Which brings us back to the "you hit, I hit, you hit, I hit, you hit, I hit" system, which I was trying to get rid of, even if I quite like that system, and developped a card game which uses sort of similar mechanics. It's not collectible, but has a board to help visualize. Moreover, with my mechanics, you can also simulate the difference of strength and speed between the two fighters, and allows for some extensions with different fighting styles and different weapons.

But my problem comes from the fact that it remains turn-based, and isn't really suited for something that pretends to be "real-time".

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Original post by Fournicolas Dredd>> The problem I was trying to get rid of was that in a MMORPG, you shouldn't have to introduce player's skills, where only the character's skills are supposed to show. If I want my character to be able to cut a bird in perfect halves when it swoops over his head without me having to noe MY particular reflexes for a good dozen of years, then it has to rely entirely on my character's skills. But How can the character's skills intervene in the actual fight without remodeling the entire system? So far, the skills were used in an almost turn-based system where you used your energy to do something, and then had to wait to have enough energy to do something else (maybe you won't see it this way, but mostly, in DAoC, AO, AC and EQ, that's basically what happens. You press a key, and wait until you are allowed to press it again.) WHat I was trying to add to the system was a way to NOT have to wait before doing something else, which means that the stream of the fight should be continous, but make it so that the player's skills were NOt used at all, except in a strategic sort of way. Which means that, if the fight relies on the character's relative speeds, and you don't want the player's own speed to play a part, then you have to slow everything until player's speed is irrelevant, but characters' relative speeds ARE relevant. Hence, the slow-mo. snip...

i see. i didn't realize you are trying to divorce player skill from combat resolution. so you want to have combat resolution based on avatar stats and have the player lean it one direction or the other via his choice of tactics.


let's assume for a second that players can push buttons as fast as necessary. couldn't you then achieve the same goal by speeding up the "wait time" between moves?(which wouldnt actually be continuous combat but would simulate it by approaching the threshold at which players could act in a tactical manner.


technically, you have a very difficult issue with your slo-mo strategy. assuming battle can consist of n' avatars and battle can be joined by n' additional avatars at any point in combat.

from a physics standpoint would you surround each player with a "slo-mo bubble"? what then of ranged combat with a non-combat participant in between?

or would you have a larger "battle bubble"? what of the archer that is 30 meters away that joins the fray?


how would you reconcile the physics system between real and slo-mo?



if you look at most FPS'S, the avatars act in a non-realistic manner. they jump half their body height wearing full gear. run at a carl lewis speed without tiring and duck from knees to full stand in less than a second.

my version of slo-mo is to maintain a simulation speed instead of a game speed. that is, a full grown human swinging a meter long axe will take a bit of time. in between this time you get to respond.


you and i have a different goal to accomplish. my approach is to maximize the player skill regarding combat resolution, but shape the battle according to stats. your goal is to maximize the stats for combat resolution but shape the battle with a player's tactical skill. it only stands to reason that our solutions would differ greatly.

i couch my approach on the view that the combat itself must be compelling enough to be a game in itself. if the combat is compelling enough to be a stand alone FPS game then the heart of your game will be compelling.

Seeing that you have a saying by Miyamoto Musashi in your signature, I suppose that you might have read some litterature about him, or maybe have seen some movies about samurais. A real duel happened over quite a long time, for the duellists jauged and tested each others even before moving. But quite often, one move (also known as "pass") was sufficient to know who would win, and somtimes, survive. As I am not seeing a fighting game as a FPS with a sword instead of a gun, I can't really imagine championning player keyboard skill for a fighting mechanic. In fact, I particularly dislike most FPSs because I am pretty crappy with their controls. I just can't get everything to work at MY speed, because the other players are just too fast for me. Plus the fact that other players don't mind their avatars dying, while I try to preserve mine for as long as possible. Problems of roleplayer, I suppose...

My approach is that, although two different characters (and I insist on characters) may have different skills, they might still want to take swipes at one another. But the faster player shouldn't win because of that. The best character should win because he is the best character. that's all.

As for the archer, I suppose that if he is thirty meters away, then the bubbles should be split and land on each member of the fight. Maybe you have, as an archer, a choice to toggle to fight speed, by drawing an arrow in your bow, and then aiming in sniper mode? WHich, in turn, slows your target, and clearly shows that you have engaged it, meaning that "steal kills" are immediately recognizable as such? I know there still is an issue about other persons engaging in combat after that, but so far, I was only trying to roughly outline a system in which character skills and player's tactics mattered more than simply combining macros and hotkeys as fast as possible. I haven't got as far as trying to solve every little problem arising. That could have been a second part of my reflexion, if the first part withstood the public criticism. It seems it didn't. Back to the drawing board.

Don't try to replicate the steely-eyed ability to size up and match an opponent that Musashi describes in his book. Have you read The Book of Five Rings? That bastard had super powers. He was prescient or something, because no normal person could apply his principles in combat. If you believe the way he describes it, you walk up to a guy, look at him, see how to kill him, then kill him. Nothing to it.

No matter how intuitive your controls are or how nuanced your AI, a video gamer cannot and will not be able to seize victory in a single decisive moment. It's not your fault as a designer, but the target audience for such a game would be... umm... uhh... Is Morihei Ueshiba alive? He's about it.

Make a game fun and engaging. Don't seek to replicate actual lethal force confrontations. People will lose interest and just start guessing, and then it's paper-rock-scissors with a brutal learning curve.

Forcing players to chain moves together, like in the Inuyasha game, combines strategy with the intensity of real-time combat. The flash game gives a delay between the moves, but if you had the execution take place in real-time, and a "move right, attack, move left" was performed as you might do it in a fencing match, it would be an accurate representation of how I, at least, operate in combat situations.

You really do plan a few steps ahead, and sometimes your target isn't there when you swing. I like that.

Precisely because you do not have superpowers, and no gamer actually has, and you're not able to move before your opponent does, you have to make things a little more equal by SLOWING SPEED, and allowing the difference of speed between player and character to have no practical effect whatsoever.

And the fact that you have to plan a little ahead is good. But not if you cannot react when you see that your plan is of no use and you're walking through the void, with someone slashing at your back happily.

As a matetr of fact, yes, I have read the Treatise of the Five Rings. And it never occured to me that the man had super-powers. He was clever, and he was quick on the uptake. And he did learn fast. But mainly, he had completely mastered his nerves, and "almost" (it pains me to say so, but even he considered that he never completely mastered) his craft. He had discipline. And even if he had acquired more techniques from his opponents and from his personal deductions, he was RAW. He was instinctive. And he firmly believed that whatever it took to win you had to accomplish. He read Sun-Tzu and deduced from his teachings his own principles on battle. But what he took from it was that there is no point in playing fair in war. You just do whatever it takes to win. I think there is a story, involving Miyamoto Musashi and another swordsman (possibly Sasaki Kojiro) discussing the art of swordsfighting. It is reported that Sasaki emphasized his own art by saying something on the lines of "One sword, one strike, one dead". Musashi answered simply "two swords".

What I would like to be able to fake, with a slowed pace, is this almost super-human ability to change the direction of your blade in mid-course, and deduce from what you see the best course to intercept your opponent's blade. Having to wait until your move has ended is quite the OPPOSITE of those super-powers. And I would REALLY like to capture this sort of sensation of super-powers. Of course, you may still argue that no one is able to do that, but, in fact, some are, even among actual fencing, and make it so damn difficult for the opponent to touch them, because they can almost predict the blade's movements. And it feels almost supernatural to anyone looking at them. But it'sd just called hard work and fast reflexes. Since you don't want to make the players have to go through thirty years of hard work before being able to predict the opponent's blade's movements, you'll have to do the opposite. You don't move your blade faster, you just see the opponent moving slower.

Hence the slow-mo.

But I know my demonstration only relies on my taste for said super-powers, and the feeling it gives to be able to see through your opponent.

I have clearly misunderstood your idea up to this point. You've said before that you're interested in the feel of combat, but I took that to mean the thrill and intensity. Now it seems that you want to capture the sense of control and superiority that all those anime heroes have in a fight.

Please explain to me how your dynamic will allow one player insight into another player's intentions. Slow-mo and the ability to change your mind in the middle of a stroke just refines the scale on which the combat takes place. Whether you're moving the blade a millimeter to beat his blade or moving your army a league to flank his outpost, the contest is the same.

Unless your system can give one player a horribly unfair advantage, allowing them to do with intellect what Musashi would do with instict and eliminating the opponent's ability to keep up, you're just making fights take place over the course of one long moment, rather than five seconds of bunny-hopping and noob-toobing.

A moment of lag when your sword is an inch from your enemy will allow him to beat you just as a moment of lag as you hit F1 will cost you the advantage in the current, lamentable system. In balanced PvP, it'll make no difference.

I think you've fallen into the trap that we all succumb to from time to time. You're looking for a way to make a multiplayer video game contest look and feel like an actual combat situation while providing the satisfaction of having outsmarted your opponents and bested them with your mind, not with your button mashing.

It happens to roleplayers. In BF2, I refused to abuse the grenade launcher. I used it to defeat fortifications at medium range, not as a splash-damage shotgun to be fired when the rifle is empty. I lost a lot of fights because I was more interested in pretending to be a soldier than playing the game. I think it'll take about four minutes for a slo-mo system like the one you describe to degenerate into paper-rock-scissors. Players will rush to the cusp of the battle and then guess which move will win it for them.

WHen I think of having super slo-mo powers, I think of F.E.A.R., where you hit the button and the bad guys are all like, "Ooohhhh nnnooooo! Hhheeeee'sssss tttoooo fffaaaasssssstttt!" while I ruin their faces with my pistols and roundhouse kicks. But if you imagine everyone having that super power, it's just slower, and individual attacks are more precise. It would be like playing UT on 10% speed. Everyone gets out the sniper rifle and you headshoot until you are headshot.

I don't think it'll work.

On a second thought, I think I have gone a little fast on some fine details, like the fact that some fights might involve more than two opponents. Group fights are fun too, and with this system, they are too difficult.

I thought of instancing the fights clientside, instead of having them handled serverside. I thought it would make things easier to handle, on the overall. WHich means that, on a PvP, it needed to have a client-to-client connection, reducing the impact of the lag, since both persons involved are just having the same connection. But when things get rougher, and there are three, four, or more involved in a fight, then the client-to-client cannot be used anymore, and therefore, the solution is useless. Something else must be devised. Too bad, the roleplaying possiblities of the thing enthrilled me. I'd be interested in seeing you devise a way of having a MMORPG actually allow some RP in the way of fighting...

well, ive already put forward my idea, so take it as you will.

That's the Holy Grail, isn't it? A system in which role-playing is more than vanity and contests are neither stat comparisons nor twitch matches.


-----------------------Off-Topic------------------------

My dream system, since you asked, is what I call "Real Experience". It involves a vast library, represented as a grid, with relationships (fighting, bartering, understanding, detecting, etc.) on one axis and entities (Ninjas, bears, automobiles, sciences, etc.) on the other. For a skill test, the situation would be matched against the grid, so if you're trying to detect a ninja, you get the intersection of your "ninja experience" and your "detection experience" as your stat for that roll. The more time you spend with ninjas, either fighting them, working with them or playing power with them, the higher your ninja experience gets. The more time you spend detecting things, whether you're hunting animals or finding Waldo at the water park, the better you get at finding stuff. So if you're good at finding stuff and you grew up around ninjas, it'll be a cinch for you to spot a ninja.

It's easy to add a third class of variables, and just make the grid 3d, or 4d, of 5d.

For combat, the grid could be populated with different weapon classes, styles of combat, individual opponents, terrain types, weather conditions, etc. So when a Cossack comes at you on a horse with a saber, all your past training and experience regarding the various elements of that situation are brought to bear and influence your ability to meet the attack. I imagine control to be fairly vague, meta-control, akin to the coaching system in Ogre Battle ("Target Leader", "Focus on Strongest Adversary", etc.), and offered in a halting turn-based notion. You give your character a command, like "Try to kill that bear," or "Look around for threats," and he does that until he's done or something interrupts him, then you give him a new order. If you divide gametime into "ticks" and have different moves require different amounts of time, similar to action points in a game like Fallout, then the system would work in multiplayer as well, although it would require some kind of local "action bubble" similar to the one you describe.

Since it's tied directly to your gameplay habits and experiences, it is highly conducive to roleplay.

And once again, I give my opinion on such as system: having to rely on your predictions or hopes, instead of your reactions to external "stimuli", in the shape of PCs, Mobs and other PCs actions and reactions, clearly isn't RolePlaying, since you are only toying around with your own possibilities, not creating something new each time.

To make things accessible to RoilePlayers in MMORPGs,a dn let them enjoy even this tedious aspect of things that is fight, I think you must give them the possibility to live THROUGH the skills of their characters, and not their player skills.

Let's take a stupid example, to emphasize the point.

Street Fighter 2. I know Ryu can throw fire Balls (Ha Do Ken). And I can spend whole days sitting in front of the arcade machine andthrowing them without missing a beat. But when it comes to doing the same on a Playstation, I just can't, because I can't do the manip with my thumbs. Which means that I can't play the game normally on the Playstation, because I cannot have access to the character's normal powers, just because of MY personal limitations. I have to resort to just Small Kicks all the way. Which is fun and testing, but really doesn't look in any way like what is shown in the demo.

Now let's stretch this to the RPG kingdom.

My character is a fighter, which has a swordwielding ability thrice as important as that of its opponent. It has learned more moves than the opponent, and yet, I can only master, as a player, two, the most basic, which are slash and stab. My opponent, a player with more finger agility can, not only slash and stab, but also parry, counter-attack, and slash in low reverse. Which means that, although my character is theoretically thrice as strong and good as the other one, I cannot do what my character does, which means that I am going to be sliced and diced.

The problem is the sheer speed of reaction demanded by a real-time game. Over the internet, real-time is pretty much non-existant, and, unless we can devise a way to go faster than existing limits, I suggest we make do with existing limits, and just go some other way. If we can't make the player react as fast as his character, then we have to adapt the character to the player. And if there is a difference between two characters, then, since we can only move one character so fast, then we'll have to move the other character twice as slow.

I am all for making every movement available from hotkeys, instead of a particular combination of keys, or series of. It means even the clumsier player can have access to his character's secret powers, and feel good for that. But because the game cannot be paused for everybody when it comes to fighting, let's suppose we have a 24 fps look for everything. The speed stat determines in fact the range of the movement within the 24 frames. We then have relative velocities, since the two weapons will be moving at different "speeds", which are in fact the same frame rate, but different distances per frame. The fact that you can move your character basically in any horizontal direction while fighting, plus the movements of your weapon in 6 degrees of freedom makes the combat not only believable, but also interactive, since you have to care for every little part of the fight, without having to stress yourself on the lines of "how the hell am I gonna type XHMYVFD.?GV in less than a second without croissing my fingers or stretching my loins?" You have "almost" all the time in the world, since you have limited the speed of your opponent to a fraction of yours, whioch means that you still have longer to react, even though time is stretched.

Really, relying on stacks doesn't appeal to me. Even in chess, or in any card game, you don't stack. You just react on time with anything thrown at you, with what you have, and hope to draw from the rest of the game. Being technical does help, and knowing a lot from the game also helps a lot. Hell, even Poker is a game of personal skills. But in my book, Chess, Bridge and Belote are infintely more complex and technically demanding than poker, because, although you have to compose with what you suspect of your opponent's hand, you have to deal with a much greater issue, which is your own sweating. *

In a MMORPG where you play a battle-hardened fighter, I can't believe your character would break a sweat when fighting another man, unless that other man was equally strong, or maybe stronger. Which means that the CHARACTER has to be stronger, and not the player better at typing. If you can't manage to give an edge to better characters while letting the clumsy players win the matches and still be clumsyt, then your design is missing something...