Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?
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I'm obviously unsure whether or not it is a thing already, but I notice a big thing in good action style combat systems is the use of animation cancelling through combos and chaining up abilities, like weaving spells together without casting times. I feel this mechanic is often rewarding for players as it shows abundance of practice, and mastery, and creates a much more fluent and smooth fighting experience
There's a lot of abilities being put into place for this game, but could it be possible to create this sort of thing?
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Please no. It is awful in every game that is not a strict fighting game.
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I'd say that, almost assuredly it won't be intentional, and equally likely some amount of this will appear - the bigger question is "will it mean anything?" for example, if you can cancel out out of a big nuke, but the way the damage catalyzes means you can't do anything useful with the extra time, then it's useless. more to the point, most of the moves are going to be near perfect effect time to animation time - there's a lot of emphasis in the fight videos on precision. if there is an advantage, it isn't going to be by a lot, and the nature of play means that it will mean less.
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I'd prefer not to have it, and also to have forced global cool down on every spell.
In this way game becomes not only about who can mash his buttons faster in right order, but also puts more weight on general tactics and combat thinking.
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i dont get what is animation cancelling. is it like playing without animation and you dont have a clue what ability enemy is using?
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@boogis
lets say an attack animation last .5 seconds. if you do that animation and follow it with another animation, that .5s animation is now cut short so it could be .3s instead.here's an example with LoL:
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@gothix said in Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?:
I'd prefer not to have it, and also to have forced global cool down on every spell.
In this way game becomes not only about who can mash his buttons faster in right order, but also puts more weight on general tactics and combat thinking.
Yes, I'm very much hoping this won't be about button mashing.
(I like ergonomic builds!)
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thank u @jetah it looks to me like some sort of cheating or bug
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@boogis
cheating not really because everyone has access to it but it is an unintended set of events that makes the character perform better than expected.
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I think I'm with those that would prefer not to see it. If the spell or attack move is designed to take .5 seconds then it should take .5 seconds. There was a reason the Devs designed it that way. Whether I know and agree with that reason or not is irrelevant.
My issue with it is that I think it would lead to more you must have skills a,b, and c and you must enter them in a specific order to get the cool down reduced. To me that would take away from the game and having those 400 skills available to me. I don't want another game where someone tells me you must do it this way.
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Animation cancelling is seriously a feature in games? I always thought it was an exploit...
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@evolgrinz It's a pretty big part of Dota 2 and part of the game's balance; there's even a stop command key that cancels whatever you're doing. For example, a move order will cancel just about any attack or skill animation. Some heroes have an attack animation that does damage very early in the animation and a longer recovery animation and other heroes do their damage towards the end of their attack animation. The former group of heroes can take steps in between their attacks so they can effectively attack while being somewhat mobile while it's harder for the latter group of heroes to take advantage the same mechanic.
If designed for it, animation canceling can make a game feel smoother by allowing you to fluidly transition between actions. It's intentionally added into more games than most of you realize and you've probably taken advantage of it without realizing it.
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@target said in Will Animation Cancelling become a combat mechanic one day?:
(...)If designed for it, animation canceling can make a game feel smoother by allowing you to fluidly transition between actions(...)
Then again, there are other, better ways to accomplish that, which I'd prefer in such a case.
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Animation cancelling may LOOK smoother, but it makes it mandatory to compete which becomes a pain in and of itself. Instead of worrying about animation cancelling, let's just have animations that fit what is happening, and not be painful hogs of too much time.
Simpler, easier on everyone playing, and it allows for similar fluid play. There's simply no need for animation cancelling if things are done well, imo. That does mean that long animations need to be rare things for special situations or abilities... but that's fine too.
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Animation cancel always ends up being an accident rather than an intention for the majority of the time. Usually animation cancel is caused by interactions between GCD, cast time, animation speed, CD, etc and then the developers decide it can turn into a mechanic with a few tweeks.~
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sounds horrifying
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@target
that sounds like a game design issue.
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@jetah It is, but the DoTa 2 devs have, as Target noted, balanced around them - the ones that can't cancel out because their big damage is at the end, now do more damage over all, compared to those that do more damage early on - it becomes a reasonable risk reward. Still would prefer the devs to have fixed it when it first became apparent, but they went a different way...
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@therippyone
instead of fixing the problem they're now a "feature" is what I'm saying.
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@jetah It's not a problem, it's an intentional part of the game's design and it comes from its RTS roots. Imagine controlling a bunch of units and having to wait for animations on each individual unit to finish before they follow the next command. Things would get desynchronized and messy very quickly. Fighting games are another example where they're used intentionally. Sometimes they're officially called 'feints' (they're also used for feints in Dota). When someone discovered animation cancelling in the Diablo 3 beta, a Blizzard representative explained that it was intentionally added to make combat feel good and responsive.
Not every game needs to be Dark Souls where you're forced to commit to every single action you take.
