Game design is ultimately about optimising fun. However people have different preferences so lets start this by me telling you the 3 criteria I use to determine if combat is fun for me, this way we can avoid just talking about simple matters of taste.
Challenge (moderate)
Combat needs to occupy you, make you use enough of your mental abilities/skills that it differs from boredom,
however even though I enjoy beeing rewarded for a good performance I am not a player able to reach perfection.
So I prefer a system that does not require perfection to stay competitive but is still challenging, a system that allows you to play stimulated but relaxed.
Variety
How often do you repeat the same routine? How much do circumstances change what you have do to in combat? Without variation things can easily get monotone, without the need to react you simple hit bags of hp under a timelimit not an opponent.
Possibility to experiment
I enjoy sandboxy elements and I can get alot of fun out of combining skills and stats trying out different builds and strategies , planning and thinking to create something that works.
facts,deductions
-For something to be challenging requires the possibility of failure
-failure with high penality is frustrating
-failure with low or no penality does not motivate to perform well
-variety requires a diversity of possible actions and/or action patterns
-for diversity to be meaningful different situations must require different actions and/or patterns
-if only certain choices of actions/action patterns succeed the rest must fail
-experimentation requires multiple possible configurations to choose from
- enough possibilities have to be valid(have the same, best effectiveness)
-different possibilities have to change the gameplay in some way to be meaningful different
conclusions, hypothesis, ideas
The handling of failure is very important in a game, you want the player to succeed because failure is no fun but if you try to go for the easy solution of delivering only opponents a player is sure to beat your actually reducing challenge and variety for the player. A player has to win because he makes the right decisions not because he picks on the weak, but that requires learning, the collection of information, it requires a period of failure.
Herein lies idea of trial and error combat, to create a system that allows you to fail in a controlled way, to gain information trough action (like for example simulated combat before actual combat) and such avoid a dumbing down of combat or standardization of enemies required by fast paced combat, which only leaves minimal time for thought, information processing .
additional questions: The amount of meaningful differences in gameplay is limited so are variety amd experimentation in competition with each other? Is the existance of non valid combinations even necessary?
discuss :)
