There is a new patch that was just released.
Sliding Locomotion in Combat
This patch includes experimental support for using non-teleport locomotion while in combat. I can’t stress enough that this is just an experiment. We have not had a chance to thoroughly test this feature and how it affects gameplay, but we’re trying it out to see how it goes. We may in the end decide to scrap it.
Combat in OrbusVR is built around the idea of battlefield positioning being important. Where you are on the battlefield in relation to the enemies and your fellow players plays an important part of the combat design, and choosing well or poorly on that front is meant to reward or punish you during major encounters. Therefore, it’s important that even though we’re adding sliding locomotion, we don’t break the combat design by allowing you to simply constantly move all over the battlefield. We still want you to have to make a decision about where you are, when the right time to move to a new location is, etc.
In that vein, you’ll notice that you now have a new bar next to your Health bar on your weapon. This bar is pink, and represents your character’s stamina. While out of combat, this bar does nothing. However, while you are in combat, using your sliding locomotion will deplete your stamina bar. Once it’s gone, you are unable to use sliding locomotion until it recharges.
The way that we’ve balanced this is that you can essentially use your full stamina bar in one go to get as far as you could by teleporting the full distance during combat before. We’ve also tuned it so that the stamina bar recharges as quickly as the teleporting does in combat. So that means in theory you can move as far and as quickly as you could while teleporting. You’ll notice that there is a “pause” between when you stop moving and when the bar begins to refill. This is by design. When taken altogether, we feel like this design allows you to quickly, smoothly transport yourself around the battlefield without relying on teleporting if that is immersion breaking to you, while at the same time still retaining the importance of battlefield positioning while in combat.
One last note. Currently the stamina bar for sliding and the use of teleport are fairly separate. If you use your slide it ‘uses up’ your teleport completely. While using your teleport does not use up your slide stamina. This is not ideal but since this is a first prototype we didn’t have a chance to do more. If we keep this feature in long-term, then what we will do is link up the teleport recharge with the sliding stamina bar such that if (for example) you use a partial telepor that will drain your stamina bar accordingly, and if you slide a long distance it will take your teleport longer to charge.
As you test this, we’d love feedback on how it feels, if you’re able to dodge AoE attacks properly, if it makes the combat too easy, etc.
Other Changes
In addition to that major change, we also:
- Greatly increased the chance of loot drops while Level 4 or below. This is to make up for the fact that you kill fewer enemies while leveling at lower levels. It’s very important that you get weapon and armor drops otherwise your power level won’t keep up with your actual level and things at the same level as you will be too hard to kill.
- Decreased the amount of XP required to level up for 2, 3, and 4. This should result in a faster leveling experience at those beginning levels.
- Increased the base attack damage of your character by 100%. This means even if you are still using the “very first” weapon you get from Guardian Bart, you should be “okay” until around Level 4.
- Fixed a bug which caused Market Stalls not to update the amount of dram available for the owner to withdraw right away.
We also moved our server architecture around. Please let us know if you were having disconnects yesterday, if the new changes made any difference in the stability of your connection. I honestly don’t know that it will, but it’s worth testing this out before diving into re-doing the full networking stack.
Thanks!
