Lack of Immunity Frames


#21

I, like Nevov, am generally not a big gamer outside RotMG. Could someone please explain what these iframes are and what they do?


#22

Immunity frames are some time (usually a frame) where the player (you) becomes invulnerable after taking any damage. This will make it so that getting popped will usually never happen because that medusa god wall is just as deadly as not dodging a single medusa’s shots. Every well known RPG and even shooters have immunity frames. The best example I can think of is Terraria, a 2d side scroller RPG. In Terraria, if an enemy knocks you back into a corner and forces damage on you, you don’t instantly die; you have time to drink a health potion and try to maneuver your way out of that scenario.

I don’t know how you don’t know about iframes because they are a vital part to any action game. To disclose, RotMG does have immunity, but only to the projectile that already hit you (which is very lazy and the bare minimum to make collision damage playable).


#23

Immunity frames are some time (usually a frame) where the player (you) becomes invulnerable after taking any damage. This will make it so that getting popped will usually never happen because that medusa god wall is just as deadly as not dodging a single medusa’s shots. Every well known RPG and even shooters have immunity frames. The best example I can think of is Terraria, a 2d side scroller RPG. In Terraria, if an enemy knocks you back into a corner and forces damage on you, you don’t instantly die; you have time to drink a health potion and try to maneuver your way out of that scenario.


#24

There was no need to double post, in the future you can just tag additional individuals in your reply by using the @ symbol, followed by their name.


#25

I never shared Thropy’s sentiment that iframes are a default option. Obviously, they need to be implemented programmatically. This isn’t an issue of time, because after the Game Jam Contest, Wild Shadow further developed the game for many months, creating Realm as a stand alone game. My point of contention lies with game design. Due to how enemy shots work, namely with non-piercing shots, iframes would drastically reduce the amount of damage incoming towards a group of players.


#26

Why do you tell him theres no need for double posts when you’re making one for seemingly the same reasons :confused:?


#27

I am not talking about sitting on enemies, where shots originate from. Obviously all characters can die effectively on top of a god.

Except it cannot. Games like terraria do not have mechanics that can heal you for 1/10th - 1/6th of your health every x seconds. Terraria is balanced, because of its health potion limit, where lifesteal from abilities or weapons are limited, and not so extreme. The game was balanced from the very beginning with iframes in mind.

This would only further the divide between those who have legendary or divine pets, and those who do not.

How so?

The spawn rates of enemies… globally? In godlands? Per dungeon? And what purpose would this serve? More enemies just mean more shots, and with iframes, many of those shots would not reach other players unless they were all made to be piercing.

This is integral to the core game loop. You speak as if they had iframes removed, but iframes were never in the game, from the earliest of builds to current day.

Difficulty is what mechanic dictates this. Having a dungeon that explicitly stops players from accessing it due to a stat value would be undermining the player’s freedom to challenge themselves. This is also off topic from iframes.

How does this affect the issue of iframes?

My issue with your suggestion isn’t making the game overall easier. It’s that it breaks the convention of difficulty in certain situations. You cannot simply change the game in such an integral way, and then make the game “harder” with more enemy spawns, or targeted player AI, without addressing the balancing issue that is causing problems in the first place.

This is opinionated garbage. Several titles come to mind, such as ET the Extra Terrestrial, Action 52, Superman 64, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, Hong Kong 97, Cube World, Airport Simulator 2014, and hundreds upon thousands of shitty walmart/staples/target games in bins that cost $5, or shitty steam games from developers that just asset flip.

This is actually a healthy discussion on the subject! No snarky quips from me, I enjoy the ideas! I can’t comment on whether or not they would work, I’d have to really sit down and think about all the enemies affected by this. I personally am for all shots to become piercing, but then I’d again, have to sift through all the game’s enemies and dungeons and see if this breaks any difficulty.

Aye, thanks. Despite my lengthy reply, I can hope that you see I have no real beef with you.

Unforgiving, yes. However “spastic” is a dated word that either describes muscular weakness, or is a slur against those who have cerebral palsy, to be incompetent or uncoordinated. I am not entirely sure what other meaning you are trying to use this term for, but I will assume that you mean that the game is chaotic at times.

I readily enjoy the bullet hell portion of the game. This is why boss fights like in the parasite chambers, or the LH 2.0 MBC is so much fun for me. I hope you do not mean those scenarios, when you refer to things being spastic. I can understand perhaps old Shaitans, and new Ivory fights being such situations, but there is a pattern to the madness, and skill is really brought to light in the form of dodging.

You can negate either, by negating X or adding Y.
X is important, so Y is the way to go?
Your two statements do not make logical sense. Beyond this, getting rid of perma death is out of this discussion. It is part of the game, and will never be removed. Iframes was never part of the game, and you are trying to discuss why it should be added. The argument you just proposed above does not make logical sense. Your primary post however, makes significantly more sense.


#28

I have only made a single post to him describing simple forum etiquette. If I were to reply to you, Xaklor, Seelpit, and Beemoth, with the same exact reply, I would simply create one reply, and tag those who I wished to see the notification of the reply, instead of creating 4 separate replies.

My additional replies in this forum thread have been to different individuals regarding completely different topics. If I combined all of my replies into one, with separate topics in mind, it would create an enormously long post that would be hard to navigate because the subject would change based on context.


#29

So you’re saying iframes aren’t needed because there are pets? Or are you saying that because the game was developed without iframes from the very start means that isn’t a clear and obvious issue? Ffs, getting popped is a game mechanic. That shouldn’t be a game mechanic. What do you understand about that? That it’s not challenging enough? Literally ~70% of the players on realmeye (look up a random name), had their account created the same time they last played on their account. That means they picked up the game, saw how bad it was, and left. I don’t want to try to refute all the claims you throw at me, but I’m 100% sure that iframes can be integrated into RotMG without too much hassle.

Those games are consistently bad. You know it’s bad from the start and you know it’s always going to be bad. But, RotMG gives you that hope! You max your character out, you get those white bags, you do some lost halls, and you’re at marble colossus standing in the crowd like always, and then you hear DUN DUN DUN! The game gives you the middle finger, and unless you’ve been on that character for hours or have all the fame bonuses, you get fuck all. You say “just dodge lel”, but when your character and enemies’ projectiles are under a crowd of people, or when someone drags a god wall, or when even the slightest bit of lag occurs, why should I be held responsible? Because I didn’t nexus? I’m pretty sure nexusing and teleporting wasn’t a fully thought out idea. Keep in mind, this was a game jam creation, and I’m pretty sure they never fixed those flaws and made them mechanics. I will stand by my statement that this is the worst video game to ever be created.

Bullet hell are things like the void entity minus the minions, or marble colossus minus the drive by rocks or pop rocks, or the crystal worm in the fungal cavern. Things like O2 where there are bullets that just POP and you can’t go near them because there are confused debuffs and constant shotguns are just bullet spam.

I’d also like to say another point. Tanks in RPGs usually cover for the teammates and take damage. In RotMG, even if they have the best armor, they die just as fast. The only thing that makes a player tanky are the divine pets. At that point the class doesn’t even matter, just keep you distance and get soulbound.


#30

Non-piercing shots are not a problem. It’s not literally invulnerability, they could make it so shots pass through you while you’re “invulnerable”.


#31

Exactly. Someone’s iframes doesn’t mean the others won’t take damage.


#32

I didn’t say you did, if you read it again you’ll (hopefully) see that this is what I’m disagreeing with:

My point is that it’s extremely unlikely that the lack of an iframe system was a conscious design choice, and therefore shouldn’t be treated like one. I would be willing to bet that the concept simply never occurred to them while making the game. It’s not a core design decision, it’s an oversight. Now whether that oversight needs to be corrected is a different discussion that you’re already having in parallel to this one, and I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other.


#33

Wait then with pets, you would effectively become immortal


#34

And therein lies the problem with implementing this in Realm; huge changes to literally every fight in the game (or some other huge mechanic, like pets or permadeath) would have to happen before iframes would have a chance to work.


#35

It just makes it so you don’t instantly die to stacked shots. You still have to dodge in order to not die. @JimdaFish


#36

I think this is a case of “everyone knows what you’re talking about, but not everyone knows the term you’re using for it”. The concept of giving players a grace period after they get hit has been around for decades.

That’s not what a grace period does. What it does is prevent you from getting combo’d to death too fast. In other words, it protects you against consecutive shots, not simultaneous ones like stacks or shotguns (not to mention it does nothing against status effects like Paralyze).

In other words, your idea would only reinforce the current “everything that’s not an instakill doesn’t matter” meta (and make pets even more ridiculous).

You guys still don’t want to admit that the real problem is and always will be the combination of permadeath and MMORPG.


The General Chat Thread
#37

I think the past, and the changes over time to the game, are being a slight bit overlooked:

The game doesn’t seem to have been designed with tanking in mind at all as a viable strategy, and isn’t really anything about melee-fighting, but only dodging projectiles, so I believe that’s the main reason they wouldn’t have thought about post-hit invulnerability from the outset, because the point was to not get hit, also, as others have said, because it was a quickly-designed game of simple concepts.

Recall: even post-teleport invulnerability wasn’t done until 2017, a year into Deca’s time and 7.5 years after launch.

Question is, is there a reason today to have post-hit invulnerability?.. possibly, though I don’t think the case has been made. Were it in the game, it sounds like boss fights could be more complex, which could make things interesting, but it would be straying away from the base premise of projectiles and dodging, and I worry about trying to turn the game into something that it’s not, instead of focusing on its core design.

It sounds like simply adding it without a full rework of the game, would make fights easier. If we are receiving dmg from two sources semi-simultaneously, IMO we should get both impacts. (Of course if enemy spawns are such that they issue their bullets unrecognisably stacked, that’s a behaviour bug problem that should be resolved, eg. this happened in CDepths to fix stacked small spiders.)

Enemies don’t work on us in a combo-attack style do they, so really the question would be what problem would it be solving? I mean, I’d love to see a class that took invulnerable when it got hit, as some kind of super-close-range brawling character with no primary ranged weapon, I can envisage that being fun, or some particular enemy shots that do it as part of a certain boss-fight, but overall I just can’t see the need to add it game-wide, unless it’s with a view to future changes.

bit of a ramble about chip damage, not really key so I've hidden it

One of the things that’s basically gone, due to how powerful pets are, is the threat of the ‘chip damage’ against us. This used to be the fundamental way the game assailed us and players had (usually) enough warning that death was about to happen, because of going flashing, or recognising the health bar was going down and down, without seeing a heal, so maybe it’s time to back out and recover for a bit.

It was far more of an ‘HP-bar management’ game with a way slower overall pace. Shotguns/burst damage were only if you stood on top of an enemy and ate all their shots at once (silly!). So that’s I believe maybe a part of the reason why post-hit invulnerability wasn’t added, because the designers wanted the game to kill players who failed to dodge. Albeit in a kinda fair-ish way, hence no insta-kill undodgeable content.

Eh I don’t know! It worked fine at the outset, didn’t it? Seems more that the choices along the way have left the game with permadeath that’s not really perma as designed (because pets endure) but yet more brutal than designed (because soulbound items), and MMO that’s had its loot sharing aspect neutered. The RPG bit still works though. :upside_down_face:


#38

I think instead of iframes a “rolling” or dash mechanic could be implemented instead.
Rolling would be like a move where the player can dodge the bullet (or go through it) without taking damage. There would be maybe 2-3 second cooldown between rolls so you can’t just spam it.

Also wish deca would make this game more like the bullet hell it was supposed to be instead of just random projectiles flying everywhere with no pattern.


#39

That would still be i-frames, just a different application of them.

“i-frames” refers to any temporary period of invincibility during gameplay.

Having a dodge roll in a bullet hell works for Enter the Gungeon because it’s purely solo and a roguelike. Putting the same thing in RotMG would be kind of busted. You’re practically giving a free Oreo to every single class in the game.

The point of making RotMG a MMO is precisely that it’s not 100% scripted. Having it be all completely set patterns would just make it a bullet hell that you can’t play solo and that lags all the time.


#40

A single iframe, or maybe 100 milliseconds worth of iframes are enough to make it so that stacked shots from gods or stupidly spastic enemies/bosses don’t insta kill your character. You still need to dodge in order to not die. To clarify, running directly into a god wall will kill you, with or without iframes. However, if you happen to step into five layers of shots, or stand on top of an enemy, the damage you would take would be the equivalent of one shot (as long as you immediately move out of the way after taking damage).

no

Wtf? A permadeath MMORPG is how the game is marketed. RotMG is known for that and I think that’s the fun part of it. Being able to instantly die is the obvious problem. And I don’t mean that enemies do 1000+ damage, because the hardest projectiles do at most 350 damage. I mean the stacked shots, and that’s all I ever meant.