Action combat and PVE

I don't think this will work.

It's a problem because the style of combat required for multiplayer action combat beyond 6 people is a style most people dislike .

I don't think Intrepid would choose to make a game that has the types of PvE encounters we've already seen, and then reduce the appeal of the game by making Action Combat a reasonable way to take on those encounters. Not because this is not possible.

But because people would not like it and the game would die. If it would be any help to the community or Intrepid itself, I will argue that point for literally hours, at the micro-level if necessary. A competent designer can learn the entirety of how these things work and don't work, in about 3 years. Intrepid has had six. Even if we cut that down to 'no, really they've only had one', I doubt it would be a problem.

Also, Neverwinter 'raids' seem to 'work' because the mobility is normally equal to or less than most Tab Target games, which is 'Action Combat In Name Only' for some people, but 'perfect' for others. Those others are going to be quite happy, I'm sure.

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When an enemy is large (bosses or the enemy from the OP video), this is fine for the overall experience, but that means that if it is not swinging its attack in effectively a 180 degree cone (Elder Dragon of Frost) or raining basically random death around (Elder Dragon of the Wood), all you really need is to put a tank in front of it and everyone else to the sides, assuming its attacks don't constantly cause it to move. No one is likely to be out of range.

If it IS swinging in this 180 degree cone, you need either a bunch of classes that have perfect active block, or iframes, for most people to manage, assuming collision. But perfect Active Block is a sort of weird way to implement Action Combat because it's explicitly 'I stand here and hold a block button', with the 'stand here' part being the important aspect, and this usually applies even if your stamina depletes while blocking.

If it is attacking with the random death shower, the combat you'll experience isn't meaningfully different from a Tab Target game, and if the boss is large and has a large hurtbox, then even targeted abilities aren't hard to deal with. For that to be true, the boss itself must be mobile.

So once you are past 6 people, even with a 60 degree attack cone, you can fairly easily make sure that the boss only hits one person, who is mitigating and taunting, for example, and everyone else just has to CHASE it when it moves. Let's assume for the moment that a large boss does not move a LOT because not only do most not do this, it makes it harder for someone to establish who is actually being targeted.

If we go down to 'small enemy groups' then they too, must be very mobile, in order for the 'action' part to work, because otherwise a large enough group will just be able to cause them to stand in the damage zone. For an enemy to react to any attack and block or dodge, either they need perfect block that covers all directions, or they need iframes. I'm not sure if you'd agree that iframes on mobs suck, but it can certainly be unsatisfying. If there's collision, then you now must possibly 'decide who gets to stand close enough to it'.

When you can't tell who is going to be attacked, you can't 'read' the situation enough to make proper action decisions, and the more people there are involved in this process, the harder that is (unless the game is super simplistic, which is again, Action Combat In Name Only, but I expect people would be happy). When the boss doesn't move or react to attacks, then there's no decisions to be made.

Yet for some reason, many people claim that they hate BDO combat. Now, those people MIGHT mean that they hate 'the fact that BDO open world mobs are easy'. But if we look at the main methods of fighting the few interesting bosses and elites in that game, things which explicitly ARE group content, their Action Combat holds up quite well.

I'm not talking about the sort of people who think BDO combat is good, of course. If one does think that (especially if you've fought Katzvariak, Nouver, Red Nose sorta, doubly so if you've fought them with less than 30 people on them) then that's great. If we believe that there's a majority of people out there willing to accept that as a combat system, then I obviously have nothing to say here and will await the possibility of this glorious experience.

EDIT: For clarity, the above is all just 'verification that we have the same understandings of what it is', since the reason for its lack of appeal have to do with 'what the above things lead to in terms of reaction times and frame data, by necessity'.

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First question is: If the enemy does not move, does it count as 'aim'? If you don't have to move yourself, on top of that, I wouldn't call this 'aim'. I also wouldn't call it 'Action'. But if that's the definition of 'Action Combat' then sure, I have no valid point.

Second question is: If the enemy does move, and you aren't entirely clear on who they are attacking next, what do you aim at?



From 9:30 to 11:30 in this video, shows what I mean here. At about the 9:33 mark, Steven attacks the boss with a fireball. Now, we all complained about the long windup of that fireball, and it did get changed, but given even a reasonable projectile travel distance, and that boss' movespeed, even a 10 frame startup (which is unreactable to most if not all humans) would not have hit.

But that would mean that Steven would have had to be able to predict precisely where the boss was going to move to, to even have a chance of landing that fireball, and would have had to do that on reaction too. This is beyond the abilities of most people even in a game at Ashes' speed (note that I have no issues with the speed).

In fact, almost ANY ability that wasn't AoE with a cone hitbox 3x larger than a player's standard swing would have missed this, unless it reached that target in 8 frames.

But then the video goes into the 'less active' mode, where the boss is just kind of standing there and players are hitting it. It DOES do some cool looking attacks. Attacks that might even, in an Action style game, encourage the player to backstep or run out of the way of them (11:11) but there's no reason to 'bother' here, as it would just move the enemy and cause other people's attacks to whiff (due to the boss stepping away)

And this is with a 180 degree attack cone on hits. I don't expect a reduction in that, of course, but what 'skill' misses from that range? If this is also sufficient to be defined as 'Action', i.e. 'can stand still and just make sure the enemy is within my line of sight while holding down my Q', then again, I have no valid point.

For an enemy to have an attack cone large enough to hurt multiple players, or an AoE centered around themselves that the players are expected to avoid, those players must be able to react to this happening. But a large enough cone to actually hurt even half of a large group and be any threat to anyone except 'those with poor reactions' must be under 16 frames of startup, and that still means you have a large set of people who get hit either just by lag or by not having fast enough reactions.

If that person is an 'Evasion Tank' for example, the enemy now moves, because the enemy does not necessarily employ a predictive model state, that would be a high requirement for AI. So the Tank/Rogue 'backflips away', let's say, and as neither iframes nor super fast animations are preferable (if they are, BDO is great), this backflip has to take 20 frames to completely animate.

Boss move begins, human reacts 12f later, does evasion, succeeds because boss attack has 18f startup and hurtbox moves out of the way in the 6f required, player is now recovering/finishing that backflip for 14 more frames. Boss recovers after usually another 20f and approaches the player. As long as that player did not immediately mash an advancing ability (and even if they did, since that ability must again, in turn, have at least 10f of startup to not just look like teleporting sometimes) the boss now calculates the player's position 'incorrectly' and moves anyway, and everyone else must adjust.

These are remarkably low frame data numbers. Almost BDO tier frame data numbers, in terms of animation fluidity.

But if one is willing to double these or higher, and still generally call it 'Action Combat', then once again, no worries, I have no valid point.

The difference between Tab and Action is 10 frames, for most people. Tab, you target the enemy, hit the button. and no matter how long the animation takes, no matter how long the projectile takes, you are 10f faster than you are if you must aim it. At one point, that boss moves 2 character 'widths' in 10f.

If it's fine for a hitbox on an attack to be 2 character widths across in order to make the Action Combat work, then I'd say that's 'Action In Name Only' personally. Even BDO has to do at least 1 character width, which is why their attacks seem so big and flashy.

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Sounds like we agree. Thanks for giving me the chance to talk about it, though, for those who don't.

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I don't really mind if things like 'Homing', 'wide hitboxes', and 'auto-aim assist' exist in a Combat System.

I don't care if we call it Action or not either. It is what it is.

If somehow other people start to like the faster stuff, or designers start making the 'less ridiculous flash' BDO/Vindictus equivalent, that's fine for me. And, again, I don't think that it can't be done. I don't even think it prevents most of the things people want from a game. But some people have very strong preferences, and I respect those preferences, so I hope that two great MMORPGs are born within the next few years, one for each style of player.

The only point being made in previous threads was 'the more people you add, the less you get to play the 'Action' part. And similarly, the only point being made in this one is 'If you try to design Action Combat that actually tests skills it will be closer to BDO, which about 50% of people say or imply they don't like'.

I've got no reason to ask for an MMO that tests spacing skills other than a personal preference, and they usually manage to at least test timing skills and synergy, even if most of them don't manage to do that at the level I'd enjoy, I have other games for that.

So yeah, sure. More forgiving, easier, lower skill ceiling, I'm happy to support all that too if it's balanced. Even moreso if it's actually interesting, since I don't think that it has to be boring just because of those factors. Clearly Intrepid also believes that they can make Action Combat PvE, at least right now. My only hope is that once it is done, that if I look at it and think 'This is the greatest combat system EVER as the icing on the cake of the greatest MMO ever thank you Intrepid', that there won't be a mass exodus of people going "wtf is this twitchy spammy casual-unfriendly crap?"

Cause that'd be terrible, y'know?