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farranor
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STO's ground combat mechanics are occasionally really, really bad. In this post I will attempt to explain what's missing and why it's important.
The biggest part is probably agency, or the feeling that you're having some effect on the system.
The vast majority of games derive their "fun" by letting the player make decisions and take actions, and then producing results that are based on those decisions or actions. It might be as simple as "jump over this chasm to get to the other side," "move your rook to capture that knight," or "hit the target to increase your score." The important part is that you do things and then your success or failure is impacted by those things.
For a counterexample, see Mario Party, a game where nothing you do matters in the slightest. It's different from gambling, because gambling is intentionally luck-based. However, Mario Party leads players into believing that it's skill-based, with minigames and decision-making. Unfortunately, the results of all that agency are thrown in the garbage and the rewards are redistributed based on apparently random events.
Riot Games, creators of League of Legends, have extended this into the concept of "counterplay." Briefly, it is the potential for agency. Over the years, Riot has refined their understanding of agency and counterplay, modifying certain game mechanics so that all players can have "fun." This means removing mechanics that make people think, "well, I couldn't do anything about that," which generally means targeted crowd control. All a player with such an ability has to do is be in range of their opponent, hover the mouse cursor over them, and cast a spell to lock down their opponent and guarantee victory. There is no way to avoid such an ability other than by being far away, which may mean not playing the game while your opponents win.
How are these abilities "fixed"? By changing them into something called "skillshots" - the player fires the ability at the chosen location, and, after a brief delay, the spell effect occurs on any target occupying that location. This manifests as a launched missile or bomb, or variations thereof. Now opponents can play the game - don't want to get hit by that ability? Keep an eye out for it, and if you see one coming toward you, move to avoid it (or use an ability like a shield or heal, if you have one). This allows players on both sides to feel like their decisions and skill helped determine their success or failure.
So, what does STO do? Ground combat is just generally unpleasant, but any mission with a Herald boss (like the latest featured episode, "Broken Circle") is a special kind of terrible. It's obvious that they were intended to have pretty common raid mechanics, like "don't stand in fire" and "run away from the fire that chases you." However, the implementation is nothing more than a crude approximation that misses all the important parts of "fun."
How can you avoid standing in fire when the boss creates half a dozen semi-overlapping fire zones right on top of you, extending farther than you could possibly sprint in the time allotted?
How can you run away from fire that chases you when the boss casts it right on top of you?
The answer is that you can't. There's literally nothing you can do when the game decides to do that. You cannot influence your victory via combat decisions and skill. However, the enemies can't influence their own victory either, because you can respawn after two seconds and hop right back into the fight at full health, so the only thing the NPCs can accomplish is to make you feel weak and ineffective... but they do that very well.
Does that sound like fun?
I don't think it's fun. Neither would the millions of people who play League of Legends. That's why Riot is consistently improving the agency and counterplay in their game. See if they'll do some consulting for you to make the same kind of improvements in STO.
Oh, and the yellow blobs of fluidic space in space combat also demonstrate poor counterplay. "It'll stop preventing you from leaving it as soon as you leave it"? Really? Who thought that was a good idea? That's not fun, that's a tar pit. Movement abilities like Evasive Maneuvers or Rock and Roll don't even help. Every time I see those things, all I can think of is the poor logic behind them. And don't say "but realism" - I don't need to launch a video game if I want reality.
The biggest part is probably agency, or the feeling that you're having some effect on the system.
The vast majority of games derive their "fun" by letting the player make decisions and take actions, and then producing results that are based on those decisions or actions. It might be as simple as "jump over this chasm to get to the other side," "move your rook to capture that knight," or "hit the target to increase your score." The important part is that you do things and then your success or failure is impacted by those things.
For a counterexample, see Mario Party, a game where nothing you do matters in the slightest. It's different from gambling, because gambling is intentionally luck-based. However, Mario Party leads players into believing that it's skill-based, with minigames and decision-making. Unfortunately, the results of all that agency are thrown in the garbage and the rewards are redistributed based on apparently random events.
Riot Games, creators of League of Legends, have extended this into the concept of "counterplay." Briefly, it is the potential for agency. Over the years, Riot has refined their understanding of agency and counterplay, modifying certain game mechanics so that all players can have "fun." This means removing mechanics that make people think, "well, I couldn't do anything about that," which generally means targeted crowd control. All a player with such an ability has to do is be in range of their opponent, hover the mouse cursor over them, and cast a spell to lock down their opponent and guarantee victory. There is no way to avoid such an ability other than by being far away, which may mean not playing the game while your opponents win.
How are these abilities "fixed"? By changing them into something called "skillshots" - the player fires the ability at the chosen location, and, after a brief delay, the spell effect occurs on any target occupying that location. This manifests as a launched missile or bomb, or variations thereof. Now opponents can play the game - don't want to get hit by that ability? Keep an eye out for it, and if you see one coming toward you, move to avoid it (or use an ability like a shield or heal, if you have one). This allows players on both sides to feel like their decisions and skill helped determine their success or failure.
So, what does STO do? Ground combat is just generally unpleasant, but any mission with a Herald boss (like the latest featured episode, "Broken Circle") is a special kind of terrible. It's obvious that they were intended to have pretty common raid mechanics, like "don't stand in fire" and "run away from the fire that chases you." However, the implementation is nothing more than a crude approximation that misses all the important parts of "fun."
How can you avoid standing in fire when the boss creates half a dozen semi-overlapping fire zones right on top of you, extending farther than you could possibly sprint in the time allotted?
How can you run away from fire that chases you when the boss casts it right on top of you?
The answer is that you can't. There's literally nothing you can do when the game decides to do that. You cannot influence your victory via combat decisions and skill. However, the enemies can't influence their own victory either, because you can respawn after two seconds and hop right back into the fight at full health, so the only thing the NPCs can accomplish is to make you feel weak and ineffective... but they do that very well.
Does that sound like fun?
I don't think it's fun. Neither would the millions of people who play League of Legends. That's why Riot is consistently improving the agency and counterplay in their game. See if they'll do some consulting for you to make the same kind of improvements in STO.
Oh, and the yellow blobs of fluidic space in space combat also demonstrate poor counterplay. "It'll stop preventing you from leaving it as soon as you leave it"? Really? Who thought that was a good idea? That's not fun, that's a tar pit. Movement abilities like Evasive Maneuvers or Rock and Roll don't even help. Every time I see those things, all I can think of is the poor logic behind them. And don't say "but realism" - I don't need to launch a video game if I want reality.
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Poor logic indeed.
Edit: No, don't take this post as antagonistic to your points. I agree that Cryptic needs a better approach to some of their mechanics. I'm merely pointing out the flawed logic behind your reasoning.
Helpful Tools: Dictionary.com - Logical fallacies - Random generator - Word generator - Color tool - Extra Credits - List of common English language errors - New T6 Big booty tutorial
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Took the Invincible Starship trait.
Applied it to all ground characters.
Made enemies tougher.
Reduced the number of enemies present.
Much of what seems arbitrary, pro or con, is in large measure a consequence of fights that are very short and designed around taking on hundreds of stormtroopers.
I think it's no coincidence that many of the most memorable fights are against individuals, like the "Bonnie Kins" hologram. I also recognize that's incredibly resource intensive to produce content like that because the content guys are more or less constantly compensating for a systems design inadequacy.
Many of the easier and more standard MMO like improvements would also make ground and space too similar. I imagine just transposing a lot of space mechanics to ground like direction shields and weapon arcs would only be considered as a nuclear option for ground improvement and would also risk alienating people.
One option I think would be interesting (and, yes, would be non-trivial) would be to keep the 1 player vs. 5 enemies balance...
But with a twist.
- Treat an enemy as 3 different enemies with individually targetable pieces each with their own attacks. The head is only targetable when one of the enemies pieces is exposed as a spin on expose/exploit. Each piece has its own set of attacks, can be stunned or disabled separately. Right hand, left hand, legs, and head. (Dual pistols have an advantage although you might rework this so that non-rifles can be dual wielded.)
- Reduce the number of enemies.
- Introduce rezzing of the individual components. So you can kill a right arm and the left arm can rezz it with a hypo if it gets a chance.
- Reduce the size of single player away teams from 5 to 3 with redshirts filling out the other spots. Redshirts don't rez and are single targets and you can have accolades for keeping them alive.
- Another option is to have player bridge officers strategically deployed throughout the mission, encouraging players to get more use out of ones not in their basic away team.
- As cool as disintegration looks, I think it needs to be rarer special. Shift the mechanics. Claim that using settings higher than stun on most locations is too risky. Make "phasers set to kill" a situational special attack that can't be used on some maps or against some enemies and one that may even flip mission trigger conditions. So the assumption is that you knocked everyone out and when and if you take a kill shot, the game records it as a special incident that NPCs may take note of. It's not always punishment. It might cause enemies to become fear prone, trigger certain people into surrendering, etc.
Tac can use motion accelerator to run out.
Eng can back up a couple steps, then, while still facing the center of the red AoE circle, make a cover shield. The cover shield breaks line of sight from the AoE (even though the character still appears to be in the AoE), making the AoE deal no damage.
Sci can outheal the damage.
Tactical Team sucked, once upon a time. I got it buffed. Don't think for a minute that Cryptic ignores forum feedback.
Did you not read the part about half a dozen of these things being cast at the same time? It creates a little Venn diagram of doom, a beautiful flower of sealed fate.
Motion Accelerator is good if you can make use of 15 seconds of boosted movespeed. If you need two seconds of boosted movespeed at a moment's notice, you might as well not use it at all because of the activation time on abilities.
Regarding Cover Shield, you assume "the center of the red AoE circle" rather than "the centers of the half-dozen red AoE circles." There's no cooldown on these AoEs anyway, so even if you did manage to survive somehow, you'd be killed by the next group while your cover shield is recharging.
Outheal the damage? The damage of half a dozen AoE knockbacks, each one of which is intended to one-shot you (or nearly so)? Are you familiar with WoW's DK tanks who were designed around self-healing rather than blocking in a world where unblocked attacks could literally one-shot you? Healing only works if you are sometimes between 0% and 100% health.
What boss is doing this I would like to make it's acquaintance.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
The only thing I can figure that even comes close to this is the end battle of Brotherhood of the sword.
The Secret World does short charging dodge me attacks very well and Cryptic either needs to figure out how to make them work like they do there or scrap them entirely.
My character Tsin'xing
Know what that means?
The NPCs spawn camp you.
My character was repeatedly killed while in the middle of casting a heal. I timed them right, too - as soon as I saw my health drop from full, I'd pop Tricorder, but I would be killed before the cast could complete. Enemies would run to me and use various melee attacks faster than I could retreat. My teammates and I would die in the red circles that cover the entire floor. More than once, my character would be killed while still completing his "stand up" animation. And then, of course, I could respawn in the same place, before completing the death animation.
Losing all your health was more meaningful in Winter Wonderland. This nonsense is like playing Mario 64 but the Goombas are bugged to zoom straight at you and kill you in one hit, but then you have infinite lives and can resume the level exactly where you left off. It's the biggest, most obvious disconnect between agency and reward I have ever seen in a game.
How is "mash the fire button and occasionally click the area where the respawn button pops up" considered a game? Cookie Clicker is more of a game than that, because the number of cookies you get is directly tied to your actions 90% of the time (there are a few RNG bits, like Golden Cookies and such).
Did you guys test this? Did you have fun playing it? Or did you just make sure it didn't crash the client?
What's your problem if it's just occasional? You find it good for most of the time.
As for me, it's freaking bad. Worse than worst. But Cryptic can do good ground combat. Neverwinter is super fine and very enjoyable. TBH NW needs air ship combat and STO needs a proper ground combat. How about they switch dev teams for a month or two....?
I mean, it would've been better if it were remotely possible to survive that place rather than seeing each teammate die 20-30 times, but still.
It's not like death in that level does anything but make the player feel bad. Dying and respawning is about as fast as using a heal ability, so instead of trying to use a few abilities and waiting for each one to activate, you can just die and pop back up. The enemies will happily chip away at your health until you use all your healing abilities, and then 100-0 you, anyway.
Or maybe if the UI allowed clicks to go through even if you moved the mouse one pixel while the button was held down, rather than interpreting it as a very tiny camera adjustment. That would make it a lot easier to deselect enemies for targeting/camera purposes.
Someone please tell me why there's a level that expects you to die so much that the penalty for it is literally smaller than it is for using abilities.
I heal to full and immediately die from an unavoidable Clobber or Phase Smash.
My teammates and I have to respawn every five seconds.
Why does it do this?
...And why does the next run take less than five minutes with only a handful of deaths? Is there some random "kill everyone all the time" variable that has a chance of taking effect for a given run? This thing is like the Weather Channel Game.
I feel the same. Especially shootermode never caused any problems for me. I also like the fact that it is quiet different from space combat.
While in space one needs some deeper dive into game mechanics not to mention traumatic recourses to make a build any good it is much easier on ground. Grab a handful of items you like and you are in the fight and can do some good. 5x5.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
I get you but there's a problem with that... how would you implement that with multiple people in STFs etc.?
I'm not a Cryptic fan, far of even but... their ground combat system works if a bit roughly. It needs to get some polish and some revisions here and there. I'd love to have a more tactical system but it would be insanely hard to get that done in a MMO environment I'm afraid. Cryptic has also been making a lot of strides with these systems, look how they changed the kits (which is a step in the good direction), but it needs further revisions. I'd say let Cryptic clean up their mess first with the lag and then we'll see. Each problem in due time, prefer a permanent fix over a new mess anyday
City of Heroes had a play mode like this. Almost nobody used it. The basic tech is doable and some of the know how may exist at Cryptic since it's basically just spawning the captain as a low altitude flying, invisible, untargetable spawn with the BO controls we have for things like reticles and BO abilities emphasized with their own trays. You could probably add resource fabrications fairly easily for a kind of Starcraft/Warcraft experience.
People did use the Masterminds in CoH which, honestly, were very similar to STO Captains but which were still field commanders. But they did sacrifice a lot of personal ability for the degree of pet control they had. (One thing I did love was that you could make your pets do emotes.) (Another thing I miss is that changing costumes was eventually upgraded to an aura effect rather than a quick cut and I think having a replicator/transporter animation when we switch costumes would look more polished.)
I would make social maps unteamed. The Captain brings an assortment of BOs, maybe 4. The player is invisible and untargetable.
Map objectives would determine rewards. Basically, I'd treat it as a "no captain" version of Nimbus with resource building. An adventure zone with Starcraft clone gameplay.
Defiler? Charge up to you at warp 9.975 and hit you for 2k+ damage.
Thrall? Teleport behind you and immediately start spamming hits for 200+ that go right through shields.
Fused Construct? Run up to you, nearly one-shot you, then hit you again a second later. Kills your whole team one by one.
Harbinger? The entire floor is lava. Boom.
Fortunately, the Iconian space missions will just spam disables on you, but not actually kill you, so death still has some meaning.
Cryptic, could we get some statistics on the average number of deaths per run for each mission?
Viral Matrix? No problem; I'll clear it with Eng Team. Viral Matrix [/i]literally five seconds later[/i]? Problem; Eng Team is on CD for at least another 15 seconds. Looks like I won't be doing anything for 15 seconds.
Subnucleonic Beam? No problem; I'll clear it with Sci Team. Wait, cancel that, I can't use Sci Team because SNB has put Sci Team on a 15-second CD. When your internet goes down, do you email your ISP? Do you know what other malady attacks the mechanism that defends against it? AIDS. This is like that.
This is awful. I hate it. I just figured I could grind some marks for the good Iconian gear, but it's making me think less of Cryptic as game devs. If I could get marks by stepping on LEGOs, I would rather do that because it is less painful.
TL;DR: SNB putting Sci Team on CD is like AIDS.
Live Long And Suck It. - Wil Weaton
playing != paying
And I might just give up on this gear if I decide it's not worth 20+ hours of something more unpleasant than my actual job.
Even the, what you called, Venn Diagram of Doom can be easily outrun and I really don't know what kind of problems you've experienced, it's so slow that I even managed to give my BOffs a Movement order.
Don't get me wrong, I always like things that actually better a system and god knows both aren't perfect.
But as I said, the main problem is that death is inconsequential and just enforces "Duh, Respawn" behaviour instead of actually using for example Duck & Cover (yes, it actually breaks line of sight).
My character Tsin'xing
If I'm shooting, it takes a moment to stop shooting, and sometimes the red circles spawn a couple seconds after each other, creating new fire right on top of me as I'm trying to walk out of it. It's not guaranteed respawn, but often. And it's just terrible design.
That said, death has a bit more meaning in space combat, because the respawn timer is like 20 seconds and the respawn points are kinda far. Death on the ground is basically a two-second cease-fire before you pop right back up and continue shooting at whatever killed you. If the Iconians are spawn-camping you as they sometimes do, you really do pop up exactly where you dropped. I just keep my mouse cursor over the area where the respawn button appears and click it every so often while spamming the fire button.
How do you duel Thralls? If they decide to melee spam, they kill me in about three seconds, right through shields.
If I try to kill a Fused Construct with gunfire while backpedaling, it will quickly catch up to me and kill me. The only way to kill them is by using damaging abilities (if you have decent ones, like mines) or hoping for your team to take care of the problem for you.
Defilers will only melee if they're in range, but they frequently charge at players at very high speed. I actually survived a charge > Phase Smash once. Here is the screenshot as evidence:
http://i.imgur.com/y7zlb7j.png
:^)
Fused constructs are a bit of a problem, but, the regular ones usually don't live that long.
My character Tsin'xing
Just had this happen to me a few minutes ago. Red circle appeared right on top of me, I started moving immediately, and when I was almost out of it a new one spawned on top of me. How are we supposed to use the "move to avoid it" counterplay if the things keep appearing right on top of us until we die? Oh, and of course you can be ten feet out of it and it'll still hit you because reasons.
I wish melee were more viable overall so I could justify using it (my KDF tac has a nice betleH), but melee is almost never viable in any context where ranged weapons are available - and that includes STO, unfortunately.
Yes, throughout this thread I have been referring to Fused Constructs, not the regular ones. The regular ones die in a few hits and are only a danger if you get a big group of them all chipping away at you and don't do anything about it.
You see a Fused Construct, you do what we do: run. You run your TRIBBLE off.
Yeah, space shields are Star Trek but ground shields are Halo. It's kind of... odd.