Our Vision For Combat: What Happened? v2.0

General Discussion General Discussion
902

Provoking… who know… but… trolling no.

I have said nothing wrong.

Kolkhara however, has been constantly trolling in different posts, including here… dont believe me look around. You expect me to believe someone that has been trolling for tens of times, is actually serious now ? Especially since is presenting senseless arguments, like “the combat was designed around stagger” … if thats not trolling nothing is.

I can talk about how i feel u talk about how u feel, i talk about how my friends feel about this u talk about how ur friend feels, and we can go on in circles… but the truth is in the end most people enjoy having responsive combat, and most people do not enjoy the stagger mechanics, be it in PvP or PvE.

You might like it or not, but the game has NOT been created for the 1.6k people that liked this idea out of the millions that visited the forum since this post has been up (or the 39.3k people that even bothered to check it out… NOT even 5% of people that read this post, agreed with it, and most people that come to the forums usually come to complain about something, yet they did not agree that stagger was necesary or wanted).

You have to accept that what feels good for u and ur friend doesnt feel good for most people, and that this time the developers have decided to go with what feels good for more people rather then what feels good for a few, as unpleasent as that is for u.

And yes this post is fantastic, it will always remind people that the developers actually care about how their playerbase feels, and they do not go with what a very “few” that enjoy something feel, but with what feels good and fun to play for most people, and no system will be perfect, but posts like this can show the community that the developers are constantly trying to improve their game… and will consntatly be removing unecessary stuff that feels bad to play with or agaist, and adding new and improved mechanics :slight_smile:

903

Thank you for proving you have no idea about combat design or the base elements of where the combat system stems from.

We get it you like “responsive” action combat aka moba style design. That would be all well and good and yet the developers are retaining elements of the old design system which in fact was built around stagger.

That you don’t understand (or purposefully ignore to troll) that suggests you didnt actually bother to read the OP nor have you actually played the combat in prior stages so your ignorance yet again shows.

Even if one were to concede that this post serves to demonstrate the devs are designing the game for the “masses” that enjoy current combat over “minority” (keep trolling with those assumptions) it fundamentally points a finger at the source of why their current combat hybrid fails to deliver the intent of changing the core combat design. It serves to let anyone know paying attention if good core gameplay matters to someone the current combat system doesn’t deliver it.

It both fails to deliver the responsive fluid control of an action moba combat game and it fails because it still holds on to impactful input design philosophies.
Its laughable you can say “responsive combat” in a game that has purposeful input que buffers on multi-action inputs.

Talks about stagger “crutch” fails to understand free dodge roll and sprint.

We get it you like combat as it is; we’ve now established you have a low bar expectation for gameplay as most who typically play the genre seem to do.

Doesn’t change the facts that the devs removed 2 critical components of a intention input based combat system and retained aspects of that system to remove a non-issue while replacing it with a system that is neither responsive nor intuitive to user input.

Oh and they replaced your “loss of character control crutch” with even more CC mechanics because turns out if you don’t have a way of stopping someones inputs they just run away from your burst phase that is now also limited to a 3 button rotation with some auto weaves in between.

The fundamentals of the combat system altered on 2 fronts lack of input control and balancing range vs melee through sprint and roll.

Whatever marginal improvements (debatable) they gained on the former have exacerbated the latter.

904

See this is why ur a troll and ur not even trying to disguise it, just like when u were trolling about mutations, u just senselessly parrot things that make absolutely no sense :slight_smile:

They say dont feed the trolls but we might as well respon for the sake of the subject :+1:

A MMORPG combat can be designed around a feature like stagger as much as a CAR can be designed around a feature like windscreen wipers, try again, put some effort into ur troll make it believable… cause lets face it, unless someone is a flat-earther this will never stick.

This and mostly everything else shows that u have no idea about networking in the slightest. But again probably parroting something u heard from someone, or maybe you know exactly what ur doing, and ur just parroting more senseless information on purpose to troll.

Nobody said that the free dodge and the horrible way stamina was set up, were not part of the “crutch”. The whole thing was just a skill-less entirely ping reliant zerg mess, and people with 0 skill loved it.

You can show 1v1 scenarios all u want and explain why this system was better in the void (which u actually didn’t do, because u wouldnt actually use a proper argument for stagger), but just like every single one of ur post, its just trolling. This is an MMORPG and you pretend to fail to understand the most fundamental facts about that :slight_smile:

All the points u make are just used to further hurt whoever is a supporter of the stagger system, since u use poor logic and senseless partial arguments, which results in anyone with a brain thinkin “stagger” system makes no sense, which ofc it does not in a MMORPG enviorment, but it can in a 1v1 or 1v2 scenario.

Anyway ur nothing but a troll :stuck_out_tongue:, idk what the people that support stagger did to u, but u probably like picking on them (indirrectly) since they get rly passionate about this everytime someone points out how stupid stagger is.

:beers: Cheers.

905

that’s a whole lot of words to troll this topic and give it a free bump.

bless you for your service :kissing_closed_eyes:

906

I am not going to participate in the argument between you and @Kolkhara.

But your arguments seem flawed.

You claim stagger is a minor feature of the combat system yet AGS themselves considered their step to remove stagger from basic attacks as adressing a major trend/theme.

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Excerpt from the infamouse Forge and Fury Update

You claim stagger does not work in an MMORPG environment yet AGS keeps adding staggering elements to the game. Not in the form of a triggered stagger effect after a regular hit but in form of ever increasing CC-abilities or decreased dodge-distances.

You claim stagger only works in 1v1 or 1v2 environments. Did you play any wars in New World as a melee class? Did you by any chance play games like Mordhau, Chivalry or Naraka? Or for a more adequate comparison - did you play New World with stagger on regular hits?

That being said it is my opinion that stagger is a major determining factor of a combat system. I think stagger is needed to encourage players to make meaningful and conscious offensive and defensive combat decisions. I think especially large-scale battles benefit from the presence of stagger on the battlefield in order to prevent players from forming a chaotic pile of player models and animations.

907

Okay so lets umpack this.

I claim this:
Stagger is not the foundation on which combat has been build around as people love to baselessly imply.
Stagger WAS a feature of said combat, among many other features!
The distinction is massive.

This makes absolutely no sense what so ever, one of them is a “enhanced” basic attack that can micro-CC/CC the other one is a ability based CC with cooldowns.

“Apples and Oranges”

I’m perfectly aware of the quote from AGS, but you are missinterpreting the information (on purpose or not), which again its not doing any favor to ur cause, because anyone with a basic understanding of english can see what they actually mean.

They said:
“There are some major trends and themes” and “some of the biggest points of feedback we have received”.

WHICH REFERS TO:
“Stunlock from light attack spam agaist either players or AI combatants isn’t fun”.

and they proceed to explain how the “free dodge roll” they added did not fix this problem, hence they taking another step to fix this problem, which they did, the unfun mechanic is now gone and never coming back :slight_smile:

Yes i played quite a decent amount o Chivalry both 1 and 2 and yes i played NW way before they removed the stagger, but this is irrelevant to the topic, because NONE of them are MMORPGs, in any way shape or form.

Theres is however a MMORPG with very similar combat to those games (unlike NW) its called Mortal Online 2. Check it out, has about as big of a population as the people that enjoy this mechanics.

Thats exactly it, its a major factor in UR OPINION. In a lot of peoples opinion the earth is flat… in some people opinions olives are the disgusting…I’m surre in someones opinion the windscreen wipers of a CAR are the most important factor to the car.
Everyone can have an OPINION, but it does NOT make it a FACT.

There is nothing wrong with you wanting this in the game, and nothing wrong with you enjoying this feature, regardless if its a massive feature or not.

However you have to accept that for the MAJORITY of players, this is NOT FUN.
This post was read by nearly 40 THOUSAND PEOPLE… not EVEN 2 THOUSAND of those agreed with the post.
DESPITE the post being of extremly good quality, explains well their opinion and why they want this. It’s been up on here for 1 years, 1 whole year.
MOST People that come to forums is to complain about something… so THIS is the perfect audience to PITCH something like this too, YET MOST PEOPLE do not like this.

All this is because it doesnt matter how EFFICIENT or NECESARY you think a feature is to the game, it only matters how much FUN it is. You can only talk about all the other things once it passes the FUN test for a considerable amount of people. And this is extremly boring to play with or agaist.

PS: Most of this things have been said multiple times, by both community members and AGS employees in both Dev blogs and post and stuff like that, its a bit pointless to keep talking about them, since its not coming back is it ?

They litteraly removed it from mobs now :slight_smile: since it was toxic in that format as well.

(entirely unrelated to stagger, but people love to group them together even thou they are unrelated) => I’m personally someone that rly liked the combat sprint, but does not mean i didnt understand why it had to go…i can also understand why it can be so frustrating for most people to play against and why it may never come back, at least not in the format it was before.

Thou its good to bump the post <3 so people can see what happened to one of the most toxic mechanics in game :slight_smile:

908

ofc, my pleasure, heres another bump <3

People need to see how AGS handles mechanics that feel bad to play with or agaist <3 and that they can trust that AGS will try their best to always improve their game :stuck_out_tongue:

909

thanks pal.

oh and you’re just flat out wrong on stagger and combat sprint not being core functions of the combat design. they literally were the glue that held melee play together. this is evident by the developers still continual inability to balance melee vs range in their combat scheme, there other option is to increase abilitie slots so players have more on demand mobility and cc at their finger tips, gee I wonder which way they’ve been trending?

the reason you are confused by this assertion is because you fail to understand the gameplay interactions. they’ve been explained if you don’t want to understand that’s on you.

also as far as fun factor goes i think the beta responses and launch responses to this topic clearly indicate fun factor stopped for far more no longer playing than currently still playing.

but by even this standard the current gameplay is decidedly unfun for quite a few people as the balance is ping ponging constantly as the developers still haven’t figured out ab effective method of balancing flaws in their gameplay design and have only made worse since removing “unfun" mechanic

by any discernable measure more people had fun with the games combat as it was then what it is now. the player counts and engagement w the topic past and present verify that.

but we thank you for your must pass fun and how MMOs should be played smell tests.

now remind the class what’s the current business outlook on the genre compared to all others in the industry?

if we use your standard of fun, well I think the vast masses of people have spoken, MMOs are no longer fun and no longer provide exclusively any element of gameplay or social interaction that can’t be found elsewhere which is why their popularity have fallen off a cliff.

almost like gamers discovered what good gameplay looks and feels like and found MMOs completely lack the mustard.

910

As combat gets worse and worse lulz

Keep spamming, my dude.

911

I think the only common ground we are going to find is that we disagree. When you wrote “baselessly” I immediatley knew you didn’t watch or understood acolyterush’s video (timestamp here). Or despite the many examples and clips given in the video you simply want to deny the fact that hitstun is a major element of the action-combat formula.

To recap what was said. Action-combat (or souls-like combat for better comparison) is based on

  • active defenses
  • startup and recovery animations
  • commitment (to an action)
  • hitboxes (aka spacing)
  • hitstun

The latter was taken out of the game and the recipe of action-combat simply doesn’t work anymore.
Now lets qualify this statement. What happens when you get hit by an NPC or a player and the only feedback you get is a drop of your HP?! Well, you compare the damage taken with the damage dealt. And the consequence of this comparison will always be the same. Players that deal more damage than they take will always choose to power through any action of their opponent because they will always win the hit-trade. The other players will probably try to disengage or defend. Sounds good at first but at some point players will realize that mid-fight there is no way to turn the tide. The combat is predetermined by gear. Hitstun made it possible to exploit weaknesses in the attack patterns of your opponent. Hitstun was the one ability that enabled disadvantaged players to open windows of opportunity to gain and keep the upper hand. This part is important because it is the crucial difference to active CC-abilities. Abilities have a duration and a cooldown. So after the ability ran out the normal damage-race will continue. Hitstun on basic attacks on the other hand are unlimited and always present* and overall felt more natural and offered more impactful combat feedback.
We saw evidence of the consequences of the removal of stagger ingame early on. The victor of a fight among players is heavily predetermined by their gear thus leading to the vastly popular opinion that PvP first starts making sense once you reached GS600+. Large-scale battles became a mess due to stacking.

I agree…at the end the game has to be fun. But fun is subjective and a very bad metric for good combat. Many people like to be challenged and overcome difficulties thus leading to the undeniable success of the souls-franchise. And AGS to this day advertises their combat system as being skill-based and impactful. And the baseline question of this topic is: WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE GOALS? Because more and more features (see above) of this formula are vanishing or being tuned down. Combat is more and more ignoring skill and favoring gear. With the further removal of stagger from NPCs actively defending against attacks becomes more useless. Attacks have less ans less impact and do not translate into approriate responses.

In the end this all does not concern you. You seem to get the game you want and enjoy - be grateful. But stop spreading false claims.

  • leading to the rightful observation that New World needed mechanics to offer ways out of stagger like an improved free dodge roll, grit attacks or diminishing returns.
1 Like
912

Wont happen. What we want to have is:

  • mele vs range (bow, musket) - both should have tools to win
  • mele vs mage - both should have tools to win
  • mele vs mele - no main issues now
  • healing

Mele vs Range
Issue here is that mele has a lot of distance to close. It does take time. And while doing this you getting shread apart.

Second issue is that even if you close distance - both bow and musket builds have so much mobility, you cant follow them to stay on them.

Fix: we need to limit moblity on dex range builds. Moment distance is closed they should still be very mobile but with option for mele to kill them. Dex dodge bonus has to go away and all haste related perks has to be looked into. Rapier was nerfed and should be revisited after haste fixes.

Second part is closign distance. Mele needs a tool to have a chance to close big distance. So maybe rework shield - allow it to reduce range related dmg somehow but with some limitations ofc. It can’t be like with healing where you take shield and dont care about range builds any more. So probably range attacks should do less stamina dmg when shield used. Also on top of that maybe some kind of aura in 2-5m range for tower shield that will also protected teammaes around (but for lesser degree).

Mele vs Mage
We had good balance before last patch. Now mele has all the tools while mage has none. Previously fight was a skill game. Both sides had tools to close distance and to get it back. So on top lvl it was matter of who will do more mistakes. Fight was jumping between mid and close range.

Fix: there are few. We can make one of them or combine some of them. What mage does need is a way to get distance back. Right now mage does not have any tools. With shirking energy nerf (good) and light armor dodge distance cut by 20% - mage has only burn out to get distance back. But issue with skill is that it can be super easly canceled by mele attack that is already in 5m range of you (you need it if he is in close range to you).

So we need restore very strong cc to IG. Or restore old distance for light armor dodge. Or remove mele hit movment penalty or remove mage movment penalty after each attack.

Or just combination of some/all of this.

Mele vs Mele
There are some builds better, some worse. But overall i dont see any major issues here.

Healing
So healing issue is that it does affect how players feel about combat. Main issue with it is that if you dont have build to burst kill before healing applies, you cant killat all. Healers can keep friendly players indefinitely.

Fix: make healing less effective with each next “doze”. So healer can help whole team but cant sustain forever single player (himself included). It will fix issue we have that we feel there is no point to fight couse of healers in enemy team. Will keep healers as they are or we can even buff them. And will make combat more tactical.

913

It’s a beautiful response :slight_smile:

Now lets unpack some things, but before that.

I think this is fair, and there is nothing wrong with it. We can value different things and this is were the disagreement stems from, again nothing wrong with that.

I will try to stay on main point of our debate which is stagger, but some things need to be mentioned.

I feel, you’re evaluation of combat is lacking and you only consider hitstun (stagger) as the main important aspect without which combat becomes just an exchange of hp. Which I think its factually wrong on many levels, this is because of the ability to avoid damage, commitement to certain actions, animation canceling and positioning still exist and are layers of skill that seems to be conveniently forgotten, or intentionally disregarded… or somehow devalued for no reason at all. If you have 5 systems that determine skill, removing one of them does not devalue the others it just empowers them (happend in this situation), and this can be a bad thing, personally i think the ability to avoid dmg is indeed in a too good of a position right now (but I’m getting off topic so lets stay with stagger).

All the videos that I seen (maybe all of them, especially on this subject) fail to mention or care at all for ping and input delay which are the core elements of any multiplayer game (when QUATUM networks will become mainstream, this will not be the case, but until then you CANNOT evaluate a situation without), which get close to unexistent on a peer to peer connection like in DS, Fighting games (not always see the latest GG game, hence its failiure) and so on or in a single player game, but they are EXTREMLY RELEVANT in a game that has game servers (a 3rd party outside the 2 (or more) combatants, this becomes EXPONENTIALLY more relevant when this involves TENS, HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of connections like in the case of MMORPGs).

And here is where the main problem stems from, taken 2 players that imput the action at the exact same time the one with the better connection (closer to the server, better internet connection) and better real life equipment (better pc) will always perform the action FIRST.
This problem does exist regardless of stagger, but with stagger this becomes the ONLY relevant measure of combat prowess once u overcome the initial learning curve.

HENCE stagger its just a CRUTCH for less skilled players with a better connection.

This problem will not disapear as i said until we have instantaneous data transfer regardless of distance, but it can be minimized by not including mechanics that soley rely on it to perform well, why it was removed and it will NEVER come back.

Also the reason why this combat became so damn boring when you know you have a good connection and all u have to do is press W and Left Click and you will win 99% of exchanges (this is just what it boils down to).

And SO, stagger becomes unfun for someone that is looking for skilled combat and it becomes unfun for the person on the other end receiving it, overall a system that is NOT FUN.
It is only fun for those looking for a crutch and lack the mental capacity to get skilled in the current system. That being said this system is not perfect and it still requires work, BUT it’s better for it then having unlimited ping reliant spammable CC.

I hope this answers why AGS realized that stagger cannot stay in this enviorment and why it will never come back, use the effort you spend on stagger to find ways to suggest improvements and solutions to the EXISTING combat, that can actually be implemented. Rather then beating a dead horse. Just my 2 cents, that is if u enjoy NW and want to see it improve, if NW is not worth playing without stagger, fair enough, were all free to have our own opinions and do whatever we want within reason :slight_smile:

Edit:
TL:DR: basically explaining why stagger is a ping reliant CRUTCH, since that is the only reason why it was removed and it will never come back. And the reason why the “very good” arguments for it will not matter.

914

I understand what you are saying. And I think the technical issue was discussed here or in a related topic before and I believe it is a relevant topic to discuss.

But if the removal of stagger was done to deal with technical limitations then why didn’t AGS just tell us? I think it would be totally understandable if a company says “Hey folks, we had this great idea to bring soul-like combat to a MMORPG as we only ever experienced it in singleplayer games before. But we figured there are technical limitations that forced us to make compromises so we can ensure a fair gaming environment without discrimiationg players with unreliable internet connections or hardware limitations. We tried our best and here is our solution.”

BAM - easy as this. But this didn’t happen. AGS is totally silent on this topic. Community Managers that interact with us somehow disappear (Our Vision For Combat: What Happened? v2.0 - #665 by Tohva). AGS offered such a transparent development process and keep giving insights with their Dev Videos, but the stagger topic is completely ignored.

Of course I would be happy to test a version of the current game with stagger on basic attacks. I also realize that this would mean reinventing or adjusting New World’s weapons, skills and enemies. We are so far past the point of stagger returning that this topic can solely serve as a case study and an archive of the development of New Worlds combat mechanics.

In the end this thread is demanding nothing more but a statement. And this statement is long overdue in my opinion.

915

I sincerely do not know for a fact why they chose not to do this… I can only assume, it’s because of the negative PR they would recieve because of this…

“AGS can’t even do this while DS games can”…

A lot of people lack the technical know-how to understand this and it would probably just result in a massive amount of negative PR for the game. I’m not a PR guy and I like to believe being direct is the best aproach, but I have seen it go badly in too many games when developers tried to be geniune with the community, just look at how it went when AGS tried to be dirrect about the BOT problem in Lost Ark and tried to explain the best they can the situation, while also actively working to fix it… the game would have been better of without them saying anything (or so i believe).

SO yeah I believe them “ignoring” this topic is the best course of action for the game.

916

Treviz, thanks for your authentic explanation. But what speaks against an introduction of a smaller amount of stagger on heavy attacks?

Since they need to be charged through a longer button press there wouldn’t be the explained problem, right? Also they occur much less often and with the explained character they can be seen like an ability that make the time of the cooldowns less boring and more strategical. Sometimes it is purely stupid smashing in the cooldown times and you get punished for every single heavy attack you use…

Plus, it just feels so weird to charge an attack and land a heavy strike without any true visual impact on the rag doll…

I’d be just super happy if they put a little stagger on the heavies…

Plus the ping problem would be reduced through the charge up animation, WHICH GIVES YOU TIME TO DODGE!

917

The concensus was that ppl disliked loss of character control (ie toal lack of input control). Stagger not only negated your next attack it was a mini stun and prevented movement.

Which is why flinch was requested as the mechanic that provides a happy medium.

instead of in hit stun you had on hit interrupt. this would allow punishment of agressive button mashing while still providing control over movement to reposition.

but that often gets lost in the conversation.

as to technological limits of ping and data travel we could extend that logic to action combat in an mmo in general and why you have to force tab target w rng dice rolls on stat modifiers because latency issues would always advantage one player over another in action combat games

with regards to stagger in relation to the pillars of combat depth logic.
no staggers removal alone, but combined w removal of sprint and while never making a balance pass w the newly introduced light attack chains certainly diminished balance and skill expression.

so much so the devs had to design a system that take active control out of your hands e regards to repositioning via haste(sprint) in favor of abilities w leaps or escapes and dodge rolls that give less distance to create space.

an honest look at combat changes cannot deny that the problem sought to be fixed by removal of hitstun with no real replacement combined w the loss of sprint has not been effectively replaced by any combat mechanics that make the game play better than it was prior to those changes.

918

Yeah that could be pretty cool… and could probably work.

Even just a proper interrupt would probably be pretty cool, unless ofc the target has grit or block (which can be applied when devs feel like said action should not be interrupted). Don’t know how this will take effect when affected by “attack-speed” increase, since some weapons u can attack pretty damn fast even with heavies, for example the greatsword… could turn into the same “stunlock” situation without.

But yeah i think it could be something worth exploring, thou i doubt they would.

I believe they are moving away from enhancing (with cc) “all” basic attacks (be it all heavy attacks) and more towards skill (abilities/reactive-passives) based combat, especially considering the addition of heartrunes and stance mechanics (with the greatsword). Personally I prefer this kind of skill expression :slight_smile: I think the greatsword just raised the bar by quite a bit and i hope they continue down this path with the next weapons (have weapons that are easy to use, and weapons that have a high skill ceiling). I personally didn’t know i needed the stances until they brought them in, and now i find it hard to play anything else other then GS (the fact that its a bit OP does substract from my enjoyment of it thou since i always feel like i have an advantage, but im sure it will be in a balanced position soon).

919

the light attack chain progression could be used to determine where in the chain it applies to balance around atk speed.

the other is x duration windup of heavy atk input. could even have it as a specific bind with a stamina cost attached as giving just an added tool to the kit.

perhaps as a modification of the block key as the dev blog indicates they want to make blocking and in my mind defensive actions more meaningful in combat.

920

And mate, this is what makes me wonder so much… And makes me believe it was more a design decision than smth necessary… The decision to remove it completely just seemed too extreme for that…

For me this turns the beating the dead horse metaphor into “man, AGS, please find a compromise!”…

1 Like
921

If it was me, i would expand on the “damage type” for heavy attacks on melee weapons. (i can already see ranged players being upset, but they can get something more, like progressive charging, for example charge a heavy arrow for 1.5-2 seconds it would interrupt/stagger/bleed/burn/freeze whatever the weapon type is).

But I would do it like that,
Blunt weapons like the Hammer (and in the future, maces 2h,1h and hopefully 1h hammer) that would hit (and connect) a charged heavy attack would “stagger”.
Slash (bladed) weapons that hit a charged heavy attack would inflict bleed.

The charge time would differ based on if its a 2h or 1h weapon, and the duration of the applied effect would also differ based on that.

But yeah i think none of this will be expanded upon, it comes down to a lot of work for the devs with very little return and appeal for what i consider a smaller audience that enjoys more indept stuff like this (which i would consider myself part off).