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Animation Canceling (and where it should go)


Ziggylata

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Ive been playing a lot of PZ since Build 41 came around and since I started ive discovered Animation Canceling. This expands the combat and makes you much stronger as a player.

 

How it works is holding CTRL puts you in the combat stance. If you let go of CTRL, naturally you are no longer in the combat stance. 

Letting go of CTRL during the attack animation before you go into recovery (easiest to do while moving) allows you to cancel the animation mid-swing. While you can do this with any weapon, doing this with either the wood-axe and sledgehammer due to their long swing animation allows you to reliably and effectively cancel your animations and skip the extremely long recovery animations you have while fighting normally. 

 

What does this mean for normal gameplay? While the wood-axe still uses a TON of stamina to swing doing animation canceling, it actually uses very slightly less with animation canceling and also gives you an unprecedented lethality against single zombies and so long as your character is healthy, awake and has the energy to fight, theyll effectively oneshot zombies with even just level 3 or 4 axe skill. Heres an example from my stream.

The character in question started with level 3 axe skill and has level 9 fitness (now has about level 6 or 7 axe skill), so his ability to oneshot and keep fighting for long periods of time are quite strong, even so this is still way too strong. 

 

What do I think needs to change?

First off, the range on the wood-axe is absurd. Almost 3000 zombie kills on this character has shown me that. Animation-canceling needs to go as well. But frankly, that isnt all.

In my opinion, and where I think the topic of debate comes in, I think animation-canceling is not a negative thing overall. What ive found is the responsiveness of animation-canceling makes combat more enjoyable and feel more involved and skillbased and I feel there should be some combat expanding a lot from this initial point.

To elaborate, im no longer holding CTRL and left clicking and hoping I kill reliably and dont get swarmed (in which id be forced to spam the spacebar to not die and hope they fall over), I am now able to do things like swing at a zombie and then cancel and immediately shove the other zombie. This gives me more control over my character and makes me feel like im doing better. I feel like im playing more. I have to do more with my fingers and press more buttons to get these results. 

 

I want to see more combat mechanics to replace this basic idea, something hard to learn and add more depth so I can feel like an experienced survivor rather than just learning when to run and when to fight. This is definitely a debatable topic but its something I want to see improved on in some way or another. Theres really nothing like a quick anim cancel to shove to save my own life from disaster, but this is definitely broken. 

 

This is also on normal apocalypse settings as well.

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Reminds me of animation cancelling in a few Castlevania games. Particularly in Harmony of Despair where when practiced it can lead to truly absurd increases in DPS. While this doesn't seem (yet) to get to that level, hopefully it gets fixed.

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To give another update to this, yes this REALLY needs to be fixed but again, id like to express some of the benefits that having a system like this could add.

Having more to think about in combat and have more technical skill required (not that this requires much skill to do) can increase the amount of thought going into the gameplay and when you require more tech-skill to do a better job in combat (allowing you to potentially increase the power of the player) and create a skill-ceiling to learn and improve over which can also allow you to increase the difficulty of the game in combat areas such as making zombies with tough clothing or helmets significantly harder to kill cause right now I dont even notice. Mechanics like this can also allow a skilled player to prevent their own demise from a mistake. You can see in the clip below there are scenarios where I swing and hit a zombie, cancel and immediately shove the zombie while backpedaling which prevented the scenario from getting out of hand.

 

 

Id like to preface that I am not saying "keep animation canceling" or "let me be super powerful and take on any amount of zombies" or even "let me never die", but frankly I just want a more advanced combat system that I can learn and feel rewarded for learning. Combat in build 41 feels pathetic on Apocalypse where if theres 2 zombies or more, it boils down to fence cheesing (where I lure them to a fence or window then killing them while theyre on the ground) or shove spamming until enough of them fall over that I can actually hit one with a weapon.

 

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