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We need more maneuverability.


Nesano

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The push for more realistic player movement is admirable, but some of the ways the player character moves is just clumsy and unrealistic.

 

You should be able to move backwards while fighting zombies much more quickly. Like, all you're doing is holding an object while walking in reverse - it's not that hard. A normal person should be able to move in reverse faster than any zombie can "shamble." Maybe make a "combat posture" and a "mobility posture" that can be toggled back and forth with the jogging hotkey. Look at how clumsy this is - I shouldn't need to completely disengage to keep distance from the zombies and turn all the way back around to reengage like that, I should be able to move back at a pace sufficient to keep me out of range. Not to mention my character just completely stops moving for no apparent reason, which almost got me bitten twice.

 

We should also be able to dodge in any direction. I'm not referring to a clumsy, cumbersome, dodge roll, I'm just talking about a sudden long step to get out of harm's way while in a combat stance. I do see the problem with this and the WASD movement, as we would only be able to dodge in 8 directions, but it'd be better than nothing.

 

Get rid of tripping. Just get rid of it or at least give us a way to recover from a trip with a sense of urgency, maybe something like that stumble-roll recovery from the original Assassin's Creed or just simply getting up faster than an 80 year old man. Like, y'know, the kind of urgency a person would have when they're 1-2 seconds from guaranteed death. People aren't this clumsy in real life.

 

The new movement system has good potential, but there are too many scenarios where the player character just shrugs and says "guess I'll just die" instead of using basic motor skills to not get his brains feasted upon. Not saying we should be ninjas, but we should be people. Most of the problems are coming from either the player character having no motor skills or just simply not having the sense of urgency that should be present in a life and death situation where they're literally becoming panicked. These changes wouldn't even make the game too easy because, not only could encumbrance hinder these maneuvers, but you're still dead as soon as one bite gets through to you.

 

This update is still a big leap and a good start, so keep up the good work.

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Holding an object, walking in reverse, swinging something with enough force to matter (requiring some degree of bracing not to fall on your ass), as the undead grab you.

 

Doesn’t scream ”easy” to me ... We’ll just have to disagree that people aren’t incredibly clumsy and slow in real life, at least when at a low “level.”

 

The issue with the spear doesn’t exist with other weapons and is counted by the ability for spears to be used when charging. It’s not a good example, as it’s not representative. 

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Completely agree, these new slow and clumsy movements make the game really painful to play, before it was fast, dynamic you could move freely, maybe not realistic but at least it was fun and you didn't have to blame the gameplay for dying, it was your own fault if you died not because the character is as maneuvrable as a truck.

 

We even have to use tricks like canceling animation to get a better gameplay, is this normal to use "glitch" to not get killed because of the gameplay?

 

It's not unplayable but really annoying, I had 1000 hours on build 40 and loved PZ but now even after 100 hours on build41 I still can't get used to it and keep dying because my character is too slow to react, it feels like pressing a button has a delay of 1 sec to move, with shamblers it's okay but with sprinters 1 sec is a lot.

 

But since we're just a small minority to complain, it won't get fixed which is understandable, I wouldn't waste time either for few players if the vast majority is okay with it, I hope some modders will fix this then.

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Before it wasn’t fast ... it was almost if not instantaneous.

 

Quite a difference. Quite impossible to go back without basically playing Wacky Sax over a massively sped up animation to appease the handful of people who just keep writing what amounts to “terrible, terrible, terrible!” A non-starter, and frankly pretty damn insulting that you think this rhetoric works.

 

You guys make it hard to support even the changes I somewhat agree with (characters not feeling like they move fast enough after a fall, or not being visibly grabbed and struggling to free themselves, for example) by taking such extreme and negative positions on things (not just animations).

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18 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

Holding an object, walking in reverse, swinging something with enough force to matter (requiring some degree of bracing not to fall on your ass), as the undead grab you.

 

Doesn’t scream ”easy” to me

Just use passing steps while swinging - it's extremely easy. You can't even move while attacking in the game right now, so there's already a huge disconnect.

 

15 hours ago, Axezombie said:

But since we're just a small minority to complain, it won't get fixed which is understandable, I wouldn't waste time either for few players if the vast majority is okay with it, I hope some modders will fix this then.

God, I hope not. This is such a glaring problem.

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I agree with your post with how walking backwards goes. There should be a better transfer animation to show some haste in turning around into a run. Rather than scrap it, It may help to have a midpoint between raising your weapon and moving in a single direction (strafing?) where you are still moving one direction, aren't focusing on hitting something. Your character could be more vulnerable as they aren't aware of where they aren't looking and are also sending momentum where they are least agile, but can move at the pace of a light jog.

 

This isn't a full defence of build 41, but I imagine the state of movement will be changing a lot before it comes out. Overall, tripping is not a bad idea, and the current implementation isn't unmanageable. It has a few areas it can improve in before release, but right now it is a proper consequence to poor planning and being overconfident. In its first attempt to release, It's bloated and clunky in the worst places. Here's where I see these improvements being made:

 

The thing that players should be able to adjust for themselves: Frequency of falls. As of right now, tripping is as much as RNG as it is tied to your moodlets. The overall "chance to stumble" can be a sandbox setting. Those of us who play in other difficulties looking for that more free-movement experience can reduce, maybe even remove it. The developers have done this with being dragged down and other newer elements of the game, so I say this is both harmless and on the easier side to implement instead of gutting the system entirely.

 

Add a sprint function to getting back up: Trying to scramble upwards from a downward spiral as adrenaline shoots through your veins can be one of the most heart-pounding experiences in build 41. Currently, fallen characters get up in an animation that doesn't really reflect the situation that they are in. Developers can remedy this by letting players holding the sprint button to force their character to "scramble" - do everything in their power to move their ass from the floor to a sprint because their life depends on it, and they will actually die if they don't. Tied to their nimble stat for speed and maybe other environmental factors, trying to scramble away can result in the survivor tripping again in the absolute worst of conditions, while most of the time giving the players some mercy who are trying to simple get away from an impossible scenario. You can still fail - but at least you can show that you are actually trying. 

 

That's my 2 cents. The previous movement made the game way too easy to cheese, that is a factual truth. Sprinting through hordes is no longer an option. However, the player maintains control over how they encounter and deal with these situations where escape is a priority. 

Edited by Kim Jong Un
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You already pause briefly while walking backwards while swinging with every item except the spear, as well. If you pick the wrong weapon or nerf your speed, it might not be as noticeable, but the standard axe or bat, let’s you do this easily enough.

 

Tripping is entirely tied to what you run into and how fast you run into it. It’s not random. Don’t run into things, don’t trip. Easy to avoid.

 

Use the shift key instead of alt and you’ll suddenly find you’re not fighting the game by trying to break into a run ... even faster is just using ctrl to turn, since presumably you’re aiming anyway if zombies are so close that it matters. And, if they’re that close, you’ll get no pity from me.

 

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I mentioned similar points in in this suggestion.

Basically, if you are doing something slower than walking speed, movement should be instant in any direction.

As for the fighting animations, apparently they are reworking animation cancelling, so hopefully that will help with some of that. Because yes, I have nearly gotten killed multiple times doing an 'execution' animation. I wonder if it would be possible to only allow executions if you hold the mouse down (?).

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5 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

Tripping is entirely tied to what you run into and how fast you run into it. It’s not random. Don’t run into things, don’t trip. Easy to avoid.

Speaking to just this, it's blatantly obvious that those are the triggers for it but falling over isn't guaranteed, hence the talk of RNG. Thankfully, this was spelled out in the earlier anim newsdoid, otherwise it would seem more unfair than it actually is. So, give the players who want more casual movement the option to play with that value, you offer them the ability to fix their own issue. It seems like a fair compromise to me, since you can already adjust other elements that were introduced in B41's movement.

Edited by Kim Jong Un
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1 hour ago, Kim Jong Un said:

Speaking to just this, it's blatantly obvious that those are the triggers for it but falling over isn't guaranteed, hence the talk of RNG. Thankfully, this was spelled out in the earlier anim newsdoid, otherwise it would seem more unfair than it actually is. So, give the players who want more casual movement the option to play with that value, you offer them the ability to fix their own issue. It seems like a fair compromise to me, since you can already adjust other elements that were introduced in B41's movement.

Iirc from the code, there is no RNG. The fall is guaranteed when you meet the right condition. If you only stumble, it’s not because the game rolled a dice, as rng implies, and decided to be gracious, but because you didn’t hit at a fast enough speed or at the right angle. You always tripped over saplings at running speed, for example.

 

Sure, having a sandbox option to disable it would be great for those who don’t like it, but there’s no need to misuse the word. Though I get it’s tempting - a whole load of these threads try to blame the game for a player’s failure to anticipate how long an action should take after experiencing it.

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18 hours ago, Kim Jong Un said:

Tied to their nimble stat for speed and maybe other environmental factors

At that point it would be worth starting the nimble stat out at something like 3 or 4 and implement traits that reduce it so that not every fresh character would be literally the most clumsy human being possible.

 

10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

 

Except you can?

Attack while moving - your character will quickly slow to a stop for no reason, then start moving again.

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1 hour ago, Nesano said:

Attack while moving - your character will quickly slow to a stop for no reason, then start moving again.


The reason for the brief pause when (and only  when) backing up being your character is bracing into the swing so that they don’t fall on their arse or lightly tickle the zombie instead of hit it.

 

It means you can’t just create an infinite conga line of undead and kill them all with no risk, of course.

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1 hour ago, EnigmaGrey said:


The reason for the brief pause when (and only  when) backing up being your character is bracing into the swing so that they don’t fall on their arse or lightly tickle the zombie instead of hit it.

 

It means you can’t just create an infinite conga line of undead and kill them all with no risk, of course.

Any direction.

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I think the character movement feels like driving a boat. It's very irritating to play and seems broken. It's looks more fluid but it is less playable than before. Trying to turn you character is MUCH too slow also. I really enjoy this game and I've played many hours please change this movement and response time issue. 2020-02-11_11-37-24.thumb.png.40d08d57d9537ecab2744676a5fe3b62.png

Also, aiming closely for realism of movement is not needful, it needs to be enjoyable. Realism is not always the best thing. The graphics area not trying to nail down realism and movement doesn't need to be all scientifically accurate. Just looks nice and is fun to play is (golden).

Edited by Doomsayer
Added play time image // Realism topic
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On 2/11/2020 at 2:51 AM, Nesano said:

Any direction.

 

Yes this is required. Without it the game difficulty plummeted to near zero its already been balanced around making the combat difficult. We could look into a sandbox option to disable it perhaps, but trust me we've been through this whole process and that was specifically added to avoid players being able to horde kill with it.

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19 hours ago, Doomsayer said:

I think the character movement feels like driving a boat. It's very irritating to play and seems broken. It's looks more fluid but it is less playable than before. Trying to turn you character is MUCH too slow also. I really enjoy this game and I've played many hours please change this movement and response time issue. 2020-02-11_11-37-24.thumb.png.40d08d57d9537ecab2744676a5fe3b62.png

Also, aiming closely for realism of movement is not needful, it needs to be enjoyable. Realism is not always the best thing. The graphics area not trying to nail down realism and movement doesn't need to be all scientifically accurate. Just looks nice and is fun to play is (golden).

 

The vast majority ARE finding it enjoyable and playable though. Almost every review, or comment about zomboid outside this community is 'you need to play 41 it makes the game 10x better' type stuff, I appreciate people in this thread's perspective but if we tightened up the controls to 40 level, we'd end up with horde killing and the game being too easy (as well as kill off the visual improvement the animations bring), which would make the game worse for orders of magnitude more people than are finding issue in this thread. We've already tightened up the controls before and during IWBUMs as far as its humanly possible to without reverting the animation system, to the point that it seems to hit the spot for the vast majority of people, but we can't go further than this without hurting the game severely in other ways for what is a minority of people who still take issue with the responsiveness

 

(responsiveness I should point out that must be like 5-6x faster response time to input than some AAA stuff like RDR2, we've already squeezed as much out as possible and compared to us RDR2 is the one where a character moves like driving a boat)

 

A lot of this stuff has been suggested without the knowledge that we HAD this stuff in testing, and purposefully removed or nerfed it. The 'Should be able to walk backward faster' thing is fair enough in principal to assume we need to add. But we literally had 100% unrestricted strafing during combat, and that seemed great until I realised I could kill 100-200 zombies with zero effort purely by holding backward and hammering LMB. Just doing that you could disperse about 200 zombies, the only consideration and risk being looking around every so often to make sure you don't back into a zombie. That's not a combat system, that's broken and would have been an exploit everyone used, people would be surviving years and have zero fear of zombies, combat would be boring and broken, and so we added the slow down during swing purposefully to fix that. This applies to most of the suggestions in here, it's the way it is for a reason after the months of testing the game has had prior to these posts, and for the majority it seems to be in a good place minus a few bugs.

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Yo make a rl video how fast you move with 2hander axe + backpack full of frige + gass can + tons of stuff you should have never contained there realistically.

Current movement system is much better compare to that meme faceroll we had in 40 build.

 

Its not minecraft.

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On 2/10/2020 at 10:51 PM, Nesano said:

Any direction.

Are you somehow still on build 26? The one that broke strafing unintentionally while fixing animation cancelling?

 

All that happens now is that you pause briefly during the swing and can then move again, without having to release the keys. Hold down the mouse and a direction jet and you live-swing/pause-move-swing ... 

 

Hardly clumsy. The realistic alternative is letting people swing totally ineffectively with a high chance to unbalanced themselves and fall on their ass because that force has to go somewhere. Now that’d piss people off, even before considering the clipping issues it’d evoke.

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10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

  The vast majority ARE finding it enjoyable and playable though. Almost every review, or comment about zomboid outside this community is 'you need to play 41 it makes the game 10x better' type stuff,

I promise you they're not talking about the clunky movement when they praise this game because I'll tell you this update absolutely makes the game better but still tell you the movement system needs work.

 

10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

if we tightened up the controls to 40 level, we'd end up with horde killing and the game being too easy

Which is why we'd need to make other changes, such as not allowing us to stab two zombies standing a meter apart with the same spear thrust. There are ways to make the game realistic without making it too easy.

 

10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

until I realised I could kill 100-200 zombies with zero effort purely by holding backward and hammering LMB

You couldn't because your character would get tired or your weapons would break before that happened. We're not talking 100-200 swings, we're talking 100-200 zombie kills. There are other mechanics in the game that make it hard for the player to deal with a lot of zombies at once.

 

10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

That's not a combat system, that's broken and would have been an exploit everyone used

Except kiting tactics like that are exactly what we would do in real life if we had to kill a bunch of stupid, slow zombies with a melee weapon. It's not an "exploit," that implies what you're doing is physically impossible. I'd take that over having to break combat to turn around and walk backwards a little because that's just tedious and the fact that I have to do that instead of just simply moving backwards faster is unrealistic and extremely annoying.

 

10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

people would be surviving years and have zero fear of zombies

Literally one bite and you're dead. Fear zombies or you'll get cocky and die.

 

10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

combat would be boring and broken, and so we added the slow down during swing purposefully to fix that

Combat is boring and broken now as soon as we have to turn around to get distance. Adding the slow just introduced this new problem.

 

10 hours ago, lemmy101 said:

it's the way it is for a reason after the months of testing the game has had prior to these posts

Then the months of testing were wrong. This is a zombie survival simulation, not an arcade game where we need to be artificially limited for muh balance.

 

10 hours ago, Caturday said:

Yo make a rl video how fast you move with 2hander axe + backpack full of frige + gass can + tons of stuff you should have never contained there realistically.

So make encumbrance slow us down in combat. Easy fix.

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1 hour ago, Nesano said:

So make encumbrance slow us down in combat. Easy fix.


At this point, I don’t think you’ve even played the game. Encumbrance is already a factor. Weapon speed is a factor. Wounds are a factor. Skills, fatigue, sleepiness, cold and even boots are a factor in terms of speed. That speed determines how long things like strafing and swinging take. You can still kite zombies if you pick the right weapon and are a bit more careful.

 

But then maybe I shouldn’t expect so much from someone arguing with one of the four founders about what the game is, while trying to paint their infinite kiting fantasy as “totally not arcade-y.” Who’d describe realism as fun or lacking tedium?

 

But at least we know how you’d die in the zombie apocalypse. 

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1 hour ago, EnigmaGrey said:

Encumbrance is already a factor.

Exactly, so why bring it up?

 

I literally couldn't care less about who is and isn't a founder and anybody that tries using their status as leverage in an argument doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Now are you gonna get back on point or are you gonna keep accusing me of things like having not even played the game and dying in a theoretical zombie apocalypse?

Edited by Nesano
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4 hours ago, Nesano said:

Exactly, so why bring it up?

 

I literally couldn't care less about who is and isn't a founder and anybody that tries using their status as leverage in an argument doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Now are you gonna get back on point or are you gonna keep accusing me of things like having not even played the game and dying in a theoretical zombie apocalypse?


Hey, you’re the guy arguing with the creator of the game, toting your hypothetical success for kiting the undead, and claiming your idea is realistic, not me.

 

Maybe you should have come at this with more than what boils down “I just really want it, it’d be cool” but here we are, playing at Critical Thinking 100 while forgetting the Fallacy Fallacy.

 

Google fighting videos or something. None I’ve seen demonstrates people fighting while moving backwards without pausing to redistribute their weight and strike for anything other than light, inconsequential punches. I dare say it looks slower than in PZ even without having to counter balance for the weight of the weapon plus force of its impact. Or get up off your chair, grab a frying pan and give it a go yourself.

 

But oh, so arcade. Life should be a simulation, just like PZ, am I right?

 

I wonder why Terraria, Diablo, and Minecraft all have kiting. It must be because they’re simulations, too.

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