Is it possible we will see a visual effect on slowed mobs? Their animation will be slowed down, and not just fewer attacks per minute with the same animation? This is one of the things I always liked. That spells can affect the visuals of a character or npc. Vice versa with Haste of course.
Well, as for "realism" in computer games, I never understood myself why the attack animation always ends abruptly, and then the character waits up to several seconds before even swinging again. I always enjoyed a more fluid fighting style, but that aside, game mechanics being as they are, I wouldn't have a problem accepting that a slowed attack did as much damage as a normal, even if it is slower.
I agree about the realism factor, it's just hard for me to imagine how it would work practically in a video game. Since all animations are basically scripts that trigger based on underlying action, there's an artifical fluidity at best, and for performance reasons, unique animations are kept to a minimum (to my knowledge). What that essentially distill down to is that even in the most expensive MMOs ever made, combat is generally distilled to a relatively small number of unique animations.
I'm kind of getting off track here but I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I don't really see any perceptible advantage in fluidity by slowing down animations instead of increasing the elapsed time between them. You'll either get very long, slow, repetitive strings of animations, or you'll get faster, more broken up animations.
I believe it's Guild Wars 2, but there is a status effect that reduces your animation speed, but it's a very short duration so it wouldn't really matter either way. EQ2 has melee and spells tied to a Casting Speed stat, and the higher the stat, the quicker you will finish a combat animation. However, that is a bit of a different function than what we're talking about because that didn't work for auto attacks.
I can only assume you're referencing EQ's slow mechanics in how it increased elapsed time between auto attack animations. Ultimately, mobs in Pantheon will have a much more diverse moveset than just auto attacking so I'm not sure if slowing will be equally valid regardless.
I don't think that slow spells are really about making the target slow, like slow-mo. The general thought behind them is more like making the target TIRED so that mustering the energy to swing takes longer. In EQ you had spells like Languid Pace, Tepid/Shiftless/Forlorn Deeds which are more about making the target tired, lazy, and dejected.
Iksar said:I don't think that slow spells are really about making the target slow, like slow-mo. The general thought behind them is more like making the target TIRED so that mustering the energy to swing takes longer. In EQ you had spells like Languid Pace, Tepid/Shiftless/Forlorn Deeds which are more about making the target tired, lazy, and dejected.
Agreed. That would be like what a Shaman would have anyway. Perhaps a Wizard could have a Time Warp effect that really does make targets move in slow motion though. (Decreased attack speed, attack dmg, and movement speed)
Very valid points. I suppose I always thought of slow spells myself as something that slowed the target's attacks by forcing their bodies to move slower, but the other reasoning makes perfect sense. And I guess I never really thought about the whole animation issue, from the animator's point of view, since I've never really animated anything myself.
On an allied note...
.... and while a great pain for the animation dept,
ROOTED => Mob animation of trying to pull feet free from mud etc
HELD => Mob animation like them creepy mimes with their invis walls
DAMAGE SHIELD =>
Translucent shield of fire in front of mob/ally
Thorns visibly adorning the affected mob/ally
HASTE => Showing slight 'trails' following weapon (higher haste = more visible 'trail')
i.e. Visual cues for spell effects (in addition to icons)
But these should be post-launch. Can be before Bard though, as i don't generally play one hehe
Evoras, enjoys poking the Bard lovers ...
Any spell/ability with effects like Slow should have a very visual style.
Two things I'd love to see change in MMOs:
1. Spell effects are clear and visual so you know what's going on by looking at the mob, not the buff/debuff bar.
2. Cooldowns and the like should have a way of indicating readiness without having to look at the toolbar.
The more we can go from watching bars to watching the game the better.
I agree with the sentiments of reducing reliance on UI for gameplay purposes, but it's pretty impractical.
MMOs pre-VR era (still has not happened yet, obviously) are dependent on either cooldown or resource management to indicate readiness. This has to be indicated by the UI because you have no other way to indicate the readiness of several potential actions of something external to you.
As humans with access to the massive amount of different senses we have built-in, it's pretty simple for us to tell our preparedness for a given activity (with some exceptions). We know when it's too cold, too hot, if we're too gassed to run any more. We know when we can't deadlift 1k+ because we'd break, aside from the top .0001% of people capable of it. So let's take a real fight into consideration, then. Real life fighting would be considered spamming in video games, let's face it. Even the most veteran MMA champions only use a handful of striking and grappling techniques, and it's realistically pretty boring from a game design perspective.
Instead, we're stuck with a huge (and simultaneously limited) number of actions that are impossible for us to mentally reference in a real life scenario because that's just the nature of being people. We don't have hit points in real life, or mana, or the ability to wiggle your hands and freeze people. How do you represent things that are so foreign to us in an intuitive manner? UI. If a mob is mezzed, rooted, slowed, and snared simultaneouslly, it'd be a graphical clustersomething to try to represent that without UI indicators. Not to mention the performance ramifications of the partical systems.
Maybe when Sword Art Online becomes a reality this will all be easily dealt with. Until then we're pretty much stuck with a handful of tried-and-true game design philosophies that we can reiterate in different forms. This is true to a lot of mediums, and even human progress itself. True novelty is very, very rare.
Dullahan said:You could have the mob yawn and stretch once in a while between attacks.
This is exactly what I was thinking of when trying to think of a way to visually represent a 'slowed' mob.
When slowed the mob could slouch over a tad and yawn and then noticeably attack slower, maybe even with half-hearted attempts, than normal speed.
I don't think it would be terribly hard to visually represent Liav's example of a mob who is mezzed, slowed, snared, and rooted. The important thing here though would be an order of operations (meaning, you wouldn't have to visually show the mob is snared or slowed or etc until AFTER the mob is no longer mezzed); first, stars and a dazed wobble visual cue for while the mob is mezzed. second, the mob is stationary with roots or bindings that spring up from the ground over the mobs feet to visually cue the mob is rooted. third, the mob is slouched over, yawns, and noticeably attacks slower to cue the mob is slowed. fourth, once the mez wears off and then the root wears off the mob walks slowly around possibly with a limp or hobble to visually cue it is snared.
I'd like to believe that we could do away with the UI debuff window entirely and just have visual animated cues for every debuff. But I'm not sure if that is possible yet because, I agree, once you get to a raid-like setting where a mob could have 20+ debuffs on it that eventually it could get very hard to distinguish all of those visual cues. Trying to display a single mob with snare, root, slow, blinded, poisoned, bleeding, burning, frozen, lowered fire/ice/etc resistances, lowered strength/dexterity/etc, recieving more damage, doing less damage, etc etc etc would be pretty difficult let alone the amount of processing power it would require for all that with multiple mobs in a raid setting.
Well, processing power aside, you also have to create these extra animation sets for literally every single enemy in the game unless they're explicitly immune to a given form of CC. To me, it seems like a massive amount of work to reinvent the wheel. Even in a small group setting I also think it would be challenging to see the animations clearly enough to identify their form of CC in the middle of a fight. I believe the particles would need to be minimalistic from the ground up to facilitate a less cluttered game environment. There may even need to be concessions made in environmental design to ensure that players can accurately tell what's going on.
Either way, I've pretty much said my piece. I like the idea in theory but I think it reaches beyond what is practical for a game like Pantheon.
Yeah, animating every type of mob would definitely be a lot of work; probably more than it's worth. Perhaps it's something they can apply to humanoid mobs at, as they have high reusability in things like emotes.
Side note: with the steam summer sale, I've spent the last week watching videos of steam games, and I'm actually amazed at how many popular games have poor graphics and animations. I mean just totally clunky and out of sync movement that is considered totally passable. I'm beginning to think this unrealistic standard is an MMO thing.
That's not to say I think VR should slack off on that aspect, but that there's definitely a point of diminishing returns it's it's probably not far off.