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Q&A
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Classes
#divine intervention
#death curse
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Q: What's your vision of pre-made abilities such as Divine Interventions and Death Curses, seems everyone is giong to have some divine interventions and death curses. What are these?
A: The whole concept again between DI and DC and abilities, are—these are not abilities in the way that we're describing abilities. Abilities, whether they're based on components, or even if we had some precooked abilities, those are meant to be used all the time. That is how you will level your character. This is how you play the game. A divine intervention and a death curse—these are, essentially, just like in Pen and Paper games, at least the games that have that, you're rolling the dice because you're about to die. You know, you're
rolling the dice knowing that you are absolutely going to die. You're willing to die and you're going "to hell with you" that would be the Viking's attitude "to hell with you", and you're calling on these abilities. So, keep that in mind. These DIs, these DCs, are not abilities in the sense that they're meant to be used all the time. They will have a long re-use timer on it, so if you use your death curse, don't expect to come right back into the game and be able to use another death curse or another death curse, or even the same death curse, right away, because that would make them pointless, and that would also make them a lot less fun, you know, for other players, right?
It would be less fun, and it would also make combat very crazy, because if you were using your death curse every time you died, and everybody was using their death curse every time they died, and you had a big battle in which people were dying all the time, everybody would be exploding and causing catastrophes and all sorts of the crazy things that happen in these abilities—we don't want those to happen all the time. We want them to be unique and rare, and to be used in situations in which you think they will actually make a considerable difference. Because if you're using a death curse, let's say, just to spite someone, just because you felt like using it, and it's not really going to change the outcome of a fight, that's kind of wasteful. But if you use it in the middle of a fight that's close, you might be able to—even though you died—get that last big hit in, or get that last, you know, control bit in that wasn't going to happen otherwise, but you died and you threw that out and put that little bit of extra effort in that could actually make a difference and turn a fight. So we want them to be situational, and used when appropriate. Not all the time.
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Classes
#ammo
#Blackguard
#quivers
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Q: Can you talk a little about quivers? Specifically the Blackguard because his death curse uses them. How will ammo in general work?
A: Ammo in general, right now, is really broken up into two different types. We've said—and we've talked about this on the forums as well—that basic ammo, you're going to be either able to carry an awful lot of it, or it will be just something that you can have in an unlimited amount. But these are very basic arrows. These are just like, um, you know, uh, melee fighters—you don't want to always be running out of your basic—if your sword broke every battle, nobody would want to play a melee guy. And it's the same with the archers. We know that you can't carry 3000 arrows. I mean, that would really break the whole encumbrance thing that we've talked about from the beginning. So you're always going to have a basic, or a supply of very basic arrows. However, the more powerful arrows, the arrows that will be made by crafters. Those things you're going to have to carry like an inventory item. Now, will it be 50? or 100? Whatever the number is; that's obviously something that we have to work out during Beta. But, they are two separate things. You will be able to, at least right now, always have an arrow that you can shoot. 'Cause, especially in the case of the Blackguard, if you couldn't carry enough arrows to go out into the woods and actually do something, there'd be nothing else for you to do. And that'd get, you know, obviously, pretty boring. So, you know, look, there's a fine line there. We know we've said no hand holding, and I think this is a good way of saying, you know, yes, the more powerful arrows, the arrows that you're going to want to use most of the time, you've got to be smart about. But, there will be plenty of opportunities to use the basic arrows, um, you know, quite effectively. And we've also talked, as well, about carrying essentially components that you can use, you know, as an archer that are made by crafters which you could them assemble. You can't do it during a fight, but during downtime, you could assemble those components into additional arrows that you could use after the assembly.
There's a bit of these details that we still have to work out the exact functionality of, but the general idea is that we don't want you just running out of arrows. Not, at least, very often. We want to allow for that, because it means that you do have to consider your ammunition but we don't want that happening all the time, we don't it to be a huge limiting factor where you're constantly worried about—every fight I use up all my arrows and I constantly have to go back and get more. So if you're carrying around enough extra arrows. If you're playing a forest stalker
and you're getting free extra arrows because you're in a forest, or if you're just carrying around some of these components in your backpack, and you're like "hold on a minute, let me put together some more of these and fill my quiver back up." You know, there need to be some methods that happen there, just exactly like Mark said, just like a sword. Like, if your sword breaks every fight, you're not going to want to play this game very long. So there's going to be a enough of a cycle there that you're not going to have to worry about it on too frequent of a basis.
And how frequent that is? That's something that's going to have to come up through testing because we could just make up a number right now, but we haven't tried it, and we haven't gotten all the complaints that say people don't like it that way and make it longer, "I never have to worry about arrows, why do I even care?" and so make it shorter. So, we'll play with that some, and it will be something that—no doubt—goes back and forth, so the first time we do it, if you guys are out there playing the game, keep in mind this is something that will change, because we're
just going to put it in the way that we think it will probably go, and then we will adjust from there.
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Classes
#ammo
#salvage
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Q: Can you salvage and recover arrows from the dead, or enemies arrows. I know we've talked a little about pieces, parts as you go. What about maybe using another realm's arrows?
A: Yeah, so, that's something we would really like to be able to do. Obviously, these arrows being crafted means that they will have a durability to them, even if you can recover them so you can't just, you know, go out some days, fire a bunch of arrows, collect a bunch of arrows, and every day you're doing that and so nobody ever has to make new arrows, because they're always just picking up and throwing arrows around. So even if you can salvage complete, intact arrows from the battlefield the fact that they've been fired and used means that that will count against their durability and they will eventually have to be replaced. We would like to be able to have scavenging, because it would be really cool, but it's a technical feature we'll to have to figure out exactly how we're going to implement—whether you'd have to have some way for the world to track what arrows exist in an area, and then you use scavenging and it collects from that pool, or whether we can actually have all these physics objects lying around that you can go around and individually pick up. That's a lot of polys lying around on the ground that we probably don't want. So we'll probably have to come up with something that's somewhat abstracted there, but salvaging arrows from the battlefield is something we'd like to do to some extent.
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Classes
#Archers
#combat
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Q: Is a short range skirmish, a la WAR's Shadow Warrior will be something that it possible, or is that too fast for this game?
A: I don't want to say exactly fast, but that's sort of what the Winter's Shadow is, right. He's sort of the skirmish archer, right. He has his shield so that if somebody gets up to him he can bash him with his shield. He'll be able to out an axe or a sword or something, and fight sort of close range. But he also has a bow, and so he will do best when making use of that, and kind of going back and forth between the two as needed, depending on people trying to close with him. As far as the actual pacing, the Shadow Warrior, as far as Warhammer, I don't want to get into all the specific minutia of the details of that, but the mobility is much higher in a lot of these other games, where you're allowed to run at full speed, and fire at full speed, and do full time kiting. That's something that we're not going to stick with. If you have your bow out you're fine to run around at normal combat speed just like somebody having a sword out. You're going to slow down with each progressive step, of like, okay, I've loaded—nocked an arrow, right, that's going to slow you down a little bit. And you're drawing your arrow—you're ready to aim and shoot somebody—that's going to slow you down, so you're not running around, you know, kiting at full speed while firing arrows, running backwards and shooting people. It's going to slow it down a little bit more than that. So it's going to be a bit more tactical, you're going to have to be somewhat more careful, but not as much as a mage who has really stand in a fixed location and use spells and stop in order to cast.
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Classes
#camouflage
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Q: How prominent is camouflage for the class overall? Is it a core focus, or something that's just added on?
A: I think it's a very important part of the class, especially for the Stalkers and the Shadows. I mean, these guys, not only part of their survivability, but part of their usefulness, when they so solo of course is camouflage, right? If you've got a bunch of your folks and you want to play a group that is guarding the borders, or guarding an area, being able to camo and hide 'cause you know those nasty other realms happen to be heading in your direction—having effective camo is kind of important. Will it be useful—and again—like stealth? With being able to go pop right back into camo? No. It will not. It is not stealth. It is not intended to be stealth. But it needs to be useful, especially for those folks who want to play the solo character who's hiding, who's waiting for the right opportunity to jump into a fight, or to start a fight. So, yes—it's important, yes—it's going to be something that factors heavily into their make up, but not in that sort of way of other games, of popping out of stealth, taking a shot at somebody, and then popping right back in. That is not part of how camouflage is going to work in this game.
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Classes
#projectiles
#reaction system
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Q: What is planned to happen when an arrow projectile hits a spell projectile? Is there an interaction? Do they deflect each other?
A: Magic! I mean, that's what's supposed to happen, right? It's AIR! That was the whole point, or one of the points behind the [A.I.R. system]]. Anything that can be cast, whether it is a spell, anything that can be thrown, or shot, like the projectiles of archers. All this is meant to interact with each other. That's the key. And whether it's a fireball hitting an arrow, or it's an arrow, or certain arrows that are made for deflecting—you know—magical attacks, that's all part of AIR. So, you know, as soon as we get the archers into the game and working, we're going to be playing with that.
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Archer Archetype
#Archers
#disruption
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Q: Will you be able to use bows while being hit from enemy melee?
A: Archers obey the same disruption rules that everyone in the game obeys, so if you're taking damage, it's not just the damage you're taking, but the disruption damage that you're taking. So, depending on the disruption health of your ability, you might be able to survive somebody hitting you, assuming they're not hitting you with a lot of disruption damage. If they hit you with a lot of disruption damage, your ability that you're in the process of is going to be interrupted, and that may have a number of very bad effects, depending on the components that you're using. But, in general, you don't, probably, want to be hit a whole lot while you're using bow abilities. In the same way that you don't want to be hit a lot if you're using magic abilities.
But if you could do that, if you're in a good fight, and you think, well, boy, I'm about to die, but I think the other guy's about to die, you might take the chance, rather than trying to put away the bow and draw a weapon, or even run away, and not use a death curse or DI, to hope that the guy won't get enough disruption damage to block the shot that might kill him. So you can still do it. Certainly, it's not something that's just binary, one or the other.
This is not a full hard interrupt system, where anything that touches you interrupts every ability that you're using. There's a wide range of how easily disrupted your ability is, based on the components that you used to create it. And then there's the possibility space of how hard is that guy going to hit me with something that actually tries to disrupt me. If he's just trying to do pure damage, he might not be disrupting you that hard, and you might be able to get some of your abilities off. So there's always that chance.
We don't want a game where is somebody breaths on a mage, somebody breathes on an archer, and all of a sudden they can't use their attacks, because that would be silly. That's not good RPS, you know, especially nowadays.
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Classes
#Archers
#melee viability
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Q: Will archers have access to melee weapons? Will the weapons available be different depending on realm?
A: They will have melee weapons. We don't list everything, obviously, we're just giving you a few samples in these reveals, so that's not comprehensive of all the things they can do—we'rejust trying to give a few of the highlights that give you a flavour of what this class is generally going to play like. Everyone can use weapons unless specifically stated otherwise.
You know, where we say 'this guy specifically can't use this', or 'this guy specifically needs to use this', in the case of some abilities that require specific interactions with specific weapons and things. But, yeah, archers, you know, if you want to pick up a sword as an archer, you can definitely do that, and you probably should in most cases, have a backup weapon, even if you're not highly specialized into that like that blackguard, like, probably will want to carry a secondary just so that when somebody gets up on him, he can hit them with a weapon and fight back which will probably be a lot better then him just trying to point-blank shoot bow abilities back at somebody who's hitting him with a melee weapon.
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Classes
#body parts
#targeting
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Q: Will archer shots target body parts?
A: Yes. Body part targeting is part of a lot of abilities, archery is definitely one of those. We're currently in the process of working that into our system. Obviously, as you've seen, we've done a little bit of testing with wounds. We're going to be expanding on that, getting into wounds to different body parts, then we're going to get into the ability components that use those body parts as specific targets, but we're also trying to integrate our physics system into that, as far as validation is concerned. So if some guy is peeking up over the top of a wall, and you're trying to shoot at his foot, and you can't see his foot, you can't hit it, just because physics says you that can't. But you're still going to be able to bake in your ability that you intended to do that. So if you can hit somebody, and you can have physical line of sight to those body parts, that you can hit them. So we're going to try to work that out, but that is, again, another work in progress thing. But, yes, just the general short answer of, 'can I target with archery different body parts?' Yes.
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Classes
#Blackguard
#camouflage
#divine intervention
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Q: Blackguard divine intervention indicates that it can target someone in camo. How do you prevent that from abuse by UI Mods?
A: He's talking about being to hack the UI and find people who are in camo. It's a specific attribute of that ability, so when that ability is triggered, that will find the person who is in camo. This is, again, going into the intricacies of the stealth system in general, I mean, camo is not the same as stealth because it has different restrictions, but it follows the same underlying system as far as the code is concerned for, you know, can your client have knowledge of other characters who are in stealth, and the answer is no, because that would lead to radar. So, in that way, stealth and camo are basically obeying the same systemic rules. And so, different abilities violating those rules and allowing you to detect people, or allowing certain abilities to work, it's a message from the client to the server that says, 'I'm going to try and use this ability, can I do it or not?', and then the server has to be authoritative on whether that's possible to hit somebody who is stealthed, or to be able to detect somebody who is not necessarily there, because the client doesn't even know about it.
And the thing, as well, to keep in mind, again, is that DI ability is not an ability that is meant to be used all the time. It is something that, again, will have a very long re-use timer. It is not something that you're going to, in a single battle, or even in multiple battles, on the same day, necessarily, be able to use. And it's so important to keep that in mind. Otherwise, there might be issues. But this isn't one—this is not going to be a problem, because, again, these things are not meant to be used a lot in a a single day, let alone in a single battle. You
will not be able to use death curses—I can guarantee—you won't be able to use death curse twice in one battle.
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Classes
#progression
#skills
#Winter's Shadow
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Q: You talked about progression, as like, let's say, Winter's Shadow, you want to train your bow abilities, but because of being forced into defence, you're required, in order not to die, to use your shield as much or more than your bow. Will there be way to counter this unwanted training of skills?
A: If you feel that it's mandatory, if like, well if I don't use a shield if I don't use a set of abilities, I'm just bad. Well don't use a shield.
Honestly, I just don't see it as being unwanted, right? If you don't want to level up anything in the game, we could say, well no you can turn off levelling. So I don't think—honestly, I think if you pull out your shield, it should level. If you don't pull out your shield, then it won't level. Because it's not automatic. You can't just go into combat, use your archery abilities, and then when somebody comes up to you, you switch to the shield. You don't. You have to make that choice to use your shield.
But if we're giving it to him as a big part of his character, right, a big benefit of this character and what makes him different from other characters is that he can use a shield. If you choose not to use that shield, you could do that.
It's not necessarily going to be the best choice. So they're feeling like, 'I'm kind of forced into using it', and yeah, you kind of are. It's like 'I want to play an archer, but I don't want to use a bow.
Well, we're not forcing you to use that bow, but you kinda should. So, you know, the shield is a less strong choice than that, because if you wanted to play a Winter Shadow without using a shield, you certainly could do that, you're going to miss out on a bunch of things. There might be some alternative choices in there where maybe there's a dual wield version of him, where he doesn't actually use the shield, and so he can go into melee and not have to carry a shield around with him, if he really doesn't want to. But he is kind of a back-and-forth hybrid. A big
part of his core components is that he has good weapon switching, so that he can switch back and forth from his bow to something else. So if you're not doing that, and you want to stick exclusively with your bow, that's probably not going to be the best pathway to go for that character.
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Classes
#defense
#progression
#Winter's Shadow
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Q: Would there be a drawback to frequently be in a defensive position, where he wants to specialize in bow damage, could his shield being higher than his bow prevent him from making progress on his bow because of some aggregate soft cap.
A: No. That's the whole point. If you have, whether it's a hybrid, or a class that has abilities that might not be the ones you would think at first would be associated with the class. We wouldn't put you guys in a position of, well, you can't level up your bow up all the way because of your shield. If his shield is part of the planned mechanics of the character, then of course you're going to be able to level them up.
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Classes
#Archers
#trick shots
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Q: Combat physics sound really interesting to where we're going to be able to target certain body parts. Does this mean we could possibly have ricochet or trick shots?
A: I don't want to commit to that at this point. One of the things that we had as, sort of a bug earlier is sort of the default behaviour for abilities is that they would bounce off of things. And so we've talked about that here and there, about putting that back in—probably not something for arrows because that's a little bit too crazy-fantasy of bouncing arrows off of things. But something that you know, maybe magic abilities might leverage to some extent, if they can ricochet off of things, or specifically if they can roll down hills and other things like that might be something that some abilities will be capable of doing in the game.
Not a chance of committing to it now. We've got to get a lot of other things working, you know, in physics, and in servers, as always, server-side physics, before we'd even consider putting something like that in there. Except for fun.
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Classes
#Archers
#visual cues
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Q: How do you visualize the archer into a visual game? For example, heavy war arrow does extra disruption damage. Will the arrow glow a different colour? How will victims know victims know that that is a highly disruptive attacks versus a high damage attack? Will there by a floating rune system like the mage, etc.
A: For certain things, we'll do callouts. Probably not for things that are just on a sliding scale, like that. You know, can you tell the difference between a sword attack that does 10 damage and a sword attack that does 15 damage? Probably not visually. You're probably just going to get hit for an amount of damage and then you can tell how much damage you just took. So, not everything is going to get that level of differentiation, but something that is going to have a really special affect, like, you know, on the forest stalker, if they're attaching plants to their abilities, you might see that arrow looks like it's got vines trailing behind it or something, so you can tell, oh, that's something that's actually got a very unique and different gameplay effect, as opposed to something that just has a slightly different stat, or a different amount of damage. Or flaming arrows, or things like that. Anything with a different effect.
We really want to call it out. And it's easy to call out, right? Because if something's going to be hard to see, and distinguish in melee, or in combat, the odds are it's not worth a lot of effort. But if it's things that can easily be well represented by Mike, you know, through particle effects, or any other system—we're just simply building bigger projectiles, right? Arrows don't necessarily have to all be the same size.
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Archer Archetype
#range
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Q: Will archers have the longest range in their realm for the three classes, or will some mages have longer range that the realm's archer?
A: Maybe, and the reason for maybe, um, is one of the things we've talked about from the beginning—and we're not trying to dodge the question, honestly—is what role will Mages have in siege combat. If—and the plan still is of course for Mages to be very effective in siege combat—and if that's the case, spells like the fireball which you've seen during testing, or things that have a long and, you know, very, uh, high arc, you can argue that they have a greater range. You know they're travelling a greater distance. Now, these spells will be, most likely nigh-to useless in non-siege situations, you know, 'cause they'll be slower. They'll be cast from a long distance. So you can argue that they might have the longest range in the game. But in group combat, or in, you know, one on one combat, you would never try to use one of these spells. First of all they take forever to cast. And you can just, you know, kind of move away from them. So, that's why it's not an attempt to dodge the question. It's just, when you have a system like ours, where you can have mages do things that they don't normally do in other games. Where you have spells that don't act like spells in any other game. The concept of who has the longer range, is not, you know, one that's easily answered. And highly situational.
Like, in specific situations, there will be a yes or a no answer, that's very clear, like, uh, probably the—the biggest thing to differentiate is to say that arrows are very fast-moving projectiles. And so they're very effective at player targeting.
Whereas spells might have tracking, and might have, uh, more power to them in some cases, versus some situations. But they're not going to—if they're tracking projectiles that ignores gravity, and the mage has to, you know, use in such a way they're not going to go as far. And so if you're going to use a big siege ball, or something, that's going to go pretty far but it's still going to move fairly slowly compared to the travel speed of an arrow so it's not going to be as good at, like, anti-personnel type situations. Uh, and so there's a lot of differences. Now a mage could still cast a giant, you know, uh, firestorm in the sky and then have some, you know, group of people pushing it in a direction, and like—does that have a long range? Well yeah. It goes really far and it covers a giant area, but, like, we're not even talking apples-to-apples about the same things, so you know, it's a very hard question to answer in that way. One thing I will say, and probably should point out, though, is that range in our game is very far. So, if you're used to plyaing these games that have a max range of, you know, 30 metres, 60 meters, whatever. Uh, our ranges are typically much father than that. So, when you talk about who has a farther range, it's like, well, engaging someone at max range means you're shooting things so far that your accuracy is going to be fairly inconsistent when it gets to using those abilities. So, where it becomes effective is a much more sliding scale. As things get closer to you, the time to hit—because projectiles are not hit scan, they're actually travelling through the air as physics objects—the time to hit becomes much shorter and so the effectiveness goes up. And so fighting even at max range is not necessarily going to give you, uh, the results it would have in another game in which, you know, as soon as somebody steps into range evertying is functioning at max effectiveness.
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Classes
#Archers
#group dynamics
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Q: Generally speaking how are archers going to be desirable? Will they overtake their Mage counterparts in group vs group situations?
A: So, archers primarily deal physical damage as opposed to magic damage. Um, there are some fundamental differences there, where, it depends a lot on armor, because, uh, arrows, primarily using piercing damage, need to penetrate the target's armor. Heavy armor is good at resisting piercing damage, cloth, not so much. Um, so, depending on the targets that you're selecting, the groups that you're tending to fight against, the more heavily armored they are, the less effective archery is going to tend to be. Uh, magic doesn't care about that so much. It cares about magic resistance. It cares a lot about the engraving system that we're going to be talking more about here in the future, and uh, the general magic resistances that targets have. So somebody that's in very light armor still might have very good magic resistance. And so, a mage might be having a very hard time with somebody that an archer would have a very easy time with. So it depends on the characters. Um, as we mentioned a little bit earlier, also, uh Mages tend to be fairly immobile, most of them. Uh, archers all sort of have, uh, an inherent mobility, in that, you know, when you're drawing and firing, you know, you're less mobile than you would be if you were just running around doing nothing, but you still have some good mobility, and, uh, and in a lot of cases you can do, uh, a lot more by, you know, slight adjustments here and there, whereas mages want to, kind of, tend to, build up there area and kind of stick to these—sort of—static locations. So if you're in a group that's highly mobile, a group that's going after low-armor targets. If you specifically want somebody in your group to pick off low armor targets, um, you're going to want to have an archer as opposed to a mage. Mages have, you know, various other things, and when we get to talking about Mages we'll talk about some of, their benefits. We're going to primarily talk about archers. So I'm not going to get into all the cool things that mages do, but, um, yeah, using arrows, using piercing damage, uh, and being mobile and picking off people at a long range is a lot of what archers do.
And it also depends on, not only what you're targets are, or who your targets are, but where you're fighting. If you're a TDD archer and you know you're going to be spending most of your time in—or, TDD group, sorry—and you're going to be spending most of your time in Viking's land, or in Arthurian's land, then some of your abilities won't be as effective. And that will factor into your choice as a group. Alright, do you want to take, you know, the archer who won't be quite as effective today as he was when we were, uh, sitting, you know, back and defending our realm. So maybe, the trade-offs with a mage won't feel, you know, as bad this time. Or not as bad, but you know, it won't be—it will not be as helpful, uh, to have the TDD archer this time as it might have been the day before. So, uh, just like the last question, it's really situational.
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Gameplay
#melee balance
#range balance
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Q: With so much range, won't this be a handicap to melee and aren't they at a disadvantage? And contrary, if projectiles need to hit a target to deal damage, will this affect range characters's DPS, and will players favor melee over range a lot due to this?
A: Isn't this perfect? This is great. I mean, this is awesome. So, you know, one of the things—and just to segue a little bit, and for a very short period of time. When I was in law school, and acting as an arbitrator, uh, during my first year, one of the things that they tried to teach us was that the best deal that you could make as an arbitrator is when both sides were unhappy with it. And that is perfect, because right now you really do have two people looking at the same system and going, well, but this is bad for this group, and then they're going this is good for that group. So—and that's what's really fascinating, the game is balanced when everyone is overpowered.
That's the best part of this kind of a system. So, you know, if combat—if melee combat, uh, well I should say, if ranged combat is very powerful. If it is always tracking 100%. If it's not projectiles, but really spells, then you'd be absolutely right. Melee characters would be in a lot of trouble depending on what survivability abilities we give them, right? But in this game, with projectiles tracking, but not tracking like the latest and greatest homing missile, you know, ever invented by man. You're going to have, as a melee character, the ability to just get out of the way. You know, to dodge some of the abilities. Not by, you know, bunny hopping—not bunny hopping—not by active dodging and rolling, and double tap and all that, but by using the terrain.
You can certainly hide behind rocks and trees and things, and move, and that's something we've seen, you know, quite a bit, even vs magic, with the long ranges that magic has in the, uh, the current version of the game when we do play tests, is that you have to take into consideration, if you're just in the middle of an open field and there's a melee guy who's way out here, and a mage who's way out here. The melee guy's going to have a pretty rough time, um, but again that's in the current version of the game. We don't have armor, we don't have damage resistances or
shield's working yet.
Imagine you're a melee character with a shield, in heavy armor, and arrows are just going to be, you know, getting stuck in your shield and bouncing off of you as you're closing on this guy who's just like, frantically shooting arrows at you, and like, you're going to have a pretty easy time closing up to him. Um, but if you don't have very good damage resistance, and a mage starts throwing stuff at you, you're going to not have as good of a time. So there's situations where it's good and situations where it's bad. Um, but, just as a general principal, because
melee characters tend to wear heavier armor than—than non-melee characters—except for stealth, but you have stealth so you don't worry about this as much. Um, if you're just running around in heavy armor you have an inherent advantage against arrows because arrows are physical attacks. So that will help compensate for that a little bit.
And one of the things that we talked about—actually before this—was the idea of looking again at arrows as not being magical spells. They can't go through trees. They can't go through rocks. They can't go through, you know, anything else that exists in the world. So, you know, yes, if you're on a totally open field, you're going to be in a bit of trouble. But, if you're in the forest. And even if you're in the TDD forest, and the TDD have uh—the archers have advantages there—they can't just shoot you through the forest. These projectiles still have to pass through the trees. So, even if there's a longer distance for you to cover, you've got—well, you've got cover. You've got things that can deflect, and can absorb, uh, these arrows. So, trade-offs. Always.
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Classes
#arrows
#target penetration
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Q: Will arrows be able to pass through a low armor enemy doing damage like, in his hand, and hit a second target in the leg?
A: No. We have absolutely, no plans yet to implement something like that. Is it something we could always look at in the future—or we could look at in the future? Maybe. But let's get it—let's get the system working were we can actually shoot an arrow and hit the intended target before we worry about if that arrow then could pass through the hand, continue its flight, and move on to another target. Though I'm sure Rob would be fascinated to try to figure out how to make that work.
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Classes
#Archers
#Beta
#bunnies
#camouflage
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Q: Given the amount of tech to get archers right, will we see them in the game soonish? Also, will NPC bunnies have camo?
A: Well, I've said this before and I'll say it again. Camo for bunnies is confirmed.
I think bunnies will have fairly high concealment. I'm not sure they will actually use camo. But they could. I think we you know, should, give them the ability to use camo, make them impossibly, we should level them up, and give them, you know, big teeth, and things like that too.
Okay, that might be going a bit much, but it's not actually far-fetched that bunnies would use camo. Just throwing that out there. They certainly will have relatively good concealment because they are small. To give out a somewhat serious answer to a kind of ridiculous question.
Um, so tech and archers.
I don't have a timeline—obviously, we had archers in, in the game, some of you may, or may not know, we had archers in the game a while ago, and started testing them out, and found that we had some core issues that we couldn't resolve at that time, because it would have taken a lot longer of engineering time, and then we would have had to push out the schedule on some of our other things that were higher priority, so, we kind of took them back out, and have them slated for a kind of pass 2, uh, before we get them back in. Um, We have a lot of the animations ready, once we get, uh, some of the more animation stuff working, uh, we have to do a bit more work on our stance system, um, and, we need to work on some targeting related things, uh, and a couple things we're not even talking about yet before we, get some of the cooler and, uh, more unique features of our archers in that we'll talk about later. So, I don't know if we have even on the schedule when the timeline is between now and Beta, but this is a Beta feature.
So, Beta will not begin without this working. Sometime between now and Beta, this will happen. It will probably happen—as with most things, when you guys are in these play tests—in small progressive steps. Where it starts out, and it's kind of wonky and it doesn't work very well, and doesn't do very much, and it gets a little bit better, and a little bit better with each play test, until, you know, by Beta, it's going to be, uh, solid and fun in a way, that you know, we get a lot of good feedback and get a lot of iteration time.
And that's exactly why we picked them as one of the opening trios because they need it. And the longer that we'll have to play with these guys, the better they'll be. So, yeah, they are absolutely confirmed as one of the Beta trios we said that last week, we'll say it this week, and we'll probably be saying it for the next eight weeks after this one. These guys have to be given time for you folks to play with and for us to balance them.
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Arms and Armor
#bows
#weapon variety
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Q: What different varieties of bows will the different classes have access to? How much variety will there be, and will they have different effects, noticeable ranges differences, etc.
A: Think of them as bows like any other weapon, right? If, crafters could only make one type of sword, and the difference between these swords was almost nothing, then crafters are going to be pretty mad at me, and, you know, so will the folks who use the swords, because we've been talking about—right from the beginning, even before the Kickstarter—of having a crafting system that matters. So if all bows are the same—just like if all swords are the same—then the crafters are going to be out of business, oh, less than a month, probably, after the game's—you know, opens. So yes, of course, there will be lots of variety in bows, lots of variety, uh, in terms of, uh—whether it's damage, or range, and other things, uh, that will factor in to, you know, every type of weapon. Not just bows,
and certainly not just swords.
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Fun
#baby wheel
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Q: Will Archers be able to kill the baby wheel?
A:....
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Classes
#Archers
#playstyle
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Q: Will archers be more useful in defence situation, and weak in the battlefield, say, 1v1?
A: Well I think we've covered that. It depends, one, on the archers, and it depends how you want to look at weak. I mean, honestly, uh, 1v1, will the blackguard going against, you know, the best damage dealing melee character, uh, be in trouble? Well, sure, of course. Uh, on the other hand, will the Blackguard, 1 on 1, going against a mage who's geared, you know, ability-wise, uh, for taking sieges, will he be more effective? Yes, he'll be more effective 'cause his abilities are geared to kill other players. So, you know, we don't want these guys as a weak class, but we won't want them—obviously—as a class that can stealth, come out, one-shot ya, and then go back into stealth. And fortunately there's a huge gap, you know, between useless and OP, and that's where we're going.
Yeah, this is the same RPS question when we talk about any class. Like, is this class good at 1v1? Sometimes they're good at it. Sometimes they're bad at it. It depends on if they're in the positive side of the rock-paper-scissors arrangement or in the negative side. Some classes are going to destroy other classes, and those classes that are getting destroyed by the one class are going to destroy in turn other classes. And so it's not as if anyone is specifically great—and we're not even talking about just going out and soloing, because soloing is obviously, you know, kind of a niche thing that not everybody's going to be great at. But just when one guy catches you, and you—and one single enemy in the middle of the large fight runs up and starts attacking you, or even starts from range attacking you, you know, dealing with that situation where you're only—at the moment—concerned with how you're going to respond to a single attacker. There's going to be different relationships. And there's going to be different targets, to you're going to have to be careful about who you select as a target and who you specifically stay away from because you know if they get on you, you're going to be in trouble.
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Classes
#camouflage
#stealth
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Q: Can you elaborate on camo? How will it be cast? What it'll look like, will the players be able to travel in camo? Similarities to — and differences to stealth.
A: Well, I mean, I think what you actually just asked highlights some of the differences in stealth. Uh, no, the idea in camo is you're not moving at full speed in camo. You know, if you want to move at full speed, you should be using stealth. You should be one of the classes that can go into the veil. In terms of what it'll look like, uh, you cannot camo—you should not be able—I hate to say cannot, but it will probably be a cannot—uh you cannot just be in the middle of a field, wearing, you know, bright gold armor, even if it's made out of leather, and hit a button, and go into camo. On the other hand, if you're wearing the appropriate armor. If you've got the things that were made by the crafters to help you in camo, and you're trying to blend into—whether it's the forest, or blend into snow, you'll be able to do that. And, again, I think the most important differences is absolutely to remember, this is not walking through the veil, or running through the veil. This is meant for the characters who want to hide in certain places. Maybe move around slowly among—within the same type of terrain, and is properly specced and geared for that. Again, if you're going out in your hot-pink dyed armor, you're not going to be able to blend really well on those grey rocks. It's just not going to work that way.
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Classes
#Archers
#archery mechanics
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Q: If archer's can pull arrows from quivers, then line up the shot, then draw the bow back, and finally shooting. Can you elaborate on how that would translate into button presses. Do we press one ability button to trigger all those sequences automatically, or will some of the things be done manually?
A: Okay. So, right now we're working on, uh, putting our component system together in such a way that's it's modular enough that you can do either one of those. So the idea is that if you wanted to just walk around with your bow you can do that—obviously, you can walk around with just a sword. If you wanted to just nock an arrow, as in, get an arrow out of your quiver, put it on the string and hold it there—not even draw it—just walk around like that, that you could do that as a single action, as a single ability that has the components of the bow and the arrow and the process by which you load it and those are your components and that would be an ability. If you wanted to go through the rest of the steps and say, not only do I want to get the arrow out and put it on the string, but I also want to draw the bow and I also want to aim at somebody and I also want to fire, and I want to take all the components that it takes to do that and put them all into one ability, so all I have to do is push one button and it goes through the entire sequence. You could also do that. So I think allowing that flexibility will give us a lot of different play style options, just, like, sort of personal preference options in the way that you create your abilities. You know, do I want to make a button for, each, you know, loading each type of arrow, and then another button for drawing fast, or power draw, or whatever, and then do I want to make another ability for the way that I'm aiming at the target, and then I—you know—every time I use an ability I'm pushing three buttons. Or do I want to just make a bunch of these combinations of like, well, I like doing this combination over here, and then this
combination, and then this combination, and then you have, you know, dozens of different combinations, or you know, more or less depending on how many different things you want to be able to do and how much flexibility you want. Um, but every button press is a full action that goes through all the things in a sequence. That's kind of something we want to leave up to you guys, because, either way, you know, you either have to make a whole lot of ability buttons for every possible conceivable combination, or make only a few combination things and then push three buttons every time you want to shoot an arrow. So neither one of those is something that we feel everybody is going to like, um, but one or the other or a mix of both is something that we kind of want to give to you and obviously test it both ways and see what comes out of it.
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