As much as I whole heartedly agree time spent on saber changes is far far too saturated for the reality that it makes up just 1/7th of the class variety in the game, and worse yet it’s only really dynamic for the sake of fighting each other, I can also see some things I believe were made worse in sabering.
Sabering is popular, the game is Jedi Academy, no one bought this game saying “Yeah, can’t wait to bust out the E-11”, so it’s always going to have attention, and it needs to be engaging, because most people are going to naturally gravitate towards it, I mean dude, lightsabers, epic duels, swordfights, who wants to be a dummy stormie when u could be anikid.
The current sabering system is very complex, and not in a good way, base JKA was also complex and it’s complexity wasn’t from having 500 mechanics, it was complex because it was fluid and it gave you plenty of tools to liquidly utilize the system in a fast and enticing manner, it almost felt natural weaving close for your hits and bobbing out of your opponent’s, and as both players got better at this you could noticeably see how their movements grew more elegant. The important thing to take away is that since they didn’t have to juggle 500 mechanics they could focus on just playing, and if the system is intuitive AND engaging enough that’s all you really need to get good, and you’ll have fun along the way.
The original MB2 saber system was more or less base with the added function of block, slap, and mblock, which was all it really needed to stand apart from JKA, people had to adapt coming from base or JA+ just to wrap around those two seemingly minor, yet clearly not, mechanics. And that was beautiful, two simple changes and you have a completely new system that is still reminiscent of the base game.
The current saber system is like the Frankenstein patchwork of those 3 changes on steroids, each one having been “fleshed out” to the point they’re abominable, and I think through the years we’ve seen that too trying to stitch together fix after fix, now we’ve got something no one really understands but everyone gets is not right.
We lost simplicity, a lot of the sabering “mechanics” that exist today also existed in the old builds, though unnamed and more intuitively integrated. The dueling was still about breaking their defense and stifling their offense better than they did to you. You still had to directionally swing the “right” way and block the “right” way to pull this off, but you didn’t have a little red or green indicator telling you it happened, you just sort of learned it, and quickly too because it was honestly simple. MB2 block, Mb1 swing, don’t get interrupted, chain your attacks, swingblock to avoid getting mblocked. Getting hit while jumping/running/crouching is bad, but movement is important. That’s it, that’s all someone needed to tell you and the rest was going to come only from hard earned experience.
The only real difference from dueling then and now is the indicators, two styles, and feints. All of that core gameplay is still there, you can feel it all the same even through all the bloat of constant and unending saber changes. It’s just a shame that as we went through saber changes all we did was add fat to a sleek and well oiled formula when what it really needed was just a slight tuning here and there.
So while I’m sick of time spent on the dueling system I can honestly say that having seen it’s iterations since B17 the only differences I see, is that now rather than intuitively feeling the saber system you have to learn all of it’s mechanics, and that just doesn’t feel as much like a game to me, to the point I don’t even duel much anymore. One of the things I miss the most about the old builds was that in the simplicity of it you still saw gems stand out, there were duelists who could regularly trounce 3-4 other saberists at once, and just as well as they could do that another good duelist could lock them down. There’s much less variance now since everyone’s forced to play so stringently to the same system which are so important you don’t even see people 2v1’ing anymore because you can’t defend against two people half so well as before. I feel that in adding so much we really tethered the saber system to this neutered and small thing it is now compared to it’s former free flowing self.
