To be honest I hadn’t commented on this issue since it took me forever to figure out what exactly was going on. Even watching the video was confusing because I wasn’t able to replicate the results in either the public beta or the patched live version. After some conversations I was able to formulate a few test cases to replicate what was shown and what everyone was having issues with.
The issue happens when you have stationary rotating camera on. (there’s another issue with it off, but I’m not focusing on that yet). It also happens whether or not you have controller style movement on or off. This issue is when your character is not facing the same direction as your aiming point AND you are not pressing a directional movement (control stick or WASD).
This affects attacking and dodging. Your character attacks in the direction your character is facing. NOT the aiming point. Your character dodges opposite to the way they are facing, not towards the camera (opposite of the aiming point).
Why is this bad? Its not intuitive to what the player is doing.
Why did I not notice it before?
The reason for this is I hold down W when attacking, and hold down either W, A, S, D, or combination thereof to dodge. When you do this, it functions nearly like Chapter 2. I say nearly because there is a slight slowdown that was introduced. That slowdown had very little effect in how I play. I usually hold down W to attack and use my mouse look to readjust mid combo as needed. This still works as long as my attacks between combo steps don’t have to adjust more than 90-120 degrees (depending on weapon).
One thing that stood out from me was dodging. While I could simply say just hold forward while attacking. Dodging from a standstill with no input is sometimes needed in unexpected combat. Either a NPC spots you that you didn’t see in PVE or a player jumps you in PVP. You need to be able to quickly move your view, and dodge before making a movement input.
What does Funcom need to do to address this?
They need to adjust the attacks to favor aiming towards the aiming point, even if no movement directional input is being pressed. This will fix the issue. What this won’t do is allow you to instantly snap a 180 on someone. Which is fine (with caveats).
For dodging while not pressing a directional input you need to dodge towards the camera away from the aiming point. This already works with target lock.
Target lock also needs to be adjusted so that it doesn’t turn faster than mouse or control stick inputs, as well as the auto readjustment the character does while holding a directional input and executing a combo. Right now its near instant and much faster.
Now I will talk about the outlier. Turning of stationary camera rotating. This is to me, obviously a bug. Your character literally rotates in place. That bug needs to be fixed and the turning animation applied.
Finally the caveat that is going to be unpopular. Being able to instantly attack in the direction you are not facing. I’ve always felt in combat that every action we take should matter. In any given moment you should have to make a choice between attacking, blocking, switching weapons, using a consumable, or moving. Like I said years ago when people didn’t like the healing changes, I said that you shouldn’t be able to heal and attack at the same time. Here I’m going to say you should not be able to move and attack at the same time.
Now combos have their own movement to ensure they have momentum and can connect their attacks. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a player who is running with back turned to their opponent and immediately attacks in the opposite direction. This is very unintuitive to encounter and even execute (unless you’re used to it). But you should have to face the general direction then let the momentum of the weapon (as well as the readjustment that was added) carry you into the attack, not merely have the attack force your movement instantly. So on that I do agree with the change to how fast we can turn in combat. You can snap around to things in front, just to not to things directly behind.
Now with all that said, NPCs should follow the exact same rules. If we can only adjust our attacks by 90-120 degrees between combo steps, so should NPCs. Right now many of them are just snapping to the point of attack (maybe not instantly but fast enough). They are in Chapter 2 where they used to be in Chapter 3, while we’ve gone the opposite. Once we’re both on the same rules, things will fall into place.
I did extensive testing with two different controllers today and it affects them as equally to mouse and keyboard. At least on the PC version of the game. No idea how this all functions on console though.