My attempt at a "high-level" solution, to what I think impede some areas in the design of the game.

Brulogaz

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Oct 24, 2021
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Hi,


I am going to share my 2 cents about the current state of the game, and why I believe there is a gap between the implementations of the core mechanics, and what the player actually experience.

My first impression is that this game is designed around systems first, and players' experience second. By that I mean systems are not designed around the player flow, but the other way around, where systems are implemented first, and the player flow tailored around what we have.

Here is one example of what I mean, and what a hypothetical design solving this could be. The very first thing you will expect your average player to do in a game like this is to head out, shoot, and kill stuff. In a game like MO2, this could mean ensuring that there is a well-thought-out player experience designed around playing a hunter, roaming around town, maybe even playing a sort of survivalist. It's a common archetype in this kind of game that the player can transition out of when its character gets more specialized. In a game where you always respawn naked, it is a great way for a new player to get back on its feet by crafting the basics in the wild. Here is where it gets odd, though. Even though all the systems are seemingly in place, the hunting experience is subpar. No way to build a camp, or to craft stuff on your own outside city walls. This means that there is no such thing as playing a lone hunter to kick-start your character. As for the hunt itself, killing animals right now just feel completely off. The static spawns kill off any sensation that you're hunting a creature, and instead feel like you're gathering another static resource. Some spawns are also just poor, one herd spawns right on top of a bandit camp, yet the map is empty for miles around the camp. The movement and behavior of the animals is probably the biggest turn off. The movement is erratic, and it feels like animals are just spinning around being dragged by an invisible pole. There is no tell in what direction the animal will lead next, nor does it feel like it is escaping effectively. In some scenarios, the animal would just get stuck in a loop between the same few coordinates. The kill also does not feel satisfying. I would expect the lowliest animals to die in just a few arrows, rather than having to engage in a goofy chase with a springbok running around with 10 arrows in its heart. Last, the actual collect & skin part of the game is not even satisfying. The animal just vanishes into a loot bag, not only making the corpse extremely hard to spot but also somewhat damping the satisfaction of skinning your prey. The looting, collecting, butchering & overall inventory management of this process scream like a "loot & inventory" system was put in place, and the experience of the player was designed around the limitations of this system, rather than designing the system around a good, minimal friction, player flow. The plant gathering mechanic is also guilty of this, as right now, I feel like I am looting a container while gathering herbs. All those cool features, but no visual or smooth interaction for gathering materials. That's odd, no?

Now, maybe I am just ranting, but my point is that all those issues stern from the fact that the hunting experience was not designed to be cohesive from the get-go. It just is that layering "systems" on top of each other gave us a semblance of hunting experience, instead of building the systems to accommodate the desired end goal for hunting. Here's some ideas: Players don't need to visit a crafting station, or a city for the basics, bonus point if there is some survivalist skill that allows this. Herds are a thing, but don't just have the spawners 10 springbok on the same spot and call it a day. Springboks should be harder to find, hard to land a first shot, and easy to finish off. As for the movement, whatever logic is driving this, it's not working. I can feel the pathfinding system having a stroke when animals are fleeing. I would much rather have a springbok run smoothly, with a limited local avoidance algorithm, at the risk of the animal getting stuck easily on the terrain, rather than have this current movement logic where it is painfully obvious that the animal is calculating a rigid path many times over, this does not look natural, and this is not a good representation of how those creatures think and behave afaik. Let me skin/pick up the corpse. Why is that lootbag a thing for NPCs? Don't force me through an inventory grid, a keyboard hotkey, plus another pop-up window, to skin and butcher my animal, please.

The "hunter path" was the first example to come to my mind, but to me it's obvious most of the "career paths" in the game are not very well thought out in terms of UX, and that just stacking more systems will not always be the solution. In my hunter example, I really feel like I am just interacting with systems, rather than just letting the flow guide me into an immersive experience. Sure, maybe the team knows about it, maybe everyone is aware of those minor changes that could make the experience better and it's planned somewhere. But to me, the fact that we are this close to the release and the world still being this empty is alarming. This is a huge tell that engineering is driving the design, and not the other way around. A basic, satisfying hunting/gathering loop should have been completed long ago for those features to be considered "done", and the wilderness spawns should have been placed, with each test refining the balance of the placement for each town. If this basic loop is fun, your players are gonna be hooked. Now try to do the same for all the "starter paths" that you can think of, eg: trader, adventurer, farmer/tamer. Refining those flows should be the priority.
 

Brulogaz

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Oct 24, 2021
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Another example is the one-world-only compromise, which again, is a cool idea. I get where the developers are coming from and why it is simpler, cooler and more fun, even for them, to only have one world. But you have to take into consideration all the negative UX this decision brings to the game. I know that ship has sailed, but still, I cannot help but think that this obsession with scaling everything up in MO2 is due to the fact that the entire game design reposes in the game only having 1 world. This is why the world had to be so big (and feel so empty). Having to deserve the whole player base from a single location also meant that the whole combat system had to be designed around the assumption that everyone ping would be poor. To me, this feels like the sort of compromise (or lack of) that is a bit disconnected from the reality of what players will hook players and make the game a success. Again, cool concept, everyone agrees, but if doing so ruin your combat system and level design, then you end up with a game that has great ideas but poor execution. It is too late to change that? Maybe. It would be possible to lock some portions of the map for the release, and to have one server per region. It would split the player base, but improving the basic mechanics of the game like combat would probably drive player retention too.

From my experience in a small indie studio, this is a very programmer-centric approach to designing a game, and this can cause blind spots. I have a vibe that those prototyping and developing the core "cool" features of the games are also probably those calling the shots and priorities. Features are probably marked as "done" right after they pass some functionality tests, but somehow I doubt someone yielding any sort of authority makes sure that those features fit a larger player experience, and that there is a "game" around those mechanics. I also get the impression that the decision makers value "cool concepts" like the only-one-server thing, over practical fun, and that this lack of compromise push the design of the game in a direction that is inherently full of cons. Sometime you just can't engineer your way out of all the compromises you don't make.

My advice would be to have some Gameplay/UX expert hold some authority on what is being prioritized, and what makes up a "done" feature in terms of player flow. It is critical that the people making those decisions are not the same devs developing the features and who spend their days trying to break the game, those devs will get used and become absolutely numb to the QoL and UX issues. I worked as a game developer for years, I know it does. This means that if someone on the team currently is both a "tech lead" and a "design lead" you're going to have issues. This person should identify and prioritizing all the pain points from a new player perspective for the various play styles that you guys want to encourage. Sure it is a sandbox, and you can do "anything", but up to a certain point, you can't just leave it to emergent gameplay to make everything flow by itself.

On a closing note, I just want to emphasize that this is meant as an open-ended post on the value tailoring experiences first, not systems or vague tenets. I went into the specifics with the hunter stuff because it is easier to portraits that way; I don't have the pretension of knowing exactly what needs to be done to improve the flow of each career path, just that it can't always be left as an afterthought. Feel free to discuss specific mechanics if that is what you want to share about. I also understand that some people are probably absolutely fine with the current game loop, and the one-server stuff. I am aware that this post is just my opinion, and that I am no arbiter of what makes up good or bad game design, it's a matter of compromises and perspective.

Last, I know this kind of post is not a fun read for the devs. I do not mean this as a call-out or to put you guys on the spot. It's hard to write this kind of stuff without sounding pretentious, and I don't claim to be an all-knowing dev, it's just that sometime it is significantly easier to make this sort of observation from a fresh, outsider, perspective. I do not know how things are internally. Maybe I am completely off the mark, but on the chance that I am right, I hope that maybe this can shed some light on the issues. I genuinely want this game to succeed and to recommend it to everyone, and I would not bother writing this sort of post if I did not believe the foundation is solid.
 

Valoran

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May 28, 2020
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Very well written post, and spot on criticisms and observations.


I wholeheartedly agree with all your sentiments, apart from the one world server which I like.


Given your past experience as a game developer i'm sure you're aware of the triple constraint inherent to all projects. They started the combat alpha for MO2 in April 2020, at which time the game was a bare bones combat simulator with only a very small map size and essentially no game systems other than killing players, resurrecting and equipping different items.

In the relatively short time since then they have added everything that is currently in the game in - more often than not - on time two week sprints. They have an enormous planned scope, a relatively small budget, and not a lot of time before release. These factors result in the scope and quality of new systems and mechanics being cut to the bare minimum of "done" so that they can work on the next core system to get as many functioning and in the game before release.

This approach is not one that I myself consider the best course of action, as I would rather have fully fleshed out well designed systems trickle in with less content come release, but nonetheless it is the one they have taken.

Due to the time limitations we can expect this will continue for all new systems before release, and we can only hope they make time to go back and polish everything after release when the race to cram as much in eases off a little.
 
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Piet

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That's a lot of reading but what I did read you just are new and don't understand how to do what you want in some cases. For instance the hunter thing. Totally a thing. You can hunt, butcher, craft all yourself. Eventually you won't need to go to the city to craft either when you can build but that's not really a core of the survivalist. It's good to go into town and that's not a mainstay of that ideal.

The whole one world one server thing not only is a good idea and implemented well it's damn impressive. The ping normalization makes it so a high ping player can beat a low ping player consistently, one of the best fighters is west NA. The world feels empty and has issues right now because a recent patch caused server issues and it's beta. There is 140k people with it on their wishlist. Even 10k players is going to feel like towns are hustle and bustle.

You're not seeing the whole picture and coming to huge conclusions without knowing what's up with what I read but like I said that's a looooot to read.
 
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Woody

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Spot on with regards to the first post and plenty of good observations with the second. I was sceptical of the one world idea at first myself and that of the implementation of combat but have come away extremely impressed as to the level of playability with what they've achieved. A stark difference to what similar games have been over the past 10-15 years.

Another thing that I feel is often overlooked when the one world system is criticised is that I didn't realise how much I've missed playing with people from other regions and walks of life. Not only that, I know that everyone on the discord, forums and the wider community, are people I can meet, team up with or fight in the world. For me, this is something I feel gets overlooked too often, and is actually a massive selling point for the game.
 

barcode

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the op gets a lot right in his observations. start with a ux designed game and you'll find the underlying systems cannot support whatever it is the ux people want it to do. start with systems first, and you'll find the ux experience to be lackluster and mechanical. you can try and start from both ends but that usually ends up as disaster when you try to meet in the middle without an extreme amount of planning and luck.

one big problem is that a lot of the stuff that's in the game is just there by happenstance. Take the recent change to 'paladin' builds as it were. Players would pick up meditation and then rest to get their mana back while wearing heavy armor to be less vulnerable in battle. SV in a recent patch changed mana regeneration via meditation to be affected by armor weight whereas before it was not. I would almost guarantee you that this particular nuance of interaction between meditation and heavy armor was never detailed in any design/planning/bugfix document whatsoever, but rather was result of just how the developer who implemented the change interpreted the request.

i.e. it was not by intent that this change was made, it was just oversight (perhaps both when initially implemented and again now with the change). There are probably countless skill interactions that have worked out this way and that players now depend on in their builds.

-barcode
 

Brulogaz

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Oct 24, 2021
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In the relatively short time since then they have added everything that is currently in the game in - more often than not - on time two week sprints. They have an enormous planned scope, a relatively small budget, and not a lot of time before release. These factors result in the scope and quality of new systems and mechanics being cut to the bare minimum of "done" so that they can work on the next core system to get as many functioning and in the game before release.

This approach is not one that I myself consider the best course of action, as I would rather have fully fleshed out well designed systems trickle in with less content come release, but nonetheless it is the one they have taken.

Very good insight! I agree with your sentiment that the scope is enormous, and that they're working incredibly fast delivering those features. Like you, at this point I expect a rush of systems for the release, as I don't expect their strategy to change much at this point since they already planned and committed to the roadmap.

Like you, I would prefer a game to bet on fully fleshed systems with content, rather than going for everything at once, followed by a bug and polish round that could last months, or years. I did not want to bloat my post with too much anecdotes, and call to authorities, but part of why I wrote this is because I know exactly the feel of having to rush features into a game, and there is always this sentiment that "polish" and "bug fixes" will come in that inevitable stabilization phase that will last god knows how long. After going through this loop so often, it became apparent to me that you can't easily push some of that stuff into a "polish" phase, because it becomes prohibitively expensive to change the stuff that is already coded in. So, "temporary" interfaces and behaviors become permanent, and slowly everyone gets used to how mechanical everything is and moves on.

To add on that, it is a risky bet that new players will care about later systems, like wars, and housing, if they're not sold on how fun and relaxing the grind is. I am the perfect customer in theory for this game, and so are my friends. I played the old mmos of the past like UO, AC, Daoc, and ofc I backed MO1 10 years ago. Yet, with the current state of the basics, I would have a very hard time selling this game to my group, and I would much rather wait for after the polish round myself, rather than play at release if the core loop remains not fully fleshed out. It pains me because I know all the elements are almost in place, and at this point I am just afraid that some things will remain this way forever because everyone will get used to it, stuff like I what I described in my first post. That being said, it is entirely possible that they blow us away with Qol/UX changes close, or shortly after the release.

That's a lot of reading but what I did read you just are new and don't understand how to do what you want in some cases. For instance the hunter thing. Totally a thing. You can hunt, butcher, craft all yourself. Eventually you won't need to go to the city to craft either when you can build but that's not really a core of the survivalist. It's good to go into town and that's not a mainstay of that ideal.

The whole one world one server thing not only is a good idea and implemented well it's damn impressive. The ping normalization makes it so a high ping player can beat a low ping player consistently, one of the best fighters is west NA. The world feels empty and has issues right now because a recent patch caused server issues and it's beta. There is 140k people with it on their wishlist. Even 10k players is going to feel like towns are hustle and bustle.

You're not seeing the whole picture and coming to huge conclusions without knowing what's up with what I read but like I said that's a looooot to read.

I am aware we can hunt. My concern is how mechanical it is, and unintuitive for new players.

As for the one server limitation, I could definitely be proven wrong on this. I don't want to sound all gloom and doom on this issue; I don't think this is an irreconcilable compromise. But to me, this felt like a good example of the decision makers favoring something else over the basics of the gameplay. I was under the impression that the combat was shallow and relied overly on animation abuses from reading other posts. Maybe this is less bad than people make it sound. I admit I'm just taking their words for it. My own personal experience is that I feel like I am fighting underwater due to the delay in the input. I would probably get used to it, and frankly, I usually like games with slow moves that you have to commit to, but it felt a bit off in MO2. This is again something I am absolutely sure everyone in my friend's group would initially complain about. That being said, I am absolutely convinced that the devs at SV made an incredible lag-compensation system, no doubt about it. My concern is that there is only so much you can do with physical limitations, like having a big rtt, and that this compromise hurt the basics.
 
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Teknique

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Jun 15, 2020
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the op gets a lot right in his observations. start with a ux designed game and you'll find the underlying systems cannot support whatever it is the ux people want it to do. start with systems first, and you'll find the ux experience to be lackluster and mechanical. you can try and start from both ends but that usually ends up as disaster when you try to meet in the middle without an extreme amount of planning and luck.

one big problem is that a lot of the stuff that's in the game is just there by happenstance. Take the recent change to 'paladin' builds as it were. Players would pick up meditation and then rest to get their mana back while wearing heavy armor to be less vulnerable in battle. SV in a recent patch changed mana regeneration via meditation to be affected by armor weight whereas before it was not. I would almost guarantee you that this particular nuance of interaction between meditation and heavy armor was never detailed in any design/planning/bugfix document whatsoever, but rather was result of just how the developer who implemented the change interpreted the request.

i.e. it was not by intent that this change was made, it was just oversight (perhaps both when initially implemented and again now with the change). There are probably countless skill interactions that have worked out this way and that players now depend on in their builds.

-barcode
5000% percent. We make our builds around what exists and make it work.

changes happen and some builds get crushed but the big problem is the developers themselves don’t know what these builds are or what the consequences of changing certain things is.

meditation I’m ok with since that was how the original game worked but everything else has been gut wrenching
 
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finegamingconnoisseur

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It is entirely possible that in the months after release SV will revamp many of the existing systems so that they feel more organic and natural from the player's perspective.

I'm not so concerned about the one global server as I was 8 months ago, they've made phenomenal progress with the latency issues which I could see and feel with every patch.

As the game approaches release, I think what they do in the next 3 months will make or break the future of the game. January 2022 will be dedicated to polishing, so let's see how they do.
 
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Anabolic Man

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Hi,


I am going to share my 2 cents about the current state of the game, and why I believe there is a gap between the implementations of the core mechanics, and what the player actually experience.

My first impression is that this game is designed around systems first, and players' experience second. By that I mean systems are not designed around the player flow, but the other way around, where systems are implemented first, and the player flow tailored around what we have.

Here is one example of what I mean, and what a hypothetical design solving this could be. The very first thing you will expect your average player to do in a game like this is to head out, shoot, and kill stuff. In a game like MO2, this could mean ensuring that there is a well-thought-out player experience designed around playing a hunter, roaming around town, maybe even playing a sort of survivalist. It's a common archetype in this kind of game that the player can transition out of when its character gets more specialized. In a game where you always respawn naked, it is a great way for a new player to get back on its feet by crafting the basics in the wild. Here is where it gets odd, though. Even though all the systems are seemingly in place, the hunting experience is subpar. No way to build a camp, or to craft stuff on your own outside city walls. This means that there is no such thing as playing a lone hunter to kick-start your character. As for the hunt itself, killing animals right now just feel completely off. The static spawns kill off any sensation that you're hunting a creature, and instead feel like you're gathering another static resource. Some spawns are also just poor, one herd spawns right on top of a bandit camp, yet the map is empty for miles around the camp. The movement and behavior of the animals is probably the biggest turn off. The movement is erratic, and it feels like animals are just spinning around being dragged by an invisible pole. There is no tell in what direction the animal will lead next, nor does it feel like it is escaping effectively. In some scenarios, the animal would just get stuck in a loop between the same few coordinates. The kill also does not feel satisfying. I would expect the lowliest animals to die in just a few arrows, rather than having to engage in a goofy chase with a springbok running around with 10 arrows in its heart. Last, the actual collect & skin part of the game is not even satisfying. The animal just vanishes into a loot bag, not only making the corpse extremely hard to spot but also somewhat damping the satisfaction of skinning your prey. The looting, collecting, butchering & overall inventory management of this process scream like a "loot & inventory" system was put in place, and the experience of the player was designed around the limitations of this system, rather than designing the system around a good, minimal friction, player flow. The plant gathering mechanic is also guilty of this, as right now, I feel like I am looting a container while gathering herbs. All those cool features, but no visual or smooth interaction for gathering materials. That's odd, no?

Now, maybe I am just ranting, but my point is that all those issues stern from the fact that the hunting experience was not designed to be cohesive from the get-go. It just is that layering "systems" on top of each other gave us a semblance of hunting experience, instead of building the systems to accommodate the desired end goal for hunting. Here's some ideas: Players don't need to visit a crafting station, or a city for the basics, bonus point if there is some survivalist skill that allows this. Herds are a thing, but don't just have the spawners 10 springbok on the same spot and call it a day. Springboks should be harder to find, hard to land a first shot, and easy to finish off. As for the movement, whatever logic is driving this, it's not working. I can feel the pathfinding system having a stroke when animals are fleeing. I would much rather have a springbok run smoothly, with a limited local avoidance algorithm, at the risk of the animal getting stuck easily on the terrain, rather than have this current movement logic where it is painfully obvious that the animal is calculating a rigid path many times over, this does not look natural, and this is not a good representation of how those creatures think and behave afaik. Let me skin/pick up the corpse. Why is that lootbag a thing for NPCs? Don't force me through an inventory grid, a keyboard hotkey, plus another pop-up window, to skin and butcher my animal, please.

The "hunter path" was the first example to come to my mind, but to me it's obvious most of the "career paths" in the game are not very well thought out in terms of UX, and that just stacking more systems will not always be the solution. In my hunter example, I really feel like I am just interacting with systems, rather than just letting the flow guide me into an immersive experience. Sure, maybe the team knows about it, maybe everyone is aware of those minor changes that could make the experience better and it's planned somewhere. But to me, the fact that we are this close to the release and the world still being this empty is alarming. This is a huge tell that engineering is driving the design, and not the other way around. A basic, satisfying hunting/gathering loop should have been completed long ago for those features to be considered "done", and the wilderness spawns should have been placed, with each test refining the balance of the placement for each town. If this basic loop is fun, your players are gonna be hooked. Now try to do the same for all the "starter paths" that you can think of, eg: trader, adventurer, farmer/tamer. Refining those flows should be the priority.


I love the skinning animations in Red Dead Redemption and i can understand that you want some animations for skinning. It just feels better but this game is an MMO

The animals are transformed into lootbags for technical performence reasons. I would love to see the animal being skinned, before it get transformed into a lootbag, but then the corpse also needs Regdoll, which takes up server capacity.
Perhaps this can somehow be resolved on the client side.
I understand what you mean. I would also like something like that, but for me the server performance and a game world with as many players as possible with low lag is more important. If SV could manage that without sacrificing performance, I would absolutely be for it.
Animals in escape mode could hit a few hooks and the loot could be damaged or be less, if you don't give the animal a headshot with the bow.
All of this is desirable, but first the core systems have to be installed in order to make the game playable for a wider audience.

We need a lot of dungens and mechanisms that relieve the dungens, so that not all dungens become the only hotspots for PVP after release. That would put all PVE players off.


If a player could set up a camp consisting of a saucepan and a mattress to log out faster, I would think that's good. In this game it must make sense to want to build a house. If you want to live in the wilderness, you have to build a house. Every player can build a house. Maybe there should be deeds for camps too. For the players who have not yet set up a house. A small hut that costs only a few materials, can be demolished again and can be rebuilt somewhere else very fast.
So to speak, an option for nomads with fewer features. E.g. without crafting tables.
Maybe there should be a small storage building instead of just being able to build a bank building but as i said other mechanics are more important atm

Mo1 had tons of features which are not implemented yet. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1170950/discussions/0/2962796621645555474/
 
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Anabolic Man

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Another example is the one-world-only compromise, which again, is a cool idea. I get where the developers are coming from and why it is simpler, cooler and more fun, even for them, to only have one world. But you have to take into consideration all the negative UX this decision brings to the game. I know that ship has sailed, but still, I cannot help but think that this obsession with scaling everything up in MO2 is due to the fact that the entire game design reposes in the game only having 1 world. This is why the world had to be so big (and feel so empty). Having to deserve the whole player base from a single location also meant that the whole combat system had to be designed around the assumption that everyone ping would be poor. To me, this feels like the sort of compromise (or lack of) that is a bit disconnected from the reality of what players will hook players and make the game a success. Again, cool concept, everyone agrees, but if doing so ruin your combat system and level design, then you end up with a game that has great ideas but poor execution. It is too late to change that? Maybe. It would be possible to lock some portions of the map for the release, and to have one server per region. It would split the player base, but improving the basic mechanics of the game like combat would probably drive player retention too.

From my experience in a small indie studio, this is a very programmer-centric approach to designing a game, and this can cause blind spots. I have a vibe that those prototyping and developing the core "cool" features of the games are also probably those calling the shots and priorities. Features are probably marked as "done" right after they pass some functionality tests, but somehow I doubt someone yielding any sort of authority makes sure that those features fit a larger player experience, and that there is a "game" around those mechanics. I also get the impression that the decision makers value "cool concepts" like the only-one-server thing, over practical fun, and that this lack of compromise push the design of the game in a direction that is inherently full of cons. Sometime you just can't engineer your way out of all the compromises you don't make.

My advice would be to have some Gameplay/UX expert hold some authority on what is being prioritized, and what makes up a "done" feature in terms of player flow. It is critical that the people making those decisions are not the same devs developing the features and who spend their days trying to break the game, those devs will get used and become absolutely numb to the QoL and UX issues. I worked as a game developer for years, I know it does. This means that if someone on the team currently is both a "tech lead" and a "design lead" you're going to have issues. This person should identify and prioritizing all the pain points from a new player perspective for the various play styles that you guys want to encourage. Sure it is a sandbox, and you can do "anything", but up to a certain point, you can't just leave it to emergent gameplay to make everything flow by itself.

On a closing note, I just want to emphasize that this is meant as an open-ended post on the value tailoring experiences first, not systems or vague tenets. I went into the specifics with the hunter stuff because it is easier to portraits that way; I don't have the pretension of knowing exactly what needs to be done to improve the flow of each career path, just that it can't always be left as an afterthought. Feel free to discuss specific mechanics if that is what you want to share about. I also understand that some people are probably absolutely fine with the current game loop, and the one-server stuff. I am aware that this post is just my opinion, and that I am no arbiter of what makes up good or bad game design, it's a matter of compromises and perspective.

Last, I know this kind of post is not a fun read for the devs. I do not mean this as a call-out or to put you guys on the spot. It's hard to write this kind of stuff without sounding pretentious, and I don't claim to be an all-knowing dev, it's just that sometime it is significantly easier to make this sort of observation from a fresh, outsider, perspective. I do not know how things are internally. Maybe I am completely off the mark, but on the chance that I am right, I hope that maybe this can shed some light on the issues. I genuinely want this game to succeed and to recommend it to everyone, and I would not bother writing this sort of post if I did not believe the foundation is solid.


"Again, cool concept, everyone agrees, but if doing so ruin your combat system and level design, then you end up with a game that has great ideas but poor execution."

I think the combat system is already really nice. Especially after being able to feint the reposts. I see the problem in the default settings. People can´t feint and do fancy stuff with the default Keybindings.
They are not able to block multiple opponents with the default keybindings, becuase you get imput errors, if you move your mouse horizontaly and want to block up or down. Thats why i use the Overhead and thrust attack buttom to block mid and overhead attacks.This is very important, becuase sometimes 2 opponents attacking you and you have to look arround to block their attacks as shown from this player in this video.



 
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ElPerro

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Jun 9, 2020
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The ping normalization makes it so a high ping player can beat a low ping player consistently, one of the best fighters is west NA.
Maybe if the low ping player is complete dogshit, altho fortunetely that is most of Mortal population, but they have double the time to block and their attack animations are alot faster. Its a pretty big advantage. And who is this pro high ping west coast NA player? Never heard of him

As for the one server limitation, I could definitely be proven wrong on this. I don't want to sound all gloom and doom on this issue; I don't think this is an irreconcilable compromise. But to me, this felt like a good example of the decision makers favoring something else over the basics of the gameplay. I was under the impression that the combat was shallow and relied overly on animation abuses from reading other posts. Maybe this is less bad than people make it sound. I admit I'm just taking their words for it. My own personal experience is that I feel like I am fighting underwater due to the delay in the input. I would probably get used to it, and frankly, I usually like games with slow moves that you have to commit to, but it felt a bit off in MO2. This is again something I am absolutely sure everyone in my friend's group would initially complain about. That being said, I am absolutely convinced that the devs at SV made an incredible lag-compensation system, no doubt about it. My concern is that there is only so much you can do with physical limitations, like having a big rtt, and that this compromise hurt the basics.
I'll share this video because it highlights the issue in a pretty straightforward no bs way.


The work SV has done on ping normalization does help high ping players, but I dont think its enough for a $15 a month sub game tbh. And it forces them to have a mediocre and slow paced combat system as anything more would break the normalization. Sadly this is one of the core features of the game according to Henrik and its very unlikely they will backtrack on this. Theres a reason no other game company, AAA or indie has tried this and its because its physically not really possible with the current tech, and its the reason MO2 will always remain a niche game and probably end up with the same population as MO1.

"Again, cool concept, everyone agrees, but if doing so ruin your combat system and level design, then you end up with a game that has great ideas but poor execution."

I think the combat system is already really nice. Especially after being able to feint the reposts. I see the problem in the default settings. People can´t feint and do fancy stuff with the default Keybindings.

You sure this change was even intended by SV? Havent seen it on any patch notes, for all we know its just a bug that they will fix someday as it breaks their "ping normalization". Dont get me wrong, I think its a pretty cool feature and the closest thing we have to a mordhau morph, even if it widens the gap between EU and high pingers.
 
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Brulogaz

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@ElPerro : This is my fear exactly. There are common tactics as highlighted in the video for compensating lag in action games, but everything has a downside to it. And when I say that, I mean every known technique for compensating lag has attached cons. Even with a good ping, it can be hard to compensate for latency in action games because if you go too far with it, then the cure can quickly become worse than the initial problem.

This is an enormous task in and by itself. And I mean enormous. If an R&D developer could come up with a reliable solution that truly makes those physical limitations tolerable, they wouldn't even need a game. They could just sell that technology they developed. It's that hard.

The fact that MO2 is an action game, with both melee combat, ranged combat, and fast moving entities, will make it very complicated and costly to maintain a tech that allows the world to look and feel consistent for all actors.

The current game model is server authorative, with client predicted movement, and their lag compensation tech can probably rewind hitboxes and synchronize the melee attacks with a buffer + a clock.

I will go into detail a bit more on those lag compensation techniques and attempt to explain why the downside are inevitables.

To "time" animations correctly on all clients, in a ping-independent manner, you need a tick-based simulation which allows you to execute the global state of the game in steps. This isn't exactly how most authoritative server models with client prediction work usually, though it's close. The most common pattern is to have each object tick and update individually, and do without the global tick thing, since in most action games you won't really need it. But here, we're gonna need that, because without that global tick (or clock), you won't have anything to time your melee swing against reliably on the clients, so at best you would have to guess when to fire the animation exactly by introducing a delay in the action based on ping, but this would not be consistent. This requires a very sophisticated network solution, that is licensed or expensive to develop. This will give, in theory, a perfectly accurate timing of the swing on all clients, and be consistent with everything that is timed with this technique. The cons are that you have to introduce an arbitrary delay to every action (probably hidden in the first stage of the animation, which is predicted locally), and the system won't be of any help at all for extreme pings. It can also be at odds with the prediction flow because your client is no longer in a purely predicted state. Some parts of your character behavior now need to acknowledge the server response to proceed. I can't see any other way to do this properly, otherwise you would see other players skip certain part of the attack animation, and that is just inconsistent. It's also entirely possible that they're not actually trying to sync the animations, and that the compensation is done some other way.

This would "fix" the swing timing animation, and every other action, at the cost of a prohibitive delay, and a lot of dev work. However, this does nothing for the player's position (and rotation!). Position and movement are another beast because those mechanics are driven by local prediction, but for the visuals to be consistent on all clients, you would need to compensate the movement the same way. Unfortunately, having a 300ms delay on your movement input is just not possible for most games, unless you managed to hide this by long, high-quality animation transitions. So what does this mean? This means that the player taking a swing at you is not exactly where he appears to be on both clients, nor even aiming the same direction, and same for your own position. By default, the player with the lesser ping will have an advantage and the more accurate representation of the world. The player with a high ping might need to lead his attacks where he believes you will be. To compensate for this, you have to rewind hitboxes on the server when computing the hit. This is, afaik, a very performance-expensive process because this involves keeping tracks of a history of all the players hitboxes in a tree-like structure that you can test against every time you test a pvp collision, or to re-simulate the animator for that previous frame. I am not aware of any game with melee combat that does this for the actual melee combat, though maybe games like Chivalry do have something like this, but this would be way too expensive to implement in a mmo. Compensating for this means, you would be moving the problem from the high-ping player to the low-ping player, meaning, by giving the high-ping player advantage, the low-ping player would get hit on his screen by an enemy that seems out of reach. If they want to "equalize" the playing field between all pings, they would need to do something like this, but compromise by rewinding the hitboxes very little, as to not moving all the advantages to the attacker.

This rewind technique works best for ranged combat, because you absolutely don't want it to look like shots are not registering, the player on the receiving end, however, usually will not be able to tell that there was lag compensation (unless he made it under cover before dying, that is). In a game with archery and fast-moving objects like MO2, this is almost a must for ranged combat. Depending on the speed of the arrows, maybe they could get away without rewinding hitboxes, by having large and forgiving hitboxes. In a modern shooter with projectiles that travel instantly, this would be impossible to hide to lag without this technique.

So, this leave positioning an issue, and in a game with mounted combat, you're gonna lose a lot of accuracy when it comes to hitting with your melee weapon. This will also cause issues even for on-foot gameplay, because the player's rotation isn't likely to adhere to the compensation rules. Devs can damp this effect by increasing the size of the hitboxes, and increasing the arc of all the orientation-related actions, but it's gonna be difficult to hide completely. A good example of a game that almost eliminated latency issues is For Honor, they went with that tick-based simulation hybrid I described, and hid absolutely all the delays in long animations, which are built-in and core to how the combat works in this game. It plays more like a fighting game, and less like a rpg, tho.

This problem will also show up in AOE spells. Even though you might be able to time the actual casting action on all clients, player positions will still be a bit inaccurate. This is very difficult to compensate for, because rewinding the hitboxes in this scenario would mean the attacking player would see high-ping players seemingly escape the zone without being hit. The opposite is that the high-ping player will constantly get hit by AOE zone that he already seemingly escaped.

Is this good enough, or is this all doom and gloom? Well, my 2 cents is that this would be enough for some players, other will be probably be frustrated by the lack of accuracy and the input delays. In a game charging you a sub, and where dying or living is the difference between a heartwarming victory, or a painful, crushing defeat and loss of items, this has me worried a bit that there is no way to play on a server with a good ping.

To me, this feels like an unnecessary challenge that is self-imposed by SV. This would work for almost any other kind of game that did not involve melee combat. It is difficult for melee combat because of what I described. It is a dance between two players, and you need to be reactive when doing it. Compensations technique usually shift the disadvantage to one player over another. If this was a purely PVE game, you could crank the lag-compensation all the way to the roof and always let the attacking player's simulation win, but in a PvP game, you just cannot penalize the receiving player too much for the attacker high latency. In MO2's case, it is gonna be very prohibitive design wise. It might even be the reason why they made movement speed that slow, to accomodate for combat.

Anyway, the same disclaimer as before. I am not a network god, maybe SV tech is truly groundbreaking, maybe I am missing some simple solutions that they've implemented already. Also, it is possible I said some silly things, it is a lot to unpack. I am developing on this because this kind of build on my initial argument, which was that the team focuses on making things "work" at the cost of the gameplay basics. This is just one thing, but it adds up, and if you have too many things that hurt the basics, some players won’t care for the rest of the game. I have seen people in this thread say that the tradeoff was worth it for them, and to me, this is a positive thing. I was not trying to prove anyone "wrong" by posting this. It's all a matter of perspective after all. My point was that there are cons associated with this decision, and unless I missed something, having a lag-compensation tech does not eliminate those issues completely. Also, since this post is already a huge, I skipped over some other tricks, like movement extrapolation and movement interpolation, but I would not call any of this "ping normalization". Those can be useful to tweak the final result, but trying to solve the sync/latency issues entirely through, lets say, running the interpolation way behind, would have very bad side effects.

TLDR: There are techniques to compensate for hitboxes, fast projectiles, animation sync, and player position and rotation, but none of those truly make the latency issues disappears, it's really just a bandaid due to the physical limitations of the internet. I have no idea how MO2 "ping normalization" system is implemented. It could be a mix of those, it could be one thing, or something else entirely. Though it is a subject where it is pretty difficult to reinvent the wheel.
 
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Piet

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May 28, 2020
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Maybe if the low ping player is complete dogshit, altho fortunetely that is most of Mortal population, but they have double the time to block and their attack animations are alot faster. Its a pretty big advantage. And who is this pro high ping west coast NA player? Never heard of him


I'll share this video because it highlights the issue in a pretty straightforward no bs way.


The work SV has done on ping normalization does help high ping players, but I dont think its enough for a $15 a month sub game tbh. And it forces them to have a mediocre and slow paced combat system as anything more would break the normalization. Sadly this is one of the core features of the game according to Henrik and its very unlikely they will backtrack on this. Theres a reason no other game company, AAA or indie has tried this and its because its physically not really possible with the current tech, and its the reason MO2 will always remain a niche game and probably end up with the same population as MO1.



You sure this change was even intended by SV? Havent seen it on any patch notes, for all we know its just a bug that they will fix someday as it breaks their "ping normalization". Dont get me wrong, I think its a pretty cool feature and the closest thing we have to a mordhau morph, even if it widens the gap between EU and high pingers.
PatWins
 

Tzone

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@Brulogaz For archery at least which I had a lot of hours behind it feels clients side while magic feels server side. I was told in the past that archery was server sided as well.

With how slow the arrows are and how quick the players are I think they made it clientside to a degree since its harder to make cheats that will also aim to land non hitscan weapons that have drop. Most of the cheats I see is just simple lagswitching with bows. You can see people shooting you no mater how to dodge at a distance or break LoS. Thats another reason I think archery is client side.

Main issue with archery is that its not viable damage wise against higher tier armor. It is very good against light armor, but on the wall of viability against bone armor. Steel I would say its not viable and wont be until fletching comes out.


You are very right with with the melee issues. It works for some people who dont care to bother too much but its leads to frustration for other players.
They do a OK job since the game is so slowed down melee wise to make up for the lag.
 

Brulogaz

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Oct 24, 2021
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@Brulogaz For archery at least which I had a lot of hours behind it feels clients side while magic feels server side. I was told in the past that archery was server sided as well.

With how slow the arrows are and how quick the players are I think they made it clientside to a degree since its harder to make cheats that will also aim to land non hitscan weapons that have drop. Most of the cheats I see is just simple lagswitching with bows. You can see people shooting you no mater how to dodge at a distance or break LoS. Thats another reason I think archery is client side.

Main issue with archery is that its not viable damage wise against higher tier armor. It is very good against light armor, but on the wall of viability against bone armor. Steel I would say its not viable and wont be until fletching comes out.


You are very right with with the melee issues. It works for some people who dont care to bother too much but its leads to frustration for other players.
They do a OK job since the game is so slowed down melee wise to make up for the lag.

Good observations!

It is going to be very difficult to tell the difference between a collision detection that is client-side, and one that is server side but extremely generous on the rollback mechanic. In the end, the cons latency-wise are the same. The server side implementation will be much harder to cheat, but it is susceptible to lag switches and packet manipulation. It is the gold standard in shooters, though; it is just a matter of not being too generous on the rollback mechanic to prevent extreme abuses. It is usually set in most games to only accommodate for a few ticks, up to something like 100ms max. So that being said, it's very possible that the bow is client side in MO2, based on your observations.
 

Anabolic Man

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Sep 7, 2020
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Maybe if the low ping player is complete dogshit, altho fortunetely that is most of Mortal population, but they have double the time to block and their attack animations are alot faster. Its a pretty big advantage. And who is this pro high ping west coast NA player? Never heard of him


I'll share this video because it highlights the issue in a pretty straightforward no bs way.


The work SV has done on ping normalization does help high ping players, but I dont think its enough for a $15 a month sub game tbh. And it forces them to have a mediocre and slow paced combat system as anything more would break the normalization. Sadly this is one of the core features of the game according to Henrik and its very unlikely they will backtrack on this. Theres a reason no other game company, AAA or indie has tried this and its because its physically not really possible with the current tech, and its the reason MO2 will always remain a niche game and probably end up with the same population as MO1.



You sure this change was even intended by SV? Havent seen it on any patch notes, for all we know its just a bug that they will fix someday as it breaks their "ping normalization". Dont get me wrong, I think its a pretty cool feature and the closest thing we have to a mordhau morph, even if it widens the gap between EU and high pingers.


You sure this change was even intended by SV? Havent seen it on any patch notes, for all we know its just a bug that they will fix someday as it breaks their "ping normalization".

I dont agrree on that, becuase the swing after a canceled repost is not faster as a normal repost. It have the same frames. I fought many good US Players and even tested it vs a 200 Ping player. I tested the feints and use them til they are possible to use.

Good US Player and my friends i duel with can block most of my feints and if you see someone using them you can walk backwards or use some tactics to prevent the player from using them. They are very situational. If you overuse them you get punished for that. For example if the player charge a comboswing after a parry from his opponent. Charging a comboswing after a parry from your opponent have a tight frame window, but i have seen many players do that. Especially with heavy weapons. They charge the next swing after you parried, turn 180, try to jump out of therang and turn arround and hit you hard, after you missed the swing or move backwards. You can only use them 3 times in a fight when the opposing player is in turtle mode. That means standing still when he has few hitpoints and tries to parry all your attacks, becuase he have low stamina. I recommend to not overuse the Spin attacks in duels, becuase if the enemy notice that, we will run arround, change his position and punish you for that as for the feints. Fight normal as in the video and add the moves from the video at certain moments/situations to confuse the opponent. Ps this not not my footage !

Here the extreme test with a 200 Ping Player. https://rumble.com/vndq4r-testing-feints-with-a-player-that-have-a-200-ping.html

There are no good US Players ? I don´t think so. Take Petwins as an example !
The difference between EU players and US players is not as big as some assume.

Let´s make the math. We have a ping normalization of 100.
That means we players from Europe have an artificial ping of 100. US players have a 110 to a maximum of 150 ping.

100 Ping means 0,1 Seconds to transmit the Data to the Server.

Let's calculate with a 50 ping difference from an US player compared to an EU player.
That is exactly 0.05 seconds to transmit the data to the server and 0.05 seconds to send the data back.
The US player has a disadvantage, but he should only have 0.1 seconds less reaction time.

The problem are Players with a 130 Ping difference. If you have over 200 Ping i not recommend using melee and go for a Archer, Mage, Mounted Archer, Mounted Combat Build.

Of course, the EU player has an advantage, but it is untrue that there are no good US players and the difference is not as big as is claimed.
 
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Brulogaz

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Hes east coast tho, has like 120 ping max. Thats a pretty playable ping tbh. A west coast player would have 180-200.

Yes! Those techniques are known to work great in that range, even though it is not perfect. If you want to gather feedback, you absolutely need to go for worst cases. You have to measure how things go with a mix of Australians and Europeans players