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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 13, 2015 7:26:59 GMT
Now that we can have an honest discussion, without being afraid of moderation, I'd like to get everyone's feedback on what they really think of the current combat and skill system, including all the mechanics that go along with them. Surprisingly not aimed to bash anyone.
I have quite a bit to say on this subject, I just need to figure out how to rely the information in a meaningful way, my thoughts will come later.
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Post by Membrane_on_Vacation on Feb 13, 2015 7:33:27 GMT
Some quick things off the top of my head. - Card Combat - They didn't want a hot bar. Not only do they have a hot bar, but they have a randomized hot bar. Seems pretty counter productive to their early thoughts on the system.
- Auto-attack - Wtf is this. Turn that shit off, and let me have control over my character. How can I ambush nubs from the bushes at the right time when I just auto-attack them?
- It is just a walk up and smash ppl in the face type combat. No intelligence. No twitch.
- Line of sight - Still not in there, claims it will be next release.
Mordecai summed it up well in the other post. It was interesting to hear them say again in the dev chat that they would still do away with the combat system if it doesn't work, or at least that is what I got out of it.
Right now it is shit, but with simple things like LoS still not even in, it is hard to say what it will become. It is taking a long...long...time to get core mechanics in in SotA.
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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 13, 2015 8:03:23 GMT
You stated some of the things that really bother me, I believe we think the same on this subject.
I know some people are hoping line of sight will be the savior to some degree but I'm thinking that it's not going to make that much of a difference. It's still auto attack, meaning that the enemy will still hit you when performing moves such as moving to the side, doing that won't dodge an attack, the only way to break the line of sight most likely will be to run behind something. Now how will line of sight change anything when you are in an open area with nothing to hide behind? or in most typical duels, pvp scenarios? It probably won't make any difference.
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Post by Membrane_on_Vacation on Feb 13, 2015 9:46:53 GMT
Oh line of sight fixes aren't going to cure the problem by any means. It is just a huge peeve.
Auto-attack needs to at least have a toggle. FFS I think they had an auto-attack toggle in Warcraft I.
I would also love to see the health and mana bars go away. You never truly know how much you have, you just run out and die or run out and can't cast. That would be pretty fucking epic, but soooo many Carebears would throw their toys out of the playpen it wouldn't be funny.
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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 13, 2015 17:59:59 GMT
To start off my thoughts on these systems and things relating to them, I'd like to first say that I think a combat system, skill system, etc is the main aspect of a game, which will make or break it. Whether you are a Pvper, Pk, Pve'r? Adventurer, Crafter, Roleplayer, whatever your play style is, it's most likely that you will be interacting with these systems more often than others. That being said, the combat system that we currently have today is the reason that I will most likely not be playing much Shroud of the Avatar at all, it is that bad. I am aware that a lot of people have left already just because of these systems alone and there are also a lot of people that won't even give the game a try after looking into it, seeing how bad the system is, in words and visually.
As i have a fare amount to say, I will be splitting up my thoughts on these subjects into numbered posts. Also to differentiate from regular posts I make within this thread. The numbers do not have any relevance to anything.
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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 13, 2015 19:10:24 GMT
#1: The Camera system, visuals and key binding.
My thoughts: I could not express enough how annoying the current camera system, setup is, especially combined with the other things our avatars have to do. A good example is while you are in combat, having to click your mouse to drag your view around in the middle of having to interact with the random deck system is a complete nightmare. These elements don't work well together at all. The visuals that I would like to comment on are these tool tips that pop up when you hover over something on your utility, combat bar and the pop up that appears when you click on another player. Do we really need tool tips on our main interface? it's not only ugly, annoying, getting in the way sometimes, bugging out on the screen but I highly doubt that people are so dumb that they need blatant tool tips everywhere. What is so wrong with having to think and not have everything given to us or told to us?, having to figure something out for yourself anyways? Onto the pop up that appears when you click on another player, this system is also very annoying and pointless at that, it could easily be implemented in better ways. I'm sure a lot of us have been in a situation where you are in a crowded area, trying to move your camera around, whether it's in combat or not and you keep mistakenly clicking on other players, most times it can't be avoided, which results in these ugly unneeded pop ups, sometimes getting stuck on screen too. For the keybind subject I most likely will be touching on more later but relating to what I'm currently talking about, I think having your camera bound to a primary mouse button is a huge waste of resources, a main button that could be used for something better. With these systems all poorly designed, joined together, conflicting with each other, it does take a lot of the fun, interaction enjoyment out of the game.
My suggestions: I would get rid of the current camera, tool tip, pop up, system entirely and start over. Take some inspiration from games like Skyrim, they have pretty much perfected the third person camera system and there is no need to try reinvent something different. What this style of camera system offers is a locked third person view, so there is no dragging, struggling for the right angle, no accidental pop ups on other players, it frees up your attention span to fewer things, you will be able to concentrate on the deck system, other things at a higher level, making it more enjoyable. Other things this style of camera system offers is when you are standing still in third person, you can move the camera wherever in third person, so you can still freely, easily decorate look around or whatever. On top of this system I'd like to see a keybind which takes you out of locked third person view when held down and lets you rotate your view while moving, like how DayZ is. Tool tips are unneeded on our main screen of play, if you need to know how something works, you should have to refer to a manual or some other means. The player pop ups situation, I'm don't really have a preference other than knowing how annoying, seeing how visually ugly the current setup is, it definitely needs to be reworked, maybe a keybind that you press to pop up a different player interface, one that isn't bound to a key that you use for something else.
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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 14, 2015 0:32:36 GMT
#2: The skill system.
My thoughts: When first hearing of this game before development really started, I would never of thought the people who claim to be responsible for UO's success would of even dreamed of implementing some of the atrocities that they have. The skill system is one of them and I have a hard time figuring out where to even start with this one. I never expected skill trees and I have no idea why they would steer away from a popular skill based system. The skill tree's that we currently have are terrible, not just the skills themselves, but also how you acquire skills and the way you are forced into certain things because of the deck system. Let's start with saying that I'm disappointed that there is no separation between combat skills, defense skills and utility skills, they are all lumped into a tree and you have to sometimes waste skill points on something just to get to what you want. For usability I do not want let's say my defense skills and utility skills mixed in with my combat skills. Having all these random skills that I don't need popping up on my random deck combat bar makes no sense at all. In fact I don't even know why we have defense skills on our combat bar, why can't we use active methods like having a block button? or having to use certain potions, eat certain food, have to use a scroll to get these defense buffs instead. Now let's talk about how bad these skills really are, I'm sure we all are aware that there is only maybe a couple worth while skills in each tree and that we are forced to put a certain amount of skills into our deck or we get slugs. This creates a problem for me because since the majority of the skills are complete trash within each tree, I am forced to hop around to multiple trees just to meet the number of cards the deck requires to not have slugs. This is a good way to waste a lot of skill points in a meaningless way that could be avoided. So What if I just wanted to be just a Fire mage? probably the most functional tree within magic, well that isn't possible either because there are only a few skills worth using within the fire tree, this carries over to pretty much every build there is. It almost seems like the further down the tree you go, the worse the skills get. For a mage, who really wants to spec all the way down a tree just to get a summon? I'll never be fighting with a summon just for the fact that I'm not the one doing the fighting then, there is no skill involved in your summon killing things and it's impractical for a lot of situations. A lot of the skills themselves are designed so badly that they don't even offer up any opportunity to have a worth while battle. How about the variety of skills? there isn't much of one, they are all pretty basic, boring, not giving us the chance to create a build different from someone else. For utility skills, I thought this would be implemented a lot differently, having lots of things to interact with all sorts of whatever but that too is plain and boring. I also think it's a joke that they took out medium armor, would of been nice to have more choices.
My suggestions: Scrap the whole skill tree idea, move to a skill based system, which offers way more functionality, flexibility, who the fuck doesn't love a skill based system? It would open up a lot more possibilities. I doubt this would ever happen though, so let's be realistic, if staying with skill trees, my suggestion relating to that would then be to create a lot more combat skills, fast pace skills/spells/counters etc. Move all utility skills to their own tree and then add in active defense mechanisms. example, replacing right mouse button view drag with block. Lower this garbage skills to deck number requirement for slugs so that we can actually build a useful deck with the minimal skills we have at hand. Instead of having to look for fillers, skills that we would never use just to meet that requirement. I'd love to see more variety in everything, so that we can customize a lot more than not being able to customize/be different at all. On another subject that I will talk about later, I would love to see a lot of these combat skills relating to weapons be replaced by active player mechanics, example different swings, trusts, whatever, rather than sitting in one spot mashing buttons.
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Post by Gunga_Din on Feb 14, 2015 2:18:04 GMT
Aye, when i 1st got the details on the card system, I PM Chris and told him to scrap it immediately. That was about 8 months ago, he never replied and because He didn't listen to me, we have the most horrid Combat system ever created.
To make matters worse, they used a skill tree in which as u go up the tree, the previous skills become less useful.
The entire system is horrible. Thats why i'm supporting Shards Online's skill based system and its nice combat ui. Go check it out.
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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 14, 2015 3:27:06 GMT
Yea, it's pretty weird how he just went ahead and implemented this disaster of a combat/skill system without acknowledging what others think. Still to this day he hasn't even shown a sign of really caring what anyone else thinks, doesn't take suggestions very well or at all. Maybe he will scrap it at some point but why put so much effort into something just to do that?, I think we are stuck with these systems. On the brighter side? we all should be thankful that we can press shift to get into chat quick right? such a great feature, good thinking inside the box.
I've played Shards, it looks promising.
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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 14, 2015 6:07:57 GMT
I forgot to comment on your health bar comment, I am all for that, I like a clean interface, world and character, having no floaters over peoples heads, no highlights on anything. that kind of stuff ruins the game visually for me. I remember early on when they said that their goal was to have a clean interface and there would be no health bars, that enemies would physically show signs of their health level instead. This was one thing I was really looking forward too, now look where we are at. I thought when they first implemented that little dot that resembled the enemies health, that it was only place holder until they figured out how to do what they previously stated they'd like to do. I am disappointed that system didn't make it in but I could of lived with that little dot. These health bars, floating names, floating guild tags and highlights are something else though, taking it beyond looking ridiculous, reminds me of F2P games. Makes me wonder why they try to spend so much time on textures, the world, then dump this load of ugly unrealistic looking crap ontop of it.
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Post by Gunga_Din on Feb 15, 2015 17:01:47 GMT
Never understood why they tried to reinvent the wheel with their combat system. That was never its main selling point.
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Post by Housewife Brittish on Feb 15, 2015 18:42:40 GMT
#3: Auto attack
My thoughts: This is a fairly simple one to understand why it's so bad and who really wants to play a game these days which utilizes auto attack? especially the way this team has implemented it. I understand auto attack had it's glory days when games and technology weren't advanced enough to make anything else possible but in today's world it is a fairly basic task to create an interesting combat system that doesn't involve auto attack. I've seen it happen many times through low budget studios or by a handful of people doing it on their own time. So either the person coding this kind of stuff isn't capable of coding to today's standards or that person made the decision to hold out on us. While either may be true, I've heard many excuses coming form the team trying to justify the auto attack, the most recent excuse was that auto attack solves the lag in combat. Either these people making these excuses don't even play their own game and or haven't played any other games with auto attack because it's obvious that this excuse is untrue, even a fanboy can experience it for themselves. If lag is the excuse of the week, wouldn't this match making system that the team kept bragging about solve most of that? the system that is suppose to match you up with the best people to play with? If this works like they stated than we most likely wouldn't be playing with a turd muffin that has a smoke signal connection which lives across the world. Most games seem to accomplish a free aim system just fine without lag or dsync, but this team seems to be using that excuse like it isn't possible to do. It's not only the excuses that they, the ones that make no sense but also the way they have implemented auto attack itself. They have coded in the most basic form of auto attack ever seen, an auto attack on a timer. It is possible to do an auto attack system that let's the player decide when they perform the swing or attack but even this seems to be over their head. This system combined with the skill system, deck system, is as simple and boring as combat can get, it promotes standing in one spot and spamming due to lack of active mechanics and poor design, implementation.
My suggestions: Scrap the auto attack and go to a free aim system with hitbox's, I'd even settle for a full body hitbox. I would like to see something within combat that actually takes skill, that can separate the bad players from the good. At the moment the system is so easy, random and limiting that it puts everyone on the same level with no room to be better. I would like to see different active attacks to, like directional swings, also would like to see blocking be worked in as an active mechanic. I know it's unlikely that any of this will happen so maybe I'll again simplify my suggestion to just let us control our 1 swing auto attack. instead of it being on a timer, if you can figure out how to code that.
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Joviex
Strong in the Force
PERMABANNED
Posts: 123
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Post by Joviex on Feb 18, 2015 19:22:23 GMT
#2: The skill system. My thoughts: When first hearing of this game before development really started, I would never of thought the people who claim to be responsible for UO's success would of even dreamed of implementing some of the atrocities that they have. The skill system is one of them and I have a hard time figuring out where to even start with this one. I never expected skill trees and I have no idea why they would steer away from a popular skill based systemYou answered your own question. They steer clear of anything that has been once innovated and iterated over and over a decade+ into what a standard system would be because of, supposedly, the very iterative refinement it went through. Makes absolutely the best design choice ever /sarcasm since that is what we engineers do, discard anything worth a fuck, tried and true, and just wing some new wack, untested design together. Of course, this is completely true, EXCEPT for when they deem it ok to justify making money -- like the bank slots -- as evidenced in Starr's reply: www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/minimum-bank-storage-capacity-multi-select-poll.21307/page-3#post-317780So perfectly ok to copy mechanics that have been used and refined when it ca$he$ the population for more, but fuck anything that we can't monetize?
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Post by Membrane_on_Vacation on Feb 19, 2015 0:35:35 GMT
What Joviex said. They are Mavericks, like Sarah Palin.
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