YAMT (Yet Another My Thoughts) Thread: First Impressions from a Vet.

[CoZ]LostProphet

First off, I know that I'm probably about to repeat what people have already said, but it does bear repeating. These guys need feedback if they're gonna make CR2.0 a success.

Secondly, I've only played briefly with the CR and only with KungFu/Karate so I haven't got a totally rounded view.

Thirdly, this is just my personal opinion. But as Tesco say, Every Little Helps.

With those caveats in mind ...

Abilities need to be defined
I'm well aware that everything is subject to change, which is fine. However it does seem that a lot of abilities are still in very unfinished states. I'd have thought that MA at least would have balanced abilities among themselves.
However that appears not to be the case, with certain moves doing outrageous damage. If that's a bug in the system then fair enough, but if its due purely to the values defined within them, then that's a bit disappointing.
Considering how long this system has been talked about, I got the feeling that most if not all abilities would have newly coded damage values balanced with one another, to SOME degree.

Attributes, influences, initiative...
I'm not a stupid person, but I feel slightly overwhelmed with the level of things that can be changed now. I'll admit to being pretty confused as to what various attributes do. Whilst this will appeal to micro-manager types, I'm concerned that there is SO much that you will be forced to micro-manage in order to get a halfway decent build.
I always had a problem with things being too heavily influenced with clothing, but was quite happy with the way things were defined in the abilities themselves.
Now it seems to have been strung out into more component parts, with base definitions in the abilities that are then manipulated by attributes and clothing.
Whilst I'm sure some clever person will come up with a new Calculator application for these things, it looks a lot more complicated and seems to indicate that a Level 50 is going to have to sit down for about half an hour just to work out what the basic aspects of his/her RSI will be after a respec.
I also hope that the effects of attributes aren't so specialised or necessary to place into one area for one good build that it effectively neuters an RSI's effectiveness when doing something else.

Combat itself
First of all, the faster combat, newer animations and so forth are excellent. From the duels I had (which were many) I was impressed how fluid it seemed.
Unfortunately it also lost me. I was duelling to have fun but I know that I'd get frustrated with an NPC that's programmed to know what it's doing.

-- Combat Rolls. I don't care quite so much about what my base roll is compared to my overall roll. What I care about is the end product. WHAT exactly am I hitting my opponent with.

-- Displaying Data. This needs to be worked on. In the old system in actual fact, displaying the rolls wasn't so important because everything was broken down into clearly defined rounds. You won or you lost, and the animation of icons showed that. However now, when it's more important that we know (with the removal of Zero Sum), it's all been taken away!!
I play at 1600*1200 with Tiny font in my chat. I do it this way because before I've always only had to glance at it. Now I'm going to have to up the font, make it more intrusive (far more intrusive in fact that the old combat HUD) to see what's going on. What with combat being faster paced, people around you shooting at you and using abilities, it's nigh-on impossible to see what's going on.
Basically, I want the old HUD back. Make it smaller, that's fine. Remove the icons, that's fine. Just give me a HUD that's in my field of vision (i.e. where the action and hotbar is) where I can see definitively if I win, lose, or draw the round.
People on 800*600 have to be even more disadvantaged. From screenshots I've seen, they barely have room to extend the chat box further than the default before they run out of room!!

--Animations. That leads me quite nicely onto this. When we heard about CR2.0 I don't think I was alone in envisaging awesome animations where somebody catches my triple front kick and throws me onto the floor, and so on.
But instead, whilst the backend combat ideals have been beefed up and made more complex and lifelike, the animation side of things has not.
I realise that it's probably a huge amount of work to create a block animation for every attack, a hit-hit animation for every attack, etc., but quite frankly without it ... it doesn't look right.
If my opponent and I hit each other with a punch, we should be seen to hit each other. This whole thing with initiative just doesn't make sense. It's an easy way out of not going the whole hog.
If a guy punches me in a bar, I am NOT going to do damage to him (unless he's particularly poor at hitting somebody). If we hit each other, then we'll both do damage.
It should be the same in game.
If I hit a guy yet he has the "Initiative" and hits me too, then only his animation will display yet damage will be done to both parties. This is simply confusing and unrealistic.

--Special Attacks. This is another area which hasn't been explained and/or executed properly IMO. In the old system, you queued attacks each round. That should happen still, just faster. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with that, it was just too slow.
How do I know when one round ends and the next begins? What happens if I activate a special too soon or too late?
It blinks in the bar and not much else happens. My suggestion:

I activate MisDirect Punch in the middle of a round. It requires no state from my opponent.
The hotbar blinks to show it is activated.
The next round, I do this special move.
It hits, and does damage. In this case it stops blinking.
OR
It misses, and stays active for the next round. It can be deactivated with another click of the button and stops blinking.

I activate Ki-Charged Foot Sweep. it requires my target to be Staggered.
The hotbar blinks to show it is activated.
If my move in the round causes Stagger, then it is activated immediately the next round and behaves the same way as above with MisDirect Punch.
However if I do NOT cause Stagger, then it stays waiting until I cause it, and then activates immediately.

^That might be the way it is supposed to work of course. But I don't know, because it seemed totally random to me.

Hotbar.
I have to admit, the late adoption of the dual hotbar makes me curious and also nervous.
Curious to see how developers and testers played the game with one hotbar and *didn't* think they could do with more room, and nervous for the future of CR2.0/the game because the entire community cried out for it instantly, and yet CR2.0 has been in development for a long time and apparently nobody there thought of it first.

It's great, more space is always good. I wish the attacks were still bound to WASD but I guess I'll get used to it in time.
However, now that more buffs are active rather than passive, I feel like we're stuck right back where we were.
You increased hotbar space by a factor of two, but it almost seems like you've increased the number of things to go in the hotbar by a factor of two.

As buffs are now active (Hyper-dodge, hyper-dance, hyper-tie-your-shoelaces) where only one or two were before and the rest were bound into passive abilities, we now have more to activate. I haven't played with them yet, so I don't know - but if you've put them on a timer then it validates my point. If I have to stop every 30 seconds to hit about 8 different buttons to reapply my buffs it's going to get very old very quickly.
And if they're a one-switch, constantly-active thing, why don't they just apply themselves as soon as you "install" them in your memory?

I've been typing this on and off for ages and I think I'm about run out of things so far (and its time for lunch SMILEY

) so any comments are welcome, and I'll be back if I can think of anything else.

>revolt_

These are EXACTLY my thoughts and impressions too.

In future I will just reference this post, because I don't want to be repetetive. (and I'm getting lazier and lazier to write long posts... SMILEY

)

>revolt_

**cloudwolf** · 01/18/2006 07:06:21

Kick *CENSORED* thread, i totally agree with everything posted (except the old UI returning, we need something like the ideas discussed here)

I especially agree with the animations/initiative part.

CR2.0 just isnt right without hit/hit animations. I too know it's probably a lot fo work but with a complete overhaul of the combat system i think it deserves such attention. Not to mention the stupid unrealism of it all, so much for this being an RPG huh?

Message Edited by cloudwol on 01-18-200603:06 PM

**DarkRevenantW** · 01/18/2006 07:05:45

I'm just worried about the new hyper-abilities too. Are they going to have scary animations too?:smileyindifferent:

Message Edited by Woreku on 01-18-200607:05 AM

Jaeger Chase

Great post, i agree with a lot of it. The thing you mentioned about activating like misdirect punch and it doesn't go through, i agree that it should continue trying to go through the next round without you pressing it to activate it again. Yes, there should be more combat animations, but i'm satisfied right now. Other things need to be handled first (like the vampire NPC in this mission that kills me with one bite).

[CoZ]LostProphet

Thanks for the positive feedback SMILEY

I like the mockup of the combat rolls, though I'm not 100% sure how well they'd work. Would it still be too small? I guess we won't know until someone actually tries it out on the game!

Another thing I meant to add, which I think ties in with my point on the over-complexity of things.

Ballistic/Thrown - Resistance/Defence
Under the old system, we had Ranged. Ranged referred to things thrown at you. Bullets, knives, crockery, pets (hey, it happens in domestics)
I'd need to take a closer look at what the attributes, etc., grant, but why have Knife and Bullet "resistance" been seperated?
Unless there are items and abilities that buff both at the same time (which again makes seperating them kind of pointless), I'm not quite sure how much sense it will make.

If somebody fires a gun at me and I can dodge the bullets, surely I should be equally as good at dodging a knife?

[CoZ]LostProphet

Jaeger Chase wrote:
Great post, i agree with a lot of it. The thing you mentioned about activating like misdirect punch and it doesn't go through, i agree that it should continue trying to go through the next round without you pressing it to activate it again. Yes, there should be more combat animations, but i'm satisfied right now. Other things need to be handled first (like the vampire NPC in this mission that kills me with one bite).

That reminded me of something I didn't explicitly say but needs saying -
The blink thing seems to be a bit broken, and as we can't see what attacks are queued, currently I don't know if an attack will repeat itself or not. When I click it again, am I turning it off or on? There just needs to be greater transparency in general with the way the system works.

**Satta**

Very good post. I got on CR2 for the first time last night. I was greatly impressed and excited. Maybe because it was alot of new stuff to learn. I did not have a chance to do much but one thing caught my eye.

I was under the impression that the duel hotbar meant we had 20 rows and not 10. Apparently you still have 10 rows, however you can display 2 rows at one time instead of having to keep switching. I can live with that but there is a problem.

The devs have added more things to place in the hotbars. Your regular WASD attacks are now in your hotbar along with a host of other buffs. We actually have less space now, and we have to do more clicking and looking at the hotbar instead of just pushing WASD and watching the animations. This is a problem for us vets because alot of us have almost every tree if not every tree and we have our hotbars already set up for each different build.

Not only that we use the hotbars for our different clothes to wear depending on what build you have, and for other macros, etc... Somebody like me has every single place in the hotbar used up. So in the middle of battle I can run to a HL and within seconds switch my build and clothes without skipping a beat. Without the extra space this makes it more difficult to do.

My suggestion would be to have each hotbar have its very own 10 separate rows. Therefore if the top row is on row 1 it is not the same as the bottom hotbars row 1.

Also is it me or does EFK do extreme amount of damage? I was able to kill level 50s yesterday in just 2 moves. I did 1,500 damage with EFK and it was like Bulldogging somebody. I do not think that a level 50 should be able to kill another level 50 in 3 moves or less. Then again we do not understand the clothing or how to buff ourselves up just yet.

I had a great time and I am looking forward to testing it again.

Can we come here with these suggestions or should we make all these suggestions in a bug report?

[CoZ]LostProphet

I think they want suggestions (wide ranging suggestions such as these covering a lot of points) in the forums so that we can bounce ideas off each other and refine them.

But I'd say if you come up with something whilst using an item/ability in game then submitting it as a /bug will still get it through to the right people.

Freiheit · 01/18/2006 07:42:58

[CoZ]LostProphet wrote:
--Animations. That leads me quite nicely onto this. When we heard about CR2.0 I don't think I was alone in envisaging awesome animations where somebody catches my triple front kick and throws me onto the floor, and so on.
But instead, whilst the backend combat ideals have been beefed up and made more complex and lifelike, the animation side of things has not.
I realise that it's probably a huge amount of work to create a block animation for every attack, a hit-hit animation for every attack, etc., but quite frankly without it ... it doesn't look right.
If my opponent and I hit each other with a punch, we should be seen to hit each other. This whole thing with initiative just doesn't make sense. It's an easy way out of not going the whole hog.
If a guy punches me in a bar, I am NOT going to do damage to him (unless he's particularly poor at hitting somebody). If we hit each other, then we'll both do damage.
It should be the same in game.
If I hit a guy yet he has the "Initiative" and hits me too, then only his animation will display yet damage will be done to both parties. This is simply confusing and unrealistic.

--Special Attacks. This is another area which hasn't been explained and/or executed properly IMO. In the old system, you queued attacks each round. That should happen still, just faster. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with that, it was just too slow.
How do I know when one round ends and the next begins? What happens if I activate a special too soon or too late?
It blinks in the bar and not much else happens. My suggestion:

I activate MisDirect Punch in the middle of a round. It requires no state from my opponent.
The hotbar blinks to show it is activated.
The next round, I do this special move.
It hits, and does damage. In this case it stops blinking.
OR
It misses, and stays active for the next round. It can be deactivated with another click of the button and stops blinking.

I activate Ki-Charged Foot Sweep. it requires my target to be Staggered.
The hotbar blinks to show it is activated.
If my move in the round causes Stagger, then it is activated immediately the next round and behaves the same way as above with MisDirect Punch.
However if I do NOT cause Stagger, then it stays waiting until I cause it, and then activates immediately.

^That might be the way it is supposed to work of course. But I don't know, because it seemed totally random to me.

The above is the of great concern to me.

As for the other things, ShadowSK made a great post about displaying rolls with the new HUD. I love the duel hotbars personally.

The damage is a nasty bug it seems.

Attributes seem to force people into using a specific set of builds rather than being a jack of all trades. Each attribute that you choose as a main seems to have one that will compliment it best for a particular role your playing. For instance Freiheit will be max focus with most other points in belief and vitality...this should help Freiheit be a good gunman as per the attribute/influence notes. It also keeps me from using MKT, which is what I usually use in the current combat system, because I'd need to put my attribute points in Focus and Reason for accuracy and damage...

I doubt you'll see the ma you just killed in pvp come back through a hardline as mkt or hacker...

Time to level some alts...

Message Edited by Freiheit on 01-18-200607:42 AM

bonobi

Nice post LP!

the large amount of damage is a bug cause I don't get do that much damage with my attacks and I've tried doing different things to get it to work but can't.

**cloudwolf** · 01/18/2006 07:55:35

Yup, thats another thing i agree with (and iv seen quite a lot on these boards)

The hotbars need to be seperate, we need 20 bars imo.

I also strongly agree with the arguement against so many new buffs, like LP said, why not have our profession buffs passive? it makes no sense to me.

Oh and another vital point that needs to be recognised. The WASD/directional arrows bindings, why in gods name arnt they there anymore? With the new combat everything looks nice and fluid, stylish and nice yet we dont actually get the chance to apprechiate it cos we're constantly looking at our hotbar, bs i say.

I can only pray the devs are actually read all the feedback floating around and take it seriously rather than a 'they'll live' attitude... The costumer knows best afterall.

Message Edited by cloudwol on 01-18-200603:55 PM

**Resonance**

I actually managed to do some fighting last night, and I have to agree with most of the posts in this thread.

My $.02...

No Zero-Sum combat and animations...Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Half the time I can't even tell if I've won a round or not. I see two block animations and I take damage? I stand motionless while a mob flips and jumps around when I win the roll? And I can win a round, yet still take damage? Maybe taking out zero-sum is more "realistic", but it definitely adds to the confusion. Put zero sum back in, while it may not be realistic it does keep things simple and intuitive. I shouldn't have to scroll up my chat log to see if my last power attack landed or not.

Speaking of confusion...

We need to see our rolls, the chat log scrolls up way to fast. I never thought I would say this, but we need the old hud system back. I want to know what attack I am performing, and what's queued up, and I want to know what my opponent is rolling against me. Let us map WASD to the combat tactics again...please.

Buffs...all those buffs...

I have KungFu Grandmaster loaded, I am using the KungFu style...of course I want all the buffs! Why do I have to keep clicking on it? These should be running in the background. Micro-managing all the different buffs (including the awakened abilities) is a big turn off. I also don't like the idea of automatically switching fighting styles if I use a special from another tree. If I want to switch styles in mid-fight, I can do that on my own.

Attributes...

How did they decide which attributes affect which stats? It seems totally random to me. Make it simple...if I want to build an MA specialist I should be able to max out say Belief and get a totally rocking MA, if I want a Hacker Character, I put all my points into Reason. As it stands right now, I have to sit down and build a spreadsheet in order to figure out how many points I want to put into each attribute. Group stats for the 4 different attack modes together, stick some regen and other miscellaneous stats on the others. Simpler is better.

Some pluses...

Animations seem a LOT smoother and in just over an hour I think I saw 4 or 5 that I had never seen before. More bullet-time blur-dodging...very cool. Ki charged foot sweep is actually usable. Free-fire melee attacks.

Bottom line...

I think we're headed in the right direction here, but they may have gone too far towards the complexity/realism side. Give us our hud/feedback for each round. Re-think zero-sum and the whole "initiative=animation" thing. Make fighting as simple as possible, with lots of visual feedback.

**UniToxic**

i want to see that tiny little circle around our feet so we know who we are IL with..........you know like in the cr2.0 walrus showoff clip

Oar

Thank you everyone for all the feedback so far.

A quick clarification note: Any time your character does damage in a combat exchange you will see a hit animation associated with your character. Initiative is currently an accuracy boost to your abilities used in combat.

Hit / Hit - both characters are seen hitting each other
Miss / Hit - the player hitting has the animation show.
Hit (ability) / Hit (ability) - the ability of character with the highest accuracy score is executed
Hit / Hit (ability) - if the ability hits, it is executed and plays as a Miss/Hit scenario, otherwise a Hit/Miss scenario is played. If your character misses, he/she does no damage.

If your character misses in a combat exchange, he/she does no damage.