SAO Hollow Realization - Pains

Problems with Sword Art Online Hollow Realization (sic)





The camera
There is a controllable camera. However it does it's best to stay within the world and outside of objects, along with staying a fixed distance from the user.

This causes severe problems when in a tight spot, even in not-so-tight spots too. It will rotate to stupid angles, often making it impossible to see what's going on. I've even had it in a state of flicking between two positions on alternate frames, because it couldn't make it's mind up where it could fit.

This is especially annoying during battles. The camera has a habit of taking on a stupid angle and often above some objects that totally obscure your view of the battle. It also makes it hard to always stay focused on a single enemy when there are many, as the camera suddenly decides to change it's position and you haven't had change to change your angle of attack to compensate, with the character totally changing their angle and you missing.

Now. If I was programming a fixed-distance 3rd-person camera, it would be just that. Fixed distance. Even if this means the camera goes through objects.

However. It'd also make objects that are obscuring anything the character should be able to see, invisible or at least of significantly reduced opacity. I mean. If the character can see things, why shouldn't this 3rd-person all-seeing 'god' camera be able to do the same?

It also feels like a bit of cheat, along with completely lazy coding, to make it harder to do things just because the rubbish camera can't see things.


Targetting
The game likes to change targets on it's own.

Yeah, you can select a target, but guess what? The camera becomes even more useless so I have a habit of leaving direct targeting off. The camera essentially changes to line your view up with the character and the enemy and you have no control over the left-right (yaw) position, just up and down (pitch). Again the up-down decides for itself where to be as you move around the enemy and it often ends looking either directly down on your character or flat against the floor. You can control it, but sometimes it'll get stuck against objects or you just haven't got time to mess with the camera in a battle.

But along with/due to the camera issues, the system likes to change targets on it's own. Even if you are in the middle of a battle and are attacking the main enemy, it likes to change it's mind for you and your attacks hit the wrong target, or often off in a totally random direction as you weren't lined up right for the enemy it decided to attack.

I've played a lot of games, like Zelda for instance, that'll let you target an enemy and then still have full control of the camera and you character keeps targeting that enemy.

Dodging
The dodge system appears to be based on your view of the world, not related to the character's frame-of-reference. Attempting to dodge moves you to a position on the enemy based on the direction you point. Instead of directly controlling the position of your character. Whilst it may make some sense, you go from the joystick being relative to the player to relative to the screen and it's a confusing mash of different control systems.

Animation cool-down
The animations can't be interrupted. It's very slow to respond to changing the actions, so you may see that the enemy is about to attack but you can't do anything because you just started another attack. The character can often get into combinations, seemingly on it's own, and you can't stop them. So whilst that massive red area appears to indicate where the enemy is about to attack you can't do anything about it. The only way to get any kind of response is to not do anything at all, if you want to dodge the enemy anyway, just wait for the attack area to become visible and then move out of the way. Of course you aren't doing much but dodging. Even a simple single attack prevents you from moving out of the way of an attack for a good few seconds, because the stupidly over-zealous system wants to complete it's own animation before letting you interrupt it.

It's supposed to be a real person in a VR game. They shouldn't have limited abilities based on animation frames because the animators and programmers couldn't be arsed to program better ways to transition between modes of operation.

Invisible walls
There are far too many of these. Enough that it seems to be almost a game running on rails. You can only go this direction even if the landscape doesn't give you any obvious reason, or cues, why you can't jump onto that rock. Some bigger rocks that you can't physically or visually jump on would've been better.

Story
There is a lot of massive story in the game. Whilst they are needed to progress the game, they often refer to things that you can't actually do whilst playing the game. Places, objects and actions you can't actually perform in the game. It kinda highlights how limited the game really is, saying it's supposed to be based on an open-world VR game. (Cooking, fishing anyone?)