Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
Combat is moving in the wrong direction
Marzzo
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
1. Every weapon in the game is hitting way too fast. One-handed weapons and Two-handed weapons alike are just too twitchy. Basic attack hits should leave small nuancaed windows between them to weave in abilities in a natural flowing manner. Currently, it's simply way too fast. Hits should be impactful, they should have weight. Right now, it looks like the characters are swinging weightless lightsabers.
2. There are too many spell effects. Especially on basic attacks. Basic attacks should be just that, basic. Relax with the spell effects.
Other than that, amazing job keep it up.
2. There are too many spell effects. Especially on basic attacks. Basic attacks should be just that, basic. Relax with the spell effects.
Other than that, amazing job keep it up.
10
Comments
I personally don't want to see the return of That Unmentioned Implementation From Alpha-1 in order to make it possible to use abilities mid-combo to maintain your procs, but the current player movement speeds will not match up in PvP if they don't attack at the rate they're doing now. Similarly, some of that flashiness is necessary so that players can tell which thing is happening, perhaps even 'which attack of your basic attack string is about to happen' so they can react.
These things may not be highly appealing visually, but they're probably required for the current design, so probably should also note if you don't have any interest in those things either and would give them up in order to get more weighty and nuanced attacks.
(my opinion, if relevant, is that I'm neutral to it for my personal play but wouldn't want it to change, knowing the difficulty that people learning nuanced games have with recognizing visual data of this type)
… other than that amazing job keep it up!
The effects speed, color, design, light, timing are really nice... but they are a bit fat for me, specially those sparks
As for the tempo/animations themselves, it obviously needs some work, but I don't think it's flawed at a fundamental level. A lot could be fixed by reducing the emphasis on overbloomed plasma streaks in favor of more dynamic and distinct animations - stuff like directional hit reacts, a more extensive state machine, and some tweaks/polish for both timing and animation.
lol
As for combat visuals, again it is something to be tweaked - but it is just tweaks that are needed.
That said, both things are worth pointing out and discussing. I just wouldnt say that the two of these constitute combat heading in the wrong direction.
Movements are fast and Jerky like Bless Online and BDO.... I hope the devs will add a few frames per second to smooth the movements and reduce the speed on heavy weapons.
It’s combat in regards to its perfect block, block fatigue, and stats are what makes it shine.
It’s slow but you increase the complexity (Ashes) you’d have a great system with strategy and tactics required.
It does make sense that they'd get toned down for sieges though. I'm sure they'll have an optimization algorithm to cut down lag for that.
About the attack speed. The game looks like a clicker right now. Just press lmb as fast as possible and everything will be ok?
The problem is that Two-Handed Greatswords literally hit faster than any man could swing a long sword. It simply looks jerky, wonky and messy. 1 hit per second is good enough when swinging a massive sword. Currently we are at 3-4 swings per seconds or something crazy.
In the streams when 4 or 5 characters (with very limited abilities) are fighting together there are times when you cannot see a single pixel of a mob anymore.
Yes, it looks cool and everything but thats not helping... a game that looks good in "cool 1vs1 pvp video on youtube" and "another super cool trailer" is not what should be aimed for here.
I cannot even imagine what a fight with 10, 20, 50! people would look like. Gameplay should come first. Then nothing for a long time. Then good looks.
and they say AoC has flash VFX ? surely sliders won't fix it like they fix BDO lol
This is exactly what I'm talking about. BDO has almost unanimously amazing combat. The vfx goes INSANE. The animations are insane. Even basic attacks have a lot of cool animations. The problem with Ashes combat isn't too much. If they subtracted 40% of the lights and slowed it down, the combat would still be unimpressive.
From my perspective, they need to lean more into the fantasy aspect. We know it'll never be like any of the eastern MMOs. The Archeage 2 trailer already looks more impressive in terms of combat. What Ashes needs is better animations, better lights, and better movement. All things that can and possibly will be improved in time.
Everyone knows what games have good/fun combat. I'm sure the Ashes devs see the same issues in their combat, from the skill light effects appearing 2D when the camera pans, not fully utilizing UE5 Lumen tech, characters appearing very static and not doing fantasy-esque animations (BDO/BnS/Guild Wars).
The final result will surely align with Stevens vision for the game. If I see that and am still disappointed then I'll just have to live with Stevens idea of good combat not being mine. And that's fine too.
Disagree, BDO looks like shit. It’s a gaudy light show.
I’d like them to just actually mocap their animations with a Martial arts professionals and add simple and clean animations.
Visual Data saturation =\= good combat
100% agree.
Some people are all about the flash, some people are all about the substance.
I'm all about substance.
BDO combats look like Street Fighter on Super Nintendo...
I would go as far as to say BDO's combat is almost unanimously panned as being horrible, to be honest.
BDO looks like bad anime.
I personally also loved BDO, but was driven away by the P2W aspects and Guild monopoly.
Vindictus is another Korean game that I enjoyed a lot.
Flashy, unreal and fast animations is really awesome, imo, because it makes the game feel like a high-fantasy game. I let my players enjoy the rule of cool when i play D&D, and I enjoy the rule of cool in games.
In my personal opinion, the animations are more important than the spell effects. I love detailed, mobile and almost movie effect-like animations and subtle effects with that, only having the real flashy stuff coming up when the most powerful stuff is being used. A game that balances this well is GW2 (imo). BDO has superior animations, but I agree the effects are a bit too flashy. WoW has gotten better over the years, but it still feels... Stiff and boring to me.
Imo, Ashes is doing pretty well, but I am holding my judgement until we get to see more! c: