Combat Video!>1!! 4 Realz this time!

[Domme]

Originally Posted by ASYLUM101

No? Create a TQIT map where hundreds of monsters appear on screen and vanish on death, tell me how much lag you get then.

I had never lag in TQIT, but besides of that it should not be hard to give the user the option to choose wheather the corpses will vanish or not.

[medierra]

Originally Posted by yerkyerk

Congratulations on the vid! It looks awesome. I'm not sure where you guys are at this stage, but it looks utterly amazing for an alpha version..

I so want to play the game right NAO!!!

Despite the video being much better than I anticipated, there's some small points of critic though, but I've always got something to bitch about. It's my nature, feel free to hate me for it
- I can't believe I'm saying this, but... The gore might be a bit too overdone at times. At 0:29 the hero starts gibbing every monster he hits. It's cool to see monsters splattering pieces of themselves all over the place, but when you can do it with every hit I believe it becomes a bit too much and it isn't special anymore. It should imho be saved for special occasions (destructive skills, killing monsters with crits - or when the hero is overpowered).
- The fiery aura is too fierce.. should be more subtle, imho
- disappearing corpses and stains - aww....?

The fiery aura is a soldier skill called "fighting spirit" (not sure I like the same yet) and it activates for a short duration giving a massive boost to physical damage and offensive ability. So, what you're seeing at 0:29 is a ton of critical hits due to fighting spirit. I'm also using blade arc a lot, which also has a damage modifier but costs a lot of energy to use successively like that.

Enemies are set up to gib when your killing hit does over X% of their total health in damage. So, when you're fighting a lot of zombies, you'll tend to see a lot more gibbing.

We have a lot more going on graphically than TQ with all the burn and spatter decals, gib physics, weather, destructibles, etc. We also tend to have battles with more enemies, so having all the bodies lying around could get really ugly for performance.

[senbon]

Great clip . Absolutely loved the use of colours and music!
Only thing I felt missing was some sort of feeling of speed / power when
the character used Blitz (charge) @ the start of the clip.

Thanks Crate! Can't wait for the alpha ;>.

[gdansk]

I, for one, appreciate the massive amount of gore. Now, I really want to buy this game but I'd prefer not to deal with any payment agent other than PayPal, which I assume will not be available until a release date is established... *sigh*

[yerkyerk]

Originally Posted by medierra

Enemies are set up to gib when your killing hit does over X% of their total health in damage. So, when you're fighting a lot of zombies, you'll tend to see a lot more gibbing.

We have a lot more going on graphically than TQ with all the burn and spatter decals, gib physics, weather, destructibles, etc. We also tend to have battles with more enemies, so having all the bodies lying around could get really ugly for performance.

I'm actually perfectly fine with that method of gibbing.
Just seemed a bit weird, suddenly all those chunks of meat flying around. Than again, I might actually prefer that if I play the game myself and activate my ownage skill

How about a slider to set a timer for body evaporation? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top?

[Rhis]

Originally Posted by gdansk

I, for one, appreciate the massive amount of gore. Now, I really want to buy this game but I'd prefer not to deal with any payment agent other than PayPal, which I assume will not be available until a release date is established... *sigh*

Don't count on ever being able to buy Grim Dawn with PayPal. See this post for why.

Our current payment provider is a real bank and therefore an order of magnitude safer than using PayPal.

[Caillou]

Originally Posted by yerkyerk

How about a slider to set a timer for body evaporation? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top?

Pleeeeeeeease

[Void(null)]

Originally Posted by Domme

I had never lag in TQIT, but besides of that it should not be hard to give the user the option to choose wheather the corpses will vanish or not.

Then you never played with XMAX or Achilles Mod.

[Cmelda13]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011...eveals-combat/

[medierra]

Originally Posted by ASYLUM101

Anyone notice the friendly AI in the beginning? Speaking of which - what's that double upwards arrow on one of the AI guys? Buff? Level up?

The NPC guard got within range of the player's "field command" aura. The icon is supposed to be chevrons denoting military rank.

Also - I noticed some zombies wearing vests and things (mostly a few greens and blue zombies), is that part of the WYSIWYG system? I'm assuming yes cause I can't imagine texturing the same zombie several times just to add a piece of equipment. (first one appears @22secs)

We added it currently as undroppable equipment just to give the zombies some visual variety. We want to later create either player versions or make it drop as some kind of crafting resource like "scraps".

Player grunts at 22 seconds, nearby enemies fall to the ground, yet get up later. Knockdown is in the game now?! YES. (can we get the name of the skill?)

Yes, you can knock down live enemies now and have them get back up. If the skill has more force, like a grenado, you can actually send them flying across the screen and have them get back up.

Heh, that skill is a little bit of a hack-job. It was originally a battle shout type skill that debuffed enemies but then I felt like it would be cool to really show off the ability to knock down live enemies and have them get back up, so I added knockdown to it. I have a similar skill in another mastery but hey, you can only fit 2 masteries per char, so battle shout got turned into a knockdown skill. Who knows, maybe I'll leave it that way. It is certainly useful.

Green zombie - hazardous to the environment? Acidic puke @24 secs?

Poison puke

25 seconds - blue zombie hits player, player gets 2 new aura effects - the huge glowy fiery one, and a snowflake one. Slow effect/cold damage on hit from blue zombie?! (he does attack slower, pay attention guys)

Good catch. I was afraid after watching the video over and over that people might think it was lag or something. Yes, the blue zombies, "cold ones", have various cold / freeze related abilities. They have a cold retaliation buff, their hits slow you and do cold damage and they also have a small chance to freeze you. They're really slow but they're actually one of the most dangerous enemies for melee chars to fight right now.

30 seconds - said blue zombie with armor gibs and drops an enormous, wicked looking sword.

Yep. We have kind of a bastardized loot system that is part WYSIWYG and part random. I think it provides sort of the best of both worlds. I mean, to me, the most important part of WYSIWYG is that when enemies have a badass looking piece of equipment, you can get it and that is still the case. However, when they're just wearing crappy rags, there is no need for them to drop 100% of the time. On the other hand, in TQ it was hard to provide good coverage of all loot types in all areas of the game because certain enemies only used certain types of gear. It also took a little of the slot-machine aspect out of loot because the drops were sometimes overly predictable. So, sometimes enemies can also drop things that they don't have equipped. We try to do this in a way that isn't too absurd. Like, insect swarms won't be dropping armor and weapons. Zombies though, have a small chance to drop a variety of human equipment. It is a bit of an abstraction but one that I don't think is too implausible and benefits the game more than it detracts from it. So yeah, sometimes badass swords can pop out of zombies... I mean who knows, maybe it was... uhh... "inside him?"

1:01 - massive gazer appears. This tells us we have champion gazers in addition to regular ones! COOL.

You are correct sir! Wait till you see the hero ones

1:19 - player drinks a potion. No animation, but he steps back from battle and begins glowing with red + marks. Either an HP pot, or a spell with no animation, no sound, and no visual effect (aside from the red things)

No potions were drunk in the making of this video. Potions are for pussies! That's my "will to live" skill that activates on low health. It provides some instant healing and then gives you damage absorption for a brief period. It has a long cooldown though, so once it goes off, you have to start being more careful. It is definitely a life-saver when you're trying to record video with the UI turned off such that you can't see your health.

@Medierra or Rhis, is the entire game going to be setup this way? I mean, TONS of mobs, nice variety, (green,blue,plain zombies, super mutants, mega mutants, 2 gazer types and more) and several heroes in between? It looks like a lesser version of xmax, but with more guys and guys that don't get 1shotted.

Yes, mostly. We mix it up a bit, sometimes you're fighting smaller groups of harder enemies. Like with rift hounds and raptors you typically are only fighting 3-6 of them at a time but they're NASTY. The aetherial corruptions and grobles / dranghouls tend to occur in large numbers like you see in the video. The video is actually even toned down a bit in terms of enemy numbers just because capturing video while playing the game on max settings is rough on performance. One o the reason though that we can have so many enemies is that the zombies are set up with ambush proxies that will spawn a configurable number and then respawn more once the zombie population drops below a set min threshhold. So the ambush keeps adding zombie to the fight until it gets tapped out.

PS: vanishing corpse haters - enjoy your persistent corpses that lag your game in TQIT. I believe this is a necessary step to minimize lag and ensure we can fight MORE guys on the same screen.

Yes, people's complaints about corpse lag in TQ and the larger number of enemies we wanted to have on-screen is what lead us to this decision.

PSS to the "huge glowy fiery aura" haters - I THINK that's a passive, not an activate-able aura, because he does NOTHING to activate it unless it's instant cast. I'm guessing medierra almost died and triggered "Will to Live". I'm not fond of the effect myself, just saying I don't think he triggered it. Watch the video, it activates immediately after blue zombie hits him.

The orange aura, that I will immediately change after posting this is a passive skill that has a % chance to activate on being hit. It's "fighting spirit" and it is what is allowing me to critical the shit out of the zombies at 0:29

Will to live is what causes the little red first-aid symbols and faint white glow.