Combat in DarkDale
To give a better picture of the skills system, let’s take a look at how combat skills will work, but first, a small discussion of combat itself. Many of you wondered why the combat is intended to be real-time instead of turn-based. Let me assure you that it is neither a buisness decision nor an attempt to make the game more “action” oriented. I love the tactical depth that turn-based RPGs have to offer, but I feel that there is still much design space unexplored in real-time crawlers.
The main critique of tile-based real-time dungeon crawlers is that you can essentially cheat your way through combat by just stepping around monsters and hitting them while they are facing another direction. While definitely an issue, I think that it is not an unsovable one, and it is the first thing that I started brainstorming about when approaching the
DarkDale project. A few ideas:
- Armor and evasion ratings, as well as protection spells, will have a more important effect, to encourage standing ground in fighting and making armor valuable. As it its, in Dungeon Master or Legend of Grimrock, if you just danced around monsters, having a shirt or a Plate Mail didn’t change anything, making finding better armor equipment a bit unrewarding.
- Stun, paralysis, slow, webs and other similar effects will be more prevalent, to hinder constant running around.
- Attacks will have to-hit penalties when striking at moving targets. Waiting for the monster to stop moving before attacking will guarantee a more efficient attack but also make it more dangerous. Again encourages standing fighting.
- Running around will use stamina more quickly and, as we’ll see, stamina is required to use special attacks.
- Monsters will have more special attacks or special AIs which play around the “two-step dance”. Legend of Grimrock introduced the side-attack for example, which was a good idea. More of the sort.
But all this won’t prevent combat from becoming boring and repetitive if there are no options for how to engage enemies. In
Grimrock, exactly like in the
Eye of the Beholder series, you had
one option: you right-click the weapon, it hits or misses, and that’s it for the whole game.
Grimrock‘s special attacks happened at random without any control from the player and weren’t adding much.
Dungeon Master, on the other hand, proposed attack modes: you right-click the rapier, you get to
Jab,
Swing or
Thrust. A great idea on paper, but poorly implemented. As the only thing that changed with better attack modes was that they dealt more damage at the cost of a longer cooldown, and that tradeoff was always at your advantage, there was no incentive to use anything but the best attack once you had the skill level to access it. So the system ended up in the same dead-end than the other games mentionned above, only with one mouse click more. Note also that in all those games, having a sword or a mace didn’t actually change much to the combat style either, apart having a different icon in your hand.