Mob/Boss Combat Interaction (plus a compromise for hybrid combat)

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

True, (and please forgive me for 'scolding' you) but this isn't really the thread for it, unless we're letting this one derail too (I'm not saying it shouldn't).

Intrepid's 'hands are tied' and they give this impression precisely because of this situation. Someone (usually you), draws on the proverbial Whiteboard, someone else comes up and points to your stuff and says 'how about we erase this part, I don't much like it', and then there's a 2 page debate on whether or not the basic thing you assumed was obvious should be erased.

The bad news is, this doesn't get better in multimillion dollar companies either. It's worse because then you have internal politics. Point is, education is a better focus than convincing. And if you want, you can leave that entirely to me, today. Stock market trades less and closes early on Fridays.

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

What exactly makes you think this, though?

"Weapon Skill" means something entirely different in other games, and there have been hints of 'Weapon Perks' which provide stuff like procs to basic attacks instead of this.

Is this something you want to happen, something you expect because that's how you visualize it from other games, or something you concluded from data given? Knowing Jeff Bard's FFXI experience, and gleaning from what else has been said in various places relative to weapons, I expect exactly the opposite of what you do.

EDIT: To clarify why.

These procs may reduce or reset cooldowns on other skills on the player's hotbar.[7]
Using a skill/ability will in general reset the combo.

Interpretation - The melee attack IS the 'spammable', and therefore any discussion of Light and Heavy attacks or similar is valid.

Let's say a dagger has some slashing effects that bleed the target or that cripple the target... Every time you attack you have a chance to proc that effect. That effect then can synergize with what your active skills tree has available to it.

Interpretation - You spec for 'bleed chance on dagger slashes' in the Weapon Tree, and possibly no additional attacks/abilities for damage are even gained.

A revised weapon use combo system will be present in Alpha-1.

Do we assume they missed the mark? Or that the thing we have now is the thing they meant? The models don't line up. Therefore we assume that what we have now is 'the combos', that Weapon Tree offers 'if you reach the third hit of this, you get a chance for this thing to happen', and therefore the precise nature of the melee attack and combos is actually one of the most important things right now.

EDIT2:
I have just remembered (my bad yet again) that non Action game players mean 'synergistic effects that come in sequence' when they say 'Combos' whereas Action game players usually mean 'a melee attack sequence that I control the components of'.

@Dygz , whenever we talk about 'combos' we're talking about 'the mechanics of hitting things' and nothing to do with synergies.

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

Honestly, at this point, the thread is all the same to me, precisely because it's all one thing in my head. I build all my games like this, so no harm.

Valheim is also Root Motion combat. The tuning is wrong here too. Attacks are too slow. This isn't actually because the animations are janky (they sort of are) but because Neverwinter's are more correct. Serious combatant humans swing their weapons so fast that you literally cannot see them properly, so games that aim to make things visible often fail. either the 'camera blur' or 'movement you can't even see' is actually more correct. (EDIT: This is important because of the way recovery frames work. Optimally, a game allows you to attack very quickly, and cancel out of the recovery of the attack into movement or a skill, the aforementioned 'transition-to-move'. Slow attacks make the player feel less in control for many reasons)

Wildstar has Free Motion combat available because of the way they wanted people to aim their abilities required so much movement of particular types, but in general, it isn't used that much, and like Ashes, it shows Rooted animations whenever the player is not in motion. Which, even in their development videos, is fairly often, since you don't have a good reason to move a lot of the time.

That's the result of 'mobs not being quite as dynamic because the mobs aren't necessarily implemented the same way as the players' but I can't be sure without watching a lot more of their DevSpeak.



Here's the reference for what I did quickly watch to check and give data. I can't see from just that video which errors they have in their tuning. It looks good, but was probably either 'too hardcore' for certain people, or got boring in some way because the way the rotations are likely to work pulls it closer to BDO. In short, I can't tell exactly why the dials are wrong because you could 'turn one dial' and make it right one way, or 'turn another dial' and make it right the other way. Something small is off, but unless it's likely to help Ashes, I may not dive much into what.

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

My tests indicate that this might actually already have been done.

It could be that the reason the monster's basic attack seems like this, is actually because the attack cones for everything are too large for you to get out of range, right now.

As long as the mob can pivot its 190 degree attack cone faster than the player can circle the mob (almost always true), you won't be able to tell the difference between Tab and Action style hits from the mob other than the fact that they don't hit other people in a cone.

The underlying controllers for players vs NPCs are actually easier to handle once homogenized, and in a certain good model, they just would be.

Basically we can't say one way or the other whether or not Intrepid has already done the work for moving closer to the Action Side of Hybrid without a very complicated test, but I can check the footage we gathered for clues if anyone cares. I didn't figure anyone would because I didn't think of the fact that someone might not 'assume it was easy'.

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

Now those things are easier to test, using the Esoteric enemies in Elyon node in the Alpha. Those ones match the behaviour of players, but again, unless you find a way to glitch their movement so that they can't turn (basically impossible) or reach you (this one, I've done, for tests, so I know the ranges on most things) it can't be absolutely confirmed.

But for now, that's why I say that my tests indicate it's already been done. I'm not sure when it was done because I only bothered to test this specific thing back right after the patch that should have been 'giving us the build they had from the June Dev Stream'.

I can run the test again if it's particularly relevant, but I don't think it is because it's basic Blueprint within UE4, to just drag and drop a controller node into a mob. Making sure it worked on every mob? QA to the rescue, but it might take a while to get to us (and it did).

So it's possible that they don't all have it, but there's also almost no good reason why they wouldn't eventually.

This thread is therefore moreso 'hey which things should the basic combat action controller contain that generalizes across all mobs?' since any generalized controller would 'need' either 'an equivalent action for every single mob' or specialized blocks to make them act correctly when they don't have that action, e.g. if a Crab doesn't have Lunge, you have to do something to its AI and settings so that it doesn't get stuck trying to use Lunge in the same place other mobs would.

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

Actually, the sad part is, it's probably inconsequential to over 70% of players, but they don't all know that.

The thing that makes Neverwinter so nice is that the transition-to-move is so small. So you swing your weapon, once, it's fast, you hit, you see something you want to dodge, you move, you swing your weapon again. The 'actual weapon swing', the first one, is so fast that a lot of people don't care that they are animation locked.

What they care about is 'I pressed a button to swing a weapon and then started to look for an enemy attack'. What they want is 'if I see an attack after I have pressed my button, I have time to dodge that attack'. It's a frame data thing. Just numbers. What people like Cypher want is 'I have continued my combo into bigger damage, I know this puts me at risk and reduces my chance of dodging if the opponent tries to hit me, but I don't think that's going to happen so I'm going for damage!'

This allows the enemies to be better while being fairer, for another essayworth of reasons. The reason Ashes Root Motion is bad is because certain attacks take literally 34 frames. You pressed a button, and depending on your ping, you are unable to move at all for over half a second. If you hold the button too long, you start the animation for the next attack which is another 20-30 frames. All the while you're moving more than one body length forward. Neverwinter Root motions are half that most of the time and you don't go flying forward unless you want to.

They also have better combos (Target Combo type, where the recovery animation is canceled by the natural flow of the next attack's vector) to cut down on this even more.

Tested the Esoterics, the Legionnaires definitely have a standing attack and a lunge attack already that is not tied to an ability, they just use it when you get out of range. it's explicitly a lunging strike with their weapon.

I don't know if that counts as confirmed for you @JamesSunderland , but that's what I've got.

@Ugoogee - I just realized that I spend so much time trying not to mention fighting games that only older posters may know for sure, the level to which I specialize in them. Let's just say that my 'special skill' is 'instinctively seeing hitbox interactions. The only reason I'm not making Ashes content that a handful of people would watch is because I'm usually too busy making fighting game content that a handful of people watch.

@Merek - FFXIV's bosses seem boring, from the reports of people I know who play, they are boring, or easy, for the most part. Unfortunately I can't say much because though FFXI bosses are not 'massively different', they are different enough that I love one game and don't like the other. Again, there's a lot of nuance.

QTE aren't necessary, and the epic feeling people get from fighting big bosses has a specific formula that some MMOs know how to follow, and some don't. It's actually almost universal across the types of game, especially when defensive mechanics players use are there primarily to reduce damage and aren't based on either the Tab Target zergfest (the fight is almost always this, the question is whether or not the enemy has enough mechanics to 'disrupt the zerg') or the Action Combat iFrame dance (even if the game doesn't have these, if the defensive mechanics are meant to completely avoid damage, the experience is different).

Monster Hunter is the way it is for a reason, years of experience crafting that reason. FFXIV's crossover can be used to see a lot. They put the iconic 'Behemoth' into Monster Hunter, and the second stage of that fight feels cool the way Monster Hunter always feels. The first stage is less so, because it's meant to feel like an FFXIV fight (they were trying to get people from one game to enjoy the other or something, I can't imagine it was that easy, but it was a semi-stated goal, they probably meant 'enjoy watching it and get into it' that way). The counterpart was that they put Monster Hunter's iconic Rathalos into FFXIV.

It's only my opinion (well, me and everyone I know that I've talked to about it), but they managed to make Rathalos boring. The most important note, though, was looking at it and thinking 'huh, I expected this to be an FFXI style fight, but I guess I was expecting too much'.



Fight, for anyone curious. It's a little sad, and I don't say that because I'm comparing it to Monster Hunter. It's because this is a terribly poor translation of the experience into a Tab Target game. Mostly, it's terribly slowed and telegraphs literally everything at least 3x more than it needs to, and 5-10x more than in Monster Hunter.

I don't know if this is a framing for discussion that suits y'all, but I offer it because I think we really need to talk more about specifics than about abstractions.

"That fight is too slowed down, even for a Tab Target game, it's tuned to make the player feel like they can handle the monster, and drastically changes the skill gap, on top of making it as rotation-heavy as possible."

I would give a proper Rathalos fight for comparison, but this isn't about comparing to MHW, this is about 'what would make that fight not be boring in Ashes?', and also any short Rathalos videos are probably from overgeared speedrunners who just stun the monster repeatedly so that it never does anything. If you want comparison for some reason try looking for something 10-15m long I guess... 'Charge Blade' would be what compares the best.