Learning to beat a difficult boss in an action RPG is one thing, but doing it all over again with a character who plays completely differently is another matter entirely. After all, figuring out when a boss is going to attack doesn’t necessarily help quite as much if the character you’re playing can’t respond to that attack the same way as the one you used before. That’s actually something NEXON’s CAG STUDIO is leaning into with Vindictus: Defying Fate, as the developer is designing each of its playable characters to offer an entirely different combat experience, to the point that even their defensive options aren’t always the same. It’s a fairly ambitious approach, especially considering how much work goes into making just one character feel good to play, but CAG STUDIO seems determined to make it work.
In an exclusive interview with GameRant ahead of TwitchCon 2026, Vindictus: Defying Fate lead director DongSeok Oh shared some interesting details about the game’s combat, particularly when it comes to how its different playable characters handle the same encounters. Alongside the interview, CAG STUDIO also provided GameRant with exclusive gameplay footage featuring Lann, Delia, and newcomer Noctia, whose appearance in the video marks the first public showing of her actual gameplay. The footage features roughly 20 seconds of combat for each character, and while Lann and Delia already have plenty of differences between them, Noctia has a particularly interesting approach to combat that involves more than just the massive scythe she carries.
Lann and Delia Have Very Different Ways of Handling the Same Enemies
For starters, Lann is all about speed, which probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering he fights with two swords. However, there’s actually quite a bit going on with those swords, as each one has its own hit detection, allowing them to connect with enemies individually even during the same attack animation. According to Oh, this was primarily done to give Lann’s combat a more rhythmic feel, although it’s his signature Fury ability that really brings everything together. Fury allows Lann to surge forward and cut through enemies after landing certain attacks, but simply using it whenever an opportunity presents itself isn’t necessarily the best way to play him.
In fact, Oh explained that the difference between someone who simply knows how to use Lann and someone who has actually mastered him largely comes down to how they use Fury. Rather than treating it like another attack meant to deal damage, experienced players can use its movement to avoid attacks and position themselves for another opening.
Players who have fully mastered Lann, by contrast, focus on Fury’s powerful forward momentum and mobility. Making the most of its nature as an advancing attack, they use Fury as a way to unite offense and defense: slipping past a boss’s attack while circling behind it to land a counter. Going further, they calculate how far to extend their combo before triggering Fury in a given situation, and through that, control the space of the battlefield in real time, deciding how much to close or widen the distance from the enemy.
What makes this especially important is that Lann’s only defensive option is dodging, meaning players will need to learn how to avoid attacks without having something like a shield to fall back on. Delia, on the other hand, has access to both guarding and dodging, although her massive Bastard Sword means she won’t be attacking anywhere near as quickly as Lann. Her attacks have longer wind-up and recovery times, so players need to be much more careful about when they commit to an attack, but successfully landing some of her heavier blows can actually stagger enemies. She also has a unique resource called Vigor that can be used for powerful strikes or an evasive move called Whispering Rose, and that’s where her combat starts to get particularly interesting.
When investing it in attacks, it’s safer to aim for moments when the enemy’s movements are sluggish. We designed it so that landing these attacks can force the enemy into a stagger, rewarding players in proportion to the risk they take. On the other hand, spending Vigor on Whispering Rose makes it easier to evade enemy attacks, but means sacrificing the damage that could have been dealt by using it on a powerful attack. Rather than making either option always the right answer, we balanced them so that players choose based on the situation in combat.
Of course, that means Delia players will need to decide whether it’s worth spending Vigor on a powerful attack when they might need it to survive whatever their opponent does next. Furthermore, unlike Lann, who can dodge both Extreme Attacks and Irregular Attacks, Delia needs to guard against Extreme Attacks and dodge Irregular Attacks. Her defensive timing is more forgiving than Lann’s, mind you, but having to recognize which type of attack is coming makes her combat a little more complicated in that regard. So, despite both characters being sword-wielding fighters, there are some pretty substantial differences in how they’re meant to be played.
Noctia Is Bringing Something Entirely Different to Vindictus: Defying Fate
As different as Lann and Delia are, Noctia might be the most fascinating character of the three, especially considering she can essentially change her entire fighting style in the middle of a combo. Noctia wields a massive scythe called the Grimscythe, which she can hold with either two hands or one, and each grip has its own advantages. Holding it with two hands allows her to perform faster, more stable attacks, whereas holding it with one hand gives her access to heavier attacks that cover a wider area. She can also switch between these grips using an ability called Reverse Flow, which allows her to evade incoming attacks while transitioning between them. However, there’s more to those different grips than simply giving players two ways to attack enemies.
Noctia also has two resources to manage, called Soul Points and Will Points, and both need to be completely filled before she can summon her guardian spirit, Vespera. Interestingly, the only way to build those resources is by using the appropriate fighting style, with two-handed attacks generating Soul Points and one-handed attacks generating Will Points. As a result, players who want to summon Vespera as quickly as possible will need to pay attention to which resource they’re lacking and adjust their attacks accordingly, rather than simply sticking with whichever grip they prefer.
Since summoning Vespera requires completely filling both Soul Points and Will Points, players need to manage the fight with both the short two-handed grip and the long one-handed grip on the scythe in mind in order to build both resources efficiently. This is because attacking with a short two-handed grip fills Soul Points, while attacking with a long one-handed grip fills Will Points. It’s designed so that checking which resource you’re currently short on and using the matching attack stance helps you summon Vespera sooner.
And then there’s Vespera herself, who is arguably the most interesting part of Noctia’s combat. Rather than simply appearing for a single attack whenever she’s summoned, Vespera actually fights alongside Noctia, attacking enemies directly and responding to many of her movements. Sometimes the two attack together, while other times Vespera moves at a slightly different pace, and CAG STUDIO has even designed certain animations to make them appear as though they’re intentionally coordinating their attacks. This is also meant to reflect the relationship between Noctia and Vespera, which Oh explained the team wanted players to experience through the combat itself rather than simply being told about it through the game’s story.
We wanted the story of Noctia and Vespera to go beyond the written narrative and blend naturally into the combat players experience firsthand. To that end, rather than treating Vespera as a simple “summon skill” or a functional tool, we designed the combat animations so that she feels like a living presence of her own, a partner who fights across the battlefield alongside Noctia. In particular, we tried to capture their relationship as fully as possible in moves where the presentation can be emphasized, such as certain Active Skills and Fatal Actions, as these were the points that could best convey the two characters’ special bond and narrative relationship visually.
Even when Vespera hasn’t been summoned, though, she can still make an appearance if players manage to dodge an Irregular Attack with precise timing using Reverse Flow. Successfully pulling that off will briefly bring Vespera into the fight to perform an attack of her own, although Oh emphasized that it’s meant to be an optional challenge for experienced players rather than something everyone needs to learn. Interestingly, this also works in multiplayer, as Noctia’s Vespera-assisted responses to Irregular Attacks are separate from the game’s Extreme Attacks system. That’s especially important considering certain Extreme Attacks aren’t available in multiplayer, but according to Oh, Noctia was designed from the beginning to retain her unique combat mechanics regardless of whether players are fighting alone or with others.
Vindictus: Defying Fate Wants Players to Keep Getting Better Long After They’ve Learned Their Favorite Character
With so many differences between characters, though, there’s also the matter of making sure the same bosses can be defeated by everyone, especially when some characters have defensive options that others don’t. CAG STUDIO has already made several changes to enemy attacks and combat mechanics following previous testing, but Oh explained that the team ultimately wants players to approach those encounters using whichever tools their chosen character has available. That’s not necessarily going to make every boss equally easy for every character, but the intention is for everyone to have a way of dealing with the same attacks, even if the decisions they need to make are different.
There’s also something to be said for how much time CAG STUDIO wants players to spend mastering their favorite characters, as Vindictus: Defying Fate places more emphasis on individual combat styles than extensive skill-tree customization. As Oh explained, the team learned quite a bit about this from operating the original Vindictus for so many years, particularly when it comes to the difference between learning a character’s controls and actually knowing how to use them.
What we came to deeply understand from operating Vindictus, the original game behind VDF, for many years is this: even after players have learned every control for a particular character, the skill of judging “which action to respond with in a split second” and executing it flawlessly grows gradually over a very long time. Once players reach a high level of proficiency with a character, boss fights go beyond simply reacting to patterns and become a new challenge every time. Players who at first went down quickly to a boss’s powerful attacks will, through repeated attempts, feel for themselves the dramatic growth of eventually overpowering it flawlessly, without even using a healing item.
That’s actually a pretty important distinction, because knowing how to perform a combo doesn’t necessarily mean knowing when it’s safe to use it. Oh even pointed out that an opening that might initially give a player enough time to perform only a short combo could eventually become an opportunity to unleash their strongest attacks, simply because they’ve spent enough time learning an enemy’s movements. Of course, that kind of mastery also requires bosses worth fighting, which is why CAG STUDIO is aiming to introduce new bosses at a fast and steady pace, although Oh didn’t provide a specific timetable for that goal.
Even so, there’s still quite a bit left to see when it comes to how Vindictus: Defying Fate‘s characters will hold up throughout the full game, particularly as players begin mastering their individual combat styles. But the fact that CAG STUDIO is putting so much thought into making each character genuinely different is encouraging, especially when those differences extend to something as fundamental as how players avoid getting hit. Noctia’s combination of stance-switching, resource management, and fighting alongside Vespera seems like it could take some time to get used to, but that’s also part of the appeal of having characters who don’t all play the same way. And with Noctia becoming playable for the first time at TwitchCon 2026, players will soon have an opportunity to see just how much there is to learn about her.
