This seemed like the best place for this post, apologies if not.
I wanted to start a dialogue about the nature of combat in general terms. I am new to the community, so if this has been previously discussed, kindly point me in the right direction, if you would.
One of the things I absolutely adored about CoH was the "many versus few" nature of combat, by which I mean you were frequently fighting hordes of bad guys with a small number of PCs. When if our regular groups favorite things to do was run villain-side into a heist, set off all the alarms at once, and cackle maniacally as we unleashed chaos on the poor, unsuspecting do-goodness that came to stop us.
The one place that really broke down is (in many cases) with the hero/arch characters, which is really a topic for a different thread.
The tl;dr here is I'm anxious to know whether it is anticipated that combat in City of Titans will share that quality or whether the Dev team has something a bit different in mind. I'm not looking for specifics, just hoping to get a sense of the design philosophy.
Did others enjoy that aspect of the combat, or are you hoping for something a bit different?
I liked that aspect of the combat system.
Didn't care too much for the whiffing, and the hit rolls and the small crit chance that was supposedly scrapper's bread and butter, huffing and puffing after a couple of swings in the early levels, and waiting for recharge of powers especially when going against cold mobs. So at least, hope that the combat system in the new game is less miss miss miss miss miss again, miss, miss. Or as they later changed it miss streak breaker miss streak breaker miss streak breaker while not missing some attacks, especially those that took a while to recharge and lot of end, back to back because the aura also is included in the hit rolls and that 3 point damage counted.
in the later levels I didn't mind it, but I personally am hoping for some sort of mix between how it was and the newer action based combat system that you see in games like Tera, or even the new WildStar.
Jag, I agree that whiff, whiff, whiff wasn't very heroic.
Haven't played Wildstar, but would definitely be interested in implementing some concepts from Tera. Having to aim, rather than tab target, would work very well with a supers game (I thought the same thing when I was playing it.)
I'd rather steer clear of the 'if the player doesn't have good twitch reflexes and high hand-eye coordination, then the character can't hit' play styles. That's one reason I avoid FPS games as a rule.
^This entirely.
The fastest I like my combat is CO's.. and even that is stretching it a bit (Mainly the absurdity of PvP fights and how quickly they can end because of tap spamming),
I know that heroes have to be quick on their feet, but the players can't always work like that. Plus my hands tend to shake a lot at random times thanks to damage years ago, so mouse-aiming is out for me when that happens.
CoH had a good combat speed. Fast enough that you weren't bored waiting for abilities, but slow enough you could think tactically and monitor your health and energy.
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that's why I said a mix, i too get frustrated with tera's combat, and don't really play because of it(plus my computer has a hard time running it). But it does add some flavor to the usual clickclickclickclickclick of how CoX was.
Say it loud and say it proud, brother.
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Well most pvp fights in COX didn't last long either. Usually about a few hits ss/sj jump around like a rabbit o ncrack and if you cant kill them in two hits flee for the hills. -COX PVP
Most PvP fights I seen in CO lasted at least twice as long as fights in COX.
Agreed. But there might be room for a happy medium. For instance, I liked how cone attacks worked in CoH. Positioning was important if you wanted to hit multiple foes. It gave you a reason to move around a bit, and it felt great when you nailed three guys with one attack.
Yeah, that was fun. Gross positioning versus fine control, I suppose.
Have there been any statements of design philosophy/priorities?
Devs have stated that they are not going to be shooting for any kind of "twich" combat. I imagine they are not going to stray too far from CoH's pacing (medium speed - positioning important on some powers like cones, occasionally have to avoid AoE attacks), which Is fine by me.
Oh Lord, yes, this. It's one of the reasons why I don't like DCUO (well, that and other things, which breaks my heart b/c I'm a DC fanboy).
+1, Thumbs Up, Like, etc. I'll even add a "Me too!" for you old AOL'ers.
The wiffing wasn't really any issue after newbie luck was instituted, and the crit chance scrappers got was quite generous. The "huffing and puffing" also went away with inherent fitness.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
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Wasn't talking about low levels. Talking about having supposedly high chance to hit but maybe hit maybe half that if even that. at 90-95% acc chance to hit, I didn't expect to see "streak breaker" when it was implemented much. But alas, I seen it very often. Many times more often than not my acc logged looked like this miss streak breaker miss streak breaker miss streak breaker miss streak breaker.
Not sure what it looked like too much as low levels, probably even lower hits but I didn't data farm low levels much. Only 50s, to eliminate variables that could be eliminated.
Scrapper had 5%-10% chance to crit depending on power. From a bunch of records I did with a few others, I critted only about 1.5% of the time out of 5% powers and about 3% for the ten percent chance. Out of our group of three, I crit the most. The other two less, And only one even said something and posted their findings on the forum, to no prevail.
So, the RNG really hated you then. I did not data mine, but I was seeing "crit" quite often on any of the scrappers I played. Never noticed any real issue landing blows, even when attacking higher conning enemies.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Yeah, tell me about it.
As I've posted elsewhere in these forums, I'm thinking that a good example of a "hybrid" between Active Combat and Tab Locked Combat was exemplified in the Tabula Rasa game system design. You had a targeting reticle in the center of your screen, and wherever that reticle pointed based on your camera control, that's where your shots went (or your Blade did its Snicker-Snack if you were a Spy like I was). So it was a Third Person Shooter in terms of target acquisition. However, once your target reticle in the center of your screen was placed on top of a Foe NPC, you could Tab Lock onto that Foe and the UI would put a target box on them, and then wherever they were on your screen your shots fired would go out and hit them (so long as they were somewhere ON screen instead of flanking or behind you). So once you had your Target in Tab Lock, all you needed to do was keep your camera angle pointed in their general direction and you could just mouse click to shoot at them without needing to keep them inside the target reticle in the center of your screen.
This gave you a hybrid of an Active Combat System, where the player actually needed to AIM first, THEN Tab, rather than just using Tab in the first place and opening fire with caring too much which way they were looking with the camera at the time. It was a little less rigorous than the Active Combat System you can find in TERA in that there was a Tab Lock capability built in, but you had to (as a player) "do the work" first in order to aim at your target downrange. One side effect of doing this, and it's something that TERA has to deal with also in its combat system, is that while the mouse is being used to control the camera like this, you don't get a mouse cursor visible on your screen ... which means any kind of powers usage would have to be controlled by keyboard inputs or mouse buttons, rather than sliding a cursor over to the powers tray and clicking on powers to activate and toggle them. When the cursor is visible and active on screen, the mouse camera look function gets toggled off in response. It takes a little getting used to in TERA, but once you "learn" the skill and master the interactions involved, it's really not that complex and difficult, just a little different than the classic CoX setup.
Now if something like this were done for City of Titans, you could make a Aim Camera To Tab Lock Target system like this function for MOST of the nominal single target, cone and AoE powers in the game ... but then set up powers like Snipe and Assassin Strike "ignore" the Tab Lock so as to "require" that the player aim the attack [i]carefully[/i] (enough) to hit the desired target without the "power steering" assist from use of the Tab Lock to (auto)hit your target for you. Another way to handle this would be to make the Snipe and Assassin Strike powers [i]not be attacks in their own right[/i] but rather Self Buffs that [b]modify[/b] the behavior and performance of your NEXT single target attack that you make within a certain time span window. This Self Buff would then apply a short duration Interrupt Time duration onto a single target attack skill (thereby modifying it into being a "Snipe" or an Assassin Strike [i]functional[/i] power) representing the extra aim time that is needed, and for that ONE attack, the game reverts to being a "twitch game" where you actively need to aim (correctly!) at your target using the reticle on your screen. This kind of Self Buff plus Interrupt Time effect could then be increased even further if you are in Active Stealth prior to shooting (ala Assassin Strike from Hide) ... and this could potentially apply to both Melee and Ranged damage.
This would be just one example of how you could potentially blend an Active Combat System like TERA uses under the Unreal Engine with a more traditional Tab Lock target system that CoH was known for. That way you can Tab Lock to continue an attack chain on a target with little difficulty and not really be all that susceptible to lag, but for target acquisition it wouldn't be "free" and would require the player to be actively playing and controlling their character (and camera angles). It would also mean that the traditional "Jackie Chan" Scrapper bind of "targetenemynear$$follow" would become a thing of the past, because you'd be needing to use camera control in order to select your targets (in effect). You could however potentially adapt that particular bind into being something akin to "targetlock$$follow" instead, which would functionally be broadly similar in intent for Melee characters in the slightly different combat system.
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If i could Queue up the next 3 powers in the order than i clicked them, i'd be content. But it might seem like your really Queueing up just 2. ;D
Can't speak in depth to the overall question (mostly because there are others who should be doing so more than I), but one of the things that I really want to have a better handle on, personally, is the ability to do data grinding and really *know* how often various things are coming up in practice. Because there were reports of a couple of incredibly subtle bugs in CoX that depended on weird and utterly non-obvious stuff like "if your internal ID number happened to end in 456" (or at least a moral equivalent of that) it triggered weird corner cases that interacted with the RNG or with other stuff. The sort of thing that really *can* cause problems like the ones described. Or, heck, even just "okay, we're seeing a whole lot of people with really poor hit rates, but in line with what we'd expect their stats to result in... so why aren't they setting up their stats for the expected hit rate?" (badly documented, buggy display information, misleading information elsewhere, random insanity...)
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one thing I have always felt was lacking from superhero MMO's has been this weird dynamic between heroes and the caste of baddy.
Actually, if anyone's played 4th ed DnD, I think they saw the same thing I've seen... Namely....
Superhero vs. Minion/Lieutenant = Dynasty Warriors
Superhero vs. minions/Boss = Dynasty Warriors (on hard)
Superhero vs. Boss = Lu Bu on Chaos
for those who don't get the reference.... Dynasty Warriors is a high-style hack and slash game set in three kingdom's china who's whole gameplay aesthetic is the one man vs. an army. Depending on the version of the game, you can rack up thousands of "KOs" per fight. for a good 70% of the game, it's you, alone, being a god of death on the battlefield, occasionally being slowed down by having some obnoxious "worthy opponent" trying to mess with you... for the other 29% ("hard" mode, and "chaos" mode), you are still a god of death, but if you aren't careful, you're gonna have to slow down and actually play "smart", or end up counting ants.
....and then there's Lu Bu.
The game flat out tells you to just avoid him, whenever he shows up. In Easy, the fight is hard, but you'll probably win, if you're willing to gut it out and play defensively...
in hard, with a max level character, eh, it's doable. In chaos.... you have to be on one of your luckier days, and he'll still probably kick your ass.
....Sorry for the tangent, but it's sort of important.
In the world of superheroes, it seems like, when there are gobs of minions, the hero can just mow them down.... when "the bad guy" is in the mix as well, it's a little harder, but it's more about how brash/careless the hero is, that determines his success in the fight...
It isn't until it's just mano a mano, that all of a sudden the hero has to WORK to win (and, in the comics, he often will lose or "fail to stop" the villain)
Oddly, team fights in comics don't quite fit the model. if you have a team, it's a bit of a slog through minions, minions+lieutenants, and generally the boss can either completely neutralize the team, or lasts for a page or two tops, before getting taken down.
Where am I going with this?
there's something.... I don't know, something disturbingly satisfying about that "army of one" experience. more over, it really is an authentic superhero experience... it's very similar to the OP's story of triggering the alarms in a heist...
but it's not just about bodies..... its about mass.
like traditional army strategy, it's not how tough the individual mob is (i'm envisioning enemies that two brawl strikes could take out)... it's just the overwhelming size of the onslaught. Yes, technically, it wouldn't be "hard" to mow through them.... but it would still feel like an acomplishment, and give you a greater feeling of "power" (be it bare knuckle boxing or the power cosmic) than any fight where you're guy (or gal) fifteen, plinking away at Mystere, madame of illusions and her 2 billion hit points......
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[i]....Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars...[/i]
Love Dynasty warriors. 4 and 5 are my favorites, 2 and 3 are good, 6 is ok. Havent tried 7 or looked into 8. Lu BU can be a pain in the butt and yeah when he appears the first thing they say is to avoid him. In some parts of the series that joker is hopped up on stats especially in 4, in 5 he wasn't too bad if ya careful, Don't remember much of 6. 3, he killed me a few times before I got wiser. But yeah dynasty warriors gives a feeling of the good old classic super hero. Murking minions left and right, getting rid of genric bosses with a tad bit of a fight and then epic battles with the big dogs, no team required with the fate of the land in your hands. Well maybe the allies that are over the place but usually they are busy getting murked especially on the hard modes. They never are able to stay alive in hard mode. And this is in an ancient war game loosely based on history. And whether playing solo or with team mate it was awesome. Even with team mate, ya know you can stand on your own and it's more than I need 7 of friends with me to take out any character that is more than a C-list bit player and advance the story and more so of "lets do this!" or in some cases seeing who can murk the most minions by the end of the mission. One day maybe we'll get that epic feel in a super hero game one day.
Agreed, Jag....
I definitely wouldn't qualify it as a "every fight needs to be like this!"
but honestly, it's the closest to feeling like a superhero, i've ever had in a game... at least in terms of the whole "villain and his minions" type superhero storyline.
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[i]....Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars...[/i]
Indeed.
There is another thread on combat here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/what-has-been-decided-about-combat in which I just posted a quote from a recent interview that states some of the official position on combat.
I think the OP was specifically discussing number of enemies, which is something I think they did well in CoX -- especially the way in which that number increased dramatically with the character's level. I loved soloing a horde of enemies at 50 with my blaster, but what made it especially gratifying was the memory of how she had to run from groups of just 2 enemies at lower levels if she missed with her alpha attack. It was the [i]progression[/i] that I loved the most about CoX.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I am very glad to hear you say that, since having that kind of monitoring (especially if it is happening automatically and alerting to results outside the expected thresholds) is one of things that has an upfront cost that is easily paid for in the problems it reveals and the regressions it catches. You can also feed it to something like rrdtool to get a manageable form of very-long-term history (which can be very handy when considering future design changes). Another plus is to have it running against both the prod and test environments, so you can see if a new version is behaving out of spec in some regard. I've seen cases where upgrading a library (like libgcc) would have caused a noticeable jump in memory usage (due to an unknown-at-the-time bug) that we probably wouldn't have picked up in testing if we hadn't been tracking RSS and VSZ and the like.
You guys make me happy (and I have a pet theory that the outside-of-gaming experience a lot of you bring to the table will result in a more robust dev and server environment). :)
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Keep Tab Targeting!
I hate mouse point and click targeting as it makes playing with a controller much harder. When Champions Online decided to add map targeted (extremely overpowered) powers I simply lost interest in them.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Good Lord, No 'rooting'.
I know in CoH it was due to limitations of animations. I hated rooting. Why in the world could I not move while attacking?
The plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces are called Aglets; their true purpose is sinister.
Mobile combat = Yes
Melee Extremely mobile.
Sniper completely Rooted.
I hope a -movementspeed is built into range powers. But players should also have the chance to increase their movement speed per character.
But know this.. as a crowd controller.. I will be "rooting".. Rooting ALL DAY LONG
Crowd Control Enthusiast
I find this interesting, because CoX had these as well....
Bonfire (Fire Control) for example springs to mind here.
And Shield Charge, which was a hugely popular attack.
DDO has a nice active combat style, where you can both tab target, as well as toggle a reticule, and they also have autotargeting, which the game engine soft targets the enemy nearest the center of your screen (or the enemy centered under your reticule if you have the enabled)...when auto targeting, hitting tab locks that enemy as the target. I really like that system of targeting, though tab is a close 2nd, as long as it is only tabbing enemies on the screen.
DDO also has a pretty nice active combat mechanism, where on mouse click you activate the weapon in your hand...if melee it just swings in front of you (if someone is in your reach then they get attacked)...if ranged it fires the weapon at the target. Then you still have all of your quickbar buttons for activating other powers. Of course you can also activate auto-attack if you want to not bother with clicking all the time.
* funny thing is that this mechanism actually bugs me in DCUO, while I like it in DDO.
Something else that I hope for is to have collision detection active during attacks. You start to swing and I dodge out of the way in time...you miss. You shoot and I duck around a wall..the shot misses. I kind of get annoyed about the ice blast zipping around a wall to hit me. Even if there is no dodge or block mechanic to your actual powers, it would be nice be to able to use the environment to protect you.
I dont mind some attacks rooting you, it makes sense...none of the basic attacks should root you. But the one thing that should be possible...is that you can interrupt your own power to move or activate another power.
Shield Charge and all the likes could be completely possible as tab targeted powers. Pick a target that is within range and its a Lunge With PBAoE.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
Please make that an option, not an unchangeable default. It was one of the things I hated about SWTOR. One guy stabbing me in the back? Hit the key for "closest enemy" and it would always target some mob in the group off in the distance. I loved that CoH would let you target the enemy that was actually closest and would automatically turn you to face it.
I always had the impression that was to equalise the field for people with slower internet connections -- i.e. avoiding twitch combat.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I have always thought that it was more based upon *When* the to hit roll was made. If it was made at the *start* (ie windup) of the power animation, then you get the "magic bullet" syndrome.
If it was made at the *end* of the animation, then you avoid that, to a greater or lesser degree (but then it is more "twitch styled"). This would mean that projectiles would have be more "aimed" by the player as well.
Then there is the case of server synchronization as well... because it is THAT which ultimately decides if you get hit or not by an attack, so if the server says "you got hit" and you were behind a wall at the time, then your client will show you getting hit by it, even if it has to go through 20 mobs, 6 walls and florist stall.
Ya, personally I always set Tab to target nearest enemy....I guess its a situation issue...as a ranged toon, you often are far away where you may have a large selection of mobs and need to focus on one...but then as the melee guy you do wanna be able to target the guy stabbing you from off camera....but it could just as easily be someone who is not closest, shooting you in the back.
I wonder about a soft targeting mechanism, where if you dont have anyone hard targeted, it will switch to anyone who attacks you...though that may lead to a lot of soft target switching.
I started a thread calling for the Devs to have monster tracking tools to prevent some of the misinformation that the CoH Devs apparently suffered from. IMHO the idea that players had to reverse-calculate how powers worked in-game and then TELL THE DEVS about it is patently stupid.
Don't build a car and sell it without knowing how it runs. As for the complaint of spaghetti code? That's management...plain and simple. "Hey Fulbright...you finish that code for that Chemical Powerset?" "Yep, put it on Test last Friday." "I don't see any notes or tracking on my desk as to how you solved that problem you were having..."
Management HAS to demand that the script codes be created and kept in order for the game to have longevity. After all the times we heard this from CoH, if it happens again MANY players are going to call 'foul.'
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
There were times when I was starting a new toon that I would turn it to '-1X4' or more JUST to get that whole 'mob' feeling. It was particularly fun with martial arts themes.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...