Post by SpaceWolf on 2024-08-31 21:53:49
I have several criticisms.
PRESENTATION
- The first impression in the video isn't good. The angle of the sun shining over everything was so oppressive that I was literally physically squinting my eyes. I want to tell you whether or not I like or dislike the design of the fortress itself, but I can't because the sun was getting in the way for most of it.
- While I appreciate the lore explanations in the beginning, I feel you were meandering way too much before engaging with the actual content. I found myself getting impatient and skipped ahead a couple minutes in the video to find you were still just randomly talking. I'd prefer a more concise format for this type of stream, where you give some lore context to explain "why this is here" and such, but then go engage with the content immediately - the content itself is what I'm here to see, not a casually-paced conversation.
- I understand that this is WIP but I feel like if you have a big desolate field outside this fortress, the render distance for enemies and some smaller details should be scaled higher up. Otherwise, a wide open space like that works against you and it just feels empty.
- I did actually rather like the garden area inside the fortress WHEN I GOT TO SEE IT (the sun issue still applied in there), and I think a great solution here would be to make the sky around this area perpetually overcast. Not foggy, mind you, just 'spooky cloudy'. That could serve as an interesting aesthetic contrast with the walkway in the fortress and how nice the garden spot looked (when I got to see it). It would tell me, "this used to be a place of beauty but now things feel off", which seems to be what you were going for with the field outside.
- Pursuant to the sky being overcast, give the enemies some more prominent glow effects, possibly some bloom lighting, which would naturally be emphasized with a darker sky palette.
COMBAT
- I'm finding that perhaps the combat camera from FFXI has spoiled me a bit. In that game, targeting an enemy (or party member for that matter) and then 'locking on' (not just targeting itself) will cause the camera to focus on them. While this might sound like a small thing, it causes each individual enemy to have a distinct feeling of weight and presence in the world. Right now, the basic mobs in the path up to the altar feel disposable to me, like generic Dynasty Warriors enemies, and this was reinforced by the fact that I never felt you were in any danger.
- I WANT to feel like I'm in danger if I'm infiltrating a big hostile fortress. For argument's sake, let's say the front gate being opened from the start was fair (the enemies were explicitly invading to take over the place, so I'll give that a pass). The way this is set up, it feels like your party is a persistent force that the enemies can't really stop or even meaningfully threaten, and can only slow down.
- In a fortress raid like this, I want to feel like I'm in danger. I want to feel like I'm deep in enemy territory, that I and my group are doing a pinpoint infiltration of somewhere dangerous, and that we need to be very careful because if we draw too much attention to ourselves, we could easily bite off more than we can chew. I want there to be a sense of risk. I dislike the power fantasy of being able to just chew through hoards of weaker mobs. I want each enemy to have more presence and thought put into its design than that.
SUGGESTIONS FOR COURTYARD FIGHTS
- As it stands, it looks like your group didn't need to care about positioning much at all. The moment where Steve could just pull back and take a stroll around for a good minute or two before more enemies spawned was especially egregious. I think adding positioning and terrain considerations would help a lot. Suggestions follow:
- Make every enemy self-destruct a few seconds after they die, and MAKE THE DAMAGE HIGH ENOUGH THAT YOU NEED TO CARE. Make it so you need to be careful of when and where (and how!) you kill enemies, since a self-destructing corpse at a bad moment could cause your party's numbers to work against you and hurt everyone badly.
- Since the enemies are being empowered by a Dangerous Flame Relic, add some more torches throughout the area (the initial walkway before the garden seems fine) and then give them the ability to cause plumes of fire to erupt from the torches periodically. Again, make the damage matter. It's another positional concern - things like this can cause enemies to feel like more than the sum of their parts, since the angles you can safely fight at become limited and your options change accordingly.
- Having to get all the way to the center of the garden to summon the Lady of the Rose seems lame. In order to prevent players from being able to stroll around the arena like Steve did, perhaps trigger the event by summoning her at the BEGINNING of the fortress (perhaps just outside it - if you want, have the gate closed until you summon her, and then she magically opens it to begin the quest). She then advances - a bit slower than her speed here but not slow enough to be frustrating - and you need to protect her as she does so. I know that escort missions can be frustrating, but the combination of restricted terrain plus enemies being spawned at HER pace rather than your own would make things much more tense. In the interest of fairness, make her immune or highly resistant to AoE damage for the purposes of this.
- When she gets to the altar, have the ritual thing take less time, since you had to escort her up. I understand this part is WIP, but make the animation of her cancelling out the artifact's power more interesting. Perhaps a visual effect that gets stronger over time to dynamically show how close she is to completing it.
- The most egregious part of the whole stream to me was when Steve picked up the artifact, which turns out to be a DRAGON EGG, and then the dragon just shows up and perches outside and waits around placidly long enough that someone (I forget if it was Steve himself) jokingly called it an herbivore. THIS IS NOT HOW A DRAGON SHOULD REACT WHEN SOMEONE STEALS ITS EGG. That should provoke an immediate and merciless response. It should be the most potent way you could EVER provoke a dragon. Once you take a dragon's egg, either you or the dragon is GOING TO DIE. Pursuant to that...
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE DRAGON
- Instead of having the dragon just plop outside and wait there in what I consider a total loss of immersion, let's instead cause interacting with the dragon egg to trigger some sort of warning that you'll enter a boss fight once you grab it, and then give you the option to grab it right away or prep first. After you grab the egg, you get teleported to an instanced arena, where a scaled down version of that dragon appears and fights you immediately (perhaps after a brief intro cutscene) because you took its egg. You win, you get to keep the egg, and that item becomes a per-requisite for spawning the larger dragon outside the fortress.
- Assuming you scale down the current dragon a bit - reduce his HP, size, and damage output by, let's say, 50% (totally arbitrary guess-number), I'd consider that to be fine for a standard-party bossfight. Have the adds explode on death like in the courtyard, and make it so when the dragon uses his sweeping fire breath attack, plumes of fire erupt from the adds. I'd consider that mostly satisfactory as a basic boss design. As for the actual raid dragon shown in the video...
- I was very disappointed. The dragon's attacks lacked a sense of power and feedback. And I see no reason you couldn't just run away from it. So after the big dragon spawns, let's have him make a really big ring of flame around the field that serves as an arena. Maybe give a telegraphed warning (whether visual, dialogue popup, or both) that a Big Nasty Boss is about to spawn so players who don't want to engage with the content have time to flee.
- The dragon's attacks lacked a sense of power, and most importantly, FEEDBACK. A dragon of that size, I expect every big swipe of its claws to stagger people around it from the sheer force of the swing. I expect its tailspins to knock people off their feet. I expect its 'stomp down from the air' attacks to do the same. I want being hit by a giant dragon to FEEL like being hit by a giant dragon.
- Make player positioning matter more! It's one of the most interesting tools you have for a fight like this! When the dragon rises up and then uses its flames on the ground in a straight line, have that cause a lingering wall of fire that lasts (arbitrary number) 30 seconds or so, and divides up the arena. You can cross that wall of fire, but doing so will cause you to take a lot of damage and get debuffed (perhaps a defense drop). Since that move is very telegraphed, you have plenty of time to avoid the initial firebreath, but you need to quickly choose how to position yourself. From what I'm aware of, every class has some sort of ranged ability, so I wouldn't call this unfair on a design level.
- In FFXI, Wyrms (the Big Dragon equivalent) have an ability called Spike Flail. Basically, if you're attacking the dragon from the back and piss it off, it can do a VERY powerful tail attack that is gonna kill or nearly kill everyone near it. Basically, this means that in FFXI, you have to choose between staying in the range of a dragon's teeth, claws, and breath attacks, or risk a very nasty Spike Flail if you try to 'cheat' and avoid those by attacking from the back. On that note, I'd give the tail the ability to attack independently of the dragon's other moves, so as to facilitate this. If anybody the tail is engaging pulls hate, a very powerful tail slam can follow and seriously mess them up. Make this the dragon's strongest damage source by far.
- Have the raid-scale dragon start spawning adds much earlier; I'd go for about 80% health instead of 50%. Gives you enough time to get used to his basic attacks, and then he immediately ramps it up.
- Arrange the cooldown of the flying breath attack such that the dragon can form two walls of fire at the same time, but probably not more than that. Apply this effect to the smaller instanced boss-dragon I proposed, just again, on a smaller scale than the raid boss.
- Make it so the dragon can flap its wings very powerfully and cause various debuffs for anyone close enough to get hit by the shockwave - such as blinding, stun, paralysis, etc. Adds some more dynamicism to the fight.
FINAL NOTES
Maybe I'm being mean, maybe I'm being unfair, but I feel like... if you took the CURRENT raid dragon, scaled him down to, say, being a bit larger than a horse, and removed his ability to spawn adds, then you'd have what I would consider a perfectly acceptable standard enemy. Like, there's Griffon-type enemies in FFXI that I would love to see function this way, and an area full of these mini-dragon-things would be great! Perfectly good standard enemy for an upper-mid level area of your world.
Basically, I think that the current form of the raid dragon, scaled down in such a way, should represent the level of thought and care that goes into EVERY mob design, just as a bottom line. The lack of feedback on his claw swipes and stomps is fine this way - it's a much smaller enemy. The lack of a lingering firewall is fine - the smaller size means it can't do that move on anywhere near the same scale to begin with.
In FFXI, I feel like the designers put a lot of thought into individual enemy types/species, making them very detailed in a vacuum, and then they just put a variety of those enemy types into the same space, gave them aggression behaviors that made logical sense, and then from there things naturally became more than the sum of their parts. Fighting a tiger, an ent, and a goblin all at the same time is possible, and you need to pay attention to the unique behaviors of each enemy. That's what I'd expect as a bare minimum level of effort for good PVE content, or engaging fortress raids, or whathaveyou.
I want to like this content. I really do. I want you to do better than this.
I want to have to care.
PRESENTATION
- The first impression in the video isn't good. The angle of the sun shining over everything was so oppressive that I was literally physically squinting my eyes. I want to tell you whether or not I like or dislike the design of the fortress itself, but I can't because the sun was getting in the way for most of it.
- While I appreciate the lore explanations in the beginning, I feel you were meandering way too much before engaging with the actual content. I found myself getting impatient and skipped ahead a couple minutes in the video to find you were still just randomly talking. I'd prefer a more concise format for this type of stream, where you give some lore context to explain "why this is here" and such, but then go engage with the content immediately - the content itself is what I'm here to see, not a casually-paced conversation.
- I understand that this is WIP but I feel like if you have a big desolate field outside this fortress, the render distance for enemies and some smaller details should be scaled higher up. Otherwise, a wide open space like that works against you and it just feels empty.
- I did actually rather like the garden area inside the fortress WHEN I GOT TO SEE IT (the sun issue still applied in there), and I think a great solution here would be to make the sky around this area perpetually overcast. Not foggy, mind you, just 'spooky cloudy'. That could serve as an interesting aesthetic contrast with the walkway in the fortress and how nice the garden spot looked (when I got to see it). It would tell me, "this used to be a place of beauty but now things feel off", which seems to be what you were going for with the field outside.
- Pursuant to the sky being overcast, give the enemies some more prominent glow effects, possibly some bloom lighting, which would naturally be emphasized with a darker sky palette.
COMBAT
- I'm finding that perhaps the combat camera from FFXI has spoiled me a bit. In that game, targeting an enemy (or party member for that matter) and then 'locking on' (not just targeting itself) will cause the camera to focus on them. While this might sound like a small thing, it causes each individual enemy to have a distinct feeling of weight and presence in the world. Right now, the basic mobs in the path up to the altar feel disposable to me, like generic Dynasty Warriors enemies, and this was reinforced by the fact that I never felt you were in any danger.
- I WANT to feel like I'm in danger if I'm infiltrating a big hostile fortress. For argument's sake, let's say the front gate being opened from the start was fair (the enemies were explicitly invading to take over the place, so I'll give that a pass). The way this is set up, it feels like your party is a persistent force that the enemies can't really stop or even meaningfully threaten, and can only slow down.
- In a fortress raid like this, I want to feel like I'm in danger. I want to feel like I'm deep in enemy territory, that I and my group are doing a pinpoint infiltration of somewhere dangerous, and that we need to be very careful because if we draw too much attention to ourselves, we could easily bite off more than we can chew. I want there to be a sense of risk. I dislike the power fantasy of being able to just chew through hoards of weaker mobs. I want each enemy to have more presence and thought put into its design than that.
SUGGESTIONS FOR COURTYARD FIGHTS
- As it stands, it looks like your group didn't need to care about positioning much at all. The moment where Steve could just pull back and take a stroll around for a good minute or two before more enemies spawned was especially egregious. I think adding positioning and terrain considerations would help a lot. Suggestions follow:
- Make every enemy self-destruct a few seconds after they die, and MAKE THE DAMAGE HIGH ENOUGH THAT YOU NEED TO CARE. Make it so you need to be careful of when and where (and how!) you kill enemies, since a self-destructing corpse at a bad moment could cause your party's numbers to work against you and hurt everyone badly.
- Since the enemies are being empowered by a Dangerous Flame Relic, add some more torches throughout the area (the initial walkway before the garden seems fine) and then give them the ability to cause plumes of fire to erupt from the torches periodically. Again, make the damage matter. It's another positional concern - things like this can cause enemies to feel like more than the sum of their parts, since the angles you can safely fight at become limited and your options change accordingly.
- Having to get all the way to the center of the garden to summon the Lady of the Rose seems lame. In order to prevent players from being able to stroll around the arena like Steve did, perhaps trigger the event by summoning her at the BEGINNING of the fortress (perhaps just outside it - if you want, have the gate closed until you summon her, and then she magically opens it to begin the quest). She then advances - a bit slower than her speed here but not slow enough to be frustrating - and you need to protect her as she does so. I know that escort missions can be frustrating, but the combination of restricted terrain plus enemies being spawned at HER pace rather than your own would make things much more tense. In the interest of fairness, make her immune or highly resistant to AoE damage for the purposes of this.
- When she gets to the altar, have the ritual thing take less time, since you had to escort her up. I understand this part is WIP, but make the animation of her cancelling out the artifact's power more interesting. Perhaps a visual effect that gets stronger over time to dynamically show how close she is to completing it.
- The most egregious part of the whole stream to me was when Steve picked up the artifact, which turns out to be a DRAGON EGG, and then the dragon just shows up and perches outside and waits around placidly long enough that someone (I forget if it was Steve himself) jokingly called it an herbivore. THIS IS NOT HOW A DRAGON SHOULD REACT WHEN SOMEONE STEALS ITS EGG. That should provoke an immediate and merciless response. It should be the most potent way you could EVER provoke a dragon. Once you take a dragon's egg, either you or the dragon is GOING TO DIE. Pursuant to that...
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE DRAGON
- Instead of having the dragon just plop outside and wait there in what I consider a total loss of immersion, let's instead cause interacting with the dragon egg to trigger some sort of warning that you'll enter a boss fight once you grab it, and then give you the option to grab it right away or prep first. After you grab the egg, you get teleported to an instanced arena, where a scaled down version of that dragon appears and fights you immediately (perhaps after a brief intro cutscene) because you took its egg. You win, you get to keep the egg, and that item becomes a per-requisite for spawning the larger dragon outside the fortress.
- Assuming you scale down the current dragon a bit - reduce his HP, size, and damage output by, let's say, 50% (totally arbitrary guess-number), I'd consider that to be fine for a standard-party bossfight. Have the adds explode on death like in the courtyard, and make it so when the dragon uses his sweeping fire breath attack, plumes of fire erupt from the adds. I'd consider that mostly satisfactory as a basic boss design. As for the actual raid dragon shown in the video...
- I was very disappointed. The dragon's attacks lacked a sense of power and feedback. And I see no reason you couldn't just run away from it. So after the big dragon spawns, let's have him make a really big ring of flame around the field that serves as an arena. Maybe give a telegraphed warning (whether visual, dialogue popup, or both) that a Big Nasty Boss is about to spawn so players who don't want to engage with the content have time to flee.
- The dragon's attacks lacked a sense of power, and most importantly, FEEDBACK. A dragon of that size, I expect every big swipe of its claws to stagger people around it from the sheer force of the swing. I expect its tailspins to knock people off their feet. I expect its 'stomp down from the air' attacks to do the same. I want being hit by a giant dragon to FEEL like being hit by a giant dragon.
- Make player positioning matter more! It's one of the most interesting tools you have for a fight like this! When the dragon rises up and then uses its flames on the ground in a straight line, have that cause a lingering wall of fire that lasts (arbitrary number) 30 seconds or so, and divides up the arena. You can cross that wall of fire, but doing so will cause you to take a lot of damage and get debuffed (perhaps a defense drop). Since that move is very telegraphed, you have plenty of time to avoid the initial firebreath, but you need to quickly choose how to position yourself. From what I'm aware of, every class has some sort of ranged ability, so I wouldn't call this unfair on a design level.
- In FFXI, Wyrms (the Big Dragon equivalent) have an ability called Spike Flail. Basically, if you're attacking the dragon from the back and piss it off, it can do a VERY powerful tail attack that is gonna kill or nearly kill everyone near it. Basically, this means that in FFXI, you have to choose between staying in the range of a dragon's teeth, claws, and breath attacks, or risk a very nasty Spike Flail if you try to 'cheat' and avoid those by attacking from the back. On that note, I'd give the tail the ability to attack independently of the dragon's other moves, so as to facilitate this. If anybody the tail is engaging pulls hate, a very powerful tail slam can follow and seriously mess them up. Make this the dragon's strongest damage source by far.
- Have the raid-scale dragon start spawning adds much earlier; I'd go for about 80% health instead of 50%. Gives you enough time to get used to his basic attacks, and then he immediately ramps it up.
- Arrange the cooldown of the flying breath attack such that the dragon can form two walls of fire at the same time, but probably not more than that. Apply this effect to the smaller instanced boss-dragon I proposed, just again, on a smaller scale than the raid boss.
- Make it so the dragon can flap its wings very powerfully and cause various debuffs for anyone close enough to get hit by the shockwave - such as blinding, stun, paralysis, etc. Adds some more dynamicism to the fight.
FINAL NOTES
Maybe I'm being mean, maybe I'm being unfair, but I feel like... if you took the CURRENT raid dragon, scaled him down to, say, being a bit larger than a horse, and removed his ability to spawn adds, then you'd have what I would consider a perfectly acceptable standard enemy. Like, there's Griffon-type enemies in FFXI that I would love to see function this way, and an area full of these mini-dragon-things would be great! Perfectly good standard enemy for an upper-mid level area of your world.
Basically, I think that the current form of the raid dragon, scaled down in such a way, should represent the level of thought and care that goes into EVERY mob design, just as a bottom line. The lack of feedback on his claw swipes and stomps is fine this way - it's a much smaller enemy. The lack of a lingering firewall is fine - the smaller size means it can't do that move on anywhere near the same scale to begin with.
In FFXI, I feel like the designers put a lot of thought into individual enemy types/species, making them very detailed in a vacuum, and then they just put a variety of those enemy types into the same space, gave them aggression behaviors that made logical sense, and then from there things naturally became more than the sum of their parts. Fighting a tiger, an ent, and a goblin all at the same time is possible, and you need to pay attention to the unique behaviors of each enemy. That's what I'd expect as a bare minimum level of effort for good PVE content, or engaging fortress raids, or whathaveyou.
I want to like this content. I really do. I want you to do better than this.
I want to have to care.