Combat Is Disappointing

[Salmonmoose]

Although the combat is a huge improvement on the 1st game I'm really struggling to enjoy the moment to moment gameplay because of the archaic way enemies react to damage and death.

As far as I can tell every enemy has roughly 3 death animations and elemental effects that can be layered on top to indicate burning, frost etc.

I'm old enough to remember games using canned death animations in the 90s and there's a reason why the industry moved to physics driven systems. They add weight, variety and a rewarding feedback loop to killing enemies. For example directional force should play a role in sending enemy corpses flying and overwhelming damage should blow an enemy to pieces, it makes no sense that 2 totally different causes of death would result in the same animation. Eventually it gets boring.

It seems a strange step backwards when combat is 90% of your game to disregard all physics in favour of a limited number of set animations.

[Critical]

Ah yes, the developer who isn't a developer trying to tell other developers how they got something wrong.

[Kashra Fall]

You want Titan's quest. I also want Titan's quest, it was the only ARPG where your impact was shown and it made you feel like a demigod. ARPG's haven't done it that way in a long time probably due to technical limitations.

[Salmonmoose]

Originally posted by Critical:

Ah yes, the developer who isn't a developer trying to tell other developers how they got something wrong.

I don't understand. I'm a paying customer giving constructive feedback about a product. Is this not a thing where you're from?

[RYⱯN]

Originally posted by Critical:

Ah yes, the developer who isn't a developer trying to tell other developers how they got something wrong.

Ahhh the tester who paid to test doesn't know how to test.

[Snobby Hobo]

Originally posted by Critical:

Ah yes, the developer who isn't a developer trying to tell other developers how they got something wrong.

The moment your house has its electricity and water cut off you're going to be in big trouble, as you aren't allowed to complain by your own genius code.

As to the OP: this is a spectacularly niche complaint. Personally I vastly prefer the baked animations, as ragdolls tend to be very inconsistent. In this game however the explanation is quite straightforward: the amount of ragdolls would destroy the CPU of a lot of computers unless very well optimized. That is without even considering how difficult it would be to make them for some of the weird creatures.

[ΜΣ†ΛĿ]

yes, it looks pretty bad especially when you 1 shot a pack of 30 of the same monsters and they all die the same exact way and lay on the ground in the same exact pose.

[Salmonmoose]

Originally posted by Snobby Hobo:

Originally posted by Critical:

Ah yes, the developer who isn't a developer trying to tell other developers how they got something wrong.

The moment your house has its electricity and water cut off you're going to be in big trouble, as you aren't allowed to complain by your own genius code.

As to the OP: this is a spectacularly niche complaint. Personally I vastly prefer the baked animations, as ragdolls tend to be very inconsistent. In this game however the explanation is quite straightforward: the amount of ragdolls would destroy the CPU of a lot of computers unless very well optimized. That is without even considering how difficult it would be to make them for some of the weird creatures.

Diablo 3 managed 11 years ago. World war Z manages with hundreds of rendered entities. More games have physics than not these days and many have more enemies on screen than POE2, so that argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

[Salmonmoose]

Originally posted by ΜΣ†ΛĿ:

yes, it looks pretty bad especially when you 1 shot a pack of 30 of the same monsters and they all die the same exact way and lay on the ground in the same exact pose.

Yup, exactly. Or when you land a heavy attack and they simple flop to the ground in the same manner as when you kill them with a light attack.

[Salmonmoose]

Originally posted by Kashra Fall:

You want Titan's quest. I also want Titan's quest, it was the only ARPG where your impact was shown and it made you feel like a demigod. ARPG's haven't done it that way in a long time probably due to technical limitations.

Thanks for the tip. I've wishlisted Titan Quest 2 now.

[Snobby Hobo]

Originally posted by Salmonmoose:

Originally posted by Snobby Hobo:

The moment your house has its electricity and water cut off you're going to be in big trouble, as you aren't allowed to complain by your own genius code.

As to the OP: this is a spectacularly niche complaint. Personally I vastly prefer the baked animations, as ragdolls tend to be very inconsistent. In this game however the explanation is quite straightforward: the amount of ragdolls would destroy the CPU of a lot of computers unless very well optimized. That is without even considering how difficult it would be to make them for some of the weird creatures.

Diablo 3 managed 11 years ago. World war Z manages with hundreds of rendered entities. More games have physics than not these days and many have more enemies on screen than POE2, so that argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

That's fair. There are also horde shooters who can handle hundreds of units at once - but that's due to effective batch processing.

Like I said: getting that many active ragdolls to work you need to optimize the game for it especially, which is a serious constraint. Some creatures also don't have obvious ragdoll skeletons, which might make optimizing even more complicated.

[Kashra Fall]

Originally posted by Snobby Hobo:

Originally posted by Salmonmoose:

Diablo 3 managed 11 years ago. World war Z manages with hundreds of rendered entities. More games have physics than not these days and many have more enemies on screen than POE2, so that argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

That's fair. There are also horde shooters who can handle hundreds of units at once - but that's due to effective batch processing.

Like I said: getting that many active ragdolls to work you need to optimize the game for it especially, which is a serious constraint. Some creatures also don't have obvious ragdoll skeletons, which might make optimizing even more complicated.

They could at least make skeletons explode into fragments, but they don't even do that lol.

[Pok]

interessting, that is something that i havent mentioned yet :o
was not so important to me it seems.

meybe they can do a little about that... but for me its not a big deal.
the gameplay and combat oprions that my charackter has is more important to me and its good :)

[SomewhatSolo]

I think this game has a lot going on to make up for some shortfalls. That being said, If I had any issues with combat, it would be the targeting system. Needs to be tightened up.

[AirSniffer]

Originally posted by SomewhatSolo:

I think this game has a lot going on to make up for some shortfalls. That being said, If I had any issues with combat, it would be the targeting system. Needs to be tightened up.

Yes. The fact that there's auto targeting even on m+kb is ridiculous.

[Salmonmoose]

Originally posted by Snobby Hobo:

Originally posted by Salmonmoose:

Diablo 3 managed 11 years ago. World war Z manages with hundreds of rendered entities. More games have physics than not these days and many have more enemies on screen than POE2, so that argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

That's fair. There are also horde shooters who can handle hundreds of units at once - but that's due to effective batch processing.

Like I said: getting that many active ragdolls to work you need to optimize the game for it especially, which is a serious constraint. Some creatures also don't have obvious ragdoll skeletons, which might make optimizing even more complicated.

Compare the hypothetical work of setting up physics based skeletons to that of multiple death animations per creature type, also consider that companies like Havok have offered an off the shelf physics solution for years. Logically processing isn't a bottleneck, time isn't likely a bottleneck, its more probably that it is a deliberate design choice that will bother some players and not bother others. To me it's very noticeable and distracting as the game is mostly combat, so most of what I'm seeing is the same animations play out thousands of times, I want variety and dynamic feedback.