RatTower
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2017
- Messages
- 470
I actually took a potion of speed in that particular gif - those go on for roughly 10-20 seconds. It's enough to start an encounter with an advantage but the thing is, they are relatively rare. So if you take them for a specific encounter and you die, they are gone - while the encounter may respawn. So using items is always a bit of a gamble. This whole approach echoes the Wizardry-esque resource management philosophy a bit: You prepare yourself, you go down the dungeon and you gotta make it through with what you have. This whole philosophy actually carried over into KF and - thanks to the lack of loading - even more into DS, where - besides estus flasks - items act the same way as in Monomyth. You gotta make due, even if the results aren't necessarily ideal. So situations like that gif should actually be the exception - you will rarely be able to outrun these guys.
Wizardry brings me to another thing, which is the prevalence of status effects during combat. You don't see those that often in western games - at least not to the extent to which they appear in lets say the old Dragon Quest games. There you'll get encounters where every enemy can hit you with a debuff - which becomes a major problem once their debuffs combine. So for example they hit you with silence and slow you down, which is death sentence for clerics (and therefore the entire group).
This is another thing that I'm trying to emulate in Monomyth's combat. The two guys from the gif are actually a good example for that, since they attack together and their default attack has a 20% chance of slowing you down. They also do a fair amount of damage and the elite version (the guy with the war cleaver) is even stronger (also I sped up his attack). So these guys catch you without a shield - which breaks their attacks and sends them into pain stun - and it might be over pretty quickly.
The attack breaking thing also goes for the player by the way - except you can quickly dodge afterwards, the stamina cost of which is dependent on your equipment's weight - so you might stamina lock yourself (no reg for ~2 seconds - which makes your attacks useless) if you do that; I still have to tweak that penalty a bit.
So all of this plays together and has an effect on the effectiveness and speed of attacks.
To answer your questions, the design philosophy behind combat encounters in Monomyth is "rare but tricky".
You actually haven't seen that much of it, mostly because I often max myself out on stats and equipment for recording (also UE's editor-internal capturing at 60 fps slows down the game, so I pretty much catch every opening for an attack).
Hard to say how far along I am with combat tweaking. The systems are pretty much all set up, but every enemy is different. In fact - with status effects playing such a big role - every attack is different. I also still wanna add support actions among enemies - so, for example, they start healing each other if necessary (perhaps not in the alpha though). The decision branch is already in the AI behaviour tree, but it's currently skipped since I still need a proper querying system for it.
Wizardry brings me to another thing, which is the prevalence of status effects during combat. You don't see those that often in western games - at least not to the extent to which they appear in lets say the old Dragon Quest games. There you'll get encounters where every enemy can hit you with a debuff - which becomes a major problem once their debuffs combine. So for example they hit you with silence and slow you down, which is death sentence for clerics (and therefore the entire group).
This is another thing that I'm trying to emulate in Monomyth's combat. The two guys from the gif are actually a good example for that, since they attack together and their default attack has a 20% chance of slowing you down. They also do a fair amount of damage and the elite version (the guy with the war cleaver) is even stronger (also I sped up his attack). So these guys catch you without a shield - which breaks their attacks and sends them into pain stun - and it might be over pretty quickly.
The attack breaking thing also goes for the player by the way - except you can quickly dodge afterwards, the stamina cost of which is dependent on your equipment's weight - so you might stamina lock yourself (no reg for ~2 seconds - which makes your attacks useless) if you do that; I still have to tweak that penalty a bit.
So all of this plays together and has an effect on the effectiveness and speed of attacks.
To answer your questions, the design philosophy behind combat encounters in Monomyth is "rare but tricky".
You actually haven't seen that much of it, mostly because I often max myself out on stats and equipment for recording (also UE's editor-internal capturing at 60 fps slows down the game, so I pretty much catch every opening for an attack).
Hard to say how far along I am with combat tweaking. The systems are pretty much all set up, but every enemy is different. In fact - with status effects playing such a big role - every attack is different. I also still wanna add support actions among enemies - so, for example, they start healing each other if necessary (perhaps not in the alpha though). The decision branch is already in the AI behaviour tree, but it's currently skipped since I still need a proper querying system for it.
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