does is allow you to see the mechanic so if you needed to compensate, all you would need to do is change how the mechanic is seen. Easiest example of it is that mechanic you showed. You could have the same mechanic in a smaller FOV and either telegraph it a little differently or find another way for the players to figure it out how to dodge it. I think it would work fine as is but if necessary, you could have the animation last a little longer so people have time to look for it.
Once again, i'm just saying that if the tab mechanic is the goal, then you can have it. I agree that you can dial it up if that's what you want.
I also feel like you avoided my comment that actions have large FOVs. Was there a reason for that?
Why would it be a downgrade, please give an example.
As i said and you agreed, you literally could have the same mechanic so if the adaptation is a downgrade, then why does it need to happen?
To me, number of mechanics is another variety thing. If you feel the mechanics are too hard to manage will doing action combat then don't require a lot of action that fight. Just because you have some fights like that doesn't mean you can't have others that aren't. Variety!
The thing is, raid encounters are made up of many mechanics, a dozen or more on the go at a time.
It is the combination of mechanics that is the issue. Tab target games already have situations where it is almost impossible to take care of all of the mechanics in the encounter while still actually performing combat to the required level.
If you alter a tab encounter to an action game, you NEED to either remove some of the mechanics, or lower the required level of combat that needs to take place.
This isn't a DPS situation or anything, it is the amount of effort needed to put in to dealing with the mechanics vs dealing with actual combat - an increase in DPS is a reduction to the amount of effort you need to put in to the combat system.
But again, this is my whole point. Because action combat requires more effort be put in to the combat system, it leaves less effort to be put in to the encounter. This means the encounter can't have as much going on, because players need to put more focus on the combat system.
If the required focus on the combat system is lowered, then players do not need to be even remotely good at the games combat system.
Now, I am sure you can understand this notion (others in this thread can't), but if you have action combat that can have some mechanics, and tab target that can have a few more, since both have the same pool of mechanics that they can use, this means that tab target has more variety of encounters that it can allow for.
I think the devs are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to peoples assertions.
As I’ve raided tab and action, it’s all on the devs.
But I’m not interested in this argument there’s pages of it.
Devs are on the right path, imo.
I mean, we can't - even if I wanted to.
There are no actual top end raid encounters at all in action games - at least not top end as would be considered in a game like EQ, EQ2, Rift or WoW (or even AoC the first, LotRO or Vanguard, which I personally consider to be second tier in terms of raid content).
Even if I gave you examples of raid mechanics that can't work in an action combat setting, you can't give any examples of top end raids in an action combat setting, because there simply aren't any. As such, any comment you may want to make about how it could work are 100% theoretical on your part - or as you would call it, your own head cannon.