Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
Procedural weapons have been in the beta for a week now, and the feedback has been really positive. We have more weapons on the way and this week we've been looking at updating damage mechanics and how weapons behave on impact. This should make various weapons feel better to use, and more accurately model differences between weapons and how procedural components and properties affect their behaviour.
Part of this is the long promised update to slash damage mechanics. We are trying to model slash in two different ways: hewing and cutting (or chopping and slicing). Hewing is what you typically get with something like axes (which are currently a bit underwhelming) and when hitting with the centre of percussion of a sword, whereas cutting occurs with more grazing or slicing hits. These would translate motion and force into damage differently, and interact with armour mitigation differently. Individual slash weapons and how you use them should give quite distinct results.
Procedural weapons give us very detailed info about the shape and purpose of every part of a weapon, so we want to leverage this to generally model impacts more accurately and predictably. We're also wanting to introduce additional properties for these parts. For example a more spiky crushing head will bite into and grip surfaces delivering force more efficiently, while a smooth head more easily disengages to deliver a remise or transition into other actions.
We've also been looking at some attack motions that didn't feel right and tweaking them to feel and flow better, looking at how to integrate dynamic grip changes into combat and various other things. With the procedural weapon system in game and functional we're generally looking at various smaller things we'd like to see come together for the full arena update.
For the next beta patch we'd like to introduce more weapons and some of what we just discussed, but we're also looking at overhauling individual interfaces and getting some feedback on those. Our priority here is the currently quite messy loadout and arsenal systems, for which we have some pretty extensive changes planned. We'll let you know in detail what these are soon, possibly including them in an upcoming beta patch.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
Procedural weapons have been in the beta for a week now, and the feedback has been really positive. We have more weapons on the way and this week we've been looking at updating damage mechanics and how weapons behave on impact. This should make various weapons feel better to use, and more accurately model differences between weapons and how procedural components and properties affect their behaviour.
Part of this is the long promised update to slash damage mechanics. We are trying to model slash in two different ways: hewing and cutting (or chopping and slicing). Hewing is what you typically get with something like axes (which are currently a bit underwhelming) and when hitting with the centre of percussion of a sword, whereas cutting occurs with more grazing or slicing hits. These would translate motion and force into damage differently, and interact with armour mitigation differently. Individual slash weapons and how you use them should give quite distinct results.
Procedural weapons give us very detailed info about the shape and purpose of every part of a weapon, so we want to leverage this to generally model impacts more accurately and predictably. We're also wanting to introduce additional properties for these parts. For example a more spiky crushing head will bite into and grip surfaces delivering force more efficiently, while a smooth head more easily disengages to deliver a remise or transition into other actions.
We've also been looking at some attack motions that didn't feel right and tweaking them to feel and flow better, looking at how to integrate dynamic grip changes into combat and various other things. With the procedural weapon system in game and functional we're generally looking at various smaller things we'd like to see come together for the full arena update.
For the next beta patch we'd like to introduce more weapons and some of what we just discussed, but we're also looking at overhauling individual interfaces and getting some feedback on those. Our priority here is the currently quite messy loadout and arsenal systems, for which we have some pretty extensive changes planned. We'll let you know in detail what these are soon, possibly including them in an upcoming beta patch.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
