Talk:2022-06-30 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Basic Melee Weapon Attack Update

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Raw transcript

• 0:28

hello everyone and welcome to another live stream day for Ashes of Creation

• 0:34

super excited to be with everybody today we have a pretty awesome showcase i think it's something that the community

• 0:41

has been asking for for a little while actually i think the last time we showcased uh some combat gameplay was a

• 0:49

year ago roughly almost um but i am very excited to show you guys what we have in the

• 0:55

works today um i have joining us with me today two of

• 1:00

our extraordinary engineers adam and kenan how you guys doing hello

• 1:07

stephen doing well how are you i am doing very good running around like a chicken with

• 1:12

its head cut off but otherwise very good keenan how you doing buddy

• 1:19

i'm doing good glad to be here awesome i'm excited to have you this is your first stream i believe correct this is

• 1:25

my first stream very cool adam you've been on a couple ones before this yeah yeah yeah it's good to be back

• 1:31

very cool and then i also have joining us today one of our senior game

• 1:36

designers mr trad how you doing buddy i'm doing great i'm glad to be back on

• 1:42

stream welcome back very excited to show what you guys have been working on what the team has been working on

• 1:49

i know i probably already said this on the stream but i'm going to reiterate it

• 1:54

here that this what you're about to see is not the final combat in ashes

• 2:00

this is a portion of the combat systems obviously a lot goes into making combat

• 2:06

right from a visual effects perspective from mechanics and functionality on the engineering side

• 2:12

the design elements and how it synergizes with our class kits and ability systems the

• 2:18

you know balance of these things the audio component the ui there's a lot that goes into making

• 2:24

combat for an mmorpg and the combat you're going to see today is very focused on

• 2:30

one component actually two components i'm sorry um the first of which is our

• 2:36

basic melee weapon attacks in addition to our floating text ui

• 2:44

so keeping that in mind that is the context of today's presentation previously

• 2:50

i had decided that i wanted to wait to showcase combat until

• 2:55

excuse me until we had um pretty much everything done and ready to

• 3:01

show and as time grew i decided what i wanted to do

• 3:07

instead was showcase little portions of each uh component of the combat system

• 3:13

starting with the basic melee weapon attacks and then we'll move into in a later live stream

• 3:19

the ability systems and the class kits and of course we're not going to show every class kit and you know everything

• 3:24

that's going to be in alpha 2 we want some of that to be a surprise right but we do want to showcase

• 3:31

the work that's been done and the direction that's been taken so that we get player feedback and

• 3:37

personally you know playing this i think it feels amazing i think it looks great i'm super

• 3:44

impressed continually by our team's talents um as i know a lot in the

• 3:49

community are after having seen the character creator and the weather systems and season systems um

• 3:56

you know there's a there's a very high quality bar that we're we're setting ourselves up for uh with ashes of

• 4:02

creation and i i think it is it is what you know the community wants um but it's

• 4:07

great to have these touch points where we get um where we get your feedback so focus today is going to be on basic

• 4:13

melee weapon attacks um it's going to be on root motion versus split body the types of agency that's provided to the

• 4:19

player while also respecting the weightedness we want from certain weapon groups and also talking about the ui

• 4:25

element and showcasing floating text and the types of customization options that players are going to have so keep that

• 4:31

in mind that's the context of of today's presentation and when you give the commentary let's

• 4:36

let's focus on what you like and what you think there could be improvements on from that perspective so without further

• 4:43

ado we are in probably an area that you guys are familiar with um

• 4:48

this is the riverlands biome yet again um you saw this in the the last month's

• 4:55

stream but we are in an area that is known to harbor um some scary things

• 5:02

um so i'm just gonna start kind of walking down in this area and um adam

• 5:08

keenan tratt if you guys want to talk a little bit about how this process began

• 5:13

all those months ago on defining good combat for Ashes of Creation

• 5:22

uh sure um i would say you know it starts with you know all of the hundreds of

• 5:29

thousands of hours cumulative hours of mmo we have under our belt right we have a lot of hours of mmo gameplay

• 5:38

we just got to push a couple buttons and we're immediately like oh it feels good or it doesn't feel good you know it's funny keenan actually you say that um

• 5:45

one of the koala i mean you guys all know this because every one of you went through an interview with me but one of the qualifying aspects of joining the

• 5:52

team is what type of mmos do you like to play [Laughter]

• 5:57

nice yeah so it starts there uh and then from there we sort of do our research you

• 6:03

know we have to take a look at the state of the art and then we [Music]

• 6:09

we study it we form hypotheses about what exactly it is that makes things

• 6:14

feel good or not feel good and then we make those things in as

• 6:19

controlled a manner as we can and then we turn the knobs we tweak things we see what feels good what doesn't feel good

• 6:26

we come up with some rules some processes and then uh we put them to the test

• 6:32

and this is this is what comes out yeah it's um it's very iterative iterative process right like you know

• 6:39

none of these things are like you form your theory on paper and then you go and you make the thing and it comes out to

• 6:45

be exactly what you see now right like it starts out the first time not super great and then

• 6:50

what we have to be able to do is engineer the designers is identify what's

• 6:56

not great about those things and then just continue to integrate on those things as long as you keep making it better

• 7:03

each time eventually you're going to end up with something good yeah and for uh this exercise and

• 7:09

finding what makes ash is great specifically we wanted to approach it from the ground

• 7:14

up uh answering individual questions about uh our hypotheses and what we

• 7:20

think is good right so we we really um focused on individual aspects

• 7:26

that we think makes good combat and answered them one at a time in a very tightly uh

• 7:32

very tight iterative process and uh we ended up at something that uh

• 7:38

we think feels really really good so yeah just just playing this i am loving

• 7:43

the hit reacts the visual effects all the ancillary components that go into making

• 7:49

the combat but but more importantly the pacing of this kind of heavier

• 7:55

weapon group um also as a side note uh outside of the combat

• 8:00

one of the things i've not necessarily liked about mmos traditionally in the past is that

• 8:07

excuse me every portion of land is covered by some type of monster right it

• 8:12

kind of gives you this weird feel but here like this is a very dangerous area that we're in the

• 8:18

environment and part of it gets communicated by the you know aspect of these rocks and like

• 8:24

the specific types of materials that's represented here but you don't know exactly where the threat lies per se

• 8:31

right you kind of move up into an area and if you move too far you get the

• 8:37

audio cue of the of the monsters like arising your character gets into the combat stance they have some really cool

• 8:44

aspects of of animation the animation team did an amazing job with the roles here i am

• 8:49

loving and also they're like death just like swinging away and then flying off that is so great

• 8:56

yeah i really like like the camp feel of of this area where you know you don't just see these guys scattered around all

• 9:02

over the world no matter where you go there's like something that's going to aggro you it's more like i'm gonna grind

• 9:07

here for a bit yeah steven you were talking about how you like

• 9:14

how heavy the wet the sword feels and um that weight impact that is one of the combat pillars

• 9:22

that we have been studying and honing in on in our development process the other side of it is um

• 9:29

the other side of it being also like agency you know to what extent does this weapon respect your intentions

• 9:35

and that's the part that's important to me i'm a i'm a classic player i come from traditional mmos right like i i want to

• 9:42

be able to move and attack at the same time right yes and that was a huge point of feedback actually that we received

• 9:48

during alpha 1 was that we started with this more root

• 9:54

motion approach to the basic weapon attacks and ultimately we

• 9:59

we called an audible mid test i remember it was in that that end of july or beginning of august month um

• 10:06

where we decided to implement a a completely split body approach and get player feedback and of course the

• 10:12

feedback was was very positive or soundingly positive right um that players prefer that agency

• 10:19

over that weightedness but they also there's a little bit of a conflict there because they also didn't like the floaty

• 10:25

feeling which comes along with not having the weighted approach so how

• 10:31

did that play into your guys's defining this current approach on the

• 10:37

weapon attacks how did you blend those two yes so we kind of approached it from looking at

• 10:44

player agency primarily as kanan had said and the games that really handled uh player

• 10:50

agency the best are those like classic mmos right players really like how smooth uh the

• 10:56

classic mmo feel how much player agency they get out of it and then we we took that and we tried building this sort of

• 11:03

impact and weight on top of it really making attacks feel satisfying making it

• 11:08

feel like the inertia of the weapon and your movements are are accurate you know physically accurate

• 11:14

and we accomplished that through a number of ways uh really again talking about the process we we try to identify

• 11:20

each individual aspect of uh of what we got out of these you know

• 11:25

more modern action games and tried incorporating that into our classic mmo bass um

• 11:32

you know i think i think it all comes down to looking at it not as a binary of

• 11:39

you know are we doing split body or are we doing root motion combat it's looking at everything as modular pieces and then

• 11:45

dialing in those numbers to make something that feels

• 11:51

high in player agency feels very impactful like it has a lot of inertia it feels very physical

• 11:58

yeah my litmus test for agency in combat is take any moment in combat pause time

• 12:04

look down at your hands look at the keyboard the buttons that you're pressing should be the directions that your character is

• 12:10

moving so with these weapons even though there are little uh [Music]

• 12:15

like little bits of root motion here or there they're always respecting your was the input and i think that's what makes

• 12:21

them feel good i think another thing that you guys did that helps with that is the

• 12:27

timing of what that gets registered right like it's not you know at one point one iteration we had it where

• 12:33

it detected what your input was at the beginning of the attack and that just

• 12:38

felt like if i decided to change my mind and go left instead of right in the middle of that attack

• 12:45

it's too bad it already kind of cued that and so i think now what you guys are doing is

• 12:50

having it happen at like swing time right yup it's constantly looking at your

• 12:56

input and adjusting now i've equipped these these daggers this dual wielding uh

• 13:03

these dual daggers talk to me a little bit about the differences between the heavier um weapon group and the light

• 13:10

weapon group yeah um so initially in our uh

• 13:16

investigation we wanted to start with the the light weapons to figure out

• 13:21

how to really blend uh the the weight of an attack um

• 13:27

and and introduce or start with player agency and then introduce that weight of the attack into it we figured the least

• 13:34

risky plot bin to start with would be the lightest weapon possible you know little daggers that move very fast very

• 13:40

high player agency and uh not necessarily focused on big weight much like a heavy sword so

• 13:48

um we started with that and tried introducing little bits and pieces here and there uh like small bits of root

• 13:53

motion to get that nice like dashy feel in when you're when you're attacking and uh play into that inertia um i know kena

• 14:02

might want to talk more about the animation timing sheets we introduced

• 14:08

for figuring out these uh timings that feel good yeah that's part of our process for

• 14:15

communicating cross department is using frame timing diagrams and being specific about how we not only want to animate

• 14:21

but also how we want to move during different frames of the animation and we found that to be very successful

• 14:28

but one of the things that makes the daggers different than the sword is that the daggers never really slow you down

• 14:36

they're both respecting your directions but the swords will actually slow you down at certain times like leading up

• 14:41

into the strike your split body movement is sort of uh blending down towards zero and then you

• 14:48

strike and then it blends back up toward the one the daggers are are not doing any blending like that you're just split

• 14:54

body and then you're striking and then you're back into split body and it's sick of seeing this process

• 15:00

yeah i'm just playing with the directionals here i mean on the animation team they did a a phenomenal job i'm loving

• 15:07

the kind of foot placement and movement the strafing feeling on the body there i

• 15:13

know alexi did a lot of work on the ik as well that we can see like when you're you know kind of stepping up different

• 15:18

portions um that's it feels really good to to play

• 15:24

oh yeah considering how uh physically based we are and animation driven our combat system is

• 15:30

uh it was super important that the animators you know get all of that right and they absolutely knocked it out of

• 15:35

the park i mean one of the biggest things i think uh to making good feeling attacks is

• 15:41

getting all of the departments involved in what feels good and on the same page right

• 15:46

getting everyone iterating so you know like in the process we started with chopping up animations to build an

• 15:52

ability that we thought felt good and then we wanted to pass that off to animation to finalize those animations

• 15:58

by chopping up our abilities and making animations that feel good and then we can all loop everyone back together and

• 16:03

finalize that ability you know vfx has the same process too so you know it's

• 16:08

it's a bunch of different departments iterating on a very micro scale to build something that is just awesome

• 16:16

yeah the animation team definitely had to take a deep breath when we went to them like hey

• 16:21

you know those three-part weapon combos that we like so much uh we want different ones for each direction that

• 16:27

you can move in oh and also you need to be able to weave between the directionals at any time

• 16:34

that is pretty funny um one of the things that's uh interesting and is always a point of contention for those

• 16:41

of us who have perhaps played different games and have become accustomed to a specific

• 16:48

visual representation of these these damage floating text right

• 16:53

and i want to showcase a little bit i'm going to let them hit on me for a little bit just so you can kind of see

• 16:58

directionally damage you take which is indicated in this red number floats towards your left hand side and when you

• 17:06

do damage to a target they float to your right hand side now

• 17:12

one of the very important aspects of these floating texts is providing the player with

• 17:18

customization options that they can adjust the size of the floating text they can adjust the color composition on

• 17:26

how these texts are represented they can also include damage icons to indicate

• 17:31

the ability that's used for those floating texts um and importantly

• 17:37

excuse me we also call out the um uh the crits that you do in a separate way how they

• 17:43

pop in they're slightly above those um the other numbers um and then more so we

• 17:49

also have additional functionality for cumulative damage uh value so i'm going to kind of go through that you'll see

• 17:55

here as i press uh you know different option now we've changed the colors

• 18:01

um whoops hold on let me see make sure is that color going off differently or

• 18:07

am i just do i not have my hold on

• 18:12

is it okay let me try this quick

• 18:21

oh maybe that's not oh let me find a different monster i hope that's working if it's not we can

• 18:27

show that a little bit later let me press this button oh here we go

• 18:33

okay so you see the color is changing now and that's something that the player has agency over right you can assign

• 18:40

different types of colors that you want um that was changing i think the one i was

• 18:45

pressing actually was changing the size so let me try to change that size again there you go you can see that size now

• 18:52

is larger you can showcase xp if you want you can bold it um the numbers a little bit as well but

• 18:58

providing kind of maximum flexibility and character customization um excuse me player customization options for these

• 19:04

floating text i think is super important but i love the way that they feel that kind of classic um very almost um

• 19:12

uh what are we saying canon very vanilla vibe oh yeah sometimes the best flavor is

• 19:17

just vanilla absolutely totally heavy

• 19:22

yeah but the ui team's done a great job on the functionality for that i think it's feeling pretty good

• 19:30

yeah that's very cool so where are we now when it comes to kind of the the

• 19:36

spectrum of light to heavy attack options on these basic weapon attacks

• 19:42

um what's kind of next for this as we showcase it to the players

• 19:48

well i think we've sort of defined our spectrum with the light and the heavy when it comes to agency versus weight versus impact

• 19:56

when you look at the heavy i think we're we're close to saying that this is sort of the most we want to compromise agency

• 20:04

for weight and impact and once we have that upper bound we can sort of play with all

• 20:09

of the different uh intermediate points right as we start to build out other weapons

• 20:15

but we have interesting explorations as well and how all of this translates into ranged and um also ultimates we might we

• 20:22

might take the limiters off for ultimates and just see what the coolest things we can make are yeah that that's

• 20:28

going to be pretty interesting another component by the way of defining um kind of this weapon attacks is also the

• 20:34

visual effects side um and weapon trailings the intensity of those weapon trailings how they scale based on the

• 20:41

type of weapon the level of weapon that you have uh but not just the trailing on the weapon per se but also the grand

• 20:46

ground decals like for this heavy weapon that first strike you see that kind of that decal in the ground is i love that

• 20:54

look and even on the back swing like when i hit the ground behind me it's causing that decal

• 21:02

yeah a lot of that stuff gets down into the really low level systems details like we want to pass

• 21:08

the artists as much information as we can about actual combat ongoings so that

• 21:13

they can inform the effects as precisely as they can or as precisely as they need to rather

• 21:19

yeah and we really wanted to um build the on a technical side we really

• 21:25

wanted to build the combat system to like like i said earlier be as physical as possible so we have it very animation

• 21:32

driven um everything is handled uh based on a reference of animation as opposed to uh like

• 21:40

nebulous timings right which allows it to feel very impactful and very

• 21:45

responsive so when you hit the ground the ground decal actually appears on the ground when it should uh

• 21:52

you know that's something that may not be seen in other mmos so we really wanted to make a big

• 21:58

focus on that and and focus on the responsiveness yeah one thing i failed to mention by

• 22:03

the way apologize for that is actually um you guys are seeing the pirate male for the first time in

• 22:11

game i know we've showed him on this on the stream before um as these character races get further

• 22:16

fleshed out but here you're seeing him in full flesh and blood so to speak virtual flesh and blood i guess um

• 22:23

in the game that's that's pretty cool to see i can't wait for players to kind of get a look at the customization options

• 22:28

and the character creator for this for this race um uh also another thing

• 22:33

that's um you know really important i think is uh the audio

• 22:41

component and cat has done a phenomenal job in both the sound design

• 22:48

for creatures as well as for the the weapon and actually you guys haven't seen anything yet

• 22:54

because we have a lot in store on that front that i think is going to be is going to be pretty cool and it and it's

• 22:59

all part of the presentation right it's all part of what makes combat feel good is also the auditory

• 23:06

component um in that talk to me a little bit about the capabilities that that the

• 23:12

audio team has when it comes to accessing combat and

• 23:17

the abilities yeah similar to vfx we plan on piping in a lot of information you know that's

• 23:23

something we've been working a lot on recently is tooling for vfx and sound effects

• 23:28

right it's a super important part as you said of the package in order to sell that weight and that immersion in the

• 23:34

game and there's going to be a lot coming online so i'm you know really excited to see

• 23:41

what we have in store for for that so yeah yeah i don't know if we'll ever show it

• 23:46

on stream but we've we're we're building a sort of a singular tool that all of the teams can

• 23:52

use to build abilities and tweak them uh sound of their sound effects visual effects animation

• 24:00

design engineering all using the same tool grip grounded in animation

• 24:06

you know to build these abilities yeah absolutely another component um

• 24:13

adam which um you guys worked on is camera controls and adding

• 24:18

um talk to me a little bit about the the kind of visuals that are provided

• 24:23

through these cam additional camera controls for abilities and combat yeah so i mean the word of the day has been

• 24:29

impact and weight right and a lot of that is sold through what the the player sees you know we didn't want anything to

• 24:36

be uh nauseating or over the top and you know certainly people can adjust it in option settings but we wanted something

• 24:42

that would uh that would sell a lot of the weight without you know being too over the top

• 24:48

and too sort of cartoonish right and so we implemented a few different camera effects you know things like

• 24:55

camera shake radio blur and a few other things involved and really tried to

• 25:02

maximize uh you know our bang for the buck with those to to sell the weight of these

• 25:07

attacks and it really adds a lot uh especially um i've noticed a lot of how

• 25:13

your peripheral interprets the way that the attack really sells it for me as a player

• 25:19

so that's something we've been focusing on and it's it's made huge improvements to the feeling of these attacks

• 25:27

yeah absolutely i love it um so

• 25:33

looking forward as we continue to flesh out both the medium

• 25:38

melee weapons and we'll be showcasing our ranged weapons in combat in a future stream we're also going to

• 25:46

be talking a little bit about and showcasing uh which you guys got a little sneak peek on a few abilities um some class

• 25:53

kits and the ability systems as a whole um and what we're able to accomplish for

• 25:58

alpha 2. um of course you know we promised at the beginning of this year that you guys would be getting some

• 26:04

pretty exciting showcases of all the work that's being done on the project towards alpha 2 you

• 26:10

got that with the character creator you got that with the seasons and weather systems now you're starting to get a little bit of touch on the combat side

• 26:17

and i know that there's a lot of stuff that design has been prepping around you know the work that's been

• 26:23

done on these class kits and and the the different archetypes that are going to be playable across alpha 2. um but

• 26:29

there's a lot in store and there's a lot of functionality that the engineering team has provided our designers when it

• 26:34

comes to both the functionality of certain types of abilities as well as the

• 26:40

synergies possible between them you want to talk a little bit adam keenan and trout about um what's possible given our

• 26:47

ability toolkit definitely man um i mean we've

• 26:53

so this whole you know prototype process has been kind of you know two steps one of those steps was what you know adam

• 26:59

and keenan were talking about a bit there with you know their hypotheses on you know what makes good

• 27:06

feeling combat and they've done a great job on that but the other side of that was also just you know

• 27:12

coming up with these almost mock class kits um and you know the idea was this might not be the final

• 27:19

class but there will be things that we can take from it that would like and then get rid of that we don't like unless we make something

• 27:26

and you guys have kind of seen some sneak peeks of that already from the assassin in the previous stream and now you're seeing

• 27:33

something from weapon master uh that was the other one that we took to experiment with and contrast these

• 27:39

different types of combat and um what i was kind of going for here

• 27:45

was you know getting fast energies in place where you know maybe you know for example you've got a

• 27:52

thing that if you kill someone with one of your other abilities it'll reset the cooldown on one of these abilities and there was a lot of that kind of stuff

• 27:58

going on in this kit whereas there wasn't so much of that interaction in the kits and you

• 28:03

know the previous outfit it was an area that we felt could really improve and the good thing about that um whole

• 28:10

exercise that we did is we came up with a lot of cool abilities you're not seeing them all here but um

• 28:16

they you know what it really did for us is it developed our tools because we realized oh we can't do this or we can't do that

• 28:24

and so like the designers and adam and keenan here would kind of go back and forth and say like

• 28:30

you know designers need to be able to do this particular thing that we can't currently do and then they would take that and

• 28:35

make it possible so we're really putting our method forward here now we're

• 28:41

going into like the full class design we're gonna have a lot of stuff that we can get the crowd running absolutely

• 28:47

oh go ahead kevin oh i was just gonna sort of build on tracks point like all of these exercises

• 28:54

or throughout all of these exercises we're very careful on the ability system side to make sure that

• 29:01

when we're adding something new we make it as modular as possible we really want to think of these abilities as being

• 29:07

made out of like lego pieces not being sort of like molded from a

• 29:12

single block of clay so whenever we're trying something and we build something new that's a new piece that we can have

• 29:18

that we have to explore and combine with all of the other pieces that we've already made absolutely um the other thing that's

• 29:24

important and is important probably for players to understand with regards to alpha 2 is that this is another testing

• 29:30

ground right alpha 2 is a test and in alpha 2 we're going to represent components of the class kits and the

• 29:37

ability system that may not make it to launch but it is a perfect area for us

• 29:43

to kind of get both player feedback as well as for us to log data

• 29:48

around its usage its impact its um you know feasibility as essentially a component of our class kits right we're

• 29:54

going to be experimenting a lot with regards to that for alpha 2.

• 30:00

so it's very exciting um definitely we're just getting started yes absolutely well

• 30:06

guys this has been a fun stream i think um i really enjoy

• 30:13

obviously talking about this stuff and showcasing the hard work that you guys are doing everybody on the team is doing across um everyone that makes combat a a

• 30:20

fun and tactile thing for us to play with um there's a lot that goes into it but

• 30:26

i think the team is hitting it out of the park with these showcases as we show you know essentially what our quality

• 30:31

bar is for Ashes of Creation so i want to thank everybody for tuning in and watching

• 30:37

please make sure it's very important that you guys give feedback uh with regards to kind of what you saw today

• 30:43

um you know it is always something that we are iterating upon uh but

• 30:48

generally based on what feedback we already received out of alpha one and the pursuits that our

• 30:54

engineering side as well as our design side have been have been examining and and and playing

• 31:00

around with we feel really confident in this approach for the basic weapon melee attacks um but we want to hear your

• 31:06

guys's feedback what you thought of today so make sure to comment both in the youtube section as well as on stream on our forums on

• 31:13

our discord connect everywhere we value your feedback very much it is an important part of creating ashes of

• 31:18

creation and remember this is a work in progress this is something that we are still expanding upon something that we

• 31:24

are still improving um it is never truly finished but of course uh it is getting

• 31:29

close to to alpha 2 ready um thank you guys again for tuning in uh adam keenan

• 31:35

trad thank you guys for being a part of it always appreciate the insight and the talents you guys bring to ashes of

• 31:41

creation as a as a game um we're very happy to have you guys so everybody in chat give a give hearts for our awesome

• 31:48

guests today and i will see you guys back on stream

• 31:59

[Music]