basic action responsiveness

[TinFoilMkIV]

After playing the game enough to feel like I have a good understanding of the overall gameplay movement and combat systems, I found a few things that I feel should be brought up to be looked at and see what others think.

The first action that I personally have the biggest issue with is the fact that you cannot do a basic dodge roll while reloading a gun. I mean imagine if you could not cancel the reload animation to perform a melee attack while surrounded by infested while trying to reload a gorgon. I think the ability to cancel the reload for melee attacks is great, and dodge rolls need to be able to do the same thing. I find this is mostly an issue on bosses where rushing them with melee to finish them off before reloading is not an option. It seems to me as if this is more of an oversight of not allowing a dodge roll to break this specific action.

Secondly for rolls, I feel like melee attacks are too sluggish coming out of a roll and waiting for your character to stand up before being able to swing. In my opinion it would be a nice addition to have some kind of extra melee attack useable at the end of a roll, not on the level of a sliding attack, but something more equivalent to a standard quick attack. I don't feel like this is a real issue with guns, even though being able to end a roll crouching with your gun ready firing at enemies would be cool, I don't feel that it's necessary, and the response time for your range weapon doesn't seem quite as off, as well as the fact that generally if you're trying to fire a gun you have at least some breathing room, and the sliding shooting ability kinda covers the low profile mobile shooting option. This may be more apparenty as I have been leveling my Scindo lately and is most likely not a big issue for the faster melee weapons, but I don't think this would be a bad addition.

Next up is the landing animations. for simply moving about the standard jumping stationary and rolling landings seem fine, but in combat they can be somewhat problematic at least for me when I'm trying to be fancy and trying out more advanced manouvers. For one the stationary land is a death sentence if the enemies around you are any real threat, as you're temporarily imobilized and unable to attack. To me this feels appropriate if you just landed from a fairly high drop (this would likely have to exclude super jumping off of a non-elevated surface), but I feel like we could do with a sorta halfway stance where you can shoot with one hand, similiar to what you can do in the air, minus the ability to zoom, so hipfire only as the character is still recovering from a landing.

The reason I feel that enhancing the stationary landing is due to the other issues with the rolling landing. As I mentioned above, if you're rolling anywhere near enemies you're basically just a target since the AI's do not lose any noticeable accuracty vs a rolling player, and you are unable to fight back until the animation ends and your character is fully standing. In this area the main thing I can think of at the moment that bothers me is the inabilty to shoot in the air without landing in a roll, interrupting your ability to attack and opening yourself up to any enemy you didnt manage to kill with the jump shot. Now the current flying one handed ninja shooting is awesome and everything I definately wouldn't like it removed, but perhaps something like while either scoped/unscoped (I don't know which would work best with this) be in more of an aerial crouching stance for more stable firing with it ending landed crouching and not interrupting your ability to shoot.

Finally (at least for now) I want to bring up power use animations. By themselves I dont have much of an issue with them, the real problem for me comes when you want/need to use a power mid action. I believe this is largely only even a significant issue for using the slower melee weapons, as most other animations finish fast enough that the effect is negligible. The problem as I have noticed it is the inability to break out of a melee combo/swing to use a power, and it doesn't seem to queue immediately after the current swing either (could be something I'm personally doing wrong as well), which as I just said, is really only and issue with weapons such as Scindo and Fragor, but with them can put you in a very bad situation when trying to use a power but are locked up waiting for the full swing animation period and sometimes even a second one to finish. To me the ideal solution is to queue a power use command with priority over consecutive melee attacks, and have an ending period to the attack animation in which it can be cancelled out to start a power use.

So yea, I realize that is a lotta rambling and text, but I feel like these kinda things could greatly improve the overall flow of combat with more potentially advanced use of combinining movement types, as well as removing some of those awkward situations where you feel like you can't actually do much.

[Volume]

Agreed 100%

[TinFoilMkIV]

while I'm at it should add something I just remembered.

There should really be a way to break out of some of the non-combat actions, specifically hacking a panel and capturing the VIP dude. I can agree that generally if you try something like that when there's a bunch of enemies standing around you or other obviously bad situation, then yes that is your own fault, but that still doesn't entirely fly with me when my super awesome space ninja cant figure out how to just turn around and stab the random enemy that just ran through the doorway when I started to hack a terminal and just takes shotgun rounds to the back without even considering to stop.

Now I certainly don't want this to turn into the "oh you were literally a moment away from finishing the final objective terminal for the 5th time? well too bad that stray bullet totally clipped your foot causing you to instantly fail" kind of situation, but it really gets ridiculous when your capturing a prisoner and you get knocked flat on your face by a leaper and you stand back up and totally ignore the enemies swarming into the room to keep doing your thing.

There are certain actions, such as before getting knocked down, and possibly even just stunned, that should straight up break these actions. Also, at least for terminals, we should be able to cancel out of them at will, as there isn't even a way to just fail them to be able to deal with any enemies that are either nearby, or happened to get a line of fire on you. If you're low on hp, or in a dangerous mission with a not particularly durable frame, this can be a real problem, as the time it takes to finish hacking a terminal can be approximately the time it takes you to die horribly, not to mention the fact that getting shot and rapidly dying tends to be a bit distracting.

Edited February 5, 2013 by TinFoilMkIV

[TinFoilMkIV]

okay lets try this again.

Also it appears that at least shockwave MoAs can interrupt hacking attempts. I do not recall what knocked me down the last time I was hacking that did not interrupt it, so it's possible this has been changed since the original post.

also repeating actions when interrupted needs to go, particularly for the longer power activation animations.

EDIT: I would again like to highlight what seems to be an oversight where you cannot dodge roll while reloading, if the devs were to see only one point from this post and that was the one, I would be okay with that.

Edited February 16, 2013 by TinFoilMkIV