**Foreword ; **
I thought I had quit from the game a few weeks ago, but I kept reading the forums, and doing so, eventually, made me want to try again
*I’m a solo player, I play solo in all the MMORPGs I play at first because I want to get to know the game and the community before creating or joining a guild.
ne of the (many) reasons I quit was because, as a solo player, I couldn’t see what I was supposed to do. There was no content for me, and if I wanted to gear up, solo, the only way I could see was by crafting my gear.
“fine” I thought, eventually, “I’ll go back to New World and give that a go”, “maybe I can solo the elites if my gear is good enough”. So off I went, or rather, back I came to the game, and focused on leveling my trade skills so I could craft my gear.
Problem is, I ran out of gold. Income, since there is no content for me, must come from the market (I considered grinding low level mobs for gold but rejected that idea on principle), and since on my server there’s like 400 players now at peek time, nothing sells. There’s no market…
So basically, I can’t make money from the market, there is no content for me as a solo player. I tried joining Outpost Rush a few times, it never even started. So there was only one thing left to try, facing the 60+ zone on my own, as hard as it was, as unrewarding as it is (for a solo player), it was at least a path, some way I could progress… something to do …
So I spent a lot of time fighting 60+ normal and elite mobs, and it’s this experience that inspired me to make this post, because when fighting mobs up until this zone, combat doesn’t really matter, you just button smash, but at 60+, on your own, you need to pay attention, you need to be careful, and you need to “learn” to fight, as in, for example, block, which is something I never did before, or hardly. If you “button smash”, you die, simple.
And it’s only then, while facing elite 60+ mobs solo, that I realised how bad your combat gameplay was.
_end of foreword*
In the first stage of Alpha, I remember many threads and discussions on the forums regarding the combat gameplay, and I remember many people providing suggestions, how to make it better. In particular, I remember what I recommended, not as a professional, not as a game developer, but as someone who’s had quite a lot of experience “fighting” in MMORPGs
Most of the feedback was quite positive, but most of it was like “its good, for an Alpha, not bad at all” “but you guys should maybe work on this or that”.
I remember that what I and many other players felt was missing the most, the one thing that needed to be improved was the “flow” of combat (this was, for me specially with regards to melee fighting, both in pvp and pve).
It was clunky, unresponsive, unreactive, not up to the standards MMORPGs held already all those years ago for an “action” gameplay MMORPG.
I remember spending a lot of time insisting on this point, spending a lot of time making a constructive post, and then spending a lot of time discussing it, thinking about it, since, as Alpha testers, many of us felt we had a responsibility to invest ourselves in the feedback a lot more than we would otherwise on a game that has been released.
And you know what? AGS?
Honestly?
You did EXACTLY the OPPOSITE!!!
I don’t know if it’s because the dev team changed and the new team didn’t bother with the old feedback (that’s the stage where I left, when AGS announced a shift in focus from a PvP game to a mainstream MMORPG) but seriously, you couldn’t have done more the OPPOSITE of what most players were recommending…
It’s even MORE clunky, it’s even MORE unresponsive, it’s a hell of a lot MORE unreactive, you hit a key to do a skill, it does it 10 hours later, often as a chain, like a script, you see an enemy about to attack, you CAN’T block, you literally can’t!!! The ONLY way to block, is by blocking before the enemy attacks, it’s ridiculous., seriously, I stop here but I could go on and on.
I mean even if you know the enemy is going to attack ahead of time, even if you block before he does, it’s still very often too late.
You took all the feedback that Alpha testers gave you, and YOU DID THE OPPOSITE.
Combat has to flow, you might not see it, but it’s an artform, I’m not even kidding, skilled players, experienced players, express themselves through the way they fight, they are creative. And talent, skill, experience, requires polished combat mechanics, that’s how talent expresses itself through combat, in combat, through the combat mechanics, they NEED to flow…
The combat in Alpha, years ago, was way better, I swear to god, without even mentioning the pvp, the combat itself, and it was already lacking so many things, was better! You guys downgraded it, I can’t begin to imagine what the hell happened …
You guys took something that was not too bad, and made it ten times worse instead of improving it.
I’m kinda pissed to be honest, I’m disappointed, because I was expecting a lot more than this.
Way I see it, his is the result either of people who are incompetent in combat design, or don’t care. I’m going to go for the second one, what will take for me to convince to care about combat mechanics?