Weapon Stance Balance

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Rythmix
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Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2004 6:26 am

Weapon Stance Balance

Post by Rythmix »

The idea of the weapon stance is great, however it doesnt follow the idea behind it. Lets look at games like StreetFighter 2, Light was faster, but weaker, Medium was a balance between stronger and faster, and Heavy was slow but more painful. But each of these also has a weakness. In the case of the chaos stances, only the Double Axe seems to follow this rule.

Light is faster, although limited by the animation speeds, so it really isn't faster, just different, easy hit swing and weak.

Medium has longer range, and does only medium damage. and follows traditinal UT2k3 moves (the original moves were best IMO)

Heavy has harder hit and multi swing, but trades it for shorter range.

But for weapons like the swords, Medium and Heavy have almost exact same swing, but slower and stronger, but since the sword has full damage from start of swing to end of swing, and it covers a full 180 degrees, its actually gaining more by being slower, instead of trading off.

Solution: For all weapons: Make light stance faster (if possible) and weak with a decent reach, leave medium stance alone, and make Heavy hit harder, but take away some of the reach, The katana and double axes are good examples of this. as they are strong, but only swing in the frontwards direction, thus limiting their range and giving heavy mode an actual weakness. The bastard sword, Mace, and Templar are the worst in this case as the swing is exactly like medium, but hurts more, no definite weakness.

This and fix the point of damage for the swings in an analog fashion as mentioned here: http://forums.chaoticdreams.org/viewtopic.php?t=3869

This IMHO, will do some good things for chaos, if possible to implement this way. But its only an opinion and feedback that i hope helps.
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jb
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Post by jb »

Thanks for the input. The orignal moves we had were using animations that we borrowed but never were 100% comfortable with. So we wanted to replace them. And while the current set of animations are good there is room for tweakage. What is not know to you folks is there is a damage modify in the code already. So light stance gets no bonus, medium gets a small bonus and heavy gets a bigger bonus. So that part is set. And you right we probably need to tweak some of the animations to balance this out a bit more. What we are doing is trying to go over all of the good melee feedback and then see where we can fix it. However this will take some time to go over. There is a large amount of feedback. Some of it is very valid. Others are not. Once we find the valid ones and can tweak them, we need to test those tweaks to ensure they work well.

So this is a good post and we can/will address it. However it probably is out of scope. We wanted to follow up with another patch soon that has some new stuff. Most of the new stuff is already started. And if we want to hit the date we set we may not have time to look at this. And I dont want to rush any parts (as when you rush you tend to make mistakes). So thanks and we will get to it!!
Jb
Rythmix
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Post by Rythmix »

Lol so is "Good" feedback saying "this mod sucks, fix it!" ? LOL (j/k)
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Tuna_
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Post by Tuna_ »

I think that the weapon stances and the damages should be switched. Take a light stance attack with the bs sword. It is over very quickly, and the chances are you did not hit anyone. Also when the animation is this fast you can't do the infamous "attack and lunge" trick. However, in a slow animation (heavy stance) it is quite easy to hit someone even if they aren't even close to you at the start of the attack.

This is why I suggest inverting the damage and the stances. Make the fastest stance do the most damage and the heavy stance do the least damage. If you were to really swing a weapon; if you did it slowly, it would probably not hurt someone very fast. But, if you do a fast slash it might cut him in half.
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Kaboodles
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Post by Kaboodles »

How about animating each of the stances so that you hold the weapon differently?
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TKATK
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Post by TKATK »

i think the chaos team's animator/s take this as a threat :?
LoQtUS
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Post by LoQtUS »

Kaboodles_The_Assassin wrote:How about animating each of the stances so that you hold the weapon differently?
Actualy there are stances. 1 frame animations that that were ment for the player to use inbetween swings. This has not been implimented yet.
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