Interactive combat

wisesquirrel

Would be cool if combat were interactive, having certain attack choices depend on what your opponent chose (Rock-Paper-Scissors), say you use "Swing" and he uses "Strike", lets say "Swing" beats "Strike" and you knock your opponent back.

Strike > Slash > Swing > Strike

What would this do?, instead of seeing to autonomous shells doing separate animations of lightning strike and firebolt and poison arrow and iceshock and bubbaguhlabuhlah, from a third person view you would see two guys fighting in a cool "Fencing" style.

Instead of separate animations, both avatars would interact doing a joint animation (Seeming more realistic).

Now lets add other cool things they do in action films.

"Jump Back" - Jump away from your opponent to rest a little or prepare to counter his next attack.

"Block"- Take a little damage to get a chance to counter attack afterwards.

"Tackle"- Lunge yourself in hoes of surprising your opponent knocking him down.

 

With our current technology (Smooth internet) this kinda of combat is easily feasible if all players were in the same country (Minimizing lag).

Wizardry

I prefer resistances like elemental and TYPE ,example piercing/magic/crushing ect ect.

Your idea is not the worst but it eliminates knock downs,push backs,sleep effects ,weapon delays.Your idea assumes both players swing at the exact same time and the coding does a check to see who wins.I prefer much more in depth combat structures,with also weapon delays.I like to see a system with lots of checks,a check to see type of armor,type of weapon,type of attack also a long swinging delay should wield more damage with differences again depending on type of weapon.

My favurite has been FFXI's combat system,imo nothing has come close,but it needed a lot more improvement.If a developer could take what FFXi started for a brilliant combat structure and improve on it,it would be a winner.FFXI even utilized the weather,but we could use surroundings like trees/water ect ect.

Shijeer

Matrix Online did 'joined' battle animations quite successfully years ago, its totally doable.

 

However I feel that most developers avoid this type of approach to combat quite simply due to the increased development times involved. Imagine implementing only one new move to a char's arsenal, one would need to code and animate a 'reaction' move for oh so many other abilities, increasing dev time exponentially for even the most simple of combat additions. In terms of economies of game development that would be quite bluntly shooting yourself in the foot. Furthermore, considering the current trends in the mmo market, the added costs would most certainly outweigh any 'cool' points gained for such a feat.

 

Perhaps a 'hybrid' approach wherein only some of the more basic 'bred and butter' attacks are implemented in this fashion would be more sensible.

 

- Shijeer

 

Buttermilch

I think a combat system that's like scissor - stone - paper would be rather frustrating, as it would depend on luck too much.

Secondly: If you want to have a joint animation, you'd need both characters to stop moving freely. And as you might now, a player who looses control over his avatar dislikes that situation. This is one reason why WoW for instance introduced "diminishing returns", shortened crowd control abilities and so on.

If you would want both characters to have a joint animation while still enabling them to move freely, it would exaggerate the means of development. Especially if you have to look at any given amount of combatants. What if three people are fighting each other in FFA? How would you do the joint animation?

It really would be cool, I admit. But it's just not possible... :-/