Does anyone else HATE the proposed card system??

GREAT POST! Honestly I didn't pick that up the first time I heard that video. Truely if you could be less experienced and squeak out a win against a more experienced opponent, then what about an experienced oppenent vs an experienced oppenent?

In other words use weaker less expensive armor and weapons vs a character that has the same skill as you because of the luck system the chances are you might be able to beat that guy. And if you lose oh well not a huge loss because it was easy to aquire cheapo equipment. No need to work hard and max out your gear with a system that requires luck.

That was a good insight.

 

Hope (or luck) is not a plan.

 

I think until we see it in action, there's not much point in getting too heavily into discussing it.

I'm expecting/hoping for a system where I have my core abilities available at all times on my character, and then, as opportunity knocks, the deck o' other-stuff deals out things that I may partake of provided I am

1) Paying attention
2) Feel like using the ability.

I could see having abilities that ONLY exist on cards while you have your normal character stuff alongside it. That seems like it would be pretty good.

 

We HAVE seen it in action, it was in the 6 month demo and it proved the exact issues I was talking about. You have a whole heap of small icons and have to divirt attention away from the battle to trying to work out what the hell they are and the you can only watch one or the other which means having no idea about what your icons are or having no idea whats going on in the battle

It makes the UI VERY intrusive

 

Shut down the icon, 3PO, shut down the icon! 3Po! 3PO!?

beep beep chirp beep

I don't know which icon, shut them all down, shut them allll downnnn!!!

 

Eh, I don't know. It showed it, but it is quite early on so there is plenty of room to improve the visual aspect so that it flows better. Glancing down to see what you've got shouldn't be THAT big of a deal, if it's even one at all.

I mean, they're your buttons. You should know what they are.

It's no more intrusive than WoW's disco light show of blinkies and washouts/flashing crap to tell you when it's time to hit another key.

 

Sorry but its FAR more intrusive than Diablo's interface. Its irrelivant what the colours are like because I already know what each button does so I never look at it. I don't need to know what the icon is because I already know what the button does. THAT is how you make a UI unobtrusive. Hell you could make it disapear and I wouldn't even notice because I'm not looking at it

Its the same in a car, when your driving you have to make yourself look at the dashboard because otherwise you just don't see it because what your watching is the road. If all the controls suddenly started changing what they do so the indicators suddenly controled the brakes, steering right took you left or made the car speed up etc your going to have to spend the whole time either looking for what the controls do and not looking at the road. Ie either way your going to end up in a hospital because you have wraped the car around a tree (hopefully)

 

Ah yes, you have say 30 icons which rapidly change, tell me you could recognise and remember them all in less than 3 seconds

 

Since I selected which cards are going to be drawn by a little simple thought going into the process before any kind of battle, yeah, I can tell you I could recognise them. I can also tell you, for me at least, I could do it with my peripheral vision and I would not be distracted either.

But hey, we each have our own levels of natural ability to play and understand different systems, I don't hold it against anyone else if they cannot do the same thing I can. In any case, I am sure you all read(and ignored) Lum's post in the other 6 month thread.

Rage on my friends, rage on.

 

The most critical aspect to making this work will be how it's presented. That's going to be the most difficult part in selling this new type of combat system -- "randomness" notwithstanding. We're taking a slower turn-based system and trying to make it real time, with all that action going on in the screen. In traditional card combat systems, the cards are the focus of attention. In these types of games, it's not, so our focus is being divided by what's happening on screen in real-time vs focusing on the skills being dealt.

It's been said that the skills might only appear for a 3 seconds, causing us to constantly focus our attention on the skills and not on the onscreen action. But if you watch the current implementation -- that we all know is very very very not-ready-for-primetime prototype -- it's actually up on screen in the hotbar for 10 seconds. Make no mistake about it though, however it's presented there will be a period of time to train our eyes on this.

There's been plenty of suggestions on how to present this in different ways, so keep those coming. And yes, some design conceits may need to be made such as having a completely unobscured screen.

 

Well, I can understand some people's frustration but I don't see it as justified. We have not been shown the combat system yet, we've only seen a demo and I won't judge a book from the cover - but I can and will judge the cover itself.

- The following comments are about the demonstrated combat system only. Everything else in the video, i.e. houses, towns, villages, visuals, armour, the cloak with the coat of arms embroidered... I could only say good things about those. -

Good:
First, I don't think the demo UI is intrusive at all. I've played other games where, while you can play with just one 12-slots hotbar, you must have at least 6 of them to be a little bit efficient. That means at least 72 icons on your screen.
What I've seen here is a maximum total of 10 icons to occasionally look up.
Maybe I've missed something, why's people talking about "30 icons rapidly changing"? I counted 10, which is good enough for me.

Another good thing is that you don't need to keep clicking those icons. We've seen the demo avatar picking just one at the start of the combat, and then just auto-attack ignoring the icons for the most of the fight.
Good because I grew tired of hitting combos as fast and as often as I could in pretty much every other game out there. I don't like button mashing Street Fighter style.

Now, I really really doubt that a newb with a wooden sword could beat a high level character in a plate armour suit.
Let's say the newb is lucky and can start the fight with their most powerful spell, like an AOE fire spell or something.
The other player is unlucky and can't dodge, losing 1% of his HP! Enraged, he auto-attacks the newb, which is again lucky and dodges! The other player auto-attacks again and kills the newb in one single blow.

The good thing here is that the newb has one (if very dim) chance of not getting one-shot by the powerful high-level player, while the powerful high-level player still cannot be one-shot by the newb even if he's extremely lucky.


Bad:
While the randomness may be good for the reasons above, what happens if you have, say, 100 skills/spells to choose from? Right: you will use, or be able to use, 10-20 of them your whole life.
Say I want to have a heal spell always available, so I put multiple copies of it in my "bag". But what about the other 50 spells I have available. Sure I could put a few "Cure Poison" in the mix, that's still 48 wasted spells which I have wasted time studing.

Also, what about non-combat spells/skills? Will I be able to cast a heal while out of combat?

I mentioned auto-attacking. While it's good that you don't have to twitch, strafe, dodge AND keep your second pair of eyes (what, only two eyes?! you lose, mate) on the icon bar.... it's also boring and very anti-climatic.
The demo looked very rough though, animations were slow and repetitive, looked much like an action movie from the '70s. I'm sure the end product will be better than that.

 

I am hoping they add in some big attacks you'll want to move to avoid. I didn't like neverwinter's implementation of that system. I do really enjoy Final Fantasy 14: ARR system and would like something similar to that. I do like mobs to have mechanics where you need to pay attention, if you see a burning ring surround you might want to move out of it.. etc.. But that has little to do with the combat system and more about designing the mobs with fun mechanics to keep combat interesting.

Now would that be too much to handle for most people, moving and dodging manually while deciding whether or not they want to cast the spell/skill that just came up? I would hope that people can handle doing both but sometimes my faith in humanity gets a little smaller.


This does minimilize UI, as in other games, such as wow, I have skills floating all over the place so I can cast them as needed, especially when I first go through a dungeon. If all my skills are available to me in this game I could easily have 80 icons all over my screen instead of the 10 that are available to me atm.

 

I agree that Neverwinter's (or gw2) system could probably be improved upon. But somewhere there should be a visual indicator for an incoming attack. And it's better than nothing. Ranged classes always slow and kite, this was a way for melee classes to do something similar but be forced to time their defense well. And I think it does fit into the combat system. You need to have access to the active defense and many skills need to be slow enough so that there's some indicator and opportunity to defend. (Such as enemy cast bars in some games.)

I agree that WoW is already bad. They constantly reduce the number of skills but are somewhat stuck with what them have. I completely agree that a skill explosion would be terrible. This is what RIFT had. And thankfully RIFT had one of the better macro systems for managing it. The macros emulated the skill priority systems people manually do in WoW. And that's what I'd hope the cards to. Your deck more or less represents a smart macro. But I'd need to be able to build intelligent variations (defense, cc, finishers) into their own buttons. Because that's a whole different though process than "best available attack."

 

I am totally confused, could you or someone please send me a link that explains how you will have 30 icons rapidly changing? I saw the 6 month vid and I saw 7 icons and we are in a mode that is before even an alpha test, if I missed something please let me know.

Now how do I percieve this so called "card system" based on the few details I have been able to find. Well combat is all about surviving and exploiting weaknesses and so forth, but a lot of this is hard to simulate exactly in the online environment. So lets say we have so many slots..slot 1 is always some kind of melee attack action, slot 2 is always some kind of melee def option, slot 3 is magic attack, slot 4 is magic def, slot 5 is special.

You learn a set of skills, the skills you really specialize in have a higher chance of poping up for you in the slot category that it belongs to. I do not think you should be forced to notice that a magic defense popped up where you normally have an offensive melee attack because even in the heat of combat no one makes that big of a mistake.

Then based on certain combos you dish out you may be given some kind of special attack, or perferably a choice between two different specials that could appear as a kinf of symbol that floats to the left and right of your character.

You combine this with allowing UI customization and I do not see tons and tons of options.

 

What podcasts are you speaking of? I would love to hear anything SotA related and my search hasn't turned anything up.

 

Combat, Magic, Skills - No UI, No 'Deck' Proposal


https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...bat-magic-skills-no-ui-no-deck-proposal.3853/

 

Id guess if you make a sweeping cut with your sword and miss it would negate a thrust stroke card from the pack for your next move even if you have the skill, it would not be a feasable choice so not available to use from your deck
of cards . So you may choose a few you want to use at the start of combat then its down to how you perform and their counterstroke to what will be available. Im not a PvPer but I think that would make for an interesting fight against a human opponent.

 

My only problem with this system, and what I consider to be the best arguement against the entire concept: This system is set up specifically to simulate something that is already and ALWAYS inherently present no matter what, and that something is 'human error'. We shall see how it works out I suppose. I'm definitely interested in trying it out and I am keeping a relatively open mind until then.

I think one of the potential best parts of their idea is the damage it would do to battle scripting in PvP, which I am all for. Scripting isn't hard for people to learn, and its just simply not impressive or skillful and has no place in competetive games.

 

Yep.. then people will say you can script anything! But I say that the way the system works you need to be tactical about your use of abilities. You wont always want to use what you have up, on the other hand depending on various circumstances you may know you need to use it. It can be a very effective anti-script/bot tool.