Sorry if this comes across as harsh, but I feel it needs to be said. I wish the devs would focus on improving the combat and character related bugs, rather than the superficial environmental stuff they've been working on. There is one major bug, which I consider basically game breaking, that has not been addressed for some time, which is the post death glitch of one sort or another. In previous releases, it was a crumpled ball that you could move around. Now it's your hero being stuck in a heroic stance, with no actual animations thereafter. You can still fight and run around and jump, but your character is completely frozen forever. Fixing this bug should be priority number one in my opinion.

After that, I would focus on combat mechanics, such as making more powers, making the powers that we do have better, with better animations, improving the enemy AI and animations, fixing the awful ragdoll effects that happens to enemies when they die, etc. All of these are really central core aspects of the game. You can have a nice beautiful city, but without these functions, you don't really have a game. So please focus less on the superficial and environmental stuff, and more on the things I mentioned above. Hell, I'd be happy to run around a blank canvas, so long as the combat mechanics were good. But right now they're not, and I'm really not psyched to test the game until they are at least somewhat decent. I get that this is an alpha, and that bugs are expected, but I just feel your kind of getting the cart before the horse by focusing on improving the city and building out the town center, when there is so much to address with combat.

A little harsh but after playing almost 7 hours now I am, for the mostpart, in general agreement with you.

---

In my opinion the two things that made CoH great were:

1. The community aspect
2. How damn good it felt to smack a mob (whatever your powerset) and defeat it.

---

Skyeline as a city/map/environment is now more than sufficient to run around in. Costumes also can take a backseat.

The development focus needs to be entirely on combat and getting the powersets right. Making the attacks feel timely, the visual effects appropriate, the physics realistic, the results effective, repeatable and reliable. When these things happen the other missing component we struggle to put a name to happens.. and that is the sense that your character has real power and substance. A visceral feeling.

At this stage of development I'd be perfectly happy if only two or three pre-made powersets were available for us to test provided they are solid and fun to play. A melee class and a ranged class would be obvious choices.


Issues like the ragdoll physics of defeated mobs can be overlooked during this phase so long as we the player feel our character is performing according to our chosen powerset.

Keep in mind that there are multiple devs, each one focusing on different things. The artist who makes buildings wouldn't be the best at fixing animation bugs, especially if the animation itself is fine, just the code telling when to fire. And of course this is an alpha, so there are tons of bugs that should be fixed, but the priority is slapping things in and seeing what works. Fine details come later. Like lowering the knockdown rate.

I personally would love to see more powerset, and more powerset categories like control. We need to test if they all work together!

I kind of agree, this city is sufficient to run around and test things with. If combat doesn't feel good then nobody will want to test anything. Also, I would like to add that they need to really work on mob density and adding more mobs to fight to level up. Fighting the same people and waiting for them to respawn is not an ideal way to get experience. Populate the city with enemies a little...

Thanks for all the great feedback. We're currently in the process of a huge animation + combat update that is nearly complete. It's the central focus of development ahead of a massive content update. We'll be sharing a video soon of the overhaul of the locomotion and combat updates.

Nice... thanks!

IronSight wrote:
Did this huge update ever happen? We are closing in on a year since this reply. I think I would remember VO putting out a video showing improved combat. Nothing on their youtube channel that is anywhere near recent.