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Melee Combat = Slashing Air
Greatsword
Member RarePosts: 414
Now that the NDA has been lifted, I can finally reveal how horribly unresponsive melee combat feels in ESO.
It has actually been quite a big topic among testers during the last two beta weekends, and alas an issue that most likely won't be resolved/resolvable before release.
As much as we all love the concept of real time combat in an MMO, and disregarding the fact that a lot of melee combat animations and stances/postures are outright horrible (if they weren't so choppy, one might assume Quasimodo was the model for motion capture), melee combat in ESO is just missing any kind of "tactile feedback" to it.
It's hard to describe something that simply *feels* wrong and bad in words. But there is no physical collision whatsoever, enemies have no physical reaction to your hits at all, there is no screen shaking and sound feedback on slashes and bashes is really weak (and often non-existent!).
Actually, it is easier to draw a comparision:
Melee combat feels pretty much the same as in Daggerfall and Morrowind. You just spam "air slashes", and the only thing that even tells you if you hit or miss is your enemies health bar.
Comments
I feel that 90% of MMOs seems this way. You always see all sorts of silliness on the animations. You often are not even hitting a body in many animations.
I suppose the semi-action and up close nature of the combat makes it more obvious or emphasizes it but in reality the actual mechanics of it basically exactly as silly as almost any other MMO except a few notable exceptions.
There are a ton of MMOs where you can be running directly through someone and execute an attack. There are MMOs where you can literally shoot a bow backwards without turning around. Many of the MMOs people say have a "great combat feel" do all of these same silly things.
I dunno maybe I am just jaded. They are all silly and all silly in pretty much the same predictable way.
First off the NDA has ONLY been lifted for content from here out, ALL previous beta content is still very much under NDA.
Second i do not agree at all abot the combat, it felt good and fluid, the only improvemts it needed imp is better sounds effects and on hit detection for sounds.
The only MMO that ever felt like I was really hitting something was SWTOR (for all its other faults) because they syncronized the auto attacks and blocking animations between you and the mob you were attacking.
Beyond that... the rest have all felt like they lacked connection, but ultimately it does not bother me much.
Totally agree. The combat is pretty awful. There is no proper feedback. It doesn't feel like you're actually connecting hits.
I totally agree...
It was quite obvious that the game was the same tab-targetting use-ability model as every other game, cleverly (or so they think) hidden by a FPSlasher shell.. I recognize that the client is lying to me and that I'm just manually doing the auto-attacks and targeting.. There IS tab-targetting.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
the problem i see a bit is that you need to decide between free movements during combat/skills and more floatiness or movement lock and more visceral combat like in neverwinter...
one thing tough - regarding the last beta feedback, the devs said they got the message regarding combat and were working on it so...lets keep the hope up
"Melee combat feels pretty much the same as in Daggerfall and Morrowind. You just spam "air slashes", and the only thing that even tells you if you hit or miss is your enemies health bar."
So they are staying true to the Elder Scroll series then, good to hear.
This has been mentioned in so many previews that I expect it to be the number one update on their minds. This is a MMO, I don't expect it to be perfect at launch. I do expect them to be addressing issues and from what I have read this must be getting a big ping on their radar.
There will be no miracle patch. This game has no collision detection. It is one of the reason AvA runs smoother than some other games.
There is no way to make truly "unfloaty" combat without collision detection because of the way things have to detect a hit. They would have to radically change the algorithm for what a "hit" even means. When you swing a sword whether or not the bit of pixels that represents the sword actually contacts the bit of pixels that is something's hit box is not part of the equation. There will always be inconsistencies. The best they can do is minimize and mask these. But that is always extremely imperfect.
They may put some animation sugar on top but there will always be certain maneuvers that are just silly looking. Just like in 90% of all MMOs. Some of the stuff in WoW is downright retarded and people rave about how good the combat feels. Maybe they can some kind of magic. I dunno because I am not fooled by it in any MMO so I don't know what would fool a larger enoug number of people to get a WoW-like reaction to what is essentially a similar problem.
I think this could end up being a huge problem for this game.
Combat is probably 80% of what people do in an MMORPG and if its bad people will not be having fun 80% of the time imo.
After playing the beta I went back and played a couple other action combat based games for comparison because I too felt that the combat in ESO was just "off", it didnt feel good or right.
Animations and art styles aside the action combat in Terra is years ahead of ESO as far as feel goes, it feels like you are hitting things when you hit things. Vindictus also does a much much better job at getting the feel of action combat down compared to ESO, once again when you hit something it just feels like your hitting something.
The tactile feel of combat is very important for an action based combat system since you can miss if your not in the right position so you need great tactile feel to know if your hitting your intended target or not, ESO does not do this well at all.
I realy want to play this game and I have been looking forward to it for a long time but if the combat doesnt get a major overhaul it might just sink the game. I am hopeful that they can fix it, but if they cant they have a massive problem on their hands.
I agree. The combat feel is probably my biggest gripe with the game currently. I hope the devs are on top of it.
I must be blind because I didn't really care. I though the combat was great, but maybe I'm comparing it to other MMOS and not to every other game available. Actually I could tell there was little feedback given even with bow/arrow, but I guess it didn't matter much because when I hit it was a hit and when I blocked, it was a block. Hard hit was always a hard hit... interrupt mostly always interrupted. So since I got the desired outcome when I attacked, I never really paid attention to any additional feedback.
This type of issue may be harder to fix than basic animations given the server structure, but who knows. As long as everyone becomes happy with it in the end so there are more players.
Going to go play chivalry now lol.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Yet in TERA on my slayer I have quite obviously hit something yet only swung at air or only barely touched it with the tip of my gigantic sword. Sure there is an animation reaction and sound reaction. But the whole thing is still obviously silly on some level.
I did compare it to another AAA MMO that has action combat, Terra. You cant compare it to any other MMO's that dont also use the action combat system since it would then just be comparing two different systems.
If you try Terra's combat or even Vindictus for that matter you will see what ESO was trying to do, sadly they just didnt get it right as far as action combat is concerned, tactile feel is VERY important to an action combat system, not so much with a tab target system.
Sadly ESO gives the player absolutley no tactile feel, and as a result the game's combat feel's "light", "floaty", and of no substance. In essance it feels unnatural.
Since combat is such a huge part of any MMO this could be a game breaker for a LOT of people.
Well I did play Darkfall 1 and Darkfall: UO, but those games have hitboxes as does Vindictus maybe. So I didn't count them. Haven't played Tera. 2Moons has some pretty good feedback :P.
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I love Tera combat, but I don't think the melee stagger from it has a place in ESO. Tera combat is much more fast paced, you are rewarded for good timing with faster animations for proper combos. Melee stagger exists to break up the player's combos so they can't just continue their rotation but have to back out and restart their attack (or use controlled stun). ESO is closer to traditional MMO than action in terms of combat, melee stagger would just annoy you in it.
I felt the combat was also a bit choppy, but the targets react to ability attacks, & im pretty sure they react to the heavy attack. Normal attack I just remember seeing a bit of blood, suppose its normal In Gw most attacks didnt get any reaction. Suppose it would be pretty hard to impliment, as say 2 people were hitting the same target, the server would have to determine whos attack to react too, putting even more demand on it.
Siege is what bugs me the most with instant dropping, packing & no resources needed to build them.