I don't like action combat, and it could very potentially stop me from playing

I'm saying that you don't understand BDO combat.

I'm saying that the reason you don't understand BDO combat is that the game disincentivizes you from actually moving to a greater understanding of its combat through its itemization. The itemization makes it unnecessary to learn to understand the combat or to experience it 'properly', but there is nothing about the underlying core of the combat engine or even the generality of its construction that leads to the thing you have so far indicated that you don't like about it.

Those things are part of the itemization. The combat is perfectly fine for an RPG, it is just not currently attached to an RPG .

EDIT: This leads to anyone who understands this, being completely happy at the idea of "Ashes Combat being like BDO combat" because they are thinking 'Oh I can get this great Combat but actually attached to an RPG backend? That sounds great sign me up'. Whereas you have concluded 'This combat is poor and should not be attached to an RPG because it will be bad'.

Whew... yeah ok that's enough for today. I thank(?) you for allowing me to probe at your mind yet again.

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Angle-based vertical combat system. All abilities have 3 forms "low, mid, high" and your camera angle determines which form of the ability will be used when you press the button. Mobs/bosses can be designed with this in mind, being weak to whichever forms and your positioning relative to said mob/boss will be very important. And your camera control skills, while doing dodges and being aware of shit, would be paramount.

If you try having this kind of mechanic in a tab system, you're either sacrificing your ability pool by 2/3 or you bloat it to 3 times its size and overwhelm the players with form shifting mechanics.

If you have a way to utilize this feature in a tab system w/o those drawbacks, I'd have to think a bit more about other possible specialties of action combat. Though the main one I could come up with so far is verticality gameplay. There's a limit to how high you can comfortably look up with a tab camera, while action camera (the almost 2nd person one) gives you pretty much 180 degree (even a bit more considering the character height) dome of potential targets.

There is no Kunoichi. There is only Frog.

Azherae wrote: »

Misattribution!

Lies and slander!

Yeah, I probably missed an inside quote from somewhere, or it might've been an undeleted draft from before. Sometime this forum's quoting system frustrates me. Or maybe I just dunno how to properly use it.

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Yeah, those would be the variables on skills with some basic function. And the form of the skill would be based on your crosshair's position in relation to your character's head, which is why I said that it'd be somewhere around the 2nd person camera position.

If you're looking down, the abilities would be red colored (for example), if you're in the mid range of the camera - yellow, aiming up top would be green. This would allow you to just perceive your attack form with peripheral vision instead of glancing at the bar. Obviously with time and practice you'd just know the separation borders by feel.

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Yeah, but I think you could agree that an action combat game could have those 30+ abilities (say, 10 active ones) w/o it feeling clunky or too much, because your camera control would be at top lvl already (in the context of top end content and all).

And you could then add synergy mechanics, not only through classes, but through directional well-timed attacks. Smth like "the tank makes a low shield bash from the front of the mob, while a warrior does a 2h sword high slash from the back. This makes the mob fall, which increases damage of low attacks and serves as a soft CC". The same could be applied to pvp, though obviously it'd be quite a pain in the ass to design properly.

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Yeah, that will always be the advantage tab games have. Both in gameplay and design of said gameplay. But this is probably the most subjective part of the whole discussion and somewhat relates to my joke of "god complexes". Some people prefer to be completely aware of their surroundings at all times and then require for there to be something to be aware of. While other people prefer to "be in the thick of it" and have a much closer feel to their combat. Both are viable gameplay styles and both have their own design difficulty limits. It's just that I'm not sure if the action side has been pushed to its limits, or at least pushed as much as the tab side has been.

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I'm just really used to reddit's quoting where you can just highlight a part of the comment, press "quote" and you'll just quote the highlighted part. That's veeery convenient.

And I see it as quite a hassle to delete autodrafts from the comment window. Sometimes I might type smth up but then decide not to send it, but at that point it would have already got saved as a draft. And even if I delete the text and leave the thread's page open - it still doesn't remove the draft. And if I then refresh the page and want to comment smth new, I have to delete all the old text and write new one. I know this is not that big of a problem, but just a bit of a nuisance for me.

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I was thinking about having abilities that you can use while jumping and/or synergistic abilities where you might be able to get onto a tank holding his shield and you'd have a higher vantage point. Say, tank could do a low shield defensive skill and you'd do a jump/dash towards that tank and the game would recognize that as a synergistic ability which would trigger an animation of the tank lifting the shield with you on it and holding it for 2-3 secs, where you can use any skill in any form. Of course I dunno whether this kinds of skills are even possible, but we are talking about the best possible representations of system so I think some engine should be able to allow this.

Alternatively you could just design the mobs and the combat around each other. Maybe birds do a swooping attack at which point you gotta time your mid/low form skills to catch them properly (would also be a good skill-tester) or you just add enough high attacks to properly deal with anything that's above your head. Or you be a gigachad dev and just say "get a ranged class into your raid and deal with them".

As for mob over another mob interaction, I'd chuck it under the "design around it or allow jumping attacks". As I imagined this in my head, the abilities were purely character based and not mob-reactive. The alternative approach of "each skill reacts to the part of the mob you're aiming at" could maybe work, but then you'd have problems with hitboxes on smaller creatures and I feel like that's a bit too limiting.

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I think Genshin dealt well with this issue (I'm sure there's other examples too). It has an 8-directional action combat with a free camera. Steven only showed the action part of basic attacks, but they did mention that the game accounts for your direction. I hope next stream we'll see some basic attacks while in tab mode.

And I think the limit to what Intrepid can ask of players in the hybrid system will be set by the speed of combat they go with and the possible upper limit of aimed action abilities. If there's, say, 15 abilities that I can make "action aimed" and they all cd within one rotation and they are all useful in most encounters - Intrepid can definitely not ask too much in terms of overall awareness. But if there's only 5 of those and they're on some sizable cds and maybe 2 of them are semi-situational - I think player skill can push past that and manage to "aim an ability, switch to tab camera, look around, switch back, aim another ability, rinse repeat... profit".

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Did you get that guild together before the release or after? Was it comprised purely of random people that you invited in-game or was some part of the guild your previous acquaintances?