Just started my first playthroughs of Dungeon of the Endless and must admit that I am totally amazed by the game,

especially by the art style. But nonetheless I am a little bit confused too. Somehow I expected something like

"A little less conversation, a little more action" or - to be more appropriate - "A little less automatism, a little more action".

Planning your defenses ahead, levelling up your crew, the surprise whats behind the next door... all works really well,

but somehow I expected a more active combat where I actually can control the actions of my selected character.

Quite like in a MOBA (Dota, LOL or recently Risk of Rain e.g.) where every character has its own "Skills"

that can change the outcome of a battle or something like "Sanctum" where I can activly fight alongside my defense lines.

I know now that my expectations were fundamentally false (which is perfectly okay) and I guess

that combat in "Dungeon of the Endless" will never be as active as in the games I mentioned, but I still hope

that we will see some more active and "combat changing" skills with the implementation of the skill tree.



Anyone heard something like that from the devs?

There will be skills from heroes.



But I hope they will stay far away from any MOBA inspiration. I would hate DotE to be too close to an action game.

But I hope they will stay far away from any MOBA inspiration. I would hate DotE to be too close to an action game.

Totally agreed! An too action-oriented approach wouldn´t fit into the concept like it is - regardless my first expectation.

But some sort of "action" would be nice. At the moment you can barely do anything except moving your characters to the center

of different rooms - which feels kind of awkward to me. I have read in the design documents that they are discussing manual targeting

and other stuff that is in my opinion a good start to give the players some more "control". I just find it hard to understand how skills

should work when they are released and how they affect combat and the individuality of characters... not even speaking of Multiplayer

and interactions between player controlled characters at the moment.

I agree with you : more things to do while the waves are spawning would be good.

But in usual tower defense games you can place turrets whil ethe waves are active because you don't have what you need to put everything you need. In DotE you do those choices before the waves start.

My hope is that skills will give us more activity during waves. I agree, as is it's fairly slow. I would also like to see the ability to change heroes focus to do things like repair modules and heal others rather than just being forces into the static if/then/else there currently is.

Personally, I expected there to be at least some more variation to the combat. During combat, characters always receive damage, I was expecting them to at least dodge some attacks depending on their Speed level. As to the skills, I was thinking that maybe they would have it like Risk of Rain, or at least some sort of system that is similar.

I think the combat fits the strategic/tactical planning needed to cope with the waves encountered. Any more "action", or twitch based stuff and the whole illusion of control will fall by the wayside, and suddenly we need micro skills - this is sure to turn a lot of roguelike and strategy game players off.

I hope they make the combat a bit more exciting to look at like it is in endless space. but controlling the heroes isn't necessary.

spelk wrote:
I think the combat fits the strategic/tactical planning needed to cope with the waves encountered. Any more "action", or twitch based stuff and the whole illusion of control will fall by the wayside, and suddenly we need micro skills - this is sure to turn a lot of roguelike and strategy game players off.

This is very much my feeling on the matter. DotE is a very strange game: I find the gameplay is most comparable to grand strategy games (Risk, etc) rather than the ARPG dungeon crawler it APPEARS to be. Which is such a mindbender that I can see where and why this confusion ("why is there so little action?") comes about.



My first thoughts when I saw it in action were approximately: "Dungeon Siege 1/2 meets Tower Defense?" But even though I really think that'd be a fine game as well, that's really nothing like THIS game.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
I hope they make the combat a bit more exciting to look at like it is in endless space. but controlling the heroes isn't necessary.

Well controlling the heroes shouldn't really be part of the gameplay really, personally I think the stats of each hero should play an important role into combat, and well I am sure they will add more variations to the combat, maybe more animations or usage of items, not to mention that there will be skills soon so there is that to look forward to.

I'm really not sure whether I'd like the game more or less if it had active skills for heros that you have to manually trigger.



Anyone knows Final Fantasy 12 and remembers how combat used to work there?

Your heros would basically do all the basic stuff like swinging their swords or shooting their bows automatically.

But you could always interfere and tell them to use their special-abilities.

Later on you could unlock more and more slots for prioritized conditional programming for your characters that determined the circumstances of when to use their active-abilities automatically aswell.

It was a relatively complicated but increadibly cool system. You could actually "program" their AI with an ingame-interface!



That, however, would probably be way too much hassle for a fast-paced game like DoTE. (and way too time-consuming to implement anyways)



That being said: If there are manually triggerable abilities, they should be very powerfull but also very costly, so you are not tempted to use them all the time.

Food/Ind or even Dust as a payment-method comes to mind.

I did like that system for FF12. This is still an Alpha version the final version probably will not look or play how it is right now.



DarkMeph

Ail wrote:
I'm really not sure whether I'd like the game more or less if it had active skills for heros that you have to manually trigger.



Anyone knows Final Fantasy 12 and remembers how combat used to work there?

Your heros would basically do all the basic stuff like swinging their swords or shooting their bows automatically.

But you could always interfere and tell them to use their special-abilities.

Later on you could unlock more and more slots for prioritized conditional programming for your characters that determined the circumstances of when to use their active-abilities automatically aswell.

It was a relatively complicated but increadibly cool system. You could actually "program" their AI with an ingame-interface!



That, however, would probably be way too much hassle for a fast-paced game like DoTE. (and way too time-consuming to implement anyways)



That being said: If there are manually triggerable abilities, they should be very powerfull but also very costly, so you are not tempted to use them all the time.

Food/Ind or even Dust as a payment-method comes to mind.

FF12 had the best combat system : you could even with the right items and skills reate a combat where you wouldn't die but didn't kill the enemy that spawned minions : you start the combat before going to bed and when you wake up you got 20+ levels (you could still die on that mission)

I don't understand why they didn't use it again, it was so beautiful and interesting. I woul dlove to see something akin being implemented in DotE.