Oh geez,
A short, simple question deserving of a long, complex answer.
Short answer: Fighting games.
"Defining Skill
To me, skill in a video game is the summation of a player’s knowledge, intelligence, reflexes, and mechanical ability (how well they can input commands). The higher each of these are, the more skilled the player.
Why fighting games?
As a genre rule, fighting games are probably the highest in terms of both skill floor and skill cap. The controls and inputs are typically harder than most people are used to, and so there’s a pretty significant amount of time practicing basic inputs before people can even begin to dream about competing. The flipside to that, is once you’ve got the basics down, they’re pretty universal across games and so picking up further games is just a matter of understanding the subtle differences.
From there, on the other end of the spectrum, players at the top end are micro-analyzing every single move of each character to understand all the frame data (startup, active, recovery, properties on-block, on-hit, on-whiff, block-stuns, etc.) to figure out their game plan and what the strengths and weaknesses of each match-up is. Two players can pick the same character and play very different styles even though they have the same movelist. That’s skill expression, and is only possible in a game with high skill cap.
The in-between of these, where most active fighting game players reside, is where most casual players slowly learn and gradually develop themselves. If every time an opponent blocks my move they get a free hit, I know to be careful when throwing out that move. If an opponent has special meter built up and a powerful reversal super (think iframes and high priority), I know to be cautious when pressuring them, or maybe even to attempt to bait it out. You don’t need to study the game’s internal data to get better because you can learn A LOT from experience, and there’s so much room for skill-expression that there is no “best way” to play. There’s a lot of analyzing situations looking for an opening or reading into an opponent’s patterns. Every match is a new puzzle to work out, and if you don’t work it out quickly, you lose.
How does this relate to New World?
Action combat games are built on similar principles as fighting games. Abilities have animations, and those animations have startup, active, and recovery frames. Blocking, special moves with special properties, timing, spacing, etc.
Games like New World (or Dark Souls, or Zelda: Breath of the Wild), have simpler combat rules because of a much more limited range of possible actions and no special inputs. This drastically reduces the skill floor and makes the game much more accessible. This, is a great thing, especially for an MMO. I highly expect Riot’s new fighting game in development (Currently called Project L) to be taking this approach, by creating much simpler inputs for attacks and abilities in order to be more approachable to the average person.
Now, AGS removed a key aspect of action combat as you’re highly aware of, hit stun (stagger), when they took it off of melee attacks in December 2020. They’ve tried to compensate that by adding various slows and attack lunges and adjusted hitboxes among other things, and yet I don’t think you’ll find too many people here that think melee combat is feels particularly good. In fact any melee weapons that do “feel good” do so because of the abilities they have which often have stuns and staggers, not because of the way their regular attacks work.
This made zerg combat much easier for the masses, but destroyed a lot of smallscale combat and drastically lowered the skill cap. Even the SnS/Hatchet one-shot builds, which only followed basic combo logic from fighting games, was nerfed because it was too good at killing… other low con squishy targets.
In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to find any aspect of the game where the developers have been interested in allowing any sort of skill-gap. There’s a basic skill floor that involves things like cooldown and stamina management, but beyond that the outcomes of battles are almost entirely gear and meta based. It’s less about how much understand of combat you’ve put in as a player, and more about how much time you’ve spent grinding in game.
A low skill-cap makes the game easy to master, boring to watch, and ultimately makes the PvP uninteresting for people who like skill-based PvP games. This is a BAD thing for New World, as it could easily leverage its PvP into an eSport and drive up both interest and users via platforms like Twitch (which of course, Amazon owns).
Just look at fighting games. EVO is a big fighting game tournament held every year, each event had over 100k average users throughout each day.
How many viewers did TwitchCon’s New World arena event get? 25k tops? And they couldn’t even fill a full roster of teams. Wasted potential.
Fun fact, as of today I’m the first unpaid forum user to get the admired badge.
