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
what you seem to be missing is that the team and Steven has their vision and philosophical standpoints for the game, which has been always known, they don't keep it secret. You can see him talk about the game in various interviews, also the Wiki has loads of information.
If you barge in and expect them to change the game in a fundamental way because you and some other guys on the forums want it you will be terribly disappointed. They want the game this way. He specifically says things like:
You don't have to compete with WOW. You don't have to be a WOW killer. You can focus on something that is different from a philosophical design standpoint; and I think that's just what a lot of studios today don't want to take the risk on. – Steven Sharif
It''s fine if you don't like it, let me paste another line from Steven:
"We're very clear with our objective and philosophy on the game and we understand that they may not appeal to everybody." - Steven Sharif
"Unfortunally the players that wants all those systems are VERY vocal on forums, while the vast majority are NOT on these forums, and hardly watch any information about the game."
You're acting like the game is this way because people force Steven to make it this way, but this is just simply incorrect, Steven and the team wants this, they showed people their plans on kickstarter and people backed it.
If you don't like it you're just not the target audience, and that's okay...
Many of banked on the game and kickstarter backed it becouse of the hybrid combat beeing something 50/50.
Due to alot of vocal players here after APOC and in general, alot of more action combat stances have been taken.
Steven also seems to read Reddit alot, and there people are VERY action combat focused.
People using reddit are also generally younger.
I kinda liked the combat from back here more as a basic combat system to build on.
Ofcourse very basic at that stage.
0dbea148-8cb8-4711-ba90-eb0864e93b5f
None of this is inherent to either system. All tab means is the skill goes to your target.
Tera was action and had rotations.
The Ashes pax demo was tab, didn't have rotations, and had you spamming your basic attack.
Them changing to tab would not magically add rotations.
From the beginning, they have wanted basic attacks to play a big role in combat. It used to build ultimate and lately there has been talk of them being used to create procs that your skills synergies with. Ultimates might be coming back it sounds.
To me, tab was the progression of a turn based system to an active third person control scheme and "action" continues that transition by adding more variety to how abilities can function.
0dbea148-8cb8-4711-ba90-eb0864e93b5f
We are going to get no where like this with giant text, give me the tab target game you played an exact example of multiple pieces of content in combat you fought. And ill be able to easily judge the overexaggerating in your post about tab target. If i don't see a reason to look at your screen every 2 seconds the entire fight it should be pretty clear you are overexaggerating.
Your comment on my statement being untrue is actually kind of funny. If in the small amount of content the boss is doing something that you can use a skill to avoid or negate a large amount of dmg that goes into my percent that you actually need to pay attention to the fight and if you know the phases you know when to worry about certain things.
Yes in tab target the mobs needs to stand because if the mob is moving or doing certain attacks people don't have access to be dodging every second based on quick reactions with tab target and not how its designed. Which goes to my point about not needing to worry most of the time, you know mechs and handle the mechs. No amount of seeing what the boss is doing is going to have you dodge an ability that will auto hit you.
Sorry but i don't take having a good memory and skill being the same thing. Skill is reaction time, ability in combat, ability to adapt quickly changing situations. All can very between game to game by the amount you need.
So please share the content and the examples of games please in your case.
You change it so you have targeting instead of complete free aim, though its their choice of course how they want to do it. Targeting in the form where when you look near someone it auto locks on to them around your cursor and as long as you generally aim at them you are good and don't have to worry about projection time. They could have one of the subsets on ranger have pure free aim and travel time on your shots so its all skill as well for people that want more dmg but risk of missing per shot.
Tons of people i know want action combat are not on forums.....
I'm not going to get into every one of your points yet but name 20 action based mmorpgs people have quit and went back to tab target. Very curious about the amount of these games as i bet it had nothing to do with action combat but was either dead games or games with no content, or p2w.
The game is competitive, and posting a video of how you kill a mob (of which there are multiple paths to take for most mobs) is giving a way information that other guilds may use to progress faster than your guild. It is literally the fastest way to get booted from a top end guild in that game - and you will not be invited in to another one.
Essentially, you are asking me to share something that doesn't exist.
You know what's funny? using the term "phases" here, it's as if you think that this is something that is inherent to all raid encounters.
It isn't, unless you are only talking about WoW (every encounter that I recall from WoW has phases - very few encounters in other games have them).
Again, this is showing your lack of understanding of tab target games. Literally every tab target game I have played has mechanics of some sort that are essentially the same as an action combat games dodge. There are abilities you can/need to activate in order to prevent an attack from hitting you.
In fact, I have already told you exactly this, in this very thread.
Point is - and please, please let this sink in because I don't want to have to repeat it again - dodge (and other similar mechanics) is not something that action games have and tab target games do not. You saying that this is a thing that action games have and tab target games don't is a bit like me saying "yeah? well, tab target games have swords, so they are better than action combat games because I saw an action combat game once where a player didn't have a sword!"
Please, let it sink in. Tab target games have abilities that function exactly the same as dodge in an action game. This means players do indeed need to - you know - pay attention and use it when it is most needed.
TL;DR (because I know you are not reading anything), tab target games also have dodge, and you do not have some of the base skill required to be good at a tab target game, yet insist that tab target games require no skill.
Guild Wars 2 (big part action combat, not dead but only a fraction of players at start)
TERA
New World
Lost Ark
Skyforge
Black Desert Online
Elder Scrolls Online (not dead but not big either)
Archeage
Wildstar
Wether its action combat or not only, the fact that people go back to traditional tab target games are true.
Pretty much all games that survives for more than 6 months with a larger playerbase are tab target.
I dont think neither you or me hang out with the "average" player.
Most are casual players with family that dont hang on discord or forums.
Those players are generally more traditional and dont like changes.
0dbea148-8cb8-4711-ba90-eb0864e93b5f
I agree mostly except none of those games did healing well. The only action combat game to do healing really well was TERA but in the years since it came out, it seems nobody is able to do action heal targeting well enough. Not even New World. So if they can't develop a heal action targeting system well enough, I'd much rather they just do tab target for any targeted (i.e. non-AoE) heals.
I'd much rather combat be fun, so I don't care if it's action or tab. I like the idea of hybrid being a mix of both so I can choose. But I do very much worry about heal design because I've seen it done so badly so many times in other games.
I do also share concerns about action combat in larger combat settings. In small scale PvE and PvP it shines, but in larger scale PvE and PvP raid sized situations it tends to get messy.
Im assuming everquest 2 both of us can look at gameplay from that and really judge how much you need to look at the screen for content shown of combat and compare that to another game. Remember im not talking about the 1% of content that might be different by a bit but the normal experience in the game and what most people do. And you can still say what it is you did and if i can't find it I can't find it.
What games have you played that didn't have phases? The only game I played would be more so City of heroes where I don't remember the phases. Phase doesn't need to be a huge change in the monster. It would be at 70% boss starts to do this new mech or new attack, at 30% he gets one more attack ability. Modern mmorpgs bosses have phases as if they ddi the same thing from 100-dead there can't be that many mechs involved which would not be a good sign. Again showing your lack of understand and a worry you don't play other mmorpgs.
Name the games you are talking about with a dodge ability, you have those in swtor as well, and don't need to be paying that much attention to the content in front of you. Bar charging use skill to stop it, your skill on cd use dodge skill to take reduced dmg, etc. Clicking a button and the action of needing to move to dodge are on two different levels. One is simply clicking a button very very easy. Another is knowing what is going on (same as tab) knowing your positioning, knowing your skills (key word multiple) and getting tot he position you need to get while dodge things that might be hitting you (lost ark is a easy example of that). Remember what I said the skill for pressing a button is like a 1. Depending on the content in a game that is action or hybrid that ramps up to 5-6 easily on difficulty.
There is a reason why people play tab target games, not everyone wants to be having to do all these inputs to do all these inputs or worry about skill they just want to relax.
So again please give me example of games you play, then we can get into the content in each of them.
I guess tab combat is mostly about the mage classes not fighters/archers. It suits support branch skills like target heal, resurrection and stuff like this (plus any channeling support skills). Don’t think tab style is for damage dealing in this game.
What I saw today was a great relief because it seems that Intrepid is going in a direction where choosing your weapon actually makes a difference in terms of your movement. At least from what I saw the daggers allowed you to move a lot more and you had a lot less movement locks. That's how it's supposed to be! I want to be able to dodge the attacks of heavy weapon users thanks to me choosing lighter armor and lighter&smaller weapons. It makes sense. It also makes sense that some attacks would not allow a dodge like the bladestorm/whirlwind attack we saw. Unless of course I back out which is another thing light armor and light&small weapons should allow you to do to some capacity no matter what class you play.
Great going intrepid!
In L2 daggers/archers had ultimate evasion that made phys classes miss 95% of hits. Elven daggers had an ability that let them dodge any phys skill for 7 secs. A mage class had a blink ability that had an iframe which let you dodge a projectile if used correctly. Mages could redirect dmg to their mana. Tanks could mirror reflect that damage or completely mitigate it. And several classes had a detargetting ability that was usually used as a cast stopping tool.
All of those things are "I dodge your hit with a press of a button", but they're all way more interesting and flavorful than a fucking sidestep.
Well this is something I do worry about. I hope we can aim above people's heads and past the people immediately in front of us. You very much could do that in TERA, but that was largely due to the camera angle being higher up and allowing you to natively see far in the battlefield, and the reticule was high as well (and adjustable in location on screen) so you could aim ranged dps or heals at nearly anyone you wanted. That's what I find more fun in an action combat game.
Compare that to New World where the camera is super low to the ground so you're forced to look through and around people horizontally, because you can't see or aim above them. In larger scale fights it presents a ton of problems and makes for bad gameplay. You just have both dps and heals speccing into a ton of AoE because they can't hit with any single target because they can't actually see their targets. The lack of ability variety you get from that is boring and limits fight strategy as well.
It has also made for some irritating metas where initially you had a lot of high defense, heavy CC specs on melee because they were subjected to tons of damage due to everyone shooting AoEs at them on the points cause they can't single target or focus target anyone, which has now just turned into light/medium armor, high mobility/dodging melee, and all the ranged as well, and it's stupid. It limits strategy, armor build variety, and weapon build variety when you can't see beyond the players immediately in front of you.
It's also just super unfun to not be able to see and aim at most of the battlefield. I find it incredibly important to be able to see and aim at most of the players on the field - if I'm out of range fine, I'll get in range. But I want too have the ability to see over the melee's heads, and aim over their heads. This goes along with being able to zoom out farther because obviously to see more of the field you have to zoom a bit.
Edit: Here's a really terrible screenshot from 2013 TERA but you get the idea. I paused it mid-video hence the blur, but I had a potato and these Nexus events on TERA had awful performance anyway, so ignore the graphics. But this is the camera PoV I had and how far I could see and how far I could thus target people.
Thing is you can have all of those features and be able to dodge abilities together. In fact BDO actually has that to an extent with some abilities. Stat changing abilities are not limited to tab target. PvP view point can be different but when you are fighting a mob that you know what it does its easy to predict when you need to do things.
I have already said many, many times that I agree action combat is better for solo content, but it falls to pieces the more you go up the content scale.
As such, the 1% is literally what I am talking about (actually, the 25%, but what ever).
Action combat simply can not handle that, never has, never will.
This isn't even a case of what games out there exist, it is a case of what is and is not possible.
if you have 40 people all actively trying to aim at a mob, and the tank is having to dodge out of the way of attacks - forcing the mob to reposition itself, things just don't work.
In order to make this situation work, you need to stop the mob from moving. This means either stop it from responding to the tank at all, or stop the tank from dodging. In both cases, you are taking a key aspect of action combat and throwing it out the window.
Explain your thinking here.
In literally every action game I have played, a dodge is a double tap in the direction you want to dodge in. since you already have a finger on that key, there is literally nothing to this.
In a tab target game, you are right in that a dodge is an ability that needs to be activated. However, that still requires a button press. This can usually be bound to a double tap of a direction (some classes have a dodge ability for each direction), but it doesn't have to be - it can be bound as per a normal ability.
However, even if it is a normal ability, I fail to see any material difference in the following scenarios;
See pending attack, double tap to dodge
Or
See pending attack, press hotkey to dodge
Explain to me why these two scenarios are - in your words - on different levels.
You saying action combat can't handle 40 people is not true, what matters is how its designed. This game is a trinity systems so there are tanks that can pull and hold aggro, id expect boss facing direction will be a thing and controlling its movements. The boss changing directions to do a special aoe skill will allow people to dodge the move using their skills, and you can adjust and scale the damage so it doesn't cause a wipe of people.
You are mistake here a game having action combat in it does not need to be fully bound to creating very high mobility fights all the time, there is nothing wrong having the tank hold position and not dodging attacks as he has healers. He can simply approach that the same way a trinity fight would be and if there is a dodge mech that pops up he can use his dodge at that point. It simply adds a layer and more tools for a fight, it does not mean dodging need to be mandatory at all times in a fight for everyone.
I explained it but ill do another example again using lost ark. Boss starts a mech with an attack that heavily follows you and all your team around the map. You can dodge it just by moving but its not that simple with all your allies as well which might require you to use a dodge at some point to gain some extra distance so you don't get stagger locked. So you are needing to watch out for the attack, your speed and all player positioning. On top of that you need to get to the edge of the map also you can die or almost be one shot, you again have to judge your distance and use your dodge and other skills with mobility as well on top of that to get to the safe spot after the last attack end in a short amount of time.
So compared to tab target when you know something is coming having done this fight already its much easier to predict what skill you need and when to sue it to avoid extra dmg if need be. You can do that standing stil.
In action it can be limited or complex depending on the encounter. From one button dodge, to player movement, player positioning (I say this because it can be constant or slightly, and still be doen in a way where tank is keeping agro and other players are dodging bombs keeping the boss in the correct position), Use of multiple inputs with movement and multiple dodge skills, seeing the bosses line of danger and obstacles you need to avoid, quick relaxes for multiple instances.
I said action combat can't handle the variety needed.
I have given examples of a few encounters with action combat and many people (in one case, I took it on with 250 or so people). The thing is, these encounters are all essentially the same - because action combat doesn't allow for that much varity - the more people you add, the fewer design options you have in combat.
Look at BDO, it has exactly three encounters of note (that is being generous). The game is 8 years old.
All three of those encounters essentially play the same. There are differences between them, but they are subtle differences rather than material differences.
Then you look at a game like EQ2. In that same 8 year period after launch (where BDO had 3 encounters of note) EQ2 had about 400. Each of those 400 or so encounters in EQ2 were more different from any other of those 400 encounters than any of the 3 encounters in BDO were different from the other two.
Again, this is where action combat fails.
You can always just throw a big stick in the ground and have people jumping over it, dodging around it, all that stuff. However, you can not get the variety in an action combat game that you can get in a tab target game - and variety of encounter IS what makes a tab target game.
Perhaps another way to out it for you. An action combat game is about the combat system - a tab target game is about the content.
As an aside, since you are ALWAYS using the same combat system in an action combat game, they tend to get boring fast. Since you are taking on many different encounters in the same day in a tab target game, they do not get boring as fast.
The only way to keep an action combat game even remotely interesting is to make it a PvP game - the game as a whole simply won't stand up without it - where as tab target games without PvP absolutely can and do stand up.
I already addressed the tab target build capabilities that someone is able to create. From the looks of the dev update, it looks like they strongly believe they are going to be able to create the hybrid combat that they envisioned otherwise they wouldn't have shown action combat basic attacks and abilities.
I keep seeing people mention NWO. What game is that? Neverwinter Online?
There is nothing action can't do compared to tab that is false you can design things to be however you want in a game. BDO devs are lazy and just want money so that is a bad example. Lost ark would be a much better example of content between all their different content when it comes to raids and such.
I don't see you give any examples that don't work for action combat....I see you talking about reposition which I already gave a answer to. Action combat can do every single thing tab can do and better from a mech stand point included. You couldn't give me a scenarios where I couldn't make it work for action combat, in fact i challenge you to do so.
Whatever you give, ill give a detailed response to every part of it why action combat can work in the same way, and also improve on it with action combat flare.
There is nothing in a tab target game that can't be implemented in an action combat one.
Just because game developers took their games in different directions and developed different content for their games doesn't mean developers who develop games with similarities doesn't have to follow their path.
Tab combat is mechanically more repetitive than action combat since it's always the same thing, you press a target, press a button, and a skill goes to the target. Action combat has more variety in ability delivery mechanics such as hit scan, projectiles, proximity aoe, and those can be further modified with things like projectile speed and size.
If tab combat was as interesting as you claim then rpgs outside of MMOs would use it. They don't. They all use some kind of system that requires aiming. Elden ring and Monster hunter could be considered some of the most popular pve games on the market and use aiming.
Both these games have a 'tab target' option similar to how it works in Legend of Zelda games. People may not always use it, but it is not quite fair to say they 'use aiming' without clarifying more detail on what that 'aiming' is.
https://www.polygon.com/monster-hunter-rise-guide/22388040/lock-on-target-monster-camera-style
That is not tab. Yes, they have assist aiming and camera direction but the retain their core action elements. If tab was the key, they wouldn't need those.
I can only say that if you perceive that using a Ranged Weapon in Monster Hunter games with lock-on to not be the equivalent of Tab Target in the context of this conversation, then whether or not you are correct about it has nothing to do with the conversation happening.
So how exactly would you have a deeper variety of skills, on top of dodgy fast movement, w/o overwhelming the player with a piano-like gameplay. Hell, I played a piano build in L2 and even that was right at the edge of what I'd consider a breaking point of "too much shit to do". I can't even imagine having 20 abilities on top of constant fast-paced movement and proper targeting.
This is a really dumb take, BDO and Lost ark, for example, have generally some of the best combat out there do you think the combat is the reason those games may lose player base? NO, it's because games like those have become major p2w shitholes the only thing that actually kept them alive this long is the fact that they have good combat. But take a game like WOW it's also been dying really hard for the last several years "biggest mmo in history" and why it has the glorious Tabbed combat. The point is it's not action or tab that causes a game to not have longevity it's content and systems that change over time.