Best examples of Action Combat? Starting to Feel Like Tab > Action

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What would you suggest as a replacement for that kind of system? Or do you think people won't leave the game when they lose every single pvp in it?

Obviously some people will be similar to you and not interact with pvp most of the time, but sooner or later all the pvp losers will leave, which will either make the winners leave because they no longer have someone to fight or they'll move onto all the other players (in some shape or form) and then even more people will leave. So imo there should be at least some system that minimizes those losses. If you have a better system, I'll gladly support it.

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I feel like an mmo with bosses being similar to Shadow of the Colossus (at least in size difference and the mechanics that come with that), where the whole raid of however many people would fight their own small mechanically difficult fights across the whole body of the boss.

You could still have the holy trinity design for classes and make it so that each fighting point on the boss' body requires proper tanking (the tank moving around and blocking hits with their shield), proper healing (hitting precision casts onto the other 2 dudes) and proper dpsing (precision shots on weak points and other similar stuff)- all while there's some environmental hazards that make you move around even more.

And I think UE5 would definitely allow for smth of that scale work fine enough and look just fucking incredible.

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Maybe a bit, yeah. I'm as much of an mmo boomer as the next guy (should be obvious considering my L2 simping), but it's super obvious that the genre has moved very far away from the "classic" definition of mmorpg. And it did so because that classic definition no longer worked to its benefit. So I think we gotta "Improvise. Adapt. Overcome" if we want the genre to stay alive and succeed in the future.

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I guess it comes down to subjective definitions of what a raid is. I see it as a big group of people working towards one goal in one place against, most of the time, one target. It could be a small boss with spells that divide you into small groups or make you move around the room (ff14/wow style afaik), it could be a huge boss that you just unleash all your spells onto (L2 style), it could be the things you've described where particular members of the raid gotta do some particular action to progress the farm, or it could be one ginormous boss body that could involve all of the above mechanics in any given order of execution. To me those are all "raids", and I don't really see how they're any different.

And on top of that you have different class combos, trinity or non-trinity systems, agro mechanics, dps rotations and all of that other shit that comes with a huge group of people working together in one place.

If anything, I'd say the same thing Nish said to Dygz - "the future is now, old man!" Why should we limit ourselves with preexisting notions of what's a raid and what's not a raid. The genres can evolve and add things to themselves w/o changing the core principle. A group of 40 people working towards a singular goal of beating a singular target by overcoming several different mechanical barriers sure as hell sounds like an mmorpg raid to me.

And when it comes to the design difficulties of boss variety - the sky's the limit. Underwater bosses, sky bosses, horizontal bosses, vertical bosses, tight internal movement bosses, elemental being bosses, swarm bosses, fractured but whole bosses, mechanical/nature-based/magic-based/ether-based/void-based/gravitational/etc-ional bosses. I could probably come up with several hundred unique bosses with fairly unique mechanics within a day or two. And those types of bosses would be considered "epic" in the game, I'm not saying that each and every single boss should be a ginormous being (though that would be quite cool). The only thing that's stopping me from making those ideas come true is money Which is why I like Steven so much. He had the money to go full Bender on the genre. I wish I could do the same cause I got endless ideas and no means to realize them.

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Yes, and in at least 2 of those players can lose a ton of their shit. And if they lose, there's a high chance of them leaving. And soon enough you won't have anyone in the game left to lose. Should we try saving the game from inevitable death or is it ok to just let it live for a few months and become the new NW (even if NW's death didn't necessarily come from the same source)?

Or do you think that all casual players will never interact with the caravan system or will never live in a node that gets sieged and destroyed, with both of those systems removing some of their resources and with destroyed nodes making those losing players go to another node (except they'll probably just leave the game because they'll see moving to another node with high freehold costs too much of a hassle)?

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https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Caravans#Caravan_destruction
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_sieges#Node_destruction
Both of those are objective-based pvp events. Both of them lead to resource loss in the case of a loss. Both of those will most likely have a decent amount of player resources. And depending on respawn mechanics during both events, any casual player might keep repeatedly dying which will decay their gear, so they'll be losing mats that way too (gear degradation quote is 64th reference on the caravan page).

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I think studios just haven't tried different approaches to action-based mmo pve. Though I did like pve in B&S, even if I hadn't reached any big scale raids (if there are any, I don't really know).

We would only know if the cup will overfill once someone tries to push it to its limits. And I'm pretty sure no one has tried yet because it's too risky, and we currently live in the age of no risk. The sheer fact that Steven decided to make something that goes against the current trends so much is the proof to that "no risk" rule.

Any other big company with investors can only see the success of wow and ff14 and them being tab "so that must be the secret sauce! Devs, go make a game like that". And any action-based game from korea/china is either too p2w for the western audience or relies too much on low ping, and west has been notorious for having problems with that. But I do think there's ways around that issue, but, again, it'd take a lot of risky money to even try and prove me wrong or right.

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I'm not asking to make literally all mmos action. Hell, if I was in fact asking for something I'd ask for L3, where it's literally the same game but with better graphics click to move and all.

What I am saying is that mmorpg can mean more than just a wow-clone or whatever Ashes is trying to be.

I'm personally not too into isometric games so I have no clue how good or bad they are as mmorpgs. Which is exactly why I'm suggesting having a 3d action mmorpg (w/o removing or replacing any potential tab mmorpgs).

NiKr wrote: »

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I think studios just haven't tried different approaches to action-based mmo pve. Though I did like pve in B&S, even if I hadn't reached any big scale raids (if there are any, I don't really know).

We would only know if the cup will overfill once someone tries to push it to its limits. And I'm pretty sure no one has tried yet because it's too risky, and we currently live in the age of no risk. The sheer fact that Steven decided to make something that goes against the current trends so much is the proof to that "no risk" rule.

Any other big company with investors can only see the success of wow and ff14 and them being tab "so that must be the secret sauce! Devs, go make a game like that". And any action-based game from korea/china is either too p2w for the western audience or relies too much on low ping, and west has been notorious for having problems with that. But I do think there's ways around that issue, but, again, it'd take a lot of risky money to even try and prove me wrong or right.

Once again, I'll say Noaani is completely right. The only outcome of more Action-y games in big properly difficult PvE is to tune the encounter so that it is less Action so that you can get the max possible 'space in the cup'. Particularly in complex raid content.

Now, this isn't actually bad, and I honestly would bet that most people would like it. But at that point the difference between Action and Tab Target (assuming the type of Tab Target you described from Lineage) is so minimal that it no longer matters.

Which brings us back to the explicit goal of the 'Lineage 3' (Throne and Liberty) devs. To just... do that. 'Pour some ice out of the cup for the sake of a challenging group encounter'.

But any game can do that, and probably while keeping Action stuff otherwise. In many ways, I consider it impossible for Noaani to be wrong about this. High level 4-man Monster Hunter showcases it pretty easily because it IS what you described and yet would NEVER work with more than 6-8 players total except on the largest of enemies if they were planning to actually use their mobility and other special skills, rather than 'one person get control of the monster and everyone else just wail on it with little or no real threat of damage'.

Azherae wrote: »

Which brings us back to the explicit goal of the 'Lineage 3' (Throne and Liberty) devs. To just... do that. 'Pour some ice out of the cup for the sake of a challenging group encounter'.

thinking that TL will be challenging I'm jk, I hope it's fun, but I hiiighly doubt it'll be anywhere near wow/ff14 complexity.

Azherae wrote: »

But any game can do that, and probably while keeping Action stuff otherwise. In many ways, I consider it impossible for Noaani to be wrong about this. High level 4-man Monster Hunter showcases it pretty easily because it IS what you described and yet would NEVER work with more than 6-8 players total except on the largest of enemies if they were planning to actually use their mobility and other special skills, rather than 'one person get control of the monster and everyone else just wail on it with little or no real threat of damage'.

And that is exactly why I suggested Shadow of the Colossus-type pve raids. Or something like the skeleton centipede from SAO. A yuuuge boi that has several points of contact with a ton of players. Add environmental hazards for difficulty, add some cool 3d spells where you might have to do a proper dodge or run to a proper "hole in the wall of fire".

Now I obviously haven't participated in the "proper difficult pve" so I'm probably missing some requirements that make that pve truly difficult and complex, but from the outside looking in it just looks like "make correct rotations of skills while moving around ground hazards". And I definitely feel like I could come up with a similar kind of boss fight, but with action combat. Now my definition of action combat might differ from other people's (and I think it does), so that might be another point of contention and why we're disagreeing on this point.

Well, I used this example somewhere before, but it was long ago, so hopefully it can help, though it does require watching some videos. Mostly just a few minutes of each.



If you prefer the guide version:



This monster is not 'hard' for most Monster Hunter veterans, but it is much more 'active' in Monster Hunter games, 'more action' is happening. Perfectly timed dodges, whiff punishes on its attacks, etc. By the nature of a Tab Target game, it 'becomes what you refer to'. 'Correct rotations while moving around ground hazards'. The 'Extreme' version just 'applies the Monster Hunter ruleset'. Only 3 people can fall, tanking doesn't work the same, etc.

Aaaand it's boring. Because by the nature of what a Rathalos is, you can't add more 'complex puzzle elements' if you want to represent it properly in a Tab Target game. Encounters in harder PvE content in Tab Target games require you to know and respond correctly to a massive number of mechanics, in unison. Various games have different styles (adding adds, creating area debuffs from the mob, requiring you to have and use specific items, or just spawning kill-zones that you have to dance through, or sometimes multiples of these, obviously).

That's 'what they think of to do' to make Rathalos even start to approach a 'Raid encounter'. Because otherwise it's just this (watch like 1 minute from 10:20 if not familiar with the game):



Now, that player is using a long range weapon, but the point is that once 'complexity' is encoded in 'movement and evasion', you will get a tier of player who will be able to overcome almost ANYTHING you throw at them that is physically possible to do. So what do devs do? They rightly make combat where there's stuff you can't avoid and therefore damage is taken. But these games are based on healing and mitigation too. The numbers don't work out.

I'm not saying these can't work in Ashes, I've outlined an 'Ashes Rathalos fight' before as an explanation to someone else somewhere. But that wouldn't be 'hard', just 'engaging'. It would barely become hard as other players showed up to PvP. But devs almost always find themselves thinking 'Ok this is proper hard content now, nearly no one will be able to do THIS, they'd have to play PERFECTLY'. And then someone will do it.

Full raid encounter difficulty is literally ABOUT overwhelming your players' mental stack while also threatening them with the DPS and Mitigation checks. Action games that aren't frustrating by design almost cannot threaten with the Mitigation check without being a serious pain to play for a large number of players. Not 'to win the encounter'. Just to PLAY.

If you've played Monster Hunter, I can probably successfully explain it, but if you haven't, it would be harder. Just take my main point as 'Given relatively free action ability, developers are constantly surprised by just HOW good players can be at games'. So their better bet is to design things where your ability to act freely is not the key aspect of success... and then we're back to 'might as well be Tab Target'.

Azherae wrote: »

and then we're back to 'might as well be Tab Target'.

I guess this will always be the case if you're trying to purely overwhelm your players. I haven't played MH, but I'd assume that the same concept applies to Souls games, where sooner or later they'll be beat by naked dudes running with sticks, which means that no matter how difficult the action-based encounter is - they'll beat it sooner or later in the most ridiculous way possible.

But I think at that point we're having a discussion of what's fun and engaging. Obviously there's people who're ready to bash their heads against bosses in both Souls games and in smth like wow mythic+++++ or ff14 ultimates. And in both of those cases the encounter will be beaten sooner or later. And both of those cases usually only appeal to the hardcorest parts of the gamer player base. So I think that as long as the base action game is fun for your rando casual - the top content can still provide difficulty through boss rng ability usage (within limits) or the same dancy mechanics that tab games use, but in context of an action game and its dodge/block mechanics.

But yes, at the end of the day, any action mmo might as well be tab. Except younger players come to dislike it more and more so I feel like the genre will shift towards it on its own sooner or later.