Unkillable Cat
LEST WE FORGET
- Joined
- May 13, 2009
- Messages
- 27,239
The ultimate desire for role-playing games has always been to be as immersive as possible. The first-person perspective, the steps towards full and free movement within a 3D environment, the pursuit of real-time interactions, improved graphics and sound, the constantly shrinking UI and the ever-growing viewscreen, all these and more are all part of the 'immershun'. Due to technological limitations CRPGs had to contend with temporary solutions or scaled-down approaches to try to find alternate ways towards the goal, but as computer hardware and software have strengthened, the goal has steadily gotten closer.
But the steps towards that goal have been interesting, to say the least. Abstract game design meeting ingenious workarounds have created some very enjoyable RPGs along the way. One of the sub-(sub)-genres is the one best known as 'real-time grid-based dungeon blobbers'. They're best described by naming the games that count amongst them: Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Bloodwych, Captive, Lands of Lore (1), Hired Guns, Stonekeep, Anvil of Dawn, Legend of Grimrock, Vaporum and many more. They offer a desirable experience because they give players the feeling of both 'being there' and them doing in-game things themselves. Your character isn't pushing that button, you are as you click on it with the mouse. The player decides the flow and pace of the battle, not the game, and its outcome is determined by the player's reflexes. Even the description below will demonstrate this as I keep talking of the player performing in-game actions, and not the game character(s).
But these games all come with a downside: When dealing with monsters there's a simple method of making combat almost a breeze... The Sidestep Mambo. A quick and clever player would abuse a 2x2 space of squares to constantly keep circling about to prevent monsters from attacking, while constantly raining down attacks upon them. (A variation of this was the Backstep Mambo, where the player constantly moves backwards through a hallway, denying the monster its opportunity to attack.) This made most combat encounters very trivial (which is a shame since 95% of these game revolve entirely around killing monsters in grid-based dungeons) but clever developers have been trying to counter this since at least 1991, with varied results. Short of making the monsters smarter and have them use specialized counter-attacks against the Mambo, none of the other methods have really worked... except that hyper-fast monster in Captive that could keep up with even the fastest players, but the challenge it presented is just too high and therefore only suitable for the endgame.
One of the attempted solutions (especially in recent years) is to pin down the player somehow, either by penalizing him for moving out of the square he currently occupies, or outright denying him the option of leaving it until combat has been fully resolved. The former approach can work if done properly, but the latter one only shows that the responsible dev completely misses the point of these games: The immersion factor.
I was thinking about something else entirely when a possible solution to this popped up in my head: What if a player can't move from a square until all of the player's weapon (and spell) cooldown timers have run down? I pondered this a bit and found it to be too restrictive to the movement, and then came to an even better solution: What if the cooldown timer doesn't run down unless the player stands still? These games have had weapon cooldown timers since the start, so why not put them to better use?
The best way to implement this would be to force the player to stand in the same square for at least a second before cooldown timers start running down. This means that the Sidestep Mambo is still possible, but the player will either be making themselves more vulnerable to attacks by having to stand still before making another attack, or be forced to use a larger space to 'dance' in to give them time to recover before the monster reaches them. At the very least this eliminates the usage of 2x2 squares for Sidestep Mambos, I'd reckon.
Opinions?
But the steps towards that goal have been interesting, to say the least. Abstract game design meeting ingenious workarounds have created some very enjoyable RPGs along the way. One of the sub-(sub)-genres is the one best known as 'real-time grid-based dungeon blobbers'. They're best described by naming the games that count amongst them: Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Bloodwych, Captive, Lands of Lore (1), Hired Guns, Stonekeep, Anvil of Dawn, Legend of Grimrock, Vaporum and many more. They offer a desirable experience because they give players the feeling of both 'being there' and them doing in-game things themselves. Your character isn't pushing that button, you are as you click on it with the mouse. The player decides the flow and pace of the battle, not the game, and its outcome is determined by the player's reflexes. Even the description below will demonstrate this as I keep talking of the player performing in-game actions, and not the game character(s).
But these games all come with a downside: When dealing with monsters there's a simple method of making combat almost a breeze... The Sidestep Mambo. A quick and clever player would abuse a 2x2 space of squares to constantly keep circling about to prevent monsters from attacking, while constantly raining down attacks upon them. (A variation of this was the Backstep Mambo, where the player constantly moves backwards through a hallway, denying the monster its opportunity to attack.) This made most combat encounters very trivial (which is a shame since 95% of these game revolve entirely around killing monsters in grid-based dungeons) but clever developers have been trying to counter this since at least 1991, with varied results. Short of making the monsters smarter and have them use specialized counter-attacks against the Mambo, none of the other methods have really worked... except that hyper-fast monster in Captive that could keep up with even the fastest players, but the challenge it presented is just too high and therefore only suitable for the endgame.
One of the attempted solutions (especially in recent years) is to pin down the player somehow, either by penalizing him for moving out of the square he currently occupies, or outright denying him the option of leaving it until combat has been fully resolved. The former approach can work if done properly, but the latter one only shows that the responsible dev completely misses the point of these games: The immersion factor.
I was thinking about something else entirely when a possible solution to this popped up in my head: What if a player can't move from a square until all of the player's weapon (and spell) cooldown timers have run down? I pondered this a bit and found it to be too restrictive to the movement, and then came to an even better solution: What if the cooldown timer doesn't run down unless the player stands still? These games have had weapon cooldown timers since the start, so why not put them to better use?
The best way to implement this would be to force the player to stand in the same square for at least a second before cooldown timers start running down. This means that the Sidestep Mambo is still possible, but the player will either be making themselves more vulnerable to attacks by having to stand still before making another attack, or be forced to use a larger space to 'dance' in to give them time to recover before the monster reaches them. At the very least this eliminates the usage of 2x2 squares for Sidestep Mambos, I'd reckon.
Opinions?