Goblin Squad Member
|
I should also point out the impressiveness around the 0:59 mark. Instead of the goblins sitting around like idiots waiting to be pulled like in most MMOs they actively start attacking. (Unless someone shot at them first and I didn't see.)
Nah. That is just aggro-range kicking in. Everquest had that in '99 and pretty much every MMO I know after that.
Actually, Everquest Aggro-range is pretty sophisticated compared to modern MMO's.
It depended on distance-to-mob, on faction with that specific mob, even on the sit/stand state. Sit-aggro could be brutal since you need to sit down when meditating. Sitting also negated any AC so that first hit was Always a bone-cracker (the sound you heard with a specifically large hit).
Also, level difference to the mob plays a role. Everquest is still awesome in so many ways.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Then it's a rather large aggro-range. That's a good thing in my opinion as it's more realistic.
Some mobs would have huge aggro-ranges in Everquest. Actually some would aggro by line of sight, no matter the distance.
The entire zone of Marus Seru(outdoors zone) was pretty much that way.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Then it's a rather large aggro-range. That's a good thing in my opinion as it's more realistic.Some mobs would have huge aggro-ranges in Everquest. Actually some would aggro by line of sight, no matter the distance.
The entire zone of Marus Seru(outdoors zone) was pretty much that way.
Same with the glimmerlings in DAoC. If you could see them, they were already heading your way. Usually bringing friends. Running through the Sheeroe Hills with a dragon-hunting army was always an experience.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Someone shot them. The aggro range in game ATM is short and not very sophisticated.
Hopefully that gets changed with crowdforging. The shot must have occured before the video cut to that scene as the player clearly has his mace and shield displayed in the weapon icons the whole time. Or another player behind him took the shot. Thanks for the clarification!
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Someone shot them. The aggro range in game ATM is short and not very sophisticated.
Kinda like the forums ;)
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Allowing the player to move the information to a less obtrusive location is a big part of UI design. Personally, I want all of the information I need in a visually compact area; I'm not sure if the numerical value of the last hit is information I need often enough to put it somewhere that it takes up visual space and brain bandwidth.
Guildwars does it well in my opinion. Combat damage dealt and taken is piped to effectively what is a chat window. If you want to see the fancy numbers, you have that window open and can watch them scroll by.
I personally would rather just see particle effects (for spells) or blood splatter effects (for weapons) to indicate a hit, and keep the numbers hidden for later review.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I'm more of a knees-and-elbows person with some grappling. Walking around with rifles isn't much of an option as a civilian nerd, even if I was beefcake strong punching people with a closed fist is just trouble, and good maces are hard to find*.
and here i was, believing that the prefered melee-weapon of the civilian nerd/geek was this
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm more of a knees-and-elbows person with some grappling. Walking around with rifles isn't much of an option as a civilian nerd, even if I was beefcake strong punching people with a closed fist is just trouble, and good maces are hard to find*.
and here i was, believing that the prefered melee-weapon of the civilian nerd/geek was this
No, it is an overloaded book bag. When swung or thrown this weapon can bowl through several victims, or burst open causing area of effect damage. I have held some book bags that weigh enough to make effective siege weapons. I have discovered book bags, left over the summer in lockers, filled with last June's lunch. These biological weapons require immediate disposal, and only a fool would risk opening them. Book bags filled with dirty gym clothes are also a severe threat, especially when allowed to fester of an extended weekend or a vacation.
Fear the book bag!
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
@Deianira - the objective of putting the UI in the center of the screen is to allow you to focus all your attention on the indicators showing what effects are on your target and not have to keep changing your focus to things on the perimeter of the screen. The intention is that when you fight, you pretty much see everything you need to see without having to move your eyes.
That's a great design, and one that I totally agree with. I just also think that "what I need to see" will vary by player, and allowing each element to be decluttered or cluttered individually is better than the alternative. I would even suggest the option to have cooldown indicators moved to the HUD, further reducing the visual scan distance and allowing more attention to be focused on figuring out the opponents' expected actions and which preactions are best.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think the biggest takeaway from all this UI talk is this: make UI modding easy, please! There are as many opinions on how the UI should be as there are players; instead of trying to please everyone just try to please most of them and let the rest do it how they want it.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I think the initial problem of the current UI is immersion-breaking:
1. Funny alien floaty thing
2. Unfamiliarity
3. Brightness changes depth perception somewhat (ie background reference color to character's range (brightness and size iirc). At least that was a problem for me with GW2 bright targetting outline.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I think the initial problem of the current UI is immersion-breakingAdd 'immersion' to the list of things which everyone defines differently while assuming their personal definition is "you know it when you see it" obvious.
I'm not rubber-stamping a "rejected" over the concept of the design but atm I don't like it because it cramps my view of the drama (sword on shield eg). I'd need to learn and see more, but atm, I'd prefer enemy info and my info compared at the bottom of the screen (like sub-titles in a foreign movie). Not saying that's a better choice and I don't know enough about the devs intentions but I like the screen clear - combine all those effects and it's cluttered pretty quickly.
|
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
I hate subtitles of any sort, even when they are of a language I know but the audio isn't.
I cannot see text without reading it, and if there's a scrolling "You hit X for 24 points of damage" in the corner, my eyes will be drawn to that text and it will distract me from the center-screen information that I need to see.
I will probably end up disabling floaty numbers for damage as well, for the same reason- even if my eyes don't need to track off-target, reading numbers takes up bandwidth that I hope I can't spare.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I need subtitles in movies. My hearing comprehension is pretty low. Having the numbers floating off the head of the target is important to me as well. Forcing that information into a box in the corner where I have to read it as it zips by means I have to guess at my effectiveness in combat.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Each to their own. I'd feel more comfortable with enemy info at bottom of screen with my skill-bar. I can easily flick my eyes between the center and bottom of the screen fairly easily.
I just think the UI hovering the middle spoils the view of the drama. Not going to argue which works more functionally for combat middle or other: I don't know yet.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I'm more of a knees-and-elbows person with some grappling. Walking around with rifles isn't much of an option as a civilian nerd, even if I was beefcake strong punching people with a closed fist is just trouble, and good maces are hard to find*.
and here i was, believing that the prefered melee-weapon of the civilian nerd/geek was this
Geeks maybe that are fans of stuff but nerds KNOW things.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I'll make noise for mod-ular gui. Turn elements on/off, move them around, pin them in the places each player likes, etc. And can keep official mods away from the client.
Keeping mods out of the client is preferable to me because it wouldn't be long before there was a battleclinic mod keeping track of kills, lists and timers of your enemies' cooldowns in pvp, etc.
|
CEO, Goblinworks
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's likely that there won't be a user-configurable UI for a long time. You will likely be able to move various objects around on the screen, and you should be able to change the size of the font in the chat windows and decide what chat tabs you want to view, but most of the UI will be fixed.
There are a several reasons for this.
First, the effort to build a user-configurable UI system is beyond the ability of our team at this time. We can't devote the necessary resources to that system without seriously impacting the work we have outlined for all of Early Enrollment and even into the beginning of Open Enrollment. It's the kind of thing that we'll likely take into Crowdforging once we have achieved a lot of development milestones related to getting basic features and content into the game.
Second, a customizable UI is a customer service nightmare and in the beginning we are going to have as minimal a customer service team as we have a product. Having a consistent UI means that we can avoid the rats-nest of problems that develops from widely divergent UI systems and most especially systems that allow customized plug-ins and layouts.
Third, we think the UI is as much a part of the game design as the behind-the-scenes math. Our team is working really hard to deliver a specific kind of experience and when we talk about the game we'll be talking as much about how you use it as how you play it and we don't want to have a bunch of screen shots and let's play videos showing a UI that isn't the UI we've designed.
I'm not saying the UI is set in stone - I'm just saying that it will be Crowdforged in a single consistent fashion rather than as a widely variable individualizable system.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
There are so many interesting opinions in this particular time period in relation to games (massively mulitplayer games especially).
When did players come under the assumption that different genres of games (FPS, Strategy, RPG, Action etc) or aspects of those particular genres have anything to do with evolution? I recently watched this video on Youtube and the negative comments it received really spoke to me. "Tab-targeting in the millennium?", "graphics looks like s@*&", etc. When did tab targeting get pigeon holed into a design of the past? Doesn't Diablo III, Starcraft II and League of Legends all include tab targeting?
Is there some kind of realization (which I sadly have yet to come to realize) that all games in the future should involve action or FPS twitch combat? What is happening? I'm 28 years old and I feel like all genres of games have strengths, weaknesses and a different fun factor. Yet it seems to me from what I've been reading is that every MMO should evolve into action combat? That would be such a travesty - embrace diversity people.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
1. Trajectory of progress by the art team from the kickstarter demo to the Q3 video to this the Q4 video is orders of improvement and detail: It's great. I've banged on a bit about the UI but it seems to grow on me so far.
2. I think seeing the connections ie I'm looking at the settlement asking myself questions: If that can be all player "made/chosen/developed" and what does each do (could do) then the keep I did not realize how well fortified that would be is already showing excellent signs of development.
3. The height maps make the world look much better than the previous flat areas and more details menhir/dolemans etc.
4. Combat!! (pvp, stealth, effects, pace is nice and deliberate).
5. Art style is good: I can always do with more grittyness but it's fantastic/outlandish without falling into the trap of hypertrophic.
It's all stirling work.
Good eg of what Bartle talks about. :)
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
@Nevy, some of that goes exactly to what Ryan was talking about with graphics; no matter how good your game is, you'll lose a significant portion of the player base if you don't have good graphics. Just look at Minecraft for example: it's a fantastic game, with no recurring costs, yet there's still plenty of people that I talk to who say the same old "I've never tried it because it looks like crap".
As for the tab targetting bit... Twitch-based and/or more actiony combat where enemies' attacks are all slow hitting AoE's just seems like the flavor of the (year? decade?) to me, so people will deride PfO for not going with the crowd to deliver what they think makes a more entertaining experience. And of course there will always be people who criticize the videos without ever looking into the game; that's just sort of how the internet works.
|
CEO, Goblinworks
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Human-skill combat is a greatly desired feature for many players who want more "Simulation" and more reward for their personal physical mastery of the controls. It's a fine objective and thre will be more such games in the future. But the reason were not using it in Pathfinder Online is that the closer to real-time you make the game loop the fewer monsters and PCs you can have within the environment. FPS games currently max out at about 24 players. We want to have several hundred players engaged in combat and at some point perhaps thousands so we can't get that close to real-time.
Most players don't understand this and they see things that look like real-time such as Tera or the ranged attacks in GuildWars2 and don't know they're seeing an illusion. So they don't understand why all games can't do it.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
@Cirolle, I haven't any clue as to the specific numbers, of course, just pointing out that graphics will be important to some portion of the player base; even if it isn't make-or-break for all of those people (as my kind of extreme example was) it could be the difference for some between picking this game and another.
I know Minecraft has a big following; it's probably my second most played game. :)
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Early analysis of NPC hp in the video based on complete fights:
*When fighting a goblin scout from 0:39 to 0:49 it is alive after 116 damage, but dead after 146. So a goblin scout's hp is between 116 and 146.
*When fighting another goblin scout at 1:01 to 1:09 it takes 130 damage. His health bar disappears after this. If this means he dies then a goblin scout's hp is between 116 and 130. For reference a starting player is supposed to have 400 hp.
*When fighting a skeleton melee at 1:11 to 1:17 it takes 183 damage and is still barely alive. He takes another 100 damage and dies. There is another skeleton behind him at full health afterwards, so there is no confusion at to which target the damage was done to. So a skeleton melee's hp is between 183 and 283, leaning more towards the lower end of that.
*When fighting a skeleton leader at the end (3:33+) it takes some unknown amount of damage (not a large amount compared to it's total health). Then it takes 298 damage on top of that and is still alive. After another 31 damage it dies. So it's harder to get a good estimate of it's hp, but it's in the ballpark of a little over 300.
There are of course other fights, but they provide less information or else require estimation based upon the size of the remaining health bar.
I also notice that some numbers are 'pushed upwards' on the screen when more damage is done. Other numbers - usually small numbers - are replaced when more damage is done.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
I think that the goblin scouts deal two types of damage on their weapons. Probably physical and poison based on the goblin squad dogslicer description from the Kickstarter.
*This assumes light vs medium armor or medium vs heavy armor. Light vs heavy is 18, with the difference increasing by 2 for each minor keyword.
The difference can be reconciled if we assume two damage types, each which faces separate resistance (see Murder by Numbers blog for an explanation of how this works). Since lighter armor gets higher resistance vs. energy types we can probably assume the same rule applies to poison. Then against the poison the rogue actually has better resistance, but worse against the physical. So the effective resistance difference between the two is reduced and is consistent with what's seen.
I'm still stumped over how the rogue does 71 damage to his pvp opponent twice when his opponent is wearing medium or heavy armor. Is sneak attack that much (~30 bonus to base damage)?
Edit: the differences in the physical resistances should be closer to 11 (9+2 due to keywords). Bringing that down to 6 means that the rogue's poison resistance is 5 higher. Interestingly the two damage type example in the Murder by Numbers blog has 5 fire resistance.
I've a question regarding the cold cone.
Are skeletons supposed to be immune to cold damages?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Did I miss this in the video? I only had a chance to watch it once... Or maybe I missed Ryans answer to this.
I didn't see any, but Stephen said somewhere close to the start of the thread that a group of enemies in the video were pulled by a bow-user. So although I don't think we saw it actually used, they did use one.
If you wanted to see the animations and such, their last video had a bow user, though of course it's possible their bow animation and such are better quality now.