Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
So the update is finally out, that was quick right? Right. It's been great seeing many people get back into the game and all the positive feedback. We've been busy patching and hotfixing, some things we'd hoped we'd fixed actually weren't and going from a few testers to so many players uncovered various things that flew under the radar or are specific to some system configurations. So much has been changed and rebuilt, so there's going to be some issues and things that need adjusting again. We've addressed a lot of this already, and made a bunch of improvements and content fixes too.
The last few months we've mostly been trying to get everything ready for the update rather than working on anything new, so our attention has been largely on what comes after this update and leading up to 1.0. As we've mentioned we won't be tearing the guts out of our engine again, so we should be able to add features that don't rely on that last bit of content in smaller updates before then. There's a fair bit we want to add and improve, but some things are a higher priority, or will benefit from long testing so we will focus on those first.
Something that we hope to add imminently is the post portal "save system". This is not a simple save and load system, but rather something that you will need to unlock and comes with some limitations. You will need to collect certain items, one of which comes from a difficult boss encounter. However you do not need to defeat the boss as there will be another way to obtain the item. This item will have other uses too, but one use allows you to essentially create your own save points at certain specific locations. If you use it in this way, you will not be able to use the item again for its other purposes. We've tried to cater for different players, and also give you a sense of agency in how you save your progress and a strategic element. It should be fairly easy to piece together how this all works, but either way we'd rather not spell it out for you and let you discover it and some its nuances in game. We've been laying the groundwork for this for some time and we're actively working to complete it, so we hope it won't be long before we can introduce it.
Something else that we want to complete for 1.0 is the remaining skills, and by extension combat in general. This has been a hot topic internally for a while, that we've also discussed with some of our community. Like some other things, combat has been in bit of state of limbo, and this is a bit of broad topic that needs some context.
Early in development we genuinely thought the game was mostly fine and just needed more features and a bit more content, but the reality quickly became endlessly iterating on combat. This is what players focused on most, either because they loved it or "hated" it. This went on for years, and eventually we said enough and stopped iterating on combat to focus on actually making a game. It was never our intent to make a combat sim, we just wanted everything to be governed by physics because of emergent gameplay, interactivity and just that sense of a tangible, functional world it brings. But here we are, with something more sophisticated that doesn't fit our original, more humble plans.
Now we've just overhauled our physics and character physics, to fix many general problems and to support new things. We also worked on combat AI, but mainly because we want smart and realistic behaviour from our NPCs and creatures. It's been all about the foundations and immersion. We've been doing the minimum to maintain combat in a working state, by adjusting most motions to the new physics and so on, but there have not been any meaningful changes or additions to combat. A lot of things have fallen into a state of disrepair as we stopped iterating on temporary things. Now it's time to finish the most important features and try to finalise things for 1.0.
You may have heard various ideas we've floated about combat, some are more speculative, but some have been well defined and tie into skills and other mechanics. That said, these things require a lot of experimentation and testing, even when we have detailed plans the physics based and very dynamic nature of combat means things could not work out as we imagined at all, so we may need to change those plans significantly, or even scrap them. Take this as our intent, but understand that we can't be sure what will actually come out the other side. There will definitely be public testing, and we'll see how things evolve.
Let's start with bashes. We're quite excited about this, and it's a core feature that could significantly change the dynamics of combat and support other mechanics. The basic idea here is the "Alternate Attack" (Alt) input is no longer just for thrusting, but basically puts you in alternate stance (e.g. half-swording). This could change how you defend too, but most importantly in this mode the right mouse button no longer walks, but performs "bashes" instead. The simplest bashes would be a shove or check, but we're also considering various mechanics for alternate bashes or combos such as queue strikes, punches (including with a shield) and sweep takedowns. We haven't defined all the exact moves for each weapon configuration yet, but so far the idea is that we'll have a similar RtL / LtR and combo system as regular attacks.
And this brings us to shields. Shields are not in a good spot, they're unappealing to the player and yet tedious to fight against when used by the AI. The difficulty is how to make them effective, and yet still have a weakness that's exploitable against AI. The shield stamina system exists largely for this purpose, and while we know some people don't like it, it will likely stay, but be fleshed out so that it's more meaningful and serves more to provide openings to players who exploit it tactically. There's a few mechanical changes planned to solve some of the issues with shields, but largely we want to play more into their offensive capabilities, and bashes will play a role there. Bashes could potentially also play a role in creating openings against shields. When ranged combat is introduced, shields will immediately become more valuable, and we'd also like to enhance their defensive capabilities against large opponents. Of course shields will also finally become procedural, with new and reworked shields.
On the topic of defences, we need to talk parrying. The issues with parries have been discussed for a long time, but it's something we haven't been dealing with, for good reason. We used to regularly tune parry motions as attacks changed, but this was time consuming, motions just kept changing, the number of motions kept growing and we wanted to change the mechanics anyway. Something that has always stood out is the "binary parry", that is whenever someone is attempting to defend all it takes is to touch their weapon with your attack it rapidly stops doing damage. This creates a lot of implausible moments that don't fit with our fully simulated combat and a few mechanical issues. This was largely a crutch for our physics engine not being to properly solve collisions between thin, fast moving objects (weapons), but that problem was fixed with our physics engine overhaul, and now it's all due a revision.
This is a very important change with a lot of knock-on effects, there's already about 60 parry motions, we'll need more and now parries must really attempt to physically stop or deflect attacks. Parries have never been reliable, this won't change, and mechanically they will be inherently less reliable, but we hope that with revised motions and dynamic behaviours we can get things working well. It's a daunting task, but either way this is clearly the way to go and we think it will be an important improvement to the feel and flow of combat.
Another potentially important addition is the "Draw" close combat skill technique. The concept here is that after landing a hit you'll be able to hold your weapon on the target and transition into a pull down, sweep or draw cut, depending on your weapon and inputs. Additionally, we may allow interrupting any attack motion to transition into one of these moves, without needing to hit anything. This so far is our best answer to officially supporting the grappling moves that some of our community is fond of. This should both provide more intuitive controls and use more deliberate motions where the characters are deliberately exerting force on the target, removing some of the randomness from both setup and execution. It should also generally support manipulating your attacks in new ways and transitioning into various cuts for swords. This also could be another tool for dealing with shielded opponents.
Obviously ranged combat represents an entire new skill category to fill and will introduce many new factors into combat, but as it doesn't yet exist in the game in any form and we're still defining some details we feel it's not time to really talk about it yet. We will say that we consider ranged combat a much easier problem to solve than anything close combat, as there aren't complex physics interactions involved. There's some new gameplay mechanics, but there aren't any new problems to solve in terms of physics and it's essentially not all that different from say using a Force Bolt.
One final topic is armour. You may have heard us say that we plan to revisit the encumbrance system, and a few things besides. Currently armour carries no penalty at all once you have 3 ranks of MiA, it's simply an incredibly strong net benefit to defences with no tradeoffs, not wearing the heaviest armour is just a pointless handicap and the lighter armour sets are just inferior in every way. Armour is obviously ridiculously good, and that won't change, but we do think there should be some upsides to using something other than the heaviest sets in the game. The obvious implication is not being able to completely negate encumbrance from those heavy sets, but rather than a simple nerf we're hoping to approach this more as a buff to both heavy and light armour. The idea is that when unencumbered you'd move a bit quicker, but also in a way that feels less "weighty", and isn't just the not very obvious speed difference we have now. For heavy armour we want to play more into its increased mass and protection, a good and fitting start is making the Security technique more effective with heavy armour, which really plays into the feel and identify of a heavily armoured "tank". We're considering a few ideas still, and we might rename the armour skill to "conditioning", introducing some things that are less focused on armour.
We look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions, just remember that our goal is to polish up and complete the combat system, we are not looking to redesign the fundamentals. Often suggestions amount to imitating features and controls from other games that people are already familiar and comfortable with, but those just don't translate to our simulation based system and its fine grained, nuanced control. These are some very important core additions and changes, we have discussed other features in the past, and they might still, but likely after version 1.0.
Those are our biggest priorities as we see them right now and likely what we will be focusing on next. There's a few other things that we'll continue working on for now though, in particular with AI which is also very complex and unpredictable, so we need to observe and tune things over time. In particular with companions (Derrin) we're working to improve various pathing and other behaviours. Watching people play and talk about their varied experiences has already given us a lot of insights.
Best,
Bare Mettle
So the update is finally out, that was quick right? Right. It's been great seeing many people get back into the game and all the positive feedback. We've been busy patching and hotfixing, some things we'd hoped we'd fixed actually weren't and going from a few testers to so many players uncovered various things that flew under the radar or are specific to some system configurations. So much has been changed and rebuilt, so there's going to be some issues and things that need adjusting again. We've addressed a lot of this already, and made a bunch of improvements and content fixes too.
The last few months we've mostly been trying to get everything ready for the update rather than working on anything new, so our attention has been largely on what comes after this update and leading up to 1.0. As we've mentioned we won't be tearing the guts out of our engine again, so we should be able to add features that don't rely on that last bit of content in smaller updates before then. There's a fair bit we want to add and improve, but some things are a higher priority, or will benefit from long testing so we will focus on those first.
Something that we hope to add imminently is the post portal "save system". This is not a simple save and load system, but rather something that you will need to unlock and comes with some limitations. You will need to collect certain items, one of which comes from a difficult boss encounter. However you do not need to defeat the boss as there will be another way to obtain the item. This item will have other uses too, but one use allows you to essentially create your own save points at certain specific locations. If you use it in this way, you will not be able to use the item again for its other purposes. We've tried to cater for different players, and also give you a sense of agency in how you save your progress and a strategic element. It should be fairly easy to piece together how this all works, but either way we'd rather not spell it out for you and let you discover it and some its nuances in game. We've been laying the groundwork for this for some time and we're actively working to complete it, so we hope it won't be long before we can introduce it.
Something else that we want to complete for 1.0 is the remaining skills, and by extension combat in general. This has been a hot topic internally for a while, that we've also discussed with some of our community. Like some other things, combat has been in bit of state of limbo, and this is a bit of broad topic that needs some context.
Early in development we genuinely thought the game was mostly fine and just needed more features and a bit more content, but the reality quickly became endlessly iterating on combat. This is what players focused on most, either because they loved it or "hated" it. This went on for years, and eventually we said enough and stopped iterating on combat to focus on actually making a game. It was never our intent to make a combat sim, we just wanted everything to be governed by physics because of emergent gameplay, interactivity and just that sense of a tangible, functional world it brings. But here we are, with something more sophisticated that doesn't fit our original, more humble plans.
Now we've just overhauled our physics and character physics, to fix many general problems and to support new things. We also worked on combat AI, but mainly because we want smart and realistic behaviour from our NPCs and creatures. It's been all about the foundations and immersion. We've been doing the minimum to maintain combat in a working state, by adjusting most motions to the new physics and so on, but there have not been any meaningful changes or additions to combat. A lot of things have fallen into a state of disrepair as we stopped iterating on temporary things. Now it's time to finish the most important features and try to finalise things for 1.0.
You may have heard various ideas we've floated about combat, some are more speculative, but some have been well defined and tie into skills and other mechanics. That said, these things require a lot of experimentation and testing, even when we have detailed plans the physics based and very dynamic nature of combat means things could not work out as we imagined at all, so we may need to change those plans significantly, or even scrap them. Take this as our intent, but understand that we can't be sure what will actually come out the other side. There will definitely be public testing, and we'll see how things evolve.
Let's start with bashes. We're quite excited about this, and it's a core feature that could significantly change the dynamics of combat and support other mechanics. The basic idea here is the "Alternate Attack" (Alt) input is no longer just for thrusting, but basically puts you in alternate stance (e.g. half-swording). This could change how you defend too, but most importantly in this mode the right mouse button no longer walks, but performs "bashes" instead. The simplest bashes would be a shove or check, but we're also considering various mechanics for alternate bashes or combos such as queue strikes, punches (including with a shield) and sweep takedowns. We haven't defined all the exact moves for each weapon configuration yet, but so far the idea is that we'll have a similar RtL / LtR and combo system as regular attacks.
And this brings us to shields. Shields are not in a good spot, they're unappealing to the player and yet tedious to fight against when used by the AI. The difficulty is how to make them effective, and yet still have a weakness that's exploitable against AI. The shield stamina system exists largely for this purpose, and while we know some people don't like it, it will likely stay, but be fleshed out so that it's more meaningful and serves more to provide openings to players who exploit it tactically. There's a few mechanical changes planned to solve some of the issues with shields, but largely we want to play more into their offensive capabilities, and bashes will play a role there. Bashes could potentially also play a role in creating openings against shields. When ranged combat is introduced, shields will immediately become more valuable, and we'd also like to enhance their defensive capabilities against large opponents. Of course shields will also finally become procedural, with new and reworked shields.
On the topic of defences, we need to talk parrying. The issues with parries have been discussed for a long time, but it's something we haven't been dealing with, for good reason. We used to regularly tune parry motions as attacks changed, but this was time consuming, motions just kept changing, the number of motions kept growing and we wanted to change the mechanics anyway. Something that has always stood out is the "binary parry", that is whenever someone is attempting to defend all it takes is to touch their weapon with your attack it rapidly stops doing damage. This creates a lot of implausible moments that don't fit with our fully simulated combat and a few mechanical issues. This was largely a crutch for our physics engine not being to properly solve collisions between thin, fast moving objects (weapons), but that problem was fixed with our physics engine overhaul, and now it's all due a revision.
This is a very important change with a lot of knock-on effects, there's already about 60 parry motions, we'll need more and now parries must really attempt to physically stop or deflect attacks. Parries have never been reliable, this won't change, and mechanically they will be inherently less reliable, but we hope that with revised motions and dynamic behaviours we can get things working well. It's a daunting task, but either way this is clearly the way to go and we think it will be an important improvement to the feel and flow of combat.
Another potentially important addition is the "Draw" close combat skill technique. The concept here is that after landing a hit you'll be able to hold your weapon on the target and transition into a pull down, sweep or draw cut, depending on your weapon and inputs. Additionally, we may allow interrupting any attack motion to transition into one of these moves, without needing to hit anything. This so far is our best answer to officially supporting the grappling moves that some of our community is fond of. This should both provide more intuitive controls and use more deliberate motions where the characters are deliberately exerting force on the target, removing some of the randomness from both setup and execution. It should also generally support manipulating your attacks in new ways and transitioning into various cuts for swords. This also could be another tool for dealing with shielded opponents.
Obviously ranged combat represents an entire new skill category to fill and will introduce many new factors into combat, but as it doesn't yet exist in the game in any form and we're still defining some details we feel it's not time to really talk about it yet. We will say that we consider ranged combat a much easier problem to solve than anything close combat, as there aren't complex physics interactions involved. There's some new gameplay mechanics, but there aren't any new problems to solve in terms of physics and it's essentially not all that different from say using a Force Bolt.
One final topic is armour. You may have heard us say that we plan to revisit the encumbrance system, and a few things besides. Currently armour carries no penalty at all once you have 3 ranks of MiA, it's simply an incredibly strong net benefit to defences with no tradeoffs, not wearing the heaviest armour is just a pointless handicap and the lighter armour sets are just inferior in every way. Armour is obviously ridiculously good, and that won't change, but we do think there should be some upsides to using something other than the heaviest sets in the game. The obvious implication is not being able to completely negate encumbrance from those heavy sets, but rather than a simple nerf we're hoping to approach this more as a buff to both heavy and light armour. The idea is that when unencumbered you'd move a bit quicker, but also in a way that feels less "weighty", and isn't just the not very obvious speed difference we have now. For heavy armour we want to play more into its increased mass and protection, a good and fitting start is making the Security technique more effective with heavy armour, which really plays into the feel and identify of a heavily armoured "tank". We're considering a few ideas still, and we might rename the armour skill to "conditioning", introducing some things that are less focused on armour.
We look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions, just remember that our goal is to polish up and complete the combat system, we are not looking to redesign the fundamentals. Often suggestions amount to imitating features and controls from other games that people are already familiar and comfortable with, but those just don't translate to our simulation based system and its fine grained, nuanced control. These are some very important core additions and changes, we have discussed other features in the past, and they might still, but likely after version 1.0.
Those are our biggest priorities as we see them right now and likely what we will be focusing on next. There's a few other things that we'll continue working on for now though, in particular with AI which is also very complex and unpredictable, so we need to observe and tune things over time. In particular with companions (Derrin) we're working to improve various pathing and other behaviours. Watching people play and talk about their varied experiences has already given us a lot of insights.
Best,
Bare Mettle
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