Trying to come up with why combat feels slightly off and I think I’m starting to understand the thing that’s missing: Gravity.
When you finish warpath animation, when you start running from a stationary position, when you swing a sword, monsters chasing you and birds flying, breaking wood and exploding skeletons, etc. All of these things are currently missing gravity. If you look at the stride of the character running, or enemies chasing you, it feels like they’re tiptoeing across a cloud. The up stride has zero weight, certain elements of the connection and down-stride don’t either. Destroying particular enemies and breakable objects sends this confetti explosion out, and their physics makes them feel like feathers rather than heavy shards of wood and bone.
This goes for combat as well. Swinging a sword doesn’t really feel like you’re actually swinging and hitting something, it fires a quick animation and then the in-between animations lack weight and gravity. Dual-wielding as a sentinel and looking at the rive animation, it literally looks like he’s swinging weightless sticks. It probably has something to do with connecting animations, how fast you accelerate/decelerate the motions, and at what point you begin to do so. Right now it just lacks finish.
Then there are the skill effects. Look at rive, for example, It’s just a colored, kind of blurry slash. Spellcasting has this issue too, where you have an effect that’s almost instant and visuals that don’t feel like they’re even coming from your character. I want spell casting to feel like my character is conjuring some incredible power, and the connection to performing an action on the keyboard and watching it happen just isn’t there. It’s weightless and needs impact. Even with screen shake turned on it just isn’t quite there.
I’ve never played Lost Ark, just watched some of the gameplay, but I think among all of the ARPGS out there they do animation and combat impact possibly the best. Their skill effects are also super clean and polished. I’d love to see some of these animation and design principles implemented to LE!
