This is by far the longest post that ive ENJOYED reading all the way through and through. Really well written.
As someone who did not play in any of the Alphas or Betas, after hearing about Stagger vs reading what your wrote… I would fucking love this system. PvP does feel bland and for me has become just a spam your abilities game with little to no thought on it really…
In short im now on the #BringBackOldPvP train.
I like this idea.
I didn’t play during alpha, I have read enough of these threads and have begun to wonder why some things were totally stripped away. I can understand the issue some had with light attack spam stagger, but they didn’t have to just toss it out.
Rework? Why? Every enemy is staggering you, every wolf, every ghost, every zombie. If you add two or more enemies it becomes increasingly worse because they are staggering you non-stop.
That’s exactly the issue in PvE: they kept enemy-stagger while they removed player-stagger.
That would be pointless. Stagger is meant to be used to take advantage of openings and counterattacks.
Heavy Attacks are near pointless as they’re so slow you can’t use them to take advantage of anything. Unless you outnumber your target or they’re hiding behind a block, they go pretty much unused.
I think there’s three premises here that I disagree with you on:
Before we argue future state of netcode including a stagger system at scale we have to acknowledge that the current game state isn’t working. 50v50 wars have been a laggy aoe spam mess well before release. The foundation of the game needs to be improved since there are currently major issues I’ve outlined here the include world object clipping, teleporting, desync etc.). These impact current combat. Lastly on this point, stagger was previously in the game and it worked fine from a technical standpoint. Any issues present in combat would still exist because they are a result of the lumberyard engine and its development not because a small combat stagger feedback system was added. The reason stagger was removed was NOT due to technical issues but because an overwhelming casual voice in the community complained about it.
You present this as though NW intentionally designed to accommodate 200ms ping by different programming methods. One example might be introducing a larger network leniency window on hit validation. In a PvP game, especially where time and resources matter to player investment, it is abnormal to accommodate extremely high ping players and think that it is acceptable to aim for quality/equity of experience concerning netcode between two players (5ms vs 200ms). There are regions in place and likely the game starts “breaking” after 100ms. If you are used to playing with 5ms and were able to introduce fake lag incrementally then likely you might notice weird behaviors or latency impacting the game even before 100ms. The game should not accommodate 200ms ping in PvP, this completely breaks combat if so and goes against New Worlds stated own PvP pillars of being responsive fast paced combat. I’m not including people in remote areas who have no choice to have 200m in their own region, however, that is the abnormal connection quality to server among majority of the NW playerbase.
I think most people in here are quick to start seeing stagger system as black and white issue and start contributing their own combat design ideas. The truth is this should be left up to devs to design, this thread shouldn’t be about whether or not stagger is the perfect solution and to bring it back in its entirety. Many people aren’t giving enough allowance that there’s a grey area for a better combat system to be improved here AND not acknowledging that the current combat system gets stale. Halcyon outlines many good examples and suggestions in their original post. Your post mostly argues from a rigid standpoint that stagger cannot work and isn’t good for the game (discrepancy between high and low ping players). I’m arguing that some sort of feedback system and other additions (not just stagger) could be way better and work.
Very well said!
As an avid fighting game player online matches are always taken with a grain of salt based on latency. People on wifi are basically unplayable due to packets, but those are games in which the outcome of battles are often measured in frames (1/60th of a second). New World’s combat is dramatically slower and mechanically easier with far less combo potential and significant cooldowns that would limit the amount of combos possible.
Wars are already a bit of a nightmare for many. Ironically, after the Preview feedback is when they started adding more particle effects to weapons. That’s why when you look at older weapons such as sword, musket, and hatchet all have very simple attacks. Newer attacks like great axe’s gravity well, ice gauntlet’s Ice Storm, or even rapier’s Fleche all have very flashy animations that wreak havoc on performance during a war.
If anything, I consider wars to be a better casualty than stagger. Wars have long come under fire for exclusivity purposes and even the ones that do take place are often just Zerg vs Zerg death balls (which also doesn’t help performance). Fun is subjective obviously, but I just can’t help but think they’ve doubled down on the wrong thing and are too tied to sunk cost to consider changing without large community support.
Sounds more like it was abused then used for skilled counterattack.
Well for those that can’t handle stopping the left mouse button slapping to hold it for a couple seconds then maybe just go with the classic interrupt button. Completely different button that staggers/ interrupts with a CD so it can’t be spammed. Then you can have your skilled counter without the annoying light attack stagger spam.
This annoys me too. NPCs should have limited ability to stagger.
So,
Stagger wasn’t tested a War scale (as far as I know). But from the exploits we’ve seen (the window dragging stopping damage being taken), it’s clear that the player state exists on the client and not the server for combat. It also takes a “client wins” approach, which is why the lag fests happen, it’s trying to sort out what’s going in in a situation where exponential event interactions are occuring. Which leads on to…
They have to handle big pings because that’s a fact of life in an MMO. Modern MMOs have gotten really good at working round bad internet connections, most by trickery. The lag protections is the reason why people become immortal when the game starts lagging. What happens is that the game ignores certain messages it receives outside of a certain window to deal with bad connections. It’s to stop players getting damage from mobs they’ve already killed in their client, but the last damage tick happened before the message was received, but after the client registered the death. It’s also why the window dragging didn’t mean you were dead after, the player state is local.
How does that lead to this? Well if you cause enough lag, you start getting these messages received later and later, until they fall out of this window and they start getting ignored, hence you basically stop taking damage.
This would be fixed if the server was handling the player state rather than the clients, and it would also solve the combinational explosion of events that happens when a ton of players stand on top of each other, which is where the lag is being generated.
And so to…
This isn’t an anti-stagger post, this is a “The experience you want is unlikely to be granted because physics”, post.
glad this post went back! ty! stopped playing nw for now. my biggest motivation was to get good in combat but without stagger it felt pointless. bring back stagger. add arena or some small scale pvp and ill be happy for the next 5 years lol
I think restoring the old combat design is the best way to keep people interested. New World doesn’t have a lot of content and adding new weapons/areas/expeditions/pvp modes is a long term solution that won’t matter much if the game’s basic mechanics aren’t improved.
The main thing that made New World stand out for me was the skill-based souls-like combat, but now that it’s gone there just isn’t anything left to keep me playing.
They all seem to have grit too. Most of my CC skills get ignored if I hit them while they’re doing their 2-hit combo, becuz it’s all gritted up. Meanwhile each hit of their combo staggers me back…
Wars were indeed a thing during stagger days. Not a lot was made public because of NDA but there’s a few videos of it. The issues most are concerned about were non-existent because the presence of stagger naturally discourages zerging. Here’s a couple videos showcasing it.
God I remember watching the second video and being like “Yea, this will rock my world”
Fun fact, today I had an encounter with a player, after 5 minutes of just LMB and dropping skills, we just said it’s retarded and went away to do quests.
That also brought to my mind this - Basically, not sure about stagger, but stamina management was also a thing in PVE right? If I recall bosses up to 60 level on dungeons, first engagin boss is actually on shipyard, what a waste, right? All bosses are the same, Skills>LMB>repeat, I don’t have to manage annything, just dodge
It’s a shame that we wont see this combat changes… it’s too late for this unfortunately.
Beware demos 
If you restricted the server to 100 people, you can probably get away with it. Especially if the server didn’t have any other zones to worry about, and is running a far higher spec than real production boxes. You can keep the tick rate high in that case, and keep most of the problems to a minimum. You also don’t have people forensically examining it, testing timings on strikes, etc. Not that you could test in wars, so many attacks flying around, you’d never be able to tell if the timings were working or not.
When you do duels and add in another 1900 people and 100k NPCs, what I said in my post way back starts happening (I staggered him first, but I got staggered instead, Literally unplayable).
But again, what I’m saying isn’t (entirely) about stagger, it’s about having souls-like combat in an MMO where two people have drastically different round trips to a server, and expecting them to have the same experience.
They would have to optimize the game for it like instancing, spawns only when players are near etc. Much to be done
None of that goes away by removing stagger. You can still stagger people, it just takes certain abilities. Not to mention stuns, slows, knockdowns, and other attacks.
Nor was any of this an issue during the Alphas except during wars. And it’s not like removing it helped them in terms of latency/synchronization in any way.
At a certain point you have to say “Hey Mr 300 ping, your experience is going to be markedly worse than the players with a 50 ping”. Dragging down the majority of players’ experience because someone is playing on non-optimal server or has a poor ISP doesn’t make the game better.
And there is still a large measure of action in the combat. If your ping is too high to aim a musket properly, you shouldn’t get free hits to make up for it. The fact that the servers trust the client at all is baffling.
Doesn’t that open up the game to hacking or other things like aimbots and such?
Figured most mmos were using server based processing for combat just for that reason.
Or am I wrong?
No, you’re correct. It’s part of how the recently fixed issue with purposely “lagging yourself so that the hatchet invulnerability never wore off” exploit worked.