Intrepid needs to get combat right

after watching the latest event showcase, here are some of my thoughts, i know alot of youtubers and streamers ( narc ) specifically will come out and say that, not every showcase can blow our minds and we cant expect something huge from every single months livestream, how ever in my opinion this is taking away issues that need to be addressed, whether or not you enjoyed the event showcase my take aways were that after 7 years of development the combat still looks so dull and boring and every encounter i watch feels more like a chore than actually something id want to participate in, if anyone has any ideas to make combat feel more fun please comment so intrepid see's this and can maybe implement some of the ideas, also if there are parts that you did like also please put these too, in my opinion the time spent in combat was way to long, the damage felt sluggish and low, the game doesnt feel fast paced at all, there was never an element of danger, i feel that there should be more raid wide damage, with healers needing to spend cds to top everyone off, i feel that there should be more mobs that hit harder with maybe lower health pools, some of the best events and combat i have played comes from guild wars 2,

i use to be extremely excited for this game but to be honest i have sort of lost hope and am just in the mind set that if its good then great and if its not i guess its just another failed mmo, the gameplay looks super average at this point, and im sure many people here are pretty sick of seeing the riverlands for the 900th time in a row, either way intrepid best of luck i hope that it is everything you have hyped it up to be

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Enigmatic Sage

@Chicago you should provide an example of a game and relative patch or expansion you feel would be a good match to support your post point. What you're describing is essentially all relative based on perspectives.

Setting too fast of a pace can snowball the game too early. Usually games over time will slowly adjust pacing and haste to some extent opposed to full throttle at launch.

Curious to your response as a reference point for perspective.

George_Black

Combat has to be spotless. That is why I have always advocated for either tab or action. Focus on one and get it right.

For me combat needs:
1) Fun archetype abilities that show its ID.
2) Weapon restricted abilities with suitable animations and weapon balance.
3) Modern mobility WSAD, with directional closers/openers that dont need a target.
4) Active blocking and roll dodging instead of passive stats (even for tab target combat)
5) Plentyful hotbars with 20+ abilities, abilities of various MP costs (or class specific sources), cooldowns and impact values. Being limited to a small hotbar whilst taunted with a vast majority of customization options is wrong. Give people access to their actice abilities and let them use their MP, timing, cooldowns after judging each situation seperately, unlike games like ESO.

I will play AoC no matter what, simply because of the owpvp, no p2w, large selection of activities that will lead to player/guild conflict, but I will be very dissapointed if combat has gaps and errors, specifically the dual wield weapon option and the fighter archetype.

I liked the healer I liked the mage but I dont play these classes so my opinion matters little.
I want to suggest with the new forums that there is a profile display setting that shows what each forum user would primirely use:
Weapon
Archetype.

It will help with feedback and counter biased opinions.

Sauronplay

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

@Chicago you should provide an example of a game and relative patch or expansion you feel would be a good match to support your post point. What you're describing is essentially all relative based on perspectives.

Setting too fast of a pace can snowball the game too early. Usually games over time will slowly adjust pacing and haste to some extent opposed to full throttle at launch.

Curious to your response as a reference point for perspective.

A solution to what you propose about speed in combat could be solved by adding new skills to the level up system, such as attack speed, as there are in other oriental MMO games.

If what Chicago says is correct, they need to optimize the Intrepid combat system, it is very simple and somewhat boring, but there is too much left to draw a conclusion. I hope that the intrepid developers give importance to the combat system, from what I see there is already a discussion about that.

Next stream, "combat system".

Veeshan

The most important thing with combat i think isnt necessarily how flashing or actiony it looks but more how it feels if i press a buttong does my skill activate and so on (FF14 has this issue everything feel like it has a half a second delay) WoW does not u press a button it immediately does it.
Then just expoand ontop of that core with weapon skill tree and other systems and it should be fine.

Enigmatic Sage

Sauronplay wrote: »

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

@Chicago you should provide an example of a game and relative patch or expansion you feel would be a good match to support your post point. What you're describing is essentially all relative based on perspectives.

Setting too fast of a pace can snowball the game too early. Usually games over time will slowly adjust pacing and haste to some extent opposed to full throttle at launch.

Curious to your response as a reference point for perspective.

A solution to what you propose about speed in combat could be solved by adding new skills to the level up system, such as attack speed, as there are in other oriental MMO games.

If what Chicago says is correct, they need to optimize the Intrepid combat system, it is very simple and somewhat boring, but there is too much left to draw a conclusion. I hope that the intrepid developers give importance to the combat system, from what I see there is already a discussion about that.

Next stream, "combat system".

a solution to @Chicago providing an example of an ideal combat example to their preference is for intrepid to add new skills to the level up system? umm... lol?

Optimisation is important regardless. Combat fluidity and pacing is a major part of rotational combat. Anyone can come in and say its too fast or too slow, too rooted and floaty (remember that fiasco....).

This can also be turned around by how gamers finger blast their keyboards thinking it's more intense than it actually is because their perspective is based around things like anxiety and what not due to a lack of familiarity and comfort that they may or may not be used to.

McShave

I agree combat needs to feel good, but this is not something that is a priority for right now for me. Intrepid needs to focus on getting the background systems designed, implemented, and tested. This includes the node system (mayoralship, guild hall, freehold, politics, leveling up, etc.) and things to do in the world (individual stuff, guild stuff, node stuff). Once we have that, then we can focus on making the combat feel good, as well as other aspects of the game like storytelling and questing. Black Dessert has shown that amazing combat without an interesting world is not worth our time.

Korela

In the context of random events with random players, it is ok if combat is slow and stupid. But if we are factoring raids or PvP (GvG) content, then I agree. I didn't see good combat showcase yet. Especially melee. The one I saw was chasing the Tumok the whole fight. Sadge.

Solvryn

Chicago wrote: »

after watching the latest event showcase, here are some of my thoughts, i know alot of youtubers and streamers ( narc ) specifically will come out and say that, not every showcase can blow our minds and we cant expect something huge from every single months livestream, how ever in my opinion this is taking away issues that need to be addressed, whether or not you enjoyed the event showcase my take aways were that after 7 years of development the combat still looks so dull and boring and every encounter i watch feels more like a chore than actually something id want to participate in, if anyone has any ideas to make combat feel more fun please comment so intrepid see's this and can maybe implement some of the ideas, also if there are parts that you did like also please put these too, in my opinion the time spent in combat was way to long, the damage felt sluggish and low, the game doesnt feel fast paced at all, there was never an element of danger, i feel that there should be more raid wide damage, with healers needing to spend cds to top everyone off, i feel that there should be more mobs that hit harder with maybe lower health pools, some of the best events and combat i have played comes from guild wars 2,

i use to be extremely excited for this game but to be honest i have sort of lost hope and am just in the mind set that if its good then great and if its not i guess its just another failed mmo, the gameplay looks super average at this point, and im sure many people here are pretty sick of seeing the riverlands for the 900th time in a row, either way intrepid best of luck i hope that it is everything you have hyped it up to be

I've been harping about this for the last couple of years.

To repeat some points, if you read the "Design of Every Day Things", it touches on interfacing and the way players will interface is from the Desktop Icon, to the Launcher, to Character Creation/Selection and then onto the world.

And the bulk of their interactions through the world will be done through combat. They will stop at the point to where the game sucks and put it away. The average person doesn't give a fuck about the 10 minutes they'll spend in a city a day when they're out grinding for 10 hours. But if that combat sucks then they'll simply find something else.

Combat is the keystone of all games, whether people know it or not.

Personally I think the Arcanist in ESO is the closest thing we'll ever see to a pure hybrid game.

It's got skill shots, it's pretty tight and accurate, takes strategy and tactics.

Veeshan

Hopefully they get the foundation solid and able to be tweaked by feedback once we get hands on experience with the combat.
Cant fix crumbling foundation so hopefully the hammer out the foundations well

Depraved

its true that mmorpg need to get the combat right. most players spend most of their time in combat.

i dont dislike aoc combat, however, mobs take too long to die for my taste (or maybe skills do too little). thats a balancing issue though. also, we dont have augments and weapon passives yet, so that can contribute to mobs dying so slowly

Percimes

I'm still willing to put that slow and sluggish feel to the current archetypes available for showcase. The group composition in short.

Cleric. Tank. Fighter. Mage. None of the other DPS archetypes are present and the ones used have not all their skills available. Oh, we've seen the fire base spell icons of the mages, but only on the skill bar. No weapon skill. Haven't seen the big glowing hammer of the fighter for several showcases too. Ranger is probably gathering some berries because it's rarely used. The rogue is still stealthed. The bard is tuning their mandolin. And the summoner is to far to hear the summon.

So we're limited to a cleric whose role is to heal more than doing damage.
A tank whose goal in life is to convince the enemies to hit them although they're not the most dangerous damage-wise.
And then we have two and half still gimped DPS.

No wonder combat look slow.
The purpose of these showcases is to present systems. Not final gameplay.

Liniker

you haven't played it yet, can't tell how something feels from looking at a video of low level gameplay,

combat looks fine to me, people just complain about everything, but no one can name even 1 Good MMORPG that failed because it had bad combat, not even saying average because thats 99% of MMOs in the market

combat can't break a good game and if anyone thinks otherwise feel free to provide examples,

because I can use EVE, FF14, and many other examples of games with slow paced and widely considered "bad" combat as successful games,

Intrepid is doing a great job, I think people just burned out from waiting and need to chill and take a break

Talents

Issue is you're judging the combat based off level 15-20 combat. I can't think of a single MMO that's "fun" at that level (much less looks fun while watching it on a stream or video). I looked at vids of Mages in WoW, FF14, BDO, ArcheAge, etc. at that same level and they all looked dull.

Here's a level 15 Mage in WoW in the recent expansion. Looks so garbage yet people hype WoWs combat up.

https://youtu.be/z1AbT_BcHO0?t=1848

Here's a level 15 Mage in FF14. Not even gonna comment on how bad it looks.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/6LySN0TErog?list=PLZvlO6GIecnH8-_3CKoSE0SWwb4uIzMyg

Here's a level 15 Wizard in BDO. The combat looks mediocre compared to late-game BDO and the camera shake is hurting my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APUtopuSuoM&t=399s

So for me, it's basically pointless to really judge the combat until we get to play it in Alpha 2 and get some augments. Steven is also notorious for not being a great player.

Caww

Chicago wrote: »

.... im sure many people here are pretty sick of seeing the riverlands for the 900th time in a row .....

The bulk of Alpha 2 is the Riverlands, atleast initially.

Voeltz

They've said they haven't done any balancing yet which makes sense if they're still in the process of designing the classes and abilities. It will get better as time goes on, just look at how far they've come since the early iterations. The pace of progress is slow, I can't deny that. Supposedly there's going to be fighter update soon so we'll see how much has changed since the last time.

The part that I'm concerned about is the AI. Most fully completed games have dumb AI like what has been shown, that run at half the speed of players, are not difficult to fight and are not a real threat. You can't have challenging combat when the AI is this bad.

Enigmatic Sage

Ai in video games for context is an algorithmic simulation of trial and error that develops over time until the developers figure out which algorithm is ideal to relatively be its foundation in a simple way to put it. I imagine once they implement more integral parts of the game with potential changes down the development pipe line we could see some changes to it. This is of course simple way to describe it before we start getting into conditions and factors for specific combat styles and systems. A simple example would be input based where if the game detects you're button mashing or spamming then the AI is like... no. not going to happen. More commonly seen in soulsborne-like games.

Depraved

Liniker wrote: »

you haven't played it yet, can't tell how something feels from looking at a video of low level gameplay,

combat looks fine to me, people just complain about everything, but no one can name even 1 Good MMORPG that failed because it had bad combat, not even saying average because thats 99% of MMOs in the market

combat can't break a good game and if anyone thinks otherwise feel free to provide examples,

because I can use EVE, FF14, and many other examples of games with slow paced and widely considered "bad" combat as successful games,

Intrepid is doing a great job, I think people just burned out from waiting and need to chill and take a break

well thats the thing. some people might say "oh the combat sucks" but in reality what they mean is they dont like it. some people might like faster combat, some people might like slower combat.

if you like fast combat and the game has a slow combat, guess what? people who like slow combat are going to play it and you can play something else. doesnt mean the game will fail.

however, is still needs to get the combat right for their target audience.

Ace1234

I don't think "not failing" should be the standard for the game. I am not set in stone in my opinion about the combat either way at this point, because its too early. They have been designing more "top to bottom" in terms of overarching systems, and are now focusing more on the more moment to moment systems. Either way I don't think standards should be so low for when the combat is in a finished state.

Veeshan

Talents wrote: »

Issue is you're judging the combat based off level 15-20 combat. I can't think of a single MMO that's "fun" at that level (much less looks fun while watching it on a stream or video). I looked at vids of Mages in WoW, FF14, BDO, ArcheAge, etc. at that same level and they all looked dull.

Here's a level 15 Mage in WoW in the recent expansion. Looks so garbage yet people hype WoWs combat up.
https://youtu.be/z1AbT_BcHO0?t=1848

Here's a level 15 Mage in FF14. Not even gonna comment on how bad it looks.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/6LySN0TErog?list=PLZvlO6GIecnH8-_3CKoSE0SWwb4uIzMyg

Here's a level 15 Wizard in BDO. The combat looks mediocre compared to late-game BDO and the camera shake is hurting my head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APUtopuSuoM&t=399s

So for me, it's basically pointless to really judge the combat until we get to play it in Alpha 2 and get some augments. Steven is also notorious for not being a great player.

People like WoW combat cause its snappy you hit a button it works, FF14 has a delay from when u hit the button and the skill activates its like half a second delay and BDO has the mess of hidden combos and shit like that which is a pain in the ass for alot of players

Ruerik

Wish wildstar was more mainstream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDrBz3sucio

This combat was snappy, fluid, ENGAGING, fun. Most everything had some telegraph to it, but you had to aim all your skills, in real time, as things moved to target you and also dodge what your doing. Heals were aimed also.

Tab targeting was simply there to display info and let you find your way to what you want to hit, everything had to be aimed.

Sadly, the game shutdown, didnt market itself to get big enough and it was aimed at mostly just hardcore folks, casuals need not apply. Also NCsoft sucks.

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