J.E. Sawyer, on 27 Feb 2013 - 19:23, said:
Sabotin, on 27 Feb 2013 - 17:15, said:
It should be VERY clear what's happening, with some icons or symbolism to see when a character is engaged.
Speaking of which, instead of totally blocking movement, how about making the character move extremely slow instead? Sort of simulating those 5ft steps from d&d. You could then still turn the character (flanking/backstabs/whatnot) by moving slowly around him or lead it to someone better suited for killing him/keeping him in check. Or a fighter "gathering" more opponents, hehe.
The disengagement should also be very clear I think, perhaps requiring a press of a button, or if right-clock means movement, then disengage+move could be shift+righ-click or something? Doing it by mistake could be really frustrating. I also have a concern about this - By how it was described, if a melee character catches you and is actively attacking you, short of a special disengagement skill or outside help you have no way to get away from him (because of the hit reaction)?
What happens when you have multiple people in a melee fight though, I could see that complicating things a bit animation wise. In NWN the AoO and Cleave attacks could prevent regular attacks from happening on time, could change the attack target etc. NWN2 solved the problem in favor of the mechanics side, but it could still look rather silly (though I preferred it)...
Our plan is to use the selection circles (which all characters have) to indicate when they are engaging, engaged, and the targets involved. The most typical example would be two melee combatants moving toward each other and starting to fight. Their selection circles would increase in thickness when they are engaged and a short, overlapping line would run from the circle of the enemy engaging them toward their circle. I.e., characters who are engaged/engaging are visually linked through their selection circles.
We do not want to slow movement because that is not as clear as stopping movement and requiring you to give new input to move the character. We also very much intend for this to require you to be more careful with moving your characters. Yes, moving away from an engaging character can be difficult because of the risk involved, but that's the intention of the mechanic. We don't want it to be overly punitive, but we do want people to be wary about moving around melee enemies.
Disengagement Attacks will likely not be animated on the character's mesh. They will probably be abstracted in a fashion similar to NWN2 (though if we can find a higher fidelity solution, such as a duplicate "ghost" mesh to animate those attacks, we would use that).
