Posts made by Target

@therippyone said in Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?:

revolves around people being more familiar with the lower levels to perform an effective feint to get the skill out. It's a Batman Gambit move, in essence - you make a play based on what you know the opponent will do, because the previous two levels trained them to do the single worst thing they could against this one, run away.

That's taking advantage of conditioning. While feinting also takes advantage of conditioning, the act of doing so is not necessarily a feint. Feinting is telegraphing an action and then changing that action.

And that would be the point - the ability to craft a viable custom skill set, that plays in a way that the player likes, while at the same time preventing any build from being "the best" build. Having animation cancels to produce feints is one option, but it is far from the only one - what needs to happen, is that the devs need to decide what they want the balance to be - animation cancels encourage faster play, while locked animations require more precise play (because a miss leaves you more vulnerable when you can't get out of it). One isn't better than the other, though I'm sure everyone will have a preference.

I'm actually not necessarily advocating for animation canceling to be in Fractured, I don't mind either way. I'm just addressing the fact that animation canceling can be an intentional and viable way to balance a combat system. Everyone here seemed to have some preconceived bias against the notion of animation cancelling and it was a little shocking to me. A lot of great combat systems use animation canceling and it can be used for more than just increasing DPS.

If your guild is big into PvP, having multiple towns is potentially a huge advantage. You guild member cap is limited by certain bulidings within a town, and by having more towns, you can have a larger guild. The hard parts are recruiting, enticing people to live in those towns, and holding on to your towns.

@lovechildbell said in Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?:

why don't they just have another animation for when you miss instead of cutting the attack animation short when you properly animation cancel?"

Because that would be a lot less flexible unless they developed a new miss animation for every single move. Some moves are intentionally made to be safe - they have a very short animation even if they miss. These moves allow you to poke and prod at your enemy without putting yourself in danger, but the reward for landing them is small. On the other hand, you have moves with longer animations that are devastating if they land, but you're in trouble if they don't. Having a single miss animation removes all of this nuance to the combat system, and the lack of animation cancel on hit would probably look very janky for most 2D fighters.

As for your question you have feints by adding in moves that are feints.

And what would that look like if not an animation cancel? Keep in mind that feinting is inherently a very meta action. It's your mind vs your opponent's mind, not necessarily your character vs their character. You're tricking your opponent into thinking you're going to do one thing by initiating an action but then doing something different.

@evolgrinz said in Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?:

Or just make it so animations can not be cancelled. You will have to wait for the animation to finish before you can use another skill or move (unless it's a skill that specifically mentions it can be used while moving).
This solves the problems and adds another strategic element to know if it's a good time to cast a longer animation spell or if it's a better idea to cast one with a smaller animation.

It doesn't need to be all or nothing. You can have some animations that can be canceled and some that can't; you can even narrow it down to some parts of an animation allowing cancelling and some parts requiring commitment. In a game with CC, long animation skills can be impossible to pull off, sometimes to the point their never seeing use. Animation canceling can be used to mitigate some of that risk and potentially open up build viability. Canceling the animation can even have a cost associated with it - going on coolown, or using mana, or even some other creative effects. Animation cancelling as a balancing factor can drastically increase skill variability.

@mae Good aligned players are incapable of harming non-evil players, and Arboreus has safe zones that only good aligned players can enter (I think it was 50% of the planet). If an evil player comes to Arboreus, they will be debuffed, and will be constantly attacked by wildlife (the planet defends itself). If a neutral player commits a hostile action, they will be treated as evil.

It will be incredibly hard to do any sort of real open world PvP on Arboreus.

@boogis The extent of what you can put in wagons hasn't been confirmed, but it seems likely that there will be trading wagons that you can put gear and stuff into. Your normal inventory is very limited in both slots and the amount of weight you can carry. It makes sense that there will be wagons for all types of items.

There'll be nothing definite, but you can definitely pick up on hints. Due to stat affinities, subraces will tend towards certain types of builds. You'll likely be able to tell what kind of armor someone is wearing. The weapon someone is wielding is a big hint since some skills only work with certain weapons.

There's nothing stopping a bunch of players getting together and forming a caravan. It's actually likely this will be a normal thing since it would be safer than being solo.

In chronological order: Planetside, Guild Wars, Silkroad Online, 2Moons, Tabula Rasa, Atlantica, Valkyrie Sky, Aion, Aika, Guild Wars 2, and Defiance. I've played a lot more but those are the ones that stick out to me. I'm mostly attracted to MMOs with good PvP.

Despite all my MMO experience, I still mostly consider myself an FPS player, but there haven't been any shooters I've liked for years.

@theseeker 10 is the baseline for all stats. 6 is the lowest you can go but you start getting negatives when you go below 10.

@lovechildbell If you're talking about the fighting game example, missing doesn't cut the animation short. The animation can only be cut short when the attack lands, allowing you to land followup attacks which is how combos in most fighting games work. Sitting through the full animation of the move is the punishment for missing.

@evolgrinz said in Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?:

Why not have have have the animations be sort of charge bar. So if you complete full animation you do 100% of the damage potential. But if you cancel it halfway through, you will only do 50% of the damage potential.

You're assuming that starting the animation of a skill will complete the skill's effect regardless of when it's canceled, and I will agree that implementation of animation canceling is usually bad design, but your suggestion wouldn't really work for a lot of attacks. If I swing a sword, but cancel before the attack lands, why should I do any damage? If I shoot a bow and decide to walk instead of wait for the recovery animation to finish, why would that arrow do any less damage?

Let's take a specific example from Dota: One of the heroes has a big flashy AoE stun ult that has about a .5 sec animation before the stun. One of the counters to this ult is an item that gives you spell immunity for 10 secs but with a long cooldown. If I'm playing this hero and I notice the enemy hero I'm targeting has this item, I can hit my ult key and then the stop command key. The result is the flash from the start of my ult animation beginning but then stopping abruptly. This would hopefully cause my enemy to notice the beginning of the animation and reactively use his spell immunity item causing it to go on cooldown while my ult hasn't.

My question to those against animation canceling: do you consider feints abusing bugs? And how would you implement feinting without animation cancels?

@ladyrowan said in Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?:

For example a spell/attack that should take .5 seconds does not have an animation that is .8 seconds. To me though this would be a bug that would need to be fixed not some work around that I need to do to short circuit the animation.

But that's also something that can be a balancing factor. For example in fighting games, some moves can be canceled into another attack if they hit an opponent, allowing you to pull off a combo. If that move misses, then the whole animation plays through, giving your opponent a window of opportunity to punish the miss.

Granted that's something that's not very likely to be implemented in Fractured, but there is a martial arts school

Warframe has a system where you scan enemies to unlock their entries in a database that gives you info about them. Some of these entries, when unlocked, come with a lore snippet. Fractured will have a bestiary that serves a similar function to Warframe's enemy database, and it could also be a way to have some small bits of lore.

@Azraelius

@kellewic said in Crafting / cooking / alchemy:

Likely came from the Q&A at -

It wasn't specifically mentioned that crafting/cooking/alchemy used your stat distribution, but I'm inferring that from the fact that other professions work that way.

@jetah It's not a problem, it's an intentional part of the game's design and it comes from its RTS roots. Imagine controlling a bunch of units and having to wait for animations on each individual unit to finish before they follow the next command. Things would get desynchronized and messy very quickly. Fighting games are another example where they're used intentionally. Sometimes they're officially called 'feints' (they're also used for feints in Dota). When someone discovered animation cancelling in the Diablo 3 beta, a Blizzard representative explained that it was intentionally added to make combat feel good and responsive.

Not every game needs to be Dark Souls where you're forced to commit to every single action you take.

Everyone can learn all the crafting professions and there aren't any levels related to them. You progress in them by learning new recipes, and what recipes you can use is determined by your stat distribution.

@evolgrinz It's a pretty big part of Dota 2 and part of the game's balance; there's even a stop command key that cancels whatever you're doing. For example, a move order will cancel just about any attack or skill animation. Some heroes have an attack animation that does damage very early in the animation and a longer recovery animation and other heroes do their damage towards the end of their attack animation. The former group of heroes can take steps in between their attacks so they can effectively attack while being somewhat mobile while it's harder for the latter group of heroes to take advantage the same mechanic.

If designed for it, animation canceling can make a game feel smoother by allowing you to fluidly transition between actions. It's intentionally added into more games than most of you realize and you've probably taken advantage of it without realizing it.

I'm not too worried about losing my stuff; I get the impression that everything is supposed to be expendable except for your cosmetics which are tied to your account with a wardrobe system and the knowledge you gain, which is permanent. The only thing that might suck is if I've acquired a decent amount of wealth and take a break, and come back to find all my money is gone.

@theseeker I would say it's the opposite. Beastmen are incapable of harming each other on Arboreus so it's much easier to do things solo. Demons have consequence free PvP on at all times. If you play solo as demon, you'll probably be constantly attacked by other demons. Having a good guild is much more important on Tartaros if you want to get anything done.

Arboreus is very limited for PvP so you would probably want to move to the human planet Syndesia. On Syndesia your options for PvP are to hunt evil players as a good aligned player, or to be neutral and attack whoever you please. I don't remember if beastmen have the option of choosing to be evil unless they change into abominations, but if you do become an abomination, that change is permanent and forces you to live on the demon free-for-all PvP planet Tartaros.

You can be whatever build you want for PvP, that isn't influenced by your alignment or anything.

Here's the PvP spotlight if you want more information.