Melee combat in IE type of games

[ArcaneBoozery]

While mage combat was a lot of fun in Baldur's Gate games, pure melee fighting was very boring. As a fighter, you would just click on the target, and watch as your character stands there and whacks away, however many attacks they had per round. I hope this will be remedied in PE, with a more active melee fighting approach. Just like a magic user would be constantly selecting which spells to use based on the situation, so a fighter would have a large selection of melee abilities to choose from (e.g. simple slash, thrust, power attack, parry, dodge, sidestep, jump, feint, throw weapon, etc). Also, there could be different styles of melee fighting, such as power based, speed based, technique based, etc, which would allow different choices from the overall pool of melee abilities. Finally, it would be nice if melee fighting had a different feel from magic casting (i.e. it didnt feel like melee abilities were just spells with melee names, cast quick thrust instead of magic missile). This could be done in different ways probably, but one way I thought of would be to make it more speed/reaction based. Not like an FPS or anything, but for example, certain melee abilities can only be activated within a short amount of time after something happens (e.g. you activate the parry skill, and when you see your character actually parry the enemy blow, you have 1 second to activate the counterattack ability before it becomes unavailable). This shouln't be a requirement, if you are not interested you can just set your melee fighters to auto-attack/tank, but for those of us who want to "main" a skilled melee fighter, this would add an active component to the gameplay that would be different from spell casting, but fun in its own way.

[Tale]

I'm conflicted here. I agree on the surface that melee characters should have interesting options for combat.

 

The problem is that if everyone has interesting things to do, it'll be a micromanagement nightmare. If I'm controlling a party, it's good that I only have to micromanage half of them. The rest I assign targets for and make sure they're not dying.

 

Having to be active and make decisions or reactions for all 6 characters every combat round sounds a bit too tedious for a RTWP system. I could definitely see it being more interesting for a fully turn based game. Now I'm not totally siding against giving them interesting things to do in combat. I'm just thinking it needs to be somewhat infrequent.

 

Or, maybe this would work too, it'd have to have really good scripting system for behavior.

[Uomoz]

From what I've read, melee fighters will use "stances" where for example a fighter can fight in a more defensive\offensive\protective way, swapping between them. But that's just an assumption from the class description. Barbarian will use "rage" to make em durable and more dangerous but it will have some form of drawback.

[Grand Heresiarch]

This was somewhat alleviated in the D&D 3rd edition rules as they were instituted in NWN and NWN2. Melee characters did not have nearly as much to do as casters, but stances and special types of attacks attained at higher levels did add more depth to melee play. That being said, I would have to echo Tale's concerns about turning the game into a micro-management pause-fest. A few casters add tactical depth in terms of spell usage, but I would more enjoy seeing the melee tactical depth occur not in skill usage but rather in placement on the battlefield (Screening casters, moving in for backstabs, positioning for cleave to hit as many as possible etc)

[rjshae]

I'm sort of expecting something like the Dragon Age/Drakensang systems where there are specific modes and maneuvers fighters can use. It didn't seem that onerous to just activate those when the circumstances seemed opportune, or else you just let the AI handle it.

[vv221]

The problem is that if everyone has interesting things to do, it'll be a micromanagement nightmare. If I'm controlling a party, it's good that I only have to micromanage half of them. The rest I assign targets for and make sure they're not dying.

 

Having to be active and make decisions or reactions for all 6 characters every combat round sounds a bit too tedious for a RTWP system. I could definitely see it being more interesting for a fully turn based game. Now I'm not totally siding against giving them interesting things to do in combat. I'm just thinking it needs to be somewhat infrequent.

 

I thought we all were micromanagement freaks on this forum, aren't we?

 

I'd love to have the possibility to fully micromanage every guy from my party, with some simple (or not so simple) AI scripts to assign to some of them, like BG does well in my opinion, to avoid headache.

[ReyVagabond]

yeah Configurable character independent AI and a lot of skills to use for melee and magic is the way to go.

 

imagine you want to try out a full 6 mages group compared to a 6 fighters group. should it be posible to play the game with that kind of party and with more or less the same kind of micromanagement. ( now that the braket alows it)

[ArcaneBoozery]

As far as micromanagement concerns, i did mention in the OP that the added options for melee fighters are optional and the fighter can instead just be set to auto-attack/tank. This will of course make the fighter weaker than if optimizing his skills, but it should be sufficient if you wish to concentrate on other characters. But if your main character is a fighter (or a barbarian, or swashbuckler type rogue), you can always minimize your management of other party members (only use priests to heal, and mages for utility, etc) and use your melee's full range of abilities to do much higher damage, or better defense. This way, everyone will be happy, and able to choose which characters to micromanage and which not to. The IE system, on the other hand, penalized melee classes, making them very boring.

 

Stances are a good idea, but by themselves, they wont make the melee fighters anywhere near as interesting as magic users. You also need something else, like more detailed active abilities and such.

[Greensleeve]

This is actually one of my greatest worries about PE, that melee characters will simply not have much to do.

 

Someone mentioned that the interesting aspect of a melee character was their positioning. I can, to a certain extent, agree to this, but it is very difficult to do this well in a RTWP system. In turn-based, yes, otherwise... Eh, not so much. So give melee characters something nice to do. Knockdowns, disarms, position control, sundering, called shots inflicting essentially de-buffs on your opponents etc. It does not (should not) have to involve deciding whether to use a thrust or a slash when attacking, nor should it require us to "twitch" activate counters, they should simply happen. So if I use my parry skill and I succeed, I should get an automatic counter-attack, not have to mash the button.

 

Also very important to allow melee characters to be skilled at multiple ranges.

[PeonWarrior]

I've always play spell casters in BG and NWN, plainly speaking all other class combat sucked bantha poodoo. The melee combat from DAO was fantastic, first fantasy RPG that I actually enjoyed playing as a warrior.Please Obsidian, you need to ace it!

 

[Larkaloke]

I actually like having the fighters just auto-attack, and fighters are one of my favourite classes. I play them a lot. Probably my single most played class, in fact.

 

See, the thing is, I tend to be sort of picky about what they can do if it isn't auto-attacking. I do like it if there are some extra, unusual things that they can do on activation, things that you wouldn't want to do in every situation (especially at higher levels), but I don't want to be having to pick which cut to use at what time and which parry to use, when to dodge or sidestep, or that sort of thing. It's just... eh, I'm trying to think how to explain.

 

Parrying and dodging is mostly reflexive and automatic. Choosing where to strike isn't something you spend time thinking about, either -- you just see an opening and you go for it. To have a fully realistic combat system where you control everything a fighter does, you would have to be able to choose exactly what they do and see exactly what the enemy is doing, and particularly in an isometric game I just don't see that working. And honestly, if I want to do that, I'll find someone to spar with or play a different genre of game -- because at that point, it doesn't feel so much like "what is my character going to do now" but "what do I do now", whereas just telling the fighter to attack it feels to me as though I'm making the decision "who does my character want to attack now" and that's all good.

 

What I would like would be to be able to choose the sorts of things that the fighter is good at, feats or perks or weapon ranks, and then just assume that they know what they're doing and see it reflected in the THAC0 and the hit points dealt (or equivalent). I like to spend a lot more time configuring how the fighter fights on level up and such, but spend not all that much time deciding what they do during the fight beyond where to position them and what weapons to use in that fight.

 

General sorts of fighting styles (the aggressive/defensive et cetera) sounds like something that could work pretty well, though.

[ArcaneBoozery]

I actually like having the fighters just auto-attack, and fighters are one of my favourite classes. I play them a lot. Probably my single most played class, in fact.

 

See, the thing is, I tend to be sort of picky about what they can do if it isn't auto-attacking. I do like it if there are some extra, unusual things that they can do on activation, things that you wouldn't want to do in every situation (especially at higher levels), but I don't want to be having to pick which cut to use at what time and which parry to use, when to dodge or sidestep, or that sort of thing. It's just... eh, I'm trying to think how to explain.

 

Parrying and dodging is mostly reflexive and automatic. Choosing where to strike isn't something you spend time thinking about, either -- you just see an opening and you go for it. To have a fully realistic combat system where you control everything a fighter does, you would have to be able to choose exactly what they do and see exactly what the enemy is doing, and particularly in an isometric game I just don't see that working. And honestly, if I want to do that, I'll find someone to spar with or play a different genre of game -- because at that point, it doesn't feel so much like "what is my character going to do now" but "what do I do now", whereas just telling the fighter to attack it feels to me as though I'm making the decision "who does my character want to attack now" and that's all good.

 

What I would like would be to be able to choose the sorts of things that the fighter is good at, feats or perks or weapon ranks, and then just assume that they know what they're doing and see it reflected in the THAC0 and the hit points dealt (or equivalent). I like to spend a lot more time configuring how the fighter fights on level up and such, but spend not all that much time deciding what they do during the fight beyond where to position them and what weapons to use in that fight.

 

General sorts of fighting styles (the aggressive/defensive et cetera) sounds like something that could work pretty well, though.

 

You are of course entitled to your preferences, but I think most people found IE handling of melee combat pretty boring. In fact, if you go to various forum posts around the internet advising people on what classes/kits to play in IE games, you will almost always see recommendations for playing magic based or hybrid ones and warnings to stay away from pure fighters. There is just nothing fun about running to the fore and clicking on the target and forgetting about that character. Within the context of isometric tactical combat, it seems like the only way to remedy this is to give fighters their own set of active abilities, so just like magic casters, they can select something specific to use based on the situation. The more reactive/speed based stuff is more controversial, but I did not mean it to be twitch based, but rather something that requires tighter control than the typical spell casting approach, to differentiate between the two, but as I said, it's just one way to do it, other people might have better ways.

[Larkaloke]

You are of course entitled to your preferences, but I think most people found IE handling of melee combat pretty boring. In fact, if you go to various forum posts around the internet advising people on what classes/kits to play in IE games, you will almost always see recommendations for playing magic based or hybrid ones and warnings to stay away from pure fighters. There is just nothing fun about running to the fore and clicking on the target and forgetting about that character. Within the context of isometric tactical combat, it seems like the only way to remedy this is to give fighters their own set of active abilities, so just like magic casters, they can select something specific to use based on the situation. The more reactive/speed based stuff is more controversial, but I did not mean it to be twitch based, but rather something that requires tighter control than the typical spell casting approach, to differentiate between the two, but as I said, it's just one way to do it, other people might have better ways.

 

True, and if I go to many forums about the internet I'll also find people saying that they find playing a fighter to be dull in various incarnations of AD&D -- I disagree there, too. I do also like playing magic-based characters, but I like different things for them, and I don't like the mechanics to be very similar between combat and magic. I won't make any claim as to who is right or who isn't, except that everyone is, because it's entirely a question of preference. I do know several people who agree with me, so I know that I'm not completely alone in my opinion. I don't know how common it is.

 

There is certainly some middle ground, and I have played and enjoyed games where fighters have activated abilities (though there have also been some of those where said abilities annoy me frequently). So long as the abilities in question are not things that I expect that a competent fighter will be doing of their own accord all the time, I might actually like a few. Knockdowns, called shots, and anything that affects more than one opponent at once are some examples of things that I wouldn't mind having as activated abilities and might even like. Choosing different guards and getting different advantages from them before a fight might be interesting, or even a few unusual strikes that require timing. I'm not opposed to having options for fighting types, just to having those options be (to me) the equivalent of picking out exactly the words and gestures that a magic user must use for a spell -- I wouldn't want to do that either, and would assume they should just automatically do it. I know many people don't see it as the same thing, but to me it is much the same.

[Brother Pain]

I would like some options for melee types other than just autoattacking the enemy. To lessen the micromanagement nightmare, perhaps wizard types could get simplified/get better AI so I can focus on the fighter types in the forefront instead

[Sensuki]

I was fine with the IE melee combat as well. And I though melee combat in DA:O was terrible.

Edited October 16, 2012 by Sensuki