I have an mmorpg, (or just rpg) concept that is steering me towards designing(well, imagining) a unique combat system, more out of necessity than out of trying to reinvent the wheel, and I was wondering if there was anything out there that was similar to what I’m about to propose, because I’d love to see it in action. If not, well here’s my proposal, and the reasons I’m proposing such a system. I’m not really sure it can be done, or that anybody would enjoy it, but here goes.
First, here are the issues I’m trying to solve for.
1. I like the idea of player-skill reliant combat. I’m not averse to twitch combat, assuming it feels deep, and a couple decades ago I used to fantasize about an mmorpg fighter game mashup. It sounds like this has kind of been done now with games like Blade and Soul, but for reasons listed below, it wouldn’t be a good fit for what I need.
2. What I don’t like about some fight games and all mmo combat is the way players wail on each other with swords and bludgeons, over and over for hit-point damage. This doesn’t offer the cinematic or epic novel quality that I want when trying to immerse myself into a fictional world. It’s just too arcade for my tastes. This is a problem with twitch-based and tab target combat alike.
3. I definitely dislike combat that relies too heavily on character level over player skill. I prefer a more horizontal leveling or skill building system that doesn’t split people based upon the hours they put in grinding.
But….
4. I am also envisioning my game as a permadeath experience. There are reasons for this I won’t go into, and whether or not this is a good idea is for another post. Suffice to say though, dying immediately upon entering combat, voluntarily or otherwise, isn’t going to endear even hardcore pvpers to the model, and such a system would be absolutely alienating to casual players. Of course, lag is another issue that is habitually cited when it comes to permadeath concepts, and for good reason.
So here is my proposal, and I haven’t been able to find something quite like this in the wild(possibly because it’s a bad idea).
1. Combat would play out fast and furious in real time, with blocks, parries, dodges, rolls, contacts, etc.
But….
2. Combat wouldn’t be twitch based, nor precisely, timer based. It would use an action-beat model where intentions are queued up, but are interruptible for certain reactive “oh shit” or exploitation abilities. That doesn’t mean that players plan their every strike, block and parry, nor do they even directly move their characters while in combat. Instead they plan their overall aggressiveness and brazenness with an array of heavily conditional attack and defend models, all while everything continues to play out in real time(the action doesn’t pause for turns). They attempt to maneuver their characters into better fighting positions, or better escape routes, either cautiously, obliquely, or with total abandon. They make choices like, whether or not to allow certain types of attacks against them to land(say if they are wearing plate armor) for the sake of gaining or pressing an advantage. They also make decisions about how much energy to exert in a particular beat, and hopefully make many more decisions. Think of the player’s role as the proactive, conscious cerebral cortex, giving overall orders to the rest of the brain and body, and think of the game engine as performing all of the lower instinctive activity of the character’s training and lower brain functions, i.e. muscle memory and split second combat tasks.
3. Closing in on victory isn’t a matter of hacking away at hitpoints, but hacking away at stamina. Poorly executed or well defended attacks take their toll and so too do desperate dodges, all of which fatigue a combatant, limiting his or her abilities.
4. Fast Killing blows are possible, but only under the right circumstances, such as when the loser has forgone caution for a big payoff and been handily thwarted. In the same way, superficial, mortal and maiming injuries can also be accrued.
5. Stamina, position, distance, terrain and momentum will open up or close different combat and retreat options.
That’s the lightly sketched gist of it anyway. There are almost certainly problems with it I haven’t even thought of, but these are the issues it solves for me, at least in theory:
1. Combat, while not realistic(if you blinked you’d miss the real stuff) would be cinematic. Essentially the engine would orchestrate a dance between fighting characters based on choices made, and it should feel frenetic and intense, making the concurrent choices high stakes and intense, but not manic.
2. Combat would still be “more” realistic, because people wouldn’t take maces to the head, hacks from claymores or fireballs to the face over and over before dying.
3. Eyes would be on the combat, not on an action bar, because the visual assessment of the character’s disposition would be paramount to making good decisions. (yeah, I’d have to figure out how to integrate a good way for people to queue up choices without drawing them away from the action on the screen).
4. Characters wouldn’t immediately croak unless they tried hard to do so. Full defense, even for level-one characters will buy them a lot of time to make decisions, hopefully decisions that get them the hell out of dodge. (I’m not certain yet how all of this would go down or how guaranteed I want escape to be—maybe this is dependent upon how much stamina has been exerted thus far. It may also depend on what terrain a character can take advantage of, like a deep dive off the hoover dam to “safety.” At any rate, nobody should take a step outside of town and instantly lose his head.)
5. Players should have a lot of choices when it comes to combat, making fighting a deeply tactical game, while not slowing down the visual pace and intensity of it.
6. Lag should be a far less instrumental roadblock when it comes to making permadeath palatable, partly due to action-beats(similarish to timers) but also because retreat attempts could be the default character action on condition of disconnect.(this shouldn’t be a guarantee or it will be intentionally exploited, but it should at least provide some added protection).
Two glaring problems that I see so far:
1. the engine would need to orchestrate increasingly complicated dances, depending on the # of player and npc participants. This might be too much to choreograph dynamically, especially given that I’m suggesting a non-abstracted look to the combat. (on the bright side, animations are more likely to make sense when player movement is no longer directly controlled …so no long wind-ups just to impact on the cracked earth in front of you while your target tickles you from behind).
2. I’m uncertain of the line of demarcation between walking around next to somebody and engaging with them in combat. Other combat systems don’t have this concern since movement is the same inside and outside of combat. When is combat officially declared? How far away are both actors? What happens if somebody who hasn’t declared just bops around through the exchange? Should players have to make a choice either to enter a combat radius(and play by the rules of the combat even if just passing through) or avoid it? That might not be too unreasonable given that people are swinging weapons in the vicinity. Still, I’m not quite sure of the details of a transition back and forth between gameplay modes.
So, bad idea?
