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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Ugh, they're threatening to start using that at work.
And bow kids should still have cast times on abilities like
I think you miss the point mate, we understand that as you level you learn new skills and may be able to " throw spears" but as an example that big sword smash ability that fighter has that is an animation lock for 2 -3 seconds, no good player even melee players will ever be hit by that, and connecting something like that on a ranged player that is decent is next to impossible, especially when auto attacks are instant and you can move whilst spamming them
a GCD doesn't allow for the server check to happen instantly, the programmer does
you can make the skills hit in tab target mode even if the target moves too far away from you.
Very false.
Animation based combat is superior to GCD systems, every ability and skill has it's set animation speed and the combat flow is vastly superior.
Yes the programmer chooses when the check happens be it when the button is pressed after the animation has finished or sometime in between. The GCD ensures animations execute in a timely matter to not let your character get hit by AoEs you aren't in. This is usually described as floaty combat by players.
Bows generally have cast times but the cast times can still continue while moving. My personal favorite bow class is the shadow warrior for WAR. It fulfilled the edgy legolas fantasy the best of any class I've seen to date.
Very false.
Using animation in this way locks the speed of combat to the speed of the animation. It removes mechanical options for players to pursue.
The "flow" you are talking about is purely visual flow. It doesnt add anything to how combat feels or plays, just how it looks.
Only in games without animation cancels or input plinking, but it is probably accurate to assume this is true for Ashes.
(it is true that most animation-based games offer more mechanical options than GCD games, but these two things are both functionally illusions anyway after a bit, as you described)
Many games have varying GCD's. Some abilities have a baseline 0.5 seconds, some go up to a full second, or down to 0.3 etc.
However, games with a GCD rather than animation can have that GCD be more fluid. If you get a debuff half way through your GCD that increases its duration, that isnt a problem. The duration of a GCD is 100% fluid.
Having animation speed change half way through the animation never looks good.
Set the effect as "after the target's next cast their animation/cast speed will be longer" and that's it. It would pretty much do the same thing, unless those debuffs influenced the current gcd as soon as they were cast on the target, but even then, I'd imagine the majority of animations would just be too fast to really notice a half-way-through-the-cast effect.
Either way. We've been going in circles for too long now. Neither of us will agree on this, so we'll just have to see what Intrepid goes with and then give feedback on that.
Yeah, games with debuffs to GCD do indeed often have said debuff take effect mid way through a GCD if that is when it lands on the target. Not all games do it, but some do.
With animation, I've yet to personally play one (or - play one enough to notice) that has any kind of variation to the animation at all, let alone changing speed mid animation.
While I could indeed be wrong, I cant imagine an animation that would look as good at 0.25 seconds as it does in 1 second (a common range for GCD in some games).
To me, any animation designed to look good at 1 second would look stupid at 0.25 seconds, and vice versa.
Since the only actual point of using animation for this is how it looks to players (the game engine doesnt care), I simply cant see how this could be considered better.
As to your comment that a GCD system sounds like animation but with extra steps - it's actually the other way around. The games engine uses time, not animation. The animation is just shown to players on top of what could be considered a rigid GCD from the game engine perspective.
How many gcd games have the effect at the end of the gcd rather than the start? I'm assuming there's quite a few games that allow you to cancel the animation, but what happens to gcd there? Can you immediately cast another ability or do you have to wait the full gcd?
I'm guessing EQ2 must've had all of that, because it was too good for its time, but what other mmos have this?
Animation cancel games, short cancels, and games that allow players to activate animation-less abilities or use animation blending, do in fact use the actual animation.
This is required particularly because the animation frame is the determinant of the hit and hurtboxes, so the intersects have to be seen accordingly.
Tab Target games with few real hitboxes or short cancels would function the same, but animation based games have the 'windows' based on that, the main thing that matters is that since the frame data for the animation is fairly rigid for many games, it will often seem as though they're the same.
You can in fact be slowed mid-animation in BDO, Onigiri, Neverwinter, etc, and it will delay your next attack or even cause you to miss the timing on the follow-up, particularly if the cancel window is not very large (MMOs by nature have lenient ones though).
In my experience, game developers stopped using actual animation as the basis for timing anything back in the early 1990's. This ties in to computers having turno buttons, and upgrading computers making your existing games somewhat unplayable.
My understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is that developers now may use a given frame of an animation as a trigger or what ever, but they are not actually using the animation itself.
I cant name any other MMO's that had it happen mid GCD, but we are talking one system and its possibilities vs another system and its possibilities here - and from my perspective the two are basically the same, other than animation as an indicator to players being less flexible.
Further, since the animation routes main benefit is that it generally looks better (I'm not going to dispute this at all), and since anything that is even somewhat similar to changes to GCD (which include animation cancelling) all kind of look silly, the times the animation route opt to go for that flexibility that the GCS route make easy kind of defeat the original purpose of going the animation route.
Basically, anyone that has a preference for aesthetics over mechanics really should prefer the animation route. Anyone that prefers mechanics and gameplay though, they should prefer a GCD.
Obviously that is all working on the assumption that the hypothetical game in question uses either system to its fullest. If they used GCD in a half arsed manner (like WoW), then yeah, I would agree with players that say they dont like it.
However, if they used animation the way a game like Basketbrawl uses it (you'll need some serious googlefu to fully understand that one), then the opposite would be true.
Since I am all about gameplay, I obviously dont much care if what is happening on screen looks good or not (within reason). As far as I am concerned, if I am even looking at my character in combat at all I am doing something wrong.
We have basic attacks, not auto attacks.
Maybe they could expand, beyond the most extreme of basic attacks, Outward has this.
But that may be wishful thinking.
Are we talking about basic attack, here??
Yes we are, the problem is that as of right now there seems not much point using anything but basic attack and its spammable wich makes other skills basically useless atm im not sure how scaling will work, but the idea of melee having an invisible cast bar on attacks is super bad, melee will be rooted in place while someone with a wand can just range them spamming auto attack with no gcd or cooldown
Why would melee be rooted in place?
Go and watch some of the animations of the fighter, there is a big overhead swing that literay roots you for 2ish seconds, now imagine trying to connect that on a ranger or mage
Look at 10:55 and tell me how this would respect your wasd, there cant be a little bit of a root and respect full control its one or the other
And then please tell me how this would ever connect on any decent player with dodge mechanics
There's this other little thing called "CCs". You limit your opponents movements in any way and then use the hammer. And again, if the dmg is properly balanced, that hammer strike will deal a big chunk of hp, so you set your target up to get hit and smash 'em.
Oka
I mean fair enough, we wont see how it works till alpha 2 but i feel youre missing the point of the post, you cant sell me locked animations on a melee character in a pvp game as variety but everyone is entitled to their own opinion 😁
Yeah we have only seen 1 or 2 abilities from the fighter, that ine and the ine tjat spins around like a whirlwind, also locks, we havnt seen much from.other classes,