The Combat System....

I see a lot of discussion going on about this. I believe they said they can take out if they needed too, it's never too late. It is a matter of them deciding to do that I think is the case to win.
Yes I like the regular MMO style, but it is old, this is different, but also not the best something has to change, maybe there will be a new change coming down the way.

 

I am getting so tired of people defending this by saying, we can't use a normal system because WOW did that

we don't have people saying we should stop using keyboards because WOW uses them and instead use the guitar hero peripherals (which would be kind of appropriate since the randomised quick use bar means your looking at that instead of the game itself, JUST LIKE GUITAR HERO), why? because a keyboard makes sense, they lay out the controls in a logical fashion.

I have said this before when this system was first announced but imagine driving a car if every 2 min all the controls changed, So sometimes pushing the right peddle down would accelerate and sometimes it would break and other times it would turn an indicator on. I have enough annoyance changing cars when the indicator is on the wrong side in some cars and that STILL throws me 2 weeks after getting my car back. You would never do this, why? because it would kill people. they would be so busy focusing on what the controls are currently doing they would never be able to focus on what is happening on the road. Instead we do the opposite, we make car controls intuitive so that they work with the least amount of attention paid to then, you want to focus on what is happening around you and instintivily react. You don't have Holden coming out saying "Ford uses a steering wheel so we have to "innovate" and instead we will make a random series of buttons to press which will randomly pop up and you can press the one which goes the direction you want IF it happens to appear and BTW it will be in a different spot every time as well". Would ANYONE be stupid enough to buy that????

And what is the solution people are proposing? well apparently the way to fix the massively intrusive system which forces you to stare at the quick use bar instead of watching the game is to make the quick use bar take up more room over top of the game itself. Again the car analogy, instead of a maximum field of view we would stick the controls floating in the windscreen so they are not only intrusive but also block your view of what is happening.

You know what's actually not intrusive at all? the GUI in diablo 3, I have actually died a couple of times because I didn't notice my health was all gone even though its a huge red circle in the bottom of the screen. Why? because the game is designed in such a way that I don't need to look at the task bar and so I forget to, I get sucked into what's happening with my character and don't even SEE the GUI. I am not focused on what button is now my summon Gargantuan button, I am focused on PLAYING THE GAME

 

When I go through the common complaints in MMO combat what I come up with as what people want changed is different than what SotA is doing.

"It's boring to always use the same rotation of skills over and over"
- to me that doesn't mean people don't want control over the order in which they get to use skills, it means people want to have to think about in what order they have to use skills. Even systems that allow complex interactions between skills, what MMO players call "synergies" tend to dictate pretty heavily what the right order to use abilities is because you need to inflict certain status effects before you can activate an effect that utilizes them. What people are really asking for here to me seems like a game where who you're with, what you're fighting, where you are and what's going on make the largest impact on what your best move is.

"I don't like to just auto target things"
- Pretty clear cut, people don't like abstracted combat where they don't feel like they are actually the ones doing the fighting. SotA isn't offering any solutions to that, in fact it's more guilty than most games of making actually observing the action irrelevant. This is an outgrowth of technical limitations, MMOs simply run better if the exact position of stuff can be a bit wishy washy and the fights still work, but people still often feel like they aren't really in control.

"I don't like having to manage so many hotkeys"
- I don't think anyone really does, people just mistake having more abilities with having a more complex character. It's better to have fewer abilities that do more, but also a lot harder to implement.

I'm not really sure what other common complaints there are, these are the ones I hear most often, and none of them seem to really be addressed by the glyph system.

 

Agree'd

 

Not at all what I said, and you know we could spin it the other way. Dozens is a fun number, is that the scientific number you came up? No where did I say we couldn't discuss this, I just don't think you guys are in the majority even if you believe you are. I'm sure there will be updates to the system and I'm hoping they continue to refine it.

I love it when posters use multiple capital letters it really shows a lot.

 

SOTA can't out-WOW WOW, it doesn't have the budget or backing to do so. If SOTA is too much like WOW, players will do little be compare it to WOW (comparisons that will continually favor WOW) and the game will collapse before launch. It's happened before to every MMO that has imitated WOW and it will continue to happen as long as WOW is the big dog in the yard. I agree that randomized toolbars aren't the secret sauce SOTA needs, the player economy might be ... but at this point it feels like an idea from '97 that is getting new legs.

I'm a big fan of increasing the ratio of meaningful to meaningless combats. I'm also not a fan of having to hit a wolf dozens of times to kill it while even a half dozen of them pose no real threat to me.

 

This problem tends to largely come down to having to fill your time with something. Since games tend to have very elaborate combat systems but are often pretty shallow in other regards they tend to focus on giving you as much combat as possible. There simply isn't a whole lot else to do that has any kind of highly interactive system to do it with in most games.

I mean think about how SotA breaks down its characters. It only has two kinds of abilities: combat abilities that all help you fight stuff in one way or another, and crafting abilities. The crafting isn't skill based either, you just unlock bonuses to your crafting chances and resource gathering and so on, but there is no way to actually just be really good at crafting, or developing a unique strategy to it. The only skill in the game I can think of that has any purpose for exploration is the Light spell, and that's not really needed since none of the caves and dungeons in the game are actually dark.

So, yea, I generally agree that there is often way too much meaningless combat, and it gets stretched out forever. But that isn't a flaw of the combat system, if anything the combat system is overdeveloped, not underdeveloped to cause this.

 

Depends, have you ever tried Space Station 13? Crazy amounts of stuff you can do, but it only works because the system gets reset rather frequently so you don't get overly attached to anything. You could extrapolate that model to some kind of "every city is an organism that needs intervention to live" for SOTA and end up with a player mayor screaming at the player head of the teamster's union because she decided to make beer shipments into the city the priority instead of the construction materials needed to repair the alchemist's quarter from where a player alchemist recently discovered a new way to produce black powder in bulk.

The main reason SOTA can't really have a system where you have cool stories like that is because at its heart SOTA is a "make the numbers bigger" simulator, and games like SS13 aren't.

So would it help to have a 3rd section for social skills? Negotiation to get better rates with NPC vendors, Administration for city owners to get a discount on the cost of city maintenance, etc.

I have to disagree on the point that the combat system is overdeveloped. As you point out, the game has two sections at this point, crafting and combat. Combat, for me, consists entirely of walking up to enemies and spamming the attack buttons that popup on the bottom of the screen. I'm not too particular as to which I click, effects aren't predictable enough to counted on. I don't really bother to stack, two weaker attacks seem to do more damage than one slightly more powerful attack. So to me, combat is extremely basic.

 

Overdeveloped doesn't mean it's good it means it's got more moving parts than it really needs.

Personally I don't think the game needs a social skill section, I just think that you really don't need 10 different ways of hitting someone with a sword, I'd much rather have skills that let me do other stuff, like climb a mountain, or hide in a tree, or forage for healing herbs... There are so many really simple things that you could be doing that don't exist at all to make room for 100 ways to hurt someone that are only slightly different from each other.

 

Thought I'd add my two cents to these points, they are well selected from amongst the various posts.

The true killing moment for WoW combat was the Cataclysm Patch. Although Lich King saw a major decline in alternate playstyles, it was still possible to build a functional character that didn't use a sequenced combat rotation. When Cataclysm (And the new band of devs) hit, they literally redid every class to act like rogue, with an opening hit, a "meat-and-potatoes" charge-up move, and a selection of charge-consuming finishers that ideally would be used in rotation with each other. Tanking, healing, dps, I'm surprised crafting didn't have it. In fact no force on Earth could convince me that one of those high-school-dropouts that took over the WoW dev department didn't suggest putting the rotation into crafting and gathering. Once everyone was a rogue, WoW combat truly sucked. Prior to that, it was uninspired, but nothing to quit a game over.

It's vital to remember, though, that World of Warcraft DID NOT invent the hotbar, or keybinds, or rotations. In point of fact I don't believe WoW invented ANYTHING. It's storyline and it's graphics engine were borrowed from the warcraft game series, it's gameplay from Everquest. The control interface wasn't WoW specific, it was MMO generic. What they had was a soft spot in the market, where convenience, brand recognition, price and fun all came together to give them an epic share of the gaming market, and the FIRST group of devs worked hard to keep that share. The new kids just assumed that all the money in the world already belonged to Blizzard by default and started ruining things because they could. If Vanilla WoW, with it's clever development, aggressive dev team, and highly adaptable character design system came out again today, legally, under a different developer, it would steal 70% of current' WoW's market share and quite possibly put several other MMOs out of business.

I will say on this that the current combat design moves in the exact opposite direction that it should here. Not only do we autotarget, but currently the majority of melee damage (or even hybrid damage) comes from melee auto attack. More than that, the system actually gives us an out and out buff for standing still for long periods of time. I would MUCH rather see autoattack nerfed to 1/4 it's current damage, ability damage buffed significantly to replace the lost dps, and the buff then be called "momentum", to start full while running and LOSE stacks for every few seconds of standing still. That alone would make the combat feel MUCH more alive. Using stricter range requirements, and allowing an attack to miss because the target exceeded the range AFTER IT WAS LAUNCHED, as well as more ground targeting effects would be the correct direction here.

This is why a simple in game macro system is a good thing. Not a huge design-a-bot-that-can-PvP-and-gather-for-me-with-one-button type of monstrosity, but a system that lets us put several abilities on one key, with alt, shift, and cntrl differentiating, a system that can put in rotations or simple unthinking sequences, and a few powers that are off global cooldown so that they can be simulcast with the abilities they support. You could even design a drop-in-the-slot UI for macro building and keybinds, similar to the current deck builder UI, so that those who don't want to type code wouldn't have to.

 

I actually like the standing buff combined with the ability to cast on the move. As a long standing caster player in MMOs I am used to not being able to move much at all, here I can move if I want to, and when I have friends who protect me so I can stand still I get a buff.

It's a bit silly when I fight monsters solo and standing perfectly still is a better strategy than moving while chewing through their HP.


I'm personally a huge fan of the idea of ditching hotkeys for individual abilities alltogether, and instead making the things you select have their own moveset. As in, rather than having half a dozen different active use fire abilities I'd much rather just be able to put "Fire" on my hotbar, and when I select it my character summons some magical flame that I can then shape like I'm doing moves with a weapon, with movement sensitive attack modifiers, heavy and light attacks, charge effects and block effects. Do that kind of thing for a variety of magic types and combat styles and you'd have a game where a player can potentially bust out dozens of moves in a fight if they switch styles often while still having a really minimal bar to deal with.

 

I emailed Chris months ago, when they 1st revealed the basis of how it would work. In a PM i told him to scrap it then and come up with a new combat system. Nothing else I can do, i warned him.

 

I sent this to him NOV 19th, 2013 :

Chris,
My advice: Scrap it now. Make a more simple system and concentrate on your bread and butter:
(STORY, CONTENT, EVENTS, HOUSING, THE ENVIRONENT, THE WORLD, ROLEPLAYING, COMMUNITY BUILDING)

Have no idea why you need to reinvent combat with this game. Its not even suppose to be is main aspect.
If the combat is too complex, its gonna interfer with the aspects I listed above.

Keep it simple, yet intelligent. GW2 - A game built for PvP - has a simple system that won't interfer with the flow of gameplay. Its got basic skills, combos, finishers, switch a weapon for a few more skills etc. Simple but intelligent. How are will you even PvP with this system?

Here are the aspects you listed: Skills, Slugs, Focus Skills, Noble Skill, Combos, locked slot and decks. Way too complex. I look at that list of terms and I'm just puzzled.

Being honest with you, I have no desire to play a game with this type of combat mechanics. At first I thought it might be a good idea, but I was wrong. It may take some courage to admit it, but I think you need to scrap this system and concentrate on the fundamentals of the game.

If you tried a simple combat system, could you even have it ready by Jan/Feb at this point?
Gunga

 

Do you are telling me a fan wrote him and he didn't use your expertise to change the game?

 

I'm a PRO, not a Fan. He Should have listened to me.

 

Heh, ok.

 

You disagree with me?

 

Hey, your a pro fan, like you said.

 

Ya know, Rune, you might want to check that keyboard courage. There ARE some real professionals in these forums, people with impressive resumes. Just you disagreeing with someone, this doesn't mean that you know what you are talking about.

Granted, you have the right to your opinion, but I somehow sense that you are wrong here.

 

It's also just as true that some think playing games makes them an authority on game design.