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What do you want from MMO Combat?
vhzod
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm trying to think of the best current combat system for PC gaming that is available now. Do most people want some variant of turn based combat like what is prevelant now in mmorpgs or real time. I personally am leaning towards some kind of real time/ rpg hybrid.
This is for a game I'm designing that will probably never get beyond the design stage, but I'm interested in designing the best systems for the game. Other things to consider, special attacks... good or bad? I personally think that special attacks should be replaced with equipment features that take certain character skills to be able to use.
Anyway, tell me what kind of MMO Combat system you want and any ideas for making a good one. I probably will steal good ones so don't give out ideas you don't want stolen.
This is for a game I'm designing that will probably never get beyond the design stage, but I'm interested in designing the best systems for the game. Other things to consider, special attacks... good or bad? I personally think that special attacks should be replaced with equipment features that take certain character skills to be able to use.
Anyway, tell me what kind of MMO Combat system you want and any ideas for making a good one. I probably will steal good ones so don't give out ideas you don't want stolen.
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But oh God would that be dangerous. Kidding aside, I don't mind the click and watch so much if they take it all the way. The way I see it, let me entertain myself with literature or studying while I play your game, or make it a full fledged game that demands my attentions like a FPS or an action game. WoW is just so that playing leaves me unfufilled but for most things, I can't effectively read and play simultaneously.
*Note: These are not the way to build a successful or acclaimed MMO. These would probably result in MMOs that are not commercially viable or would result in necessarily a good game.
I can understand, for casual gamers, the urge to reward simple time investment.
On the other hand, if you want that, there is a vast number of suitable MMOs already out there.
I would like there to be an MMO for people who want more skill-based games.
That said, there are rewards to each style, and I can't blame you for wanting what you want. Do know that most MMOs will give an edge to the better player, and shitty players are annoying. But most MMOs mostly only require learning a basic recepie that doesn't have much room to be perfected. Player skill tends to shine most in PvP, though a lot of games have more than spank and tank now adays which mixes it up for both categories. Unless you can come up with some genericly neat mechic to be used in someone elses game, it just seems a little done.
It's worth looking at any related mechnic that will be interesting; I'll give my recent pondering.
No healing mechanic, or rather, one that means you don't heal mid instance other than a slight heal; a way to accrue increasing damage. If you take 100 damage, I might be able to patch you up for part of it (say 80) through your catching your breath or restoring your faith in the task, but the remainder (20) is accrued for the rest of the instance. Encounters would need to be tuned to be less dangerous as one progresses, and you're a lot less likely to wipe in the course of a dungeon, but a particularly bad pull, instead of wiping and forcing you to reset the encounter instead is particularly taxing and limits how far you can go until you must turn around. SWG had a system that sort of kind of approximated this, but so much butchering and craziness buried the idea. What got me thinking about this was how in Shadowrun PnP (atleast in third, I don't know much about fourth), you got one attempt to magically heal, and one attempt to first aid, and then the rest of the damage had to be long-healed meaning it was there for the rest of the run. It allows for attrition against the players in a manner more than "using up their pots".
I plan to have a more realistic system than hitpoints. Basically you have a general health status that is determined from a variety of conditions such as blood loss, temperature, presence of poison in the blood stream, etc. When your health status drops below a certain point it starts attacking your conciousness level and when you fail you lose conciousness and then die if not treated. Wounds can be bandaged to stop the bleeding but a wound remains that makes it easier to cause critical hits in that area and increases pain (which reduces healthiness and conciousness). Its overly complicated, but i want to make it so the person playing the game only has to deal with the outward signs and effects.
Action MMO's don't work so well I think because of lag/skill vs time played issues, I really like MMORPG style gameplay, but I think there is a lot to be desired in the aspect of how it is done. Currently what I see is a lot of gameplay systems being based heavily on gear, stats, and upgrading old moves. I think something a little closer to what Guild Wars did, with making a large amount of moves and making players make a decision as to what they want to actually use in combat is a better way to go. Make combat much more strategic, like make it so that I HAVE to use a certain move in certain situation, so that I cannot spam the same move over and over, in fact spamming moves in general without really paying attention will be ineffectual. Maybe some sort of combat system where you can tell where the enemy is guarding, and you have to attack using certain attacks to exploit their weaknesses.
eg.
The enemy raises his sword high, he is guarding high, so you sweep low with your sword, or he looks like he is going to do a hard attack, so you ready a parry maneuver because you see his attack coming, which does more damage if he attacks within a certain time frame, and you are vulnerable if he does not attack. I want my next move choice to heavily depend on what the enemies are doing, so that I feel that I am actually effecting the outcome of the battle I am fighting, and its not just my stats and my gear thats winning the battle.
Playing the game more should give you stat boosts, better gear which slightly SLIGHTLY makes your character better, and instead of better moves, MORE moves, which give me more options to fight enemies. Maybe as time goes on different enemies which execute different attacks come into play, and you get moves at that time to deal with them as they pop up (eg. you move into an area where Undead come into play, now every class gets some sort of holy move they can use to more effectively defeat specifically undead)
I want the hits to MATTER. I want realistic parries, thrusts, small glancing hits and one/two decisive hit that ends the battle and cripples/kills the opponent
Horizons promised it at one, but then decided to suck
Also, horse back fights
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cykstfc
Do you mean like in Bushido Blade? Man that'd be intense.
well, I never played that
but I mean I hate it when the 2 peoples' animations are just based on their own character, each character slashes and whatevers completely independently, like the other person isn't even there. Like in WoW. They just slash slash slash different slash, kick, slash
etc
and maybe the other person recoils every once in a while
I just want a system that LOOKS like real combat, like designed so the 2 characters actually dodge, parry etc all the attacks, fight back with their own, etc
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DDO has something like this, except with mana. Casting is handled through a spell-point varient, with the spell points only being restored while you sit in a tavern or spend a bit of time sleeping at a rest shrine, which gives you the equivelent of a D&D night of sleep, healing a bit of damage, restoring your spell points and allowing you to change up your memorized spells, and removing all buffs on you. Each shrine can only be used once per person per run, so if you waste your resources and run out of shrines, you might have to give up.
Guildwars gives you a stacking 15% max health debuff each time you die, up to a maximum of 60%. You can keep fleeing and resurrecting everyone after a wipe, but a group where everyone is at 40% health isn't going to get very far.
So yes Bushido Blade.. :P
I never asked for this!
I think you want The Matrix: Online. Actually, you probably don't, but at least the combat matches what you're talking about.
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ZOMG Blindness is overpowered, nerf it!
Real-time games need to be more tactical than actiony, because action will get bogged down by latency. "What you see is what you get" combat - which a few people have expressed as their ideal - is right out, because what you see isn't what your opponent sees. Obviously, the problem can be alleviated somewhat in a PvE environment, where clients can predict the opponent's actions very well. In PvP, or PvE where there are other players also influencing the NPCs, prediction starts to fail. So, a slower pace is generally better. Or, at least, a slower pace of reactions. Combat can take five seconds to complete, so long as you only need to respond to something at most once during it.
I believe the OP stated that he was thinking about this in terms of a shooter. The key is to design a system that maintains the spirit of the genre while not actually requiring twitch reflexes. So, for an idea: design a shooter based entirely around the concept of cover. Give everybody autoaiming: any shots you fire are directed to whoever your crosshair is closest to. Perhaps you could receive a small benefit for being on the mark, but nothing major. Damage is dealt steadily based on a number of factors, derived entirely from action movies. Having any cover whatsoever prevents you from dying (except henchmen: non-boss NPCs can still be easily dispatched if they're behind cover). However, the more cover you have, the higher the cap on your health, so hiding behind a potted plant means you'll got shot down to within an inch of your life. Busting out of cover lends the benefit of that cover for a second, after which you're out in the open, allowing you to reposition yourself. And, of course, once you stop getting shot at, you quickly regain your health.
In this manner, players aren't going to get anywhere by sitting there shooting at each other. Neither are players going to get anywhere by going around in a big gang trying to get "behind" people, because they'll be able to get behind different cover. In order to take out another player, you have to have at least one person laying down suppressing fire while another goes to get a shot from another angle. None of this requires any immediate reactions, but rather favors correct positioning. In addition, it keeps the spirit of the shooter genre in tact, while removing the need for twitch gameplay that is vulnerable to high ping.
Anyways, what I want is more interactivity, IE the ability to dodge attacks thrown at you (rather then them just honing in on you no matter what), more weight to the combat - for example compare hitting someone with a sword in say WoW, to hitting someone with a sword in a 3rd person action game like God of war or devil may cry. More fluid combo systems would be nice as well.
Also on another tanget the enemies we fight need vast improvement. In nearly every mmo out so far the way you defeat an enemy comes down to throw as much damage as you can at it until it dies. While it's okay to have a few enemys like this, it would be far more intesting to have enemys that require some tactics to defeat - for example an enemy that is attracted to fire; which needs to be exploited to open one of its weakpoints. Of course, you'd need to make a variety of weakneses and solutions for each monster as it may become just as tedius only having one way to defeat something.
I also rather like, KotOR
1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, dead enemy.
Most RPGs suffer from this, not just MMOs. There's one single way to kill 90% of enemies with maximum efficiency.
Really, the only thing I dislike about the CoH/CoV combat is it doesn't feel epic. Stand there. Attack. Not a city shattering battle between two or more super powered beings.
I kinda find the Arch-Villain fights to be pretty epic in a good team. Especially through the initial chaos of getting through the AV's surrounding cronies.
And on the subject of CoH/CoV, I like MMOs that don't stick entirely to realism. Defying the laws of physics with combat makes things pretty awesmoe
Now, one of the reasons we haven't seen Gears of War: The MMO is quite simply due to lag. You just can't have detailed, fully real-time combat with everyone on the server potentially involved. Yet, many MMOs try to push as much "realtime" interaction in as possible. Look at games like Planetside, an MMOPFS that achieves it's FPS-ness by limiting the number of people in a zone to a fraction of what's in other MMOs, has a much simpler combat system than seen in regular FPSs, and has very limited environmental interaction/physics.
Instead, I think that (at least some) MMO developers should acknowledge the weaknesses of the genre and build their game systems around that. A good, robust turn-based system would address and solve this problem completely. Imagine an MMO with combat like Fallout, Disgaea, XCom, Grandia, or Xenogears. By recognizing that you probably can't have stuff exactly happening in real time, you can build a battle system that takes your actions in turn, but as a consequence you can instead specifically add in more complex maneuvers and actions.
Suddenly, with a turn-based system battlefield position becomes important, you can have complex hit locations, more interaction with the environment, and best of all, your PC's latency becomes almost a non-issue. Everyone can have the same experience, and success comes down to your skill and tactics rather than having a monster internet connection and mad reflexes. You can also branch out in styles, and have players control several characters at once without massively screwing things up. If players have the ability to command several troops, entire armies commanded by relatively few players become possible.