I would like to see physics like Exanima!

While that kind of thing is fun and all, I don't really think that it would work nicely in an mmo setting, let alone a high fantasy one. Do you expect a magic explosion to throw hundreds of people in all directions? How would blocking influence that if at all? What about that fighter whirlwind attack? What if the fighter used a hook-shaped polearm. Would the ability hook in several people and twirl them around?

NiKr wrote: »

While that kind of thing is fun and all, I don't really think that it would work nicely in an mmo setting, let alone a high fantasy one. Do you expect a magic explosion to throw hundreds of people in all directions? How would blocking influence that if at all? What about that fighter whirlwind attack? What if the fighter used a hook-shaped polearm. Would the ability hook in several people and twirl them around?

It's fine, it works decently in Absolver.

Comboing a frame perfect air roundhouse with your friend's Shockwave against five enemies at a time is the best feeling.

Would it work with hundreds of people? It might look a little weird but for most things it'd probably be fine.

Imagine it for BOSSES. It'd be great.

Azherae wrote: »

It's fine, it works decently in Absolver.

Comboing a frame perfect air roundhouse with your friend's Shockwave against five enemies at a time is the best feeling.

Would it work with hundreds of people? It might look a little weird but for most things it'd probably be fine.

Imagine it for BOSSES. It'd be great.

But Absolver seems to be a hand-to-hand combat fighting game. Some ragdoll physics are fine for that and their combat seems to account for some minimal loss of control over your character if you got badly hit.

I'd personally dislike if my character loss control in a ragdolly way during a fight in a non-fighting mmo. Especially when there's a ton of magic that "supposed to" throw me around like there's no tomorrow. The boss slamming the ground and throwing people around might look cool, but I'm not sure if it'd fly with most players.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

It's fine, it works decently in Absolver.

Comboing a frame perfect air roundhouse with your friend's Shockwave against five enemies at a time is the best feeling.

Would it work with hundreds of people? It might look a little weird but for most things it'd probably be fine.

Imagine it for BOSSES. It'd be great.

But Absolver seems to be a hand-to-hand combat fighting game. Some ragdoll physics are fine for that and their combat seems to account for some minimal loss of control over your character if you got badly hit.

I'd personally dislike if my character loss control in a ragdolly way during a fight in a non-fighting mmo. Especially when there's a ton of magic that "supposed to" throw me around like there's no tomorrow. The boss slamming the ground and throwing people around might look cool, but I'm not sure if it'd fly with most players.

The concept here would be that 'losing control' of your character is not actually a thing that is required in these situations, it's what people who are used to 'always being able to do EXACTLY whatever they want' expect from games, but those people seldom enjoy these games anyway, because to introduce 'skill' you must introduce 'limitation', whether that be 'because you can't hit your opponent due to their movement', 'you can't act because of CC', or 'you are in hitstun/blockstun', seldom matters.

But I suppose that is actually your point maybe?

I find that MMO players have a much lower tolerance for ANY loss of control over their character regardless of the reason. I thought this was because of CC-lock but I've definitely learned from these forums in the last few years that it isn't really about that.

I just don't like the result (games are usually either shallow or entirely build based) of 'making sure players don't have any control loss'. And Ashes is just going to represent this differently anyway, as we learned in the last LiveStream.

Fighter does 'Spin-To-Win' and if you get hit, you can't use abilities. This seems to be possible now. I'm sure there's a difference, but I'd rather 'I got knocked over and rolled backward' as a more visceral visual indicator of the Fighter's ability working, than 'Ok the word stagger came up over my head and my hotbars turned red/black for 1.2s'.

Azherae wrote: »

Fighter does 'Spin-To-Win' and if you get hit, you can't use abilities. This seems to be possible now. I'm sure there's a difference, but I'd rather 'I got knocked over and rolled backward' as a more visceral visual indicator of the Fighter's ability working, than 'Ok the word stagger came up over my head and my hotbars turned red/black for 1.2s'.

Guess this is the main source of difference in our opinions then. I'd rather stay 3s in a stun than be thrown around as a ragdoll. That's most likely just my L2 bias showing again, but it somehow feels better to me.

It might also come from the nature of the ragdoll physics. Usually ragdoll means a pretty long animation, and if it's somehow animated super quickly it just looks like shit. And while I'm completely fine with super long stuns, I'm sure others aren't (as pointed out by your "1.2s" comment). And I just don't see how a properly ragdoll physics could be faster than 1.2s and not look like shit.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Fighter does 'Spin-To-Win' and if you get hit, you can't use abilities. This seems to be possible now. I'm sure there's a difference, but I'd rather 'I got knocked over and rolled backward' as a more visceral visual indicator of the Fighter's ability working, than 'Ok the word stagger came up over my head and my hotbars turned red/black for 1.2s'.

Guess this is the main source of difference in our opinions then. I'd rather stay 3s in a stun than be thrown around as a ragdoll. That's most likely just my L2 bias showing again, but it somehow feels better to me.

It might also come from the nature of the ragdoll physics. Usually ragdoll means a pretty long animation, and if it's somehow animated super quickly it just looks like shit. And while I'm completely fine with super long stuns, I'm sure others aren't (as pointed out by your "1.2s" comment). And I just don't see how a properly ragdoll physics could be faster than 1.2s and not look like shit.

I don't know what to say to that really, other than to bring in my experience from my other genre once again...

A second is a LONG TIME to me. Sixty LONG frames.

My character can dash FOUR TIMES in one second.

My opponent's 'fall and wobble' animations generally don't get UP to 1 second. I guess if you include 'everything from the moment the strike connects', it can get there.

BDO actually drives me crazy sometimes for this reason. They enforce the 'knockdown' being at the 'MMO' tier of time frames and it just feels like my character is taking FOREVER to react or get up, because an 82 frame knockdown is an ETERNITY to me.

But more important to the point of this thread... it also seems unrealistic.

Azherae wrote: »

BDO actually drives me crazy sometimes for this reason. They enforce the 'knockdown' being at the 'MMO' tier of time frames and it just feels like my character is taking FOREVER to react or get up, because an 82 frame knockdown is an ETERNITY to me.

And this is exactly why I say that ragdoll just doesn't work for mmos. Ragdoll is supposed to be slow and random and fun. That video shows it perfectly. They stumble, fall, wobble, shake - all of that good stuff and it all takes forever. Even the stuff I saw in Absolver videos doesn't come close to "proper" ragdoll.

Well I was mostly talking about just the frame data. And since I forgot to do my usual 'embed if the other person didn't', here we go.



I guess the question would be to @akabear actually. Exactly how specifically realistic would it need to be to result in a good feeling?

Because there's 'full ragdoll' and then there's 'just a bit past this'.



Considering ONLY the 'fall and hit' animations here, please ignore the fighting game happening all around that.

Azherae wrote: »

Considering ONLY the 'fall and hit' animations here, please ignore the fighting game happening all around that.

Yeah, to me that's not a ragdoll at all. That's just a falling animation in a fighting game. It's tight, quick and looks just fine. When I hear "ragdoll" I'm thinking of that exanima video and even more so the GTA4 physics. I spent days shooting at people and watching them stumble, fumble, crumble and fall.

We have not received permission from akabear to share the quoted post.

We'll be able to push people cause body collision and the fighter showcase showed that mobs can push us with their attacks. So I'd assume we're quite close to what you want already. Maybe not quite as close to ragdoll stuff, but the physics already look better than most games I've seen.