The biggest reason that i quit New World about 2 months ago now, is because of the clunky and poor combat.
It feels terrible to play the game in it’s current state, not only for the lack of endgame content, but when the main gameplay part of the game is this bad, then that makes it hard to enjoy any part of the game overall.
These are my suggestions as to what needs to happen to combat for it to be in a decent shape.
Increase responsivity
The feels of combat is super important, pressing a button and having the response time be sorta lagging, feels bad.
To me a click should respond instantly, all relative to latency ofc, but latency aside
Improve the spell/skill targetting
Spell/Skill targetting is awkward at times, small edges makes your spell targetting jump all over the place, this is due to the way the game wants to force you to hit a spesific layer (The ground layer in this case) for it’s targetting.
The fault here is that the Raycast (The way you target the spell) doesn’t ignore other layers like objectives or enviromentals etc…
So then it turns out like this:
When it should turn out like this:
Don’t force stand-stil during animation casts
This goes back to combat responsivenes, where you basicly stun yourself with each cast.
Creating a game where everything has a cast time is fine, but when that cast time involves you standing stil during it, it causes you to constantly stutter around and forcing the player to play around self CC.
This feels terrible when you want the combat to be a constant flow of back and forth between each player.
Give dodge a sepperate CD
This is something Guild Wars 2 and ESO did.
And it works great there.
You have a dodge, but the dodge is unrelated to other mechanics in the game.
And has it’s own sepperate cooldown.
The way this ruins gameplay in New World, is that a spear user forexample who has a constant flow of Stamina, is constantly running around dodging.
Each dodge adds around 0.2sec of invulnerability, so when a player spams this you end up with a combat that looks little something like this:
Invulnerable 0.2sec → killable 0.1sec → Invulerable 0.2sec → killable 0.1sec
Timing between this makes the game feel buggy somehow, and makes it seem as if your spells isn’t working properly, as they sometimes tick and sometimes doesn’t.
And since a player is constantly just rolling arond like a rolling beetle, it makes timing super awkward.
Visible skill/spell hit box
A better visual for skill to properly show their hitbox.
At the moment you only have the spell effects showing, and visually spell effects in this game doesn’t visually show in a proper way where exactly it will tick.
This goes for both bosses and players, in online games this matters as every cm/mm can make a difference when it comes to a PvP combat.
And for effective DPS this applies to bosses ingame aswell.
As of now most players know where to be and when because they have repeatedly brought down the 4 bosses that are in the game, but for a new player this is confusing and irritating.
As you would constantly die from things without knowing how to improve on it.