Merely updating the engine wouldn’t really have fixed anything. TSW’s combat system was widely regarded as one of the weakest elements of the game, so leaving that untouched would have brought up comparisons with polishing a ■■■■. (I’m not saying TSW was a ■■■■ btw, but it’s the obvious metaphor.)
The ability wheel was loved by many TSW players, but was disliked by a lot more people. The overhaul of the ability and gearing systems was necessary, though I don’t think the end product was as good as it was hoped it would be.
SWL’s level of success makes it hard to justify things like mass re-balancing of the weapons. I think it’d be good if they did so, but the amount of time it would take to do everything together strikes me as prohibitive. Smaller tweaks are quicker, but to rebalance everything is either going to be a long term project or simply won’t happen.
Similarly, the time an engine change would take makes it unlikely. The costs involved with using an outside engine would probably remove most (if not all) of the profit margins, so it’d need to be another proprietary one, and I can’t see Funcom rushing to develop a new engine for a game with a questionably large niche market.
People didn’t blame the nexus or the combat system but the combat animation and those from builders were particulary soft. If the dev team had taken the time to redo animations with more punch, most would have appreciated.
Oh yeah, ideally the relaunch would have been a complete overhaul that was perfectly balanced, bug-free, and updated for modern computers. But like you said, it would have been hard for them to justify that kind of investment. Maybe if they went all in on it, it could have become something great and profitable, but I feel the biggest problem with the relaunch is that it was half-hearted. It was too much of a change for a large portion of TSW players, and it wasn’t enough of a change to bring in a large amount of new customrs. Perhaps it was the best they could do, but if that’s the case they should have just left TSW in maintenance mode and moved on.
I, personally, liked the combat and gear system in TSW, or at least I tolerated it enough to enjoy the content, but if it were upgraded, I wouldn’t complain. My problem with the SWL combat is that it’s a step in the wrong direction. There’s less options and balance is all screwed up. And, not just that, but they spent time and resources on it that could have been used to fix more important things or work on new content. Again, it was a half-hearted attempt to “improve” combat. It was mostly changes for the sake of changes. Oh, and also changes for the sake of making the game more grindy. I also don’t think it can, or at least will, be fixed at this point.
To steal your metaphor, in attempting to polish the ■■■■, they just mashed it up some.
You have no idea how many customers it brought in though.
I seem to recall hearing that TSW’s combat was one of the main reasons people bounced off the game, so it’s a bit of a stretch so suggest that adjusting it is “change for the sake of change”. I enjoyed TSW but let’s be honest - the vast majority of the ability wheel never saw serious use and the combat was never its best feature. SWL’s combat is far from perfect but it seems to put way fewer people off the game, so it’s probably safe to call it an improvement.
The combat animations were only one part of it, (though the animations really weren’t great). Build to x and consume was never going to be a particularly responsive or dynamic system, and elemental force meant that rotations became even more static. It would seem to link to the extra energy from crits in SWL, trying to make fights a little bit more random.
The new weapon gimmicks help create a bit more difference in how the weapons play, but there was little of that in TSW because there were just so many skills that it was hard to make any weapon feel unique. Weapon synergy could have been better - nice idea, but if you picked one of the weaker synergies then you suffered for it (I remember finding out that my first chain build wasn’t worth much).
I had a lot of fun playing TSW, and I still have fun playing SWL. Out of the 30+ people I managed to convince to come play the game with me, none of them lingered. Their main complaint wasn’t combat animations, it was the combat itself. I feel like the new combat is a bit better, but still lacking.
You are right about that. In PvE, there were not that much of a need to have complex Ability Wheel, after best cookie cutters were discovered and gear for it. That is what SWL is purely aimed for, just slap stuff on and pew-pew. But in TSW PvP, Wheel was incredibly fun and did make a lot of difference. In best cases, you had to build deck and gear for killing just one certain player alone. That was fun!
In TSW PvE, I had 6 basic Decks and gear sets. In TSW PvP, I had about 30 Decks and about 70 gear pieces and weapons. SWL does not need this, it is for easy PvE gaming.
Unless you happened to be someone without all of the abilities unlocked and without 70 gear pieces, then it was just frustrating. Running into a glance tank that you’d zero chance of killing (for example) wasn’t fun, chasing a chicken around ED wasn’t fun, getting spawn camped in Fusang wasn’t either. There were plenty of ways to get totally pwned without any real hope of success. If you had the gear then it was a different story, but getting through to that point took more time than many were willing to invest. Given how long it took to fill out the whole wheel, that was quite a lot of people.
PvP in TSW wasnt’s ment to be soloed, and it was pretty much End Game content to those who were enthusiastic. It took lots of work, and if you didnt want to work for it, you role was to take dirt naps.
I also like to make a note, that one of the key things for early TSW marketing, was PvP. Every teaser or trailer had lots of PvP. Ability Wheel was build for Faction PvP. From the beginning of TSW, there were lots of testing in Test Server for balancing PvP. Devs did lots of work for PvP… I got my “Dev Killer” T-Shirt too.
Running to Glance Tank was challenging, but it didnt take much than patient and some skills to kill one, even with low stuff. If you didnt want to work for it, dirt nap was for you. I honestly managed to kill one with Healer/Tank hybrid with using Blood build and Gadgets. It took a while but I won. And those “undead” kind of Tanks… well, they didnt pose much of thread if you just left them alone. But, Woodcutter and NM Raid gear made them something else, I admit it wasnt fun at the end.
Chicken running ED was totally fun! It made teams to really work as a team. Only those whined who were hunting heads rather than build Deck for Team efford. Fight like Primal Instinct vs. ICO vs. Shinsengumi chicken runner hunts were super fun. I havent had that much fun in TeamSpeak ever before, nor after those fights.
Spawn kill in Fusang? You did know that you could change Anima Well? Even back to base.
I disagree strongly about getting pawned without hope. If you know what to do, you performed well even with just starter weapons in hand. Example, when I started building my Illuminati Healer “Sunray”, I didnt have much of problem because I have Healed in PvP for years with Templar “Sawo”. Havie for example didnt manage to kill my Lumie 1 vs 1 in Fusang and I didnt even have full Deck yet. Even that I didnt tell Havie that I was Sawo, he did knew that it was me, my moves was a tell.
So… everything you brought up, was pretty much of end of PvP in TSW. Negativity and lack of fun and co-operation.
I think many players didn’t even get to elemental force. I saw players frustrated from multiple options of first rows of wheel. ‘This game is so complex’. Also don’t forget that original pre-epeen tsw was rather hard for solo player in open world. Especially if you want to have your own adventure and explore world without advices and guides from forum. NE is the best when you crawl through it shuddering from sudden sounds (IMO of course). And then you hit BM wall. I myself left game at that moment and returned only half year later. I suspect many left forever at that moment.
I always feel like the new combat system didn’T came exactly because the old was to clunky but because it didn’T fit the more casual f2p market. I do agree when people say they made it a little to simple but I also shiver at the thought that I would ever have to do the wheel. It never struck me as the most intuitive or optimal system.
I really hope the new animations aren’t what people call “an improvement over soft combat animations” cause the overly long animations (most ‘instant’ casts take nearly 600ms to hit the enemy), high saturation of effects and unresponsiveness in SWL is so much worse for me than tsw’s. Once you have 2-3 players attacking an enemy the saturation gets so bright you can’t see the enemy’s casts.
If this is what people want, then I guess action RPGs aren’t for me cause I like snappy controls, not intricate animations. At least SWL still lets you pick fully-instant weapons even if there are less of them than in TSW (eg. blood and rifle had full-instant builds in TSW but they only kept cast-time power moves for SWL. fist and pistol are technically instant but the animations are so slow I can’t play them)
Yeah, I’ve noticed much more lag on abilities triggering in SWL. Evulsion is always annoying like that for me. It’s hard to impair anything with it when it takes as long as the entire enemy cast-time to actually go off. Of course, maybe that has more to do with performance issues due to engine limitations, but it still feels like certain abilities are far less responsive. Especially compared to gadget impairing.
I will admit that the new energy system makes combat a little more free-flowing, but I don’t think that’s an acceptable tradeoff for the balancing issues. Which goes back to my point that the relaunch was half-hearted. If they actually wanted to improve combat without breaking the game, they would have tested and tweaked it a lot more until it worked. But I think they just got to a certain point and said, “Eh, good enough for the casuals.” And now, since they didn’t fix the problems before launch, it will be much harder, maybe even impossible to fix it now.
In tsw some abilities worked at start of GCD and some at end. I think renowned anima shot worked like this - at start. They probably made all instant abilites now work at end of GCD.
I can offer no opinion on contents/correctness of that video, but I wish people would write things like these down in text. For an analysis piece there’s no need for a video, and it’d be faster to read and understand.
Abilities with “instant” cast time take effect at the start of the GCD but damage is not displayed until they get to the part of the animation that hits the enemy. Slowest possible instance of this is stuff with a projectile that moves slowly to the target, like Bloodshot (tsw move) I don’t know offhand when it shows interrupts cancel the castbar but gadgets are fully non-GCD and go off when you push the button, instant ability interrupts go in the normal GCD queue.
Things like debuffing (with debilitate/expose) or proccing damage (talismans) or killing the enemy happen when the ability is cast, so usually you get some instant damage when you push the button from those, and then later in the second the actual ability deals damage. And if you’re killing stuff it dies when you push the button.
I believe DoTs also sync to the GCD but happen before casts, so if a DoT kills an enemy your cast gets cancelled.
That’s why, realistically, I’m more in favor of tweaks/buffs to various weapon gimmicks over anything else-- it could be done much easier than anything else, or relatively speaking compared to a full rebalance of everything.
I’ll be honest, I never really payed much attention to the global cool down. I guess that could explain why some abilities seem to have a delayed cast. Also, why gadgets are much quicker compared to abilities. It just seems to me that it stands out a bit more in SWL than it did in TSW. Or maybe it’s just been too long and I’m just not remembering it right.
Well, even though this thread is about what went wrong with TSW, I guess the more productive discussion would be how to fix things moving forward. Though even if we found the perfect solution here, would Funcom listen?
I’m not so sure small tweaks would really do much to fix things. Do you really think increasing sword dps by 10 percent or so is going to bring people back to the game? And it really depends on how they approach it. If they tweaked every weapon to make them stronger, that would be okay, but I worry they would instead just nerf AR to bring it down to the level of the others. That wouldn’t really make other weapon users happier, it would just piss off the AR users, possibly causing even more people to leave.
Actually, I’m not even sure a full rebalance of the weapon system would do much at this point. Maybe some people would come back to the game if healing was a thing again, but that would mean sustain tanking would have to die which would probably have a net negative impact. I can’t speak for everyone, but there’s no way I’m going to build up a whole different set of talismans with defensive glyphs. So there’d be an increase of healers standing around with no one to heal.
I also don’t think rebalancing the current system is as big of an issue as the recent cutback to customer support. Being able to do more damage with your favorite weapons isn’t going to mean that much if they randomly disappear one day and you can’t get them back.
The “perfect” solution is subjective. What we as players might think would be perfect may not work for Funcom. There’s all kinds of information that we don’t have, which means we’re seeing an incomplete picture - most obviously is that we don’t know how long it would take to develop any ideas we come up with.
The devs do read the forums, so if some kind of divine revelation happens, they will see it. Ofc the problem straight away would be that they probably wouldn’t be able to tell us.
Any change will have people against it, that’s pretty much a given in an MMO. The devs have to try to weigh up potential changes & improvements against the impact they have. We saw in TSW that Funcom does listen to player feedback, (one of the elemental force nerfs/changes never made it to live). About the only thing that we can do is to keep giving them that feedback so that they have more data about what we already have. Talking about stuff that we don’t have is nice, but that tends to be much more open ended and less defined. Being as specific as possible with feedback helps so that you create more precise data.
I’m hoping that the customer service issues of late are going to be limited. There was this tweet recently, (well, 10 days ago): https://twitter.com/FuncomHelp/status/1114128255961972736
There’s also been a much higher number of people playing exiles on PS4 than anticipated, and looking at the exiles part of the forum, that seems to be generating a LOT of tickets. I don’t know if the same department covers exiles CS too, but if it does then they must be seriously snowed under atm. Hopefully when that all clears, it’ll be back to normal in terms of wait times (which funcom is normally pretty good at).
