Criticisms around combat systems

[11thboris]

These are my feelings, praises and gripes for the game. I will not delve to long on the praises.
Iv’e just finished breach campaign, this is my second walkthrough of the story (what there was of it) and some side activities.

Games world building is genuine 10/10, music atmosphere, npcs that populate it, their stories, the structure of the main story, everything is great.
I think most of the systems are people are having problems with are perfectly fine, travel sistem, crafting (with some exceptions), gathering of resources, all of those things are fine by me.

My main gripes are with the combat. And I must say outright say I really hate the combat. Even more because i like everything else so much.
What makes it even more bad for me is because i have no problem with a single mechanics of the combat it self, but the doughy feeling it has when you play it is more than often infuriating.
I get that developers want a hard game, so do I. But there is “hard” when you always see clearly where you made mistake, and you feel you get punished fairly the feeling of ‘ill get it next time’, and there is ““hard”” where the game is kicking you in the groin every 2 seconds (at least you feel like it)

Below is the list of gripes I have, in no particular order, as i wrote them in the notes while playing;

• First of all, every character combat animation is too slow, that is the most obvious thing to me. I think if one would just outright speed them up by 20%, it would fix 80% of problems. But there needs to be more nuance to it, i personally do not like those kinds of changes, where developers go like “we increased or decreased that by 2%, its a fix”. Ignoring the fundamental problems.

• Healing animation is too long. I get that there needs to be intention and space you create for everything in this kind of combat system, but taking two seconds while you have no space for healing is unfair. It feels like it is long for long sake, just to piss you off (this is the theme of the day).

• Wind-ups for some weapons are too long, it feels like slow motion. Ive played with strength/dex spear and the first hit literally feels like hitting under water, most of the hits felt that way. The same is for wind-downs, I can not count how many times I have been hit, after i hit and then was just locked in the animation after my hit, just standing there waiting to be punished, for what, hitting enemy? I experimented with other weapons and most suffer from the same issue. Again I understand the purpose of this but there is such a thing as too much, the character in the end feels like slug. If the player has stamina, it should feel like it, not like he will die from astma on every step.

• Crafting is really fun and well thought out, but some resources are to rare, mainly the Dracaena, Artemisia, Lithops. I ended up with stacks and stacks of other ingredients for the food (like shrooms), but always missing that one. I dont know if that is intentional, but i feel like there should be at least some balance.

• Single target hits “pokes” and or overhead slams miss locked on target too much.

• Rolls have a mind of their own, the direction does not feel precise (and it is crucial that it is precise), it should not feel like drunk falling on the side of the road. Many times the character will not roll in the direction pressed, mainly happens when trying to roll back from enemy and the character side rolls.

• Charge attacks are almost useless, and is to big of a risk. Any attack that has long animation is basically useless, that includes combos that you sometimes lock your self into and then certain sweet death. So what is left is dancing, or better to say running away from enemy and waiting for a single or two pokes (which character sometimes misses) and you pray you have enough stamina (i had several mods on items for stamina) to run away again. The game in this sense forces you to play like coward and not some “hero”.

And below is the list of some suggestions I have;

• Almost all combat animations need a speed up.

• There should be a cancel animation, but not outright (since it would defeat the concept of the combat). There could be like a short roll or side step out of animation. This would bring so much more dynamic feeling to the combat. This does not mean one should be able to cancel animation in mid air. It can be done tastefully.

• Dmg to stagger, and stagger animation interruption when enemies hit you in the middle of your animation should be literally halved. There should be no punishment for action, or it should be less than for inaction (standing still). Seeing your character being ragdolled around just because you tried to hit the enemy is ridiculous. Player is as far as I noticed always at an disadvantage here compared to enemy npcs. One should ask, just why ?

• When it comes to healing, intermediate healing needs to be addressed, in between fights there is no reason to walk around with 5% hp, to have to consume valuable food, or to go back to town. I think berries, apples, and the raspberries, should be buffed (i actually found out if you consume all three one after the other, you get desired effect). Or make a healing potion that gets you your hp back over time, all of it. The food should be for the fight.

• Charged attacks should always do dmg, the length of the press should dictate amount of dmg, and the attack animation should execute as soon as you release the button. This would fix getting bonked on the head while on 50% charge. Which happens for all intents and purposes, always.

• Rolls should be tighter, much tighter, and i dont mean faster (ignoring the character weight) , but more intentional, with clear direction.

• Action que should accept button inputs only after the animation finishes. Or the window should be smaller. Too many times i wondered why the character is hitting twice when i clearly pressed once.

In the end, i think desired outcome should be combat that feels good. That you go in with risc but dont feel powerless, because 90 % of the fight is taken by your animations, that is if you decide to fight and not just run and poke.
There is also complicated question of what “hard” means. Is the game “easy to play, hard to mastee” (i dont think this is good path for this game), or is it “hard to play, hard to master” (if you only struggle, then what is the point, where is the fun part), and in my opinion how it should feel is “challenging to play, hard to master”, where you feel motivated to get better.

There will be allot of elitist with their “get good”.
But the games success will not be in having dedicated small community of players that are “used” to game, that like banging their head against the wall, I know because I am one such player. The game will be success if it is fair and fun, and designed well in all aspects. If it is fair in its difficulty.

I dont pretend like I understand game development, far from it. And I am probably off by a mile with some of these things. But these are my good intentioned observations. I really want this game to be good and successful.

Kind regards

[Psytoxin]

I agree with a lot of points you made.
You’re not alone in the feeling that the animations are sluggish and clunky. The enemies sure as hell like to go at you like hyenas on speed but the player meanwhile is fighting underwater.

I really really think we need animation canceling, the game punishes you HEAVILY for pressing a button at an odd time and simply makes you commit to it. There is a skill and it basically muscle memory for me from playing games like Super Smash Bros competitively that there’s a grace period where you can animation cancel into something else. There’s bosses that are HUGE assholes about you getting hit, it makes combat very slow and tedious where you have to be ultra careful because the boss might throw this pretty quick move that knocks you down to the floor and guess what now you’re dead because you cant do anything about it and hits you like a truck.
Animation cancelling will be requested constantly forever until it gets implemented, might as well implement it now. There’s 0 design downside to it and only upside.
1.- It still takes skill to perform (you’re reacting)
2.- you pay in stamina cost, dealing no damage (if thats what the devs want)
3,- the only reward is that you potentially reset the momentum of the fight.
4.- ultimately animation cancelling feels good to the player and gives them control over the situation (of course I think there’s a point where an animation should not be cancellable anymore)

I’m a game developer and aspiring game designer and I really spend a lot of time thinking about game design. Im by no means the know-it-all of game design but I do my studying and play a ton of games, I really think some of this mechanics need to be reworked and tweaked. The “git gud” argument only has so much weight when it comes to game design, people will throw it just to feel good about themselves to to have a laugh.

Ultimately I think the developers will realize that the combat needs to be tweaked and im sure they already know that, they are very smart people.

Anyway, sorry for the long reply but if you have a minute you can read my post talking about these issues and others as well if you’re interested: Feedback & Suggestions Post-Breach Update – Combat, Builds, Gear, and Enchantments - #5 by Zenith

[11thboris]

Ive read your thread, they are good suggestions, but like you mentioned, probably something devs are aware of. Tweaks there and there are easy to implement. And they already did, in allot of aspects. Like for example with shields, all be it I agree that hp cost of blocking is unnecessary.

But the combat thing, seems fundamental. And extremely hard to get right.

About animation cancellation, like i said. I dont think there should be outright animation cancelation that feels unnatural/arcady, but my suggestion is to have animation chaining, like a “back off” small animation, similar to a side step you have as a light character but much smaller in scope, just to create a flow and ability to react. And like you said, now you just feel powerless, you press a button and pray.
There should be enough time to see that you are in animation, you see enemy winding up, you deduce that your hit will not connect, you step back, block, parry or roll, and then continue. It would really create neat flow to a combat.
This only makes sense in a more comprehensive combat revision.

[Psytoxin]

Animation cancelling can work, you just need to do it in a way that makes sense and is natural, usually there’s a kind of “grace period” where you can cancel out of an animations within certain frames. For example if an animation is 10 frames long, you’d be able to cancel out of it from frames 3 to 6 but the other frames would not be cancellable.

Anyway, I like your suggestion of having a kind of chain animation out of an attack, it could be very interesting for PvP where you could also do faint attacks. For example begin charging an attack and then cancel into a light attack and so on.

Either way I think we all agree that the game needs tweaks and changes in terms of animation and combat. "
I will upvote your post so more people read it, if you could do the same for me i would be thankful.

[Zenith]

The whole animation lockdowns feel especially worse because of the game’s serious problem with ability queing on multiple inputs.

They need to reduce the window for ability queing.

A lot of weapons also feel incredibly slow while enemies feel incredibly faster than you, and this is not playing a 2H greatsword bruiser.

The other annoyance is the forced displacement on attack sequences. Some mage staves make you walk/slide backwards as you perform the attack, placing you out of range for follow up. Other weapons like the daggers make you fall off cliffs as they lunge you forwards even after an enemy dies or you’re near an edge after pushing an enemy off.