Hi all,

I am currently musing over how to handle hit reactions in melee combat in my third person rpg.

It seems that the most realistic way to react to being hit hard with a sword or axe is that the character doubles over or reacts hugely to the collision with a large metal weapon. This is what I've programmed my games animations to do.

The problem is that whilst the enemy is bent over in pain from the player attack they are unable to run away or hit back, therefore the player could hit them again and again whilst they are clutching their stomach or otherwise reacting badly to being hit.

While realistic it would make combat easy and boring as the first one to get a successful hit in would just pummel the other guy to death with no chance of defense.

My question then is how can I keep realistic hit reactions whilst avoiding "stun lock". To prevent the npc doing it to the player is simple, simply introduce delays to make it fair. It's more the player abusing the system to easily win confrontations I'm concerned with.

Thanks all!

Having the victim stagger backwards buys you a little time for animating, as does slightly slowing down the attacker's recovery, drawing their blade back, resetting their footwork. With a backwards stagger, you still have an issue if the victim is cornered, but that leading to a devastating combo might be acceptable since the victim screwed up his positioning so bad.

Another option is to stun attack but leave defensive actions. Maybe his offhand is on his stomach and he's a little bent over, but his sword arm will still parry off attacks as best he can. Getting a major hit then opens up an opportunity to push the advantage (you're temporarily pretty safe from counter attack) but no guarantee you'll land your next blow before he's recovered.

In many old 2d side scrolling fighting games this occurred, the enemy when attacked would double over and after a few consecutive hits would fall down, then after a while get back up and continue fighting. What balanced it was the fact that there were many enemies on screen at a time, so simply unleashing everything on one enemy while ignoring the others meant certain death. In fact juggling this 'stun lock' was a very important skill in many of these games.

Have you thought of different attack recovery times? If someone is getting a strong hit with a large sword or axe, it will take some time to "reload" aka bring the weapon back to a decent position before they can attack again. A small sword or dagger may be little reaction and little recovery till next attack time and a very heavy blow from a weapon could in fact take a second or two to recover the weapon to a full ready to attack position again. Basically your light, medium and strong attacks have differing recovery times for both the attacker and the defender. Adding push back effect to stronger attacks might be a good idea too.

The problem is that whilst the enemy is bent over in pain from the player attack they are unable to run away or hit back, therefore the player could hit them again and again whilst they are clutching their stomach or otherwise reacting badly to being hit.

The movie industry seems to perfectly agree with that:

Not every attack should cause a stun, unless maybe you fight against crowds of weak enemies and want the player to feel much more powerful than the enemies. When fighting against a crowd, stunning one weak enemy isn't overpowered when you have other enemies attacking you from other directions. In Diablo, there's a short stun that you see on weaker enemies. I think it triggers when you damage a % of their health in a short time, so weaker enemies can get stunned by ordinary attacks while larger ones only get stunned from your biggest attacks (or not at all). You could also give some immunity or resistance to getting stunned again for a moment, so stuns can't be chained together every time.

If the game is more about one on one fights, attacks that cause stuns might be followed up by a combo, but at the end of the combo the attacking player might have a delay long enough for the enemy to recover from their stun. I don't play a ton of fighting games (like mortal kombat and street fighter), but I understand these short stuns and combos are an important part of them. I think one key to this is fine tuning the timing of short stuns and attack combos.

Mostly, I recommend playing similar games that you like to analyze how they do it. Then copy what works, and/or make it your own with your new understanding of the mechanic. And if realism gets in the way of good gameplay, consider dropping some of the realism.

Hi everyone, thanks for the useful replies :)

Generally I am drawing from the appearance of elder scrolls oblivion but from a third person perspective.

Under the hood though the combat is driven by a "fighting fantasy" style ruleset so whether or not a hit lands and how much damage it inflicts is a little bit of luck weighted by stats, as well as the players skill.

I think a combination of cooldown on attacks and stagger back on stun will work well in my game (see my journal in my sig for an example of combat without stun behaviours)

The game already kind of has cooldown as an attack is a sword swipe or thrust which takes some time to execute and only damages whilst the sword is in overlap with the enemy mesh. Therefore you can't hammer the mouse button to spam attacks as they realistically animate and can't be interrupted once started, this element of combat works well.

Any further feedback here or on my journal is always appreciated!