I guess that I might as well throw in my battle system design (that I someday hope to breathe life into in fully rendered high-powered 3D etc.). Purely for the sake of instigating what I believe to be a discussion that is not had often enough. Combat systems are the basis of the entertainment factor in many RPGs and we rarely take advantage of the amount of options laid before us. but enough rambling Look at Grandia (Playstation) and Grandia II (Dreamcast) and also cast a glance over at Warcraft (PC) and finally at Baldur''s Gate (PC). Warcraft is randomly linked to all this, you will see. My idea stems from the concept that if you want to do something, there is a given amount of time you will spend doing it. To demonstrate the concept, I can very simply run through an example that requires only one mob, the player character. The player character has a certain array of abilities. Each one has (besides whatever mana and skill points involved) a certain ''charge up'' time, this applies even to physical attacks. Warcraft comes into this because the view it gives you of the battlefield is excelent for representation of placement. At a glance you can see what''s going on. While playing you can click on your character (or some other selection method) and sift through a little side menu with a list of abilities. for each one, there will appear a shaded area on the screen next to your character for the area that it can cover (a sword slash is an arc in front of your character, a fireball is a circle of damage, with an added circle around the character whose radius represents the maximum range of casting). Once you''ve chosen a desireable action a little timer appears above your character''s head. When the timer is done counting down you can choose to unleash the ability in any direction from his/her position. To get into position, you select your character and click somewhere on the game map. Your character will head towards that point in a ready stance (medium walking pace). While walking the countdown rate is halved. You can tell your guy to run and the timer stops until he stops running. If he''s in danger you can tell him to Guard (block). The exact effects of blocking on incoming damage would be determined by the balancing of the game mechanism, but while guarding, the counter recounts at half-rate (meaning you lose time by guarding). Once the timer has counted down to zero, you select your character and click in some direction to unleash the ability towards your pointer (all the while, the area of effect is shown with respect to your pointer so you sort of know what''s going to happen). you have one second after the timer has reached zero to unleash the ability at full power. after that, a new timer appears, this timer is how long your character can remain in concentration ready to unleash the attack. if your character is hit during that time then the concentration timer drops rapidly, if your character moves it drops more rapidly etc. The strategy falls into place when you consider doing this with four or five guys on your team. Whether through a multi-player network (one player per character) or on one computer against an A.I. Because you have to time the selection of your abilities, the getting into advantageous positions and ultimately, the effective unleashing of your abilities. You can also take into account ideas like fighters blocking for the wizard standing behind them and then getting out of the way when he wants to blow a whole in the generic enemy. An optional extra is using Baldur''s Gate''s freeze time system. That way orders could be assigned to the various dudes in due course, but that''s almost a different kettle of fish because it would be hard to implement for a multiplayer game. George D. Filiotis

this sounds likea very interesting idea, but i have one complaint (which you may not care about, as it is only my opinion): you said that the "Strategy comes into play when you are doing this" for your party of 4 or 5 guys... this does not make gameplay more fun, it just makes it harder to do what you want to do. rather than concentrating on strategy (placement, timing, defending mages, etc), you have to worry about clicking the right guy and making him do his thing before his action expires...
i guess after playing for a long time, the player would get used to the timing, and could possibly get good at using this system... but personally i wouldn''t bother. if you took out the expiration of the actions, i think it would be better.
just my opinion

--- krez (krezisback@aol.com)

Good point, that is the precise reason I wanted to put in the freeze time for giving orders. Even in multiplayer it might be do-able, if players were limited to ten seconds at-a-time to give orders, but a frantic battle might get overly lagged in multiplayer if everyone is always pausing the game. It's also a sure evil that at there will be players who will pause and unpause repeatedly just to piss others off because they're losing.

My thought is that if each player has one character then you don't need to worry about who you're controlling. If each player has multiple characters then it comes with the territory that in an online game everyone has a certain number of characters to control so everyone suffers equal levels of confusion. So the better player comes forward because he/she has better control over the characters at his/her disposal.

The ability ready time might be three or four seconds as opposed to one, that depends on balancing of play. I should note that the interface would not be as ungainly as I implied in my previous post, your characters may be numbered so that you select them using the keyboard (the mouse wheel might also be an option) and the abilities would be icons down the right side of the screen. You could then click somewhere on the map so that your guy moves there, or click an ability to start charging it.

The abilities could even be hot-keyed so if you know your characters well, you would tap the number and then the hot key and get the lightning bolt coming at just the right moment, and then tap your fighter and click an enemy so that the default attack ability starts charging and your character will use it when he/she gets to the enemy.

I'd like to set aside interface semantics though, because that's a different level of design. It's the actual combat system that matters for this discussion.

Another point is that some abilities will be like Auras in Diablo II, and there's no reason why such abilities would not be unleashed immediately.

EDIT: Grammar and extra paragraph

George D. Filiotis

Edited by - symphonic on October 24, 2001 6:19:46 PM