I've been playing through Baldur's Gate lately and while most of the game holds up fairly well over time, one thing that has been really difficult to put up with is how normal combat plays out, which makes sense since the game is D&D. You start at level 1 with incredibly low health (usually less than 10). This means in order for you to not need to fully heal after every battle, early enemies need to miss a lot and when they hit, it should be for 1-3 points of damage. When actually playing, though, it definitely does not feel epic or heroic in any way for your group of 6 adventurers to surround a kobold, with everyone swinging their weapons wildly and missing constantly. It doesn't make any sense logically either. If six people surrounded someone else and started swinging clubs and staves at the general direction of the 1, I guarantee at least one person would hit successfully even if they weren't aiming. Adventurers should do even better I'd imagine.
To me, a miss should be just a rare an occurrence (if not rarer) than a critical hit. The way to adapt the previous system with this concept is to just increase everyone's health and the damage dealt. The easiest way to calculate this is to figure out how many battles (and how many enemies in each battle) you expect your player to get through before needing to go to an inn to recover. Then figure that on average each enemy successfully hits for their average amount of damage and the player successfully hits for their average amount of damage. Start multiplying and adding numbers left and right to see how much damage a player can take and base their health on that value.
You can also choose to go the Disgaea route and take this even further to make people feel epic. Players start off with health in the thousands and deal damage in the hundreds from the get go. This doesn't really work (or matter) if you show progress bars for health. In that case, the key is just to play with the numbers so a good portion of the progress bar is taken away when the player hits and a small portion is taken away when the enemy hits.
The goal of balancing the numbers is to make the player feel like they are succeeding from the get go, while at the same time giving them a baseline for when an enemy is stronger than previous ones (they do more damage or take less damage). Just promise me you'll never go the Final Fantasy route of giving bosses 4+ health bars that change colors as they go down. That's just annoying.
"To me, a miss should be just a rare an occurrence (if not rarer) than a critical hit."
ReplyDeleteDepends on the style of combat you're going for. If we're talking about realism, misses are actually more common (assuming both combatants are trained). Like in Bushido Blade, where you spend most of your time dodging and blocking, because it almost always takes only one hit with a sword to disable or kill someone.
I know in Black Isle's Torn, we wanted to include dodge animations (since that's what the misses actually represent: the other person dodging). But it's hard to do without making it look lame.
Misses are realistic in a one on one situation, but with the Infinity Engine games it's six on one. I'm sorry, but no matter how nimble a kobold is, he's not dodging six weapons coming down on him all at once that frequently. The ogres make even less sense missing...I would be okay with misses happening that frequently on very skilled/nimble opponents, though.
DeleteIt's not so much the realism that bothers me, it's that it makes me and my party look like a bunch of weaklings and therefore not heroic and it's also really boring to watch.