Greetings Contestants!

Yesterday, we shared our findings related to shove spam becoming a “thing,” and took you down the rabbit hole explaining how we intend to make some small tweaks to help you escape the grasp of a nasty shove sandwich in duos.

As it turns out, the rabbit hole goes quite a bit deeper.

Some of you have noted that combat still feels a little off compared to Day 1. You’ve given us the feedback that fast weapons are too darn fast and that the meta is evolving into something generally spammier than it used to be. One intrepid community member even took the time to create a side-by-side video that illustrated some differences.

As a result, we’ve taken a deeper dive and we’ve found a couple of likely suspects.

In the Day 1 build a bug with the weapon speed system resulted in all weapons jabbing at the same rate (once every 0.67 seconds), regardless of their speed. The attack animation played faster for fast weapons, but was followed by a brief pause after the animation before you could take another action. With slow weapons, however, you could take another action before the attack animation completed, which felt so margarinely-smooth that you wouldn’t believe it’s not butter.

In the Origins build, this bug is rectified, which means that you are able to take another action immediately after your jab is finished. For fast weapons, this means an action every 0.57 seconds. For slow weapons, every 0.8 seconds. These may seem like a matter of only tenths of seconds, but the net result is that fast weapons have a significant mechanical advantage in Origins vs. Day 1, and slow weapons are at a significant disadvantage. Furthermore, with a fast weapon you can engage in far spammier behavior than you could in Day 1.

But wait, there’s more!

We also took a closer look at Shove, and found that the Origins shove animations last 0.67 seconds (which matches the base jab time). In Day 1, the Shove duration was 0.8 seconds. Again, only about a tenth of a second, but it can make a big difference in terms of feel, risk, and spammability.

So what are we going to do about it?

Here’s the thing: This sucks and it represents a pair of major oversights on our part. We worked hard to deliver Origins to you in a timely manner and these deviations from Day 1 were not intentional. Moreover, they are definitely not in keeping with our commitment to preserve Day 1 combat. At the same time, a big motivator for sticking with Day 1 combat is to prevent players from having to re-learn combat because we keep making changes. Making changes now, as always, risks alienating players who like combat in Origins just the way it is.

The only good answer, in our humble opinion, is to remain committed to Day 1 parity and fix these issues.

Our plan is as follows:

• Weapon speed will no longer scale attack animation speed. This means all attack animations will be consistent across all weapons (at 0.67 seconds) and weapon speed will only impact charge time. From a gameplay standpoint, this will match Day 1, but from a feel standpoint it represents a small improvement over Day 1, as fast weapons will no longer force you to wait for a fraction of a second after the animation completes before you can take another action. This is how the system should have been implemented in the first place.
• Shoves will return to their Day 1 timing of 0.8 seconds.

How did this happen and how can we be confident there aren’t more issues like this lurking?

We did a good job of returning all the timings and variables back to Day 1 settings across the combat system, but we failed to recognize how important it was to “unfix” the Day 1 weapon speed bug. In the case of the shove animations, we like the look of the new animations better so we decided to keep them, but we failed to check the timings to make sure they matched.

The bottom line is we screwed up. It’s hard to admit, but it’s true.

Are there more issues like this out there? It’s possible. We’re keeping our eyes peeled and we’re counting on you all to continue reporting the issues that you find. We suspect that after this round of changes things will stabilize considerably.

We are currently targeting this Friday for a patch that addresses these combat fixes along with some other important items. We’ll get a preview of our patch notes out ASAP.

In the meantime, how do you feel about this plan? Please fill out the survey and let us know.

Until Next Time,

We’ll see you on the Island.