Skip to the TLDR section to see my suggestions.
So after almost 500+ hours pvping in Conan (and 20 years of fighting game exp), I can safely say that overall, the slower movement and momentum was incredibly beneficial and held huge potential for future PvP design changes on many levels. Unfortunately it had some implementation issues and pissed off a lot of players. I’d like to share some suggestions to help with this.
First lets inform people about the Pros and Cons of the slower movement and why the changes were very good (and tedious) for PvP, and annoying for PvE, and why my changes should help a lot with the issues.
Pros
- First it forced the overall combat mechanics into a more Fighting game like formula. Such as Zoning, Footsies, and Spacing, too which future designs can be made more interesting and clearer. This also helps Funcom have an easier time realizing a direction for their combat design. And because the player focuses less on running away like a pansy, they can now focus on the strategical thinking skills. This is not only going to be more fun and rewarding but it now allows many useless features that weapons have (like most of the two handed Sword animations) and make them not only viable, but fun.
1.5. Now you can create clear purposes for each individual weapon attack to add more depth and reward player skill.
-
You don’t have spend 5-10 min chasing someone trying hit them only to inevitably miss. Thus attacks are much more reliable and PvP is less frustrating, irritating, but rewarding.
-
Players had too commit to fighting people, instead of careless attacking someone better then them, and then running away as soon as the fight got too hard. Commitment is important for PvP.
Cons:
-
moving short locations is very tedious for players who are farming grinding and moving about the base.
-
Lower mobility made it harder to defend yourself from more then two enemies. (we’ll get into this later because its not really the movements fault)
-
many players found it difficult to use AWSD to move with the horse.
So how do we make both PvP and PvE players happy? how do we slow movement down for PvP but not make it annoying as hell for PvE but also calibrate for mass combat? Lets take a look at some tweaks:
TLDR
-
When you “draw” your “Weapon” you move slower / have slower momentum. this animation is instant as always.
-
When you “Sheath/Stow” your “weapon” you go back to normal movement speed, but the sheathing animation takes 2-3 seconds. Only “Weapons” incur the animation, not “Tools”. And Switching between weapons will not trigger the animation. Unless the character switches from a weapon to a tool this will incur the animation. Also while the animation plays, the character will either be slowed further or immobile during the animation, and then a very slight momentum slow after the weapon has been put away.
-
Weapon canceling (hitting Q) while attacking will now cost stamina, but it wont remove your weapon, only resetting the attack.
-
Weapon canceling when not attacking can act like a “Parry” (see Multi-enemy combat below)
(Big TY to CodeMage for pointing out the clarification for the animations for tools and switching between weapons.
Bonus Suggestion ( skip this part if you just want to see the other main changes)
We could also takes this a step further to add and highlight potentially cool future PvP options.
for now lets call it Combat Stance and Mobility Stance.
In Combat your character takes out their weapon and moves slower and takes less damage.
In Mobility stance the Character returns to normal speed but takes more damage.
combat stance could add very short dashes, not just rolls, but a small dash. the dash animation could be what the character does right before he starts to run. The player could double tap forward and then not hold down the “W” button to not run further. Also the dash could be extended based on how light the armor is. but none the less both options are good because the game is now about zoning and reading moves. short detailed dashes could be very useful to support this combat system. Dashing in and out of combat to bait attacks. But of course its not as fast as a dodge and gives no real defensive options. it only usable if the player properly reads the other opponents future attack. do not mistake this for dodge, dodge is an easy mechanic to “fuzzy” defend attacks, but they are not reactionary based you need to commit to a dash and improper use will get you punished.
Bonus Suggestion end
SO what do these changes mean to you?
For one, it won’t penalize PvE’rs who just want to farm, grind and move about the base.
It again makes many weapons more viable and more interesting, as well as opens many doors for future changes.
Also for PvP, it makes it so that if someone attacks you, they are committed to the fight. And can’t just run away as soon as they realize they are in way over their head. Also for PvErs who refuse to fight don’t need to be forced too. but, because runners take more damage there is still a way to kill them if you’re smart enough.
It also makes it so the not so obvious class in the game (loot grabbers) feels more interesting, because they can move around more freely trying to grab gear, but they can’t attack and take more damage.
This also works for Horses, many people complain that they just want to use the mouse to move. So, we let them, once they pull out their weapon the mouse movement shifts from controlling the horse to controlling the camera. this allows for people to deal with the horse on different movement styles. So now we have just made a ton of people happy. the ones who can adapt will have fun with AWSD and the ones who can’t (who also don’t PvP) can stick with the easier option.
Multi-enemy Combat:
Now as much as I believe that the egotistical pvper excuse of “I can’t 1v10 anymore” is a ludicrous complaint at best, this however doesn’t mean that fighting 1v2 should feel so penalizing or impossible.
The problem when fighting multiple enemies isn’t based solely on the movement speed, its really not. I can prove this by the way. Put the movement speed back to being slower and then simply remove stamina costs for weapon attacks and rolls. You’ll find that you can fight two people a lot more confidentially and you wont feel penalized for it.
Anyways if you ever find yourself fighting a 1v2, the main issue is that when you fight two people, you are bascially fighting someone with twice your stamina bar, twice the amount of attacks, twice the HP (more actually because one guy can fall back and heal while being guarded by the other) also they can outmaneuver you. Also, you now have less Stamina. You now have to dodge attacks from two players, attack more often to keep them at bay. And in general have less stamina because you have to outmaneuver two additional players.
So how do we fix this? Well, right now without being able to do thorough testing, is we probably need to find a way to reward player skill with extra stamina. And unfortunately the only cheap and easy way to do this (which isn’t great) is too reward player attacks that hit with a stamina regen buff, or some kind of static amount that regens over time when you perfectly dodge an attack.
And this unfortunately is where the cheap and easy fixes stop. because balancing this to feel less penalizing requires the devs to add in extra mechanics. Because we need to find a way to reward player skill with stamina.
SO the only ideas I can think of at this moment without full access to the games test server and a dude to help me right up some code are as following.
Parry mechanic
The weapon cancel mechanic can also act like a Parry if you use it while not attacking. If you parry the weapon attack you gain a small bubble of damage immunity and gain a Stamina regen buff. you also might be able to counter attack with a light attack. the point of the parry is to gain stamina advantage, not to do damage. we reeeeally need to avoid Dark Souls’ parry design. Also make it so parrying Heavy attacks doesn’t net you an attack. The reason for this is that heavy attacks are slow, they are easy to parry and thus you are simply rewarded with stamina. Or make it so they can’t parry CERTAIN heavy attacks or that they take more stamina. Btw the counter to parry would be Weapon canceling. because you could make it so that Parrying a poorly timed attack could leave you in a punishable animation state. So you could throw out a heavy and then cancel it if you think they are going too parry it. If they go for the parry, they leave themselves open for punishment. I want to throw out a warning because this will need some very precise timing and tweaking on the Devs side, because done wrong this mechanic will be more harmful then good. Also Parry should cost a decent amount of stamina if you miss (key point here), that way people can’t spam it. We want to reward proper reads and skill.
another idea is having a mechanic in the game that if you are outnumbered you gain “Resolve.” resolve will be an invisible short range ring around each player, that will reward you with more stamina the more enemies that are within that ring, and then it equalizes the more clan members near you. the issue with this of course is that there is no friend or foe mechanic outside of clans. so it could potentially be abused by clan members leaving a clan going on an attack and boosting everyone’s stamina gain. only thing i can think about atm is increasing friendly fire damage for non clan members to deal with this.
Also not stamina related but we can add a feature that when a player kills an enemy player the attacking player can gain a static heal over time that can’t be canceled by being hit.
anyways if you have any ideas, corrections, etc, please add them. Thanks for reading!
