An interruptible wind-up turns offense into a timed defensive response. Kern exposes a break rune before a radial slam; Tavi's first committed sword hit cancels it and opens a short punish. The second wind-up expires and the announced ring fires. Signal, qualifying action, deadline, cancellation, and fallback must remain distinct.
At 0.72 s Kern raises a break rune and a deadline gauge. Tavi commits to a sword strike; contact at 1.58 s meets the required impact before the 1.82 s cutoff.
Autoplay is disabled by reduced motion. Scrub to compare the open window, cancellation, completed release, and recovery.
Define the interrupt signal, qualifying action, deadline, cancellation payoff, completed threat, and recovery.
Give the window a stable sign that is not reused for ordinary danger: here a break rune and filling bar appear from 0.72–1.82 s. The ring still previews the eventual threat, so the player can choose between interrupting and moving. Test the signal against effects, camera motion, color-vision filters, and reduced motion.
Specify the required action, impact value, collision target, and inclusive deadline in game logic. Tavi's committed sword hit connects at 1.58 s and supplies one interrupt point; a light touch, miss, or hit after 1.82 s does not cancel the cast. Resolve simultaneous cutoff events deterministically and show insufficient impact differently from success.
On success, remove the pending hitbox immediately and hold Kern open until 2.55 s. On failure, close the interrupt marker, activate the exact previewed ring from 4.18–4.56 s, and keep an ordinary recovery afterward. Test both paths: a cancellation is legible only when the completed consequence is equally concrete.
If chip damage and incidental projectiles trigger the same result, the mechanic becomes passive crowd control rather than a deliberate response. Gate cancellation on an explicit interrupt tag or impact threshold and retain ordinary damage feedback for rejected hits.
A bar that looks open after interruption has stopped accepting input creates false failures. Drive the marker, input rule, pending attack, and audio cutoff from one timeline boundary, then test hits one frame before, on, and after it.
When the qualified hit resolves, atomically mark the cast cancelled, remove its future damage event, play the break response, and start stagger. Seeking or rollback must reconstruct that state rather than firing the old event later.
Tavi must enter sword range before the deadline, trading safer spacing for the stagger reward. Tune approach distance and wind-up duration together; the slowest supported movement route still needs a feasible response after recognition and input latency.
Missing an interrupt should not automatically mean damage. The same preview communicates a second valid response: leave the ring. This keeps the mechanic useful for builds without the qualifying verb while preserving the stronger reward for players who commit.
Check simultaneous hits, multiplayer impact sums, invulnerable and phase-transition states, queued casts, death during wind-up, interruption on the cutoff frame, rollback, pause, slow motion, and whether removed damage can reappear after seeking.
Kern lifts one bright break rune while stone energy gathers in the floor. Tavi's sword splits the first rune and the unfinished ring fades. The second rune seals, sending the stored force through the completed circle; one prop explains both opportunity and consequence.
The example needs no special counter item: a committed sword hit carries the interrupt tag. Other games can use a heavy attack, parry, spell, or team crowd-control total, but the accepted verb and its strength must be taught before a tight deadline is demanded.
A normal wind-up only announces when an action will resolve. A posture gauge accumulates progress across attacks. An interruptible wind-up exposes a bounded state on one pending action: a qualifying hit inside that state deletes the scheduled result and grants a defined cancellation response.
Sea of Stars shows type-marked locks above an enemy action; the official combat explanation says breaking every lock cancels the move. The Dweller of Strife encounter presents a multi-lock version, useful for studying how the deadline, required verbs, and partial progress remain readable.
ArenaNet describes a defiance bar during Shard Storm: timely crowd control prevents the devastating attack. The large public encounter demonstrates a shared interrupt requirement, where contribution feedback and a clearly bounded cast matter as much as the final cancellation.
Gauss exposes named cast bars, including Lightning Storm, that an interrupt skill can stop before completion. The focused fight clip makes the bar and repeated casts easy to compare; it also highlights why temporary resistance to repeated control must be communicated separately from the cast itself.
Found an inaccuracy or have a suggestion for this page? Propose an edit on GitHub