f13.net

This is the first in a handful of articles Llava sent in. Link (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1144229367&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&).

imo, the weakest one I sent.  But your call.  At least I actually talk about something having to do with game design in this one!

Awww. I liked this one.

Maybe it's better than I think and it's the other two that suck. I'm awful at judging my own work. My favorite stuff is awful, and everyone loves the stuff I hate.  Except when it's the other way around.

It's very hard to keep track.

Umm... D&D combat is supposed to be an abstraction.  When you miss, it doesn't always mean you miss.  It means it was deflected against armor, parried, was a grazing hit and so on.

I don't mind missing in these sorts of games personally -- all that really matters is how fast you kill something. So for something like:

10 points of damage
10 points of damage
10 points of damage
10 points of damage
10 points of damage
10 points of damage

or

20 points of damage
miss
20 points of damage
miss
20 points of damage

it's all the same to me. In fact I usually turn off the miss displays if the UI allows it.

As for throwing rocks or shooting arrows at targets, it's one thing if they are stationary, quite another if you or the target is moving. The same goes for sword fighting where your opponent has an opportunity to dodge, block or parry your swing -- but if you do connect it's pretty much over. It's sort of like the difference between the D&D and RuneQuest combat systems. D&D with its scalable hit points is more about nicking your opponent to death (assuming a reasonably high level). With RuneQuest which doesn't have levels or scaling hit points you end up missing most of the time against an equally matched opponent (your chance to hit is countered by his equal chance to parry or block) but that one good swing will take out a limb or kill him outright.

The worst problem with the combat systems isn't even the built in ineffectiveness (I've commented before that it is some sort of weird geek perception of athleticism) it's that the leveling system works backwards in many situations.

At level 1 you are usually capable of fighting something as EQUALLY skilled as your self and winning most of the time.  By level 50 in most systems you can not dare to fight something as equally skilled as yourself, you will get your ass handed to you.  You might have overall improved, afterall you can kill those level 1 spiderlings 10 at a time now, but your rate of improvement has been outstripped by your opposition.  Yes, that's right, all your hard work has made you a loser, isn't that fun?

Ha!  So true.

I'm going to champion, of all things, Shadowbane, as having one of the better roll-the-dice-for-combat systems.  First game that I know of which had 'stances' such that you could elect to go on the offensive and risk taking more hits while swinging harder and faster vs. the defensive vs. deciding to be 'precise'.  Intuitive, simple... well, it's SB so I won't go to the 'elegant' card.

But as said above... I never felt like I am generally 'missing' of my own accord but that whatever I'm trying to attack is blocking, dodging or otherwise trying to avoid being hit.  And don't beat yourself up, Llava, you rite gooder then me.

I have to hand it to you, llava, you hit the nail on the head for my feelings on this topic. I detest that I am playing a hero who is missing. If it is a hero against an arch-villain, then perhaps there will be some misses due to dodging and mad skills on both sides, but otherwise, Captain Kickass should be smacking all of the minions, even, as you suggest, if it doesn't do any notable damage.

Yeah, even if you hit for nothing, what is the point of missing?  Block, dodge, sure, but just miss when standing 2 feet apart?  Not likely.

Like that early book on RPGs, whose suggested combat system would result in a something like 10-20% of the combatants maiming themselves in battle through critical failures.

A 25% (or higher!) miss rate seems alright to me (or, uh, _more_ alright) in a combat system where it takes 4 shots to bring down a target, rather than one where it takes 20.

--GF

At least you didn't mention DDO, where if you are a rogue, you only hit 25% of the time.  :evil:

The biggest problem is that it takes no effort on the part of the defender to cause the player to miss. It really is just abstract dice rolling. The defender most of the time can't elect to block, or do much of anything to make the attacker miss. They are static target dummies. Attack becomes the only real option for most participants, so you have to build in some misses or the combat is over too quickly.

Missing wouldn't be nearly so bad if it actually took effort on the part of the target.

Gemstone III (or IV if you will) has had stances for almost 20 years.

Mmo combat sucks. I like BF1942. I aim, I shoot, if I aimed well, I hit. If not, or if I'm some bunnytard, or if I'm spraying bullets, I miss. My bad. Even better, if I go prone, shoot in controlled bursts and aim for the head, I get rewarded with a more effective hit. BF2 kinda lost that, unfortunately...but it's still miles ahead of mmo.

Taking on the topic title...just having a +70 "to hit" on a weapon is a stupid artifact from AD&D. I could maybe see a slightly higher damage output due to construction, say a bronze tulwar vs a damascan steel one.

Even worse are the ridiculous stat bonuses so common to mmo in the post-EQ world. It's not magic, it's ridiculous. Every mmo is now the most egregious case of monty-haulism that could never have been conceived in the worst nightmare of a convention tourney judge's fevered imagination.

So, we removed misses in SWG so that we could resolve combat visually client-side (i.e. immediately), then do the to-hit rolls, etc. serverside after the attack had already been displayed. So a "miss" is a hit-for-less-damage and a "hit" is a hit-for-more-damage. Overall, it all balances out the same in terms of the numbers (as Trippy described); but resolving the visuals client-side makes combat look-n-feel faster paced.

The down-side of this approach is that it can be difficult to provide feedback to the players when something is "hard to hit" or not (due to a defensive buff or just because it's much higher level than you, etc.); I think they're tweaking the damage-number flytext size-and-color to address that, but it's definitely not as clear as a *whiff* for no-damage when you miss and a *crack* for some-damage when you hit.

Anyway, that might have been the motive behind not having "misses" in guild wars, too, rather than it strictly being some gaggle of designers thinking, "Yaknowwhat? Missing sucks."

Question is, is it really a problem that it's harder for the player to determine if he's winning? It sounds more to me as an improvement.

I don't much pay attention to the animations or the sounds of combat in these games, in fact I play with my speakers off.  All I care about in combat is that the targets bar is going down faster than mine. Until I read this article I never even noticed that you didn't miss in Guild Wars, funny thing I did notice that a miss in DDO, beta anyway, produced the same sound as a hit which seemed confusing, then I remembered to turn off my speakers.  As far as the article's main point I guess it doesn't matter to me if they call it a miss, a dodge or 0 damage it's all the same in the end.  I suppose it's easier for the animation guys  if they don't have to make a miss animation but otherwise what's the difference?

Oh we definitely saw it as an improvement; but just like anything else, there are trade-offs.

Making saber-block "work" when combat visuals are resolved client-side, for example: had to be an all or nothing thing because we don't want to do any sort of dice-rolling on the client.

I think the trade-offs are worth it with a fast-paced combat system, but it's probably unnecessary for a slower-paced system.

That sounds like a good system to me, Dundee.

It was really City of Heroes that made mestart to get irritated with missing.

They have a system in place that'll most likely prevent you from  missing 4 times in a row. 3 times in a row, sure,  no problem, but that 4th one will almost  always hit.

At low levels, this system  is so visible it's not even funny.  I plan attack chains around it  ("Oh I missed, okay, use two more wimpy attacks, surprise, miss, miss, and now the big one. BOOM.   Okay, good.") and it really detracts from the fun of the combat.  Let's say I'm playing an archer-type guy.  They have a small inherent bonus to accuracy in their attacks, but you still miss one hell of a lot.  How many times have you seen Green Arrow or Hawkeye miss?  Way to make me feel like a hero.

I know that the "miss" is supposed to be an abstraction- it could be any number of things.  Well, at the very least you could tell me what things we'retalking about here.  Guild Wars will tell me WHY I missed- it was evaded, it was blocked, the arrow strayed, whatever.

And DAoC has less excuse on this- if something evades, blocks, or parries you, that's different than a miss.  So it tells you that.  But you can still just flat out "oops, miss, lol!"

Animate it.  Make a sound effect.  A weapon clanking off armor, instead of feebly striking the air.  MMGs ask a lot from player imaginations already when it comes to immersion- help us out here.

That's because most of them have not gotten past the point where what happens in the text box (or combat chat channel) is in anyway reflected by what happens on screen. That's getting better, with things like WoW's visual indicators, but it's still an artifact of Diku-suck.

Yeah, I'd argue that it works fairly well in a MUD (or in any other abstract format, like tapletop RPGs), but it's one of those things that dioesn't translate well to a very concrete representation like we're allegedly getting in a modern MMO.  I remember going nuts in Morrowind (not an MMO, but still...), seeing my weapons physically PASS THROUGH people and them not really appearing to get hurt.

I do see it as part of a larger problem, though, rather than something we can just band-aid up by replacing the word "miss" with the words "you deal 0 damage".  The problem I'm seeing is that animation in these games is usually very bad across the whole board.  If you want to feel like your character is engaged in epic combat, it needs to LOOK LIKE COMBAT, rather than two guys just facing each other and waving weightless weapons through their opponent's body.  The whole "you miss" thing is a symptom of this.  If I'm sword fighting a wolf or something in real life (as I do on my lunch break occasionally), it's not going to just stand there and square off against me like we're going to be graded on our form afterwards, it's going to bowl me down and try to remove my throat.  Missing an attack makes sense when you're talking about a real fight, where something's running at you or trying to scramble around you or whatever.  It doesn't make sense when you've got two guys standing three feet apart bringing awl pikes down on each others heads repeatedly.

I'm heavy into martial arts and I disagree that you should always hit. Try hitting my sensei with a rock - if you damn good you might hit him once out of 100 attempts.

Yea, well, that's a level disparity right there. Hitting one of your fellow students with a rock should be trivial for you.

It's a tough problem to try and synchronize all the animation. Even doing just two humanoids is hard enough but then multiply that by the various shaped and sized creatures in your typical fantasy game. Some games do do a better job than others, though. FF XI is one of the better ones as is CoH. Beating on EQ skeletons was great fun because of the distinct sound effect when you hit and the skellies would actually stagger (plus they had that maniacal laughter). One of the best RPGs for synchronized combat animation was actually Darklands. There it was all "auto attack"-style combat of course but it actually looked like your little sprites were sword fighting.

That's not a miss though. In terms of hit/miss, hitting your sensei would be as easy as hitting a stationary dummy of his proportions. What happens from there is he either evades or dodges depending on the system you have and there you go, the rock didn't connect. For some games hit/miss is pure abstract with all things taken into account and then you either hit or you don't. In other games dodge/parry/block/evade/whatever are all seperate events. Why can you still miss in those games if you are supposed to be some sort of hero? I'd imagine if I was some legendary swordsman I'd be able to swing my sword at a target and not accidently miss... somehow.

In an RPG system like, say, D&D, that's represented by giving him 100 hit points.  If you throw 100 rocks and each one does 1 point of damage, and each one "hits", the last one will knock him down.  In real-world terms you'd say that he dodged or deflected the first 99, and by the time the 100th one was thrown either he was tired or you were lucky, and you finally conk him in the head.

A "hit" that results in a reduction of hit points is usually conceptualized as corresponding to physical damage, but there's no law that says that a reduction in hit points doesn't correspond to being tired out, forced into a disadvantageous position ("I've got the high ground!" = "you've got only 4 hit points left!"), or any number of other situations that would eventually lead to a defeat in the real world.

Of course, in a video game it's a hell of a lot easier to draw spurting blood than to try to represent that sort of thing.  (One exception: Pirates! represents your "health" during a duel by having your character either press forward or fall back.)

I think the issue is not misses and hits (though for a lot of games, reducing the # of misses would probably be an improvement) but the issue of feeling like a hero or not.

Which, ironically, I thought was one of CoH's weak points.

I think CoH would be better if they focused around two types of mobs:  Minions and Giant Monsters.  Battles that involve you taking on 20 minions at once, or battles that involve you and 10 friends taking on a monster that's 10 times taller than you are.

The lieutenant/boss/elite boss rubric just seems really unfulfilling to me.

Exactly as schild said.  Level disparity.  He'd have leet evading skills to activate.  Note that I didn't say there should be no defenses and that everything should hit- but that defenses should be active.  Guild Wars requires you to activate a skill of some sort, usually one that lasts around 5-10 seconds, that gives you a chance to evade.  But if you're just standing still, not doing anything, no one's going to "miss" you.  And the same goes for reality.


Well obviously doing that won't fix anything.  The only time when someone should literally deal 0 damage is when the target is SO much more powerful that it really makes sense (e.g. a level 1 mage bonking Grr'Zhank, God of Stone, on the shin with an elm wand) or when the target has activated something that specifically reduces damage.  Guild Wars has things like that, WoW has things like that (woo Paladins), even CoH has that (Phase Shift).  Those things, I think, should stay.

The benefit of having everyone hit reliably, even if they do very little damage, is that it can still add up.  So if a crazy uber level 500000 foozle starts wreaking havoc in newbietown, the newbies can actually fight back and do something about it.  It'll take a long time, most of them will probably die (a few times, likely), but it's not pointless.  This goes for PvP, too.

Because hits/misses are, in my experience, always based on level of the attacker and level of the target, this makes progress towards reducing the importance of level VS skill in these kinds of games.  It allows for more strategy in PvE and PvP, because your  tools are not denied to you- you know, no matter what, it's at least worth a shot.

Like I said, it's too late for most games out there.  They'd have to completely rebalance.  And, sorry SWG- it sounds cool on paper, it really does- it's just plain not a good idea to completely change the game that people picked up in the store.  Reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg joke:
"I hate turkeys.  Spend too much time in the lunchmeat section of the grocery store and you'll start to get pissed off at turkey.  You'll see turkey ham, turkey bacon, turkey salami.  Someone needs to tell the turkey- Man, just be yourself."
Not exactly the point I'm making, but it's a funny joke.  For the most part- people who are playing your game are doing so because they like it the way it is.  They might not like EVERYTHING about it, but chances are that they're pretty used to the core system and wouldn't want that to change.

So this isn't my call for CoH and all the other MMGs to rebalance and get rid of missing.  But couldn't future designers please, please think about this a bit and ask the question, "Is missing actually fun?"

If you want to actually go for more realism (which is usually a bad idea) normally what happens is everything is blocked/dodged/mitigated until one of the combatants makes a mistake or an extraordinary effort which creates an opening.  One hit is usually all it takes because if the people fighting are any good the hit will be delivered to a critical area which, if it doesn't incapacitate out right, will severely hamper the opponents ability to defend.

I've fenced, I've trained kung fu, I've boxed, etc.., the above holds true always, if there is one opponent who is much more skilled than another then the opportunity to strike just comes much faster and the strike itself is just that much more guaranteed to be perfect, a knock out blow, a break, stab at the heart, whatever.  Even in shooting, the one who shoots the first accurate shot is the one who wins.

There is no room for error in real fighting and the only way a lesser skilled person wins against a greater is by luck or a critical misjudgement by the person with greater skill.

I'm not sure that system would be a lot of fun in MMOG land.

The counter to this is that when you have two equally skilled opponents at the top of their game facing each other something trancedent happens and you can throw all the rules out the window and people will pay $1000's of dollars to watch it happen and talk about it for years because it is just that good.

They did post the numbers on it.

If you use an attack with a really huge chance of missing you screw up the streakbreaker. I think it's something like, if you've got a 90% net chance to hit you can only miss once, at 80% twice, at 70% 3 times... if you have an attack with like a 10% chance to hit you can miss 100 times in a row before it kicks in. The length of the streak is determined by the least accurate attack in it, so you can't deliberately game the streakbreaker by turning on auto-brawl.

--GF

I auto-brawl with my Brute anyway because I HAVE FURY!

No, but you plan attacks around it.

If you just missed 3 times, and you have a BIG damage attack handy, it's stupid to use Brawl right then.  In fact, even if your big damage attack isn't handy, it's probably better just to wait for it to recharge than to brawl.

RE: Realism

Not exactly what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about the kind of combat we imagine in our heads when we think about fights like these. Of course it's never going to be exactly like in the movies (the hero one shots everything- wouldn't be a lot of fun, really), but there are steps they can take towards getting us closer to that happy funzone median.  Think, I think, is one.

Another thing would be to make healing much, much, much more rare.  Last I can remember reading any fantasy novel, watching any movie, there was never anyone spamming any sort of heal.

I love the observation that as I invest more time in a game and advance I actually become "worse" -- clarity FTW.  More please.

Also, missing sux, no arguments there.  Forced hits are as bad as forced misses, but this is all the product of an auto-attack system.  I did like in SWG how the animations notify you of the situation, and that's one of the serious flaws in DDO (the combat spam is poor and there are no animations for all combat events).

 Finally, I haven't played enough console FPS or near real-time combat games to know enough if more combat "realism" is bad in an MMO, is it? 

It's not, if you give players tools at their disposal.  A big one is the ability to switch (for ranged attacks) between predictive targetting (i.e. your shots lead the target according to their speed and direction) and straight shooting (i.e. your shots aim exactly at where the enemy's standing right now) at the press of a button, as well as the attack height (for melees, whether you aim at head, torso, or legs - for mages/archers, whether you shoot projectiles in a high arc, for instance going over hills, or a low arc / almost flat, which will hit the target a lot faster).

For instance, playing an archer in AC1, I'd have one hand on WXSD (X for backward, with Z and C for strafing) and the other hand on the text cursor movement keys (home, insert, end, pgup, pgdwn, etc.) that would alter my targetting style, attack height, and attack power (AC1 used a charge-up bar to determine the tradeoff between speed and power in your attacks - same DoT, but differing situational usefulness).

The actual physical missing made it interesting sometimes - you could shoot/swing over the head of a rat, or under a hovering wasp.

I don't know that being able to switch attack modes is really an important part of realistic combat.  You could theoretically have a realistic auto-attack system, if that's what you were after.  Accurately simulate how someone would fight, how would they react if you cut them here, how would it impair their mobility, et cetera.  Handle it all automatically.  Might not be fun, but it could still be realistic.

As to whether or not realistic combat would be fun, I dunno.  It would be totally different from any MMO on the market, obviously, and I don't know how players would accept it.  I think it could work well as a crafting/social game, or as a MMORTS or something, but I think it wouldn't really mesh well with the "slaughtering armies of monsters" theme that most MMOs use today.

I do think there's a lot to be said for the middle ground, here.  You can have highly unrealistic combat that still looks realistic enough to be exciting.  That, I think, would be an excellent thing for mass market games to aim at.  You can make your game a lot more exciting without having to reinvent the wheel when it comes to gameplay.


I haven't played CoH or FFXI, but most of the games I have played could have withstood some serious improvement.  In theory, synching the animation shouldn't be a problem.  Once my client gets the info that I swing and miss, it should be able to trigger the melee_miss_01 animation in both my character and my local instance of my opponent's character.  And yeah, it would be more work than the WoW method to include all those custom animations, but I don't think it would be unworkable.  Maybe fifty or a hundred more one second animations per skeleton would give you a HUGE amount of versatility.  Your character getting beaned in the side of the head by a iron maul or by the paw of an angry dragon are going to be fairly similar.  Your character getting tackled by a wolf or an angry bandit can look fairly similar.  More work, yes, but I think it would be a good investment.  In a game where my character can wear upwards of a thousand different kinds of armor, it seems really odd that he's only got maybe five minutes of animation total.

edit: middle ground, not missile ground... oops.

A practical consideration is that anything with a delay more than 100 ms starts to become noticable (particularly to caffinated preteens).

On a good pipe and ideal conditions its 30ms to and another 30 from the server leaving the server only about 40ms to do everything it's got to do and get back to you.  On a bad day you are going to be well over that 100ms limit no matter how fast your server response is.

Real life demands that you probably can't have animations that respond to particular aspects of an attack without people calling your efforts a 'piece of laggy shit'.  Unless, of course, you work for Red Dragon Software.  Prediction can solve some of this but occaisionally it's going to be wrong and then you are really going to pay a penalty.

Anyway, short of mandating connection speeds and latency for users it's not an easy problem.

See, I really don't have a problem with that approach. But I'm sure most VC do.

Ahh, sorry, misunderstood what you meant by 'realistic combat'.

When I was fleshing out my spec sheet for Magical Samurai Gank Squad (Someday it'll be possible, until then I dream), I thought about this a lot - and here was the solution I came up with:

First, I'm operating under the assumption of 200 ms lag.  That seems to be a standard enough experience in MMOs that if you make a game playable at 200ms lag, you'll do alright.

Here's what I came up with:  Your character has a sword.  So does the other guy's.  (Hence, the Samurai) Assume that you're both fast-moving and twitchy characters, about like AC1 with 400 runspeed or so.  None of this WoW/EQ/DAoC-like sluggishness.

you're both running around trying to hit one another.  If you want to strike with your sword, using left-click you drag your sword through the air with an arc that you want to attack.  The arc becomes visible to the other player when you drag it, and after releasing from the arc your guy charges up for about 1 sec and then swings through the arc.

Assuming lag, that gives the other player about 0.8 secs to get out of the arc of your sword.

Wouldn't you both end up dodging each other quite a lot, then?  Why yes, you would.

Which is why you'd want to fight one another in groups, and getting the other guy into the arc of a sword would be a strategic challenge.  Hence, the Gank Squad.

Layer spells and special abilities in the usual tap-a-key-to-cast sense.  (Hence, the Magical portion)

Magical Samurai Gank Squad.  It will be so beautiful someday.

And yet another example of why ideas actually have no value.

Very true - nearly every 'Mod team' you see is one guy who thinks he's 'the idea man' and looking for everyone else to execute it.

Me personally, I'm interested in tools that allow idea people to transform themselves into execution-people without too much effort.  Case in point: Sauerbraten. (http://www.sauerbraten.org/)

IMHO, if you're looking for new and interesting things to do at current latency, all the really cool options are in 2D - something akin to Sonic the Hedgehog, for instance.

It's not a tough problem, it's pretty simple. How is it a tough problem?

The server tells the client that my character swung at the enemy and he blocked. So then on the client side I play the character swinging animation and enemy blocking animation. That's all there is to it.

Now you do run into issues if after you swing you start moving, or change equipment, or something to that effect. But if you are just standing there auto-attacking it's pretty simple.

That stupid "Fly For Free" game or whatever it was called had perfectly synched animation. FFXI is fine unless you start twitching around.

It's not hard - people just neglect it. It's MUCH MUCH harder to make a real action game. MMORPG is just playing canned animations with no real interaction.

Yeah it wouldn't be hard, you just have to calculate hits/misses in advance, so that by the time the client needs to show the swing it already knows what to do. The problem of course is that this only works on autoattack. Anything that requires user input (unless there's a queing system or w/e) is going to make it impossible to work shit out in advance.

Have you done any 3D animation before? It not an easy task to align the swing which could come from a number of different angles (think how many different weapon attack animations there are in something like WoW) and block animations which would also have multiple versions to match the different swing angles so they don't look stupid and that's with two equally sized humanoid figures. Now throw in radically different sized humanoids and a whole slew of non-humanoid creatures and that's an incredible amount of animation work that would have to be done.

The other problem is latency. Now it does matter that your round trip time might be a half second or more. Your choices are either to have the block show up a half second or more after you swing or you don't actually swing until a half second after you hit the button or key.

To put it another way if it really was a simple problem wouldn't everybody be doing it?

Pre-rendered animation simply will not be capable of such variety.  For there to be this level of detail, combat will have to be integrated with a physics engine.  A fairly advanced one if it is going to look half-way decent.

I dunno about that; I think you could get a solid amount of variety out of a hundred or so animations.  You'd just have to make sure everything fits together is all.  Let's say you can get hit high or low.  From the front, back, left, or right.  And one of, say, three strengths: light, heavy, and knockdown.  Say we animate hits and blocks differently, too.  That's just (2x4x3x2) 48 situations for the entire defensive set.  It's not going to be something you can bang out in an hour, but it's not some insane, unattainable goal (for a moderately high budget game, that is).

You don't need to do specific defensive animations for every attack individually, you just need to make sure that every attack falls into one of those categories.  It's not ideal, I'll concede that.  But I'd argue that it is technically feasable, it would look FAR better than something like WoW's non-animation, and it would be more realistically attainable than on-the-fly realistic skeletal calculations.

Each race, unless they are identical which is boring, would have its own set of 48 animations.  It starts to add up.  At some point it becomes easier to let physics take over than to handcraft everything.

Now I'm no expert on animations but I'm fairly certain that this is done fairly easy with bones, which can be scaled. As long as it has a body shape which resembles a human ( which they always do ), it's only a matter of export/import.

Ever get in fights lately?  I play rugby, so I have to put up with my fair share, and get to see a few close up.  Even using their fists, not weapons, you'd be amazed how much people miss.  Half the shots are going wide.  And this in a sport where most are not unaccustomed to the noble art.

And as someone said, if your DM is saying, every time you fail your to-hit roll, "you miss", then *he*, not the system, is missing out the drama.  It should be "your swing looks destined to take the top of the orc's head off, but he just ducks in time", or "you throw all your weight behind your swing, but your hammer does no more than dent the gnoll's shield, glancing off it in a shower of sparks".  Purple, over-excited stuff like that...

Sure you can "scale" the animation but that doesn't mean it will look right. Think about a horizontal swing of a weapon at shoulder height. For two models that are the same height that's basically a swing to the neck (a la a decapitation attack). To block it you need to raise your weapon or shield to shoulder/neck height to the proper side (your left if the opponent is right handed). Now imagine it's a Gnome attacking an Ogre. For the Gnome she's now swinging at the Ogre's kneecaps and the block animation for the Ogre is well over the head of the Gnome.

Like I said originally it's a tough problem which is not to say it's impossible to do but you have to have enough constraints to make it a tractable problem with current technology. There are games out there that do show this sort of synchronized combat animation with weapons such as 3D fighting games like Soul Calibur and games like Onimusha however all those games "cheat" in various ways right now. With 3D fighting games like Soul Calibur there are no extreme differences in height and you are fighting on a line a la Street Fighter (yes I know you can sidestep but you don't block/parry during that, it's a dodge move) so you don't have to animate trying to block an attack from the side. In Onimusha defending an attack usually means the attack "bounces" off the defender which is obviously not realistic but it simplifies trying to have to make the weapons line up properly. Also in Omimusha the game automatically rotates your character to face your attacker when you block so that it doesn't look like you've stuck your sword/weapon out in front of you to block an attack from the side. These games also have many fewer unique models than your typical MMORPG which means you can tweak a lot of the animations by hand to make them look better within a reasonable amount of time (and money).

Oblivion's current system is love for me. If you swing and your weapon connects with soemething, you hit. If your oppenent gets a block up in time, your damage is reduced. Your total damage is based on your skill with the weapon. It is not reduced because your opponent is higher level than you (I hate that system), though it might be reduced because he has better armor.

Now it works in Oblivion for a couple reasons. Animations aren't an issue, since combat is first person - if your target is short, you have to lean down and be aiming at it to hit it. Oh, and the second reason it works in Oblivion - it's a single player game.

As long as client/server lag is an issue, its going to be tough to base any system on collision detection in combat. Oh well, ignore me, carry on

In professional boxing, a 50% hit rate means someone is getting killed.

I don't like the idea of removing ToHit vs Damage for a simple reason:  It removes depth / tactical choices.

Say you have a choice of using a slow hard hitting weapon, or a fast low damage weapon with the same DPS (against a average mob).

So if you fight a mob you've learned is hard to hit, you use the fast weapon.  If you fight a mob that has a lot of hitpoints, you use the slower one, or it doesn't matter, depending on crit ratios, etc.

I always wished MMORPGs would make more interesting types of mobs, and have the basic model kind of reflect it, without even changing how the engine or physics or animation works, in other words just data and basic model.  But most don't seem to bother.

If you are fighting some high level giant, the ToHit chance should be almost 100%, but its armor and hitpoints are way up there.  But another equal high level monster is some kind of small fast moving mob, thats really hard to hit, but if you do hit it, its dead. 

Likely the reason is that AOE magic would make it too easy to take out high level low HP mobs, so they can't do it, unless they made them almost immune, but then magic only users would complain.

To me the more variation, the more tactical depth, the more choices == more fun, since more to learn, esp. if there are 'hints' by the mobs look.  I don't care about perfect animation, or real-time combat.  To me MMORPG combat is over before it starts, assuming you have the right equipment for the job (weapons, armor, buffs, potions, level, friends etc.)  that's the game, not the actual combat.  The actual incident of combat is just telling you if you are prepared or not, maybe with some randomness tossed in so you are never absolutley sure, and learning about the specifics of a mob type.   I understand how some people don't care for that, they want 'twitch' or more interactive combat, fine, but that doesn't make statistical, round based combat 'bad' or 'invalid' or 'unrealistic', its just a different abstraction.  Both styles could be equally 'valid'.

A lot of the solutions sound like over-kill to me. I don't need manual control of my characters dexterity, it has its own attribute representing that feature. Nor do I need precise animations to indicate the exact connection between attack and defence. The first one ends up with "jousting" and latency over-riding the in-game logic. If your character is a weedy mage you shouldn't be dodging like a class that specializes in that ability no matter how good your real life reflexes are. The second is just eye candy, all that's really needed is a visual indication that my character is trying to carry out the task I set it (eg an attack animation) and some indication why it hasn't happened yet (opponent dodges, parries, blocks... or just has a heap more HP).

I'm satisfied with WoW in this context, although obviously more could be done to make it prettier. attacks, special attacks and all the major defensive moves have signature animations to make it clear what's happening. And a character who's dodging, blocking and parrying actually does look like an active participant in a serious fight. The only real additions would be visible damage (which is a lot of work for the real thing, WoW has blood gouts and hp bars) and some indication of critical hits.

I've been watching a bit of UFC lately, and it shows an interesting combination of "realistic" fighting factors.

Misses being common against highly skilled, comparable individuals as they duck, weave, dodge etc against one another. That's part of being in a fighting stance. Just because you don't spam your "dodge" button doesn't mean the target's standing there like they're waiting for a bus. I'd look at "dodge" talents and skills etc as being extraordinary dodges of attacks that would have really hit because, you know, we're talking about superheroic combat. Worrying overly about player-active defensive combat really requires a twitch game.

"Hit points" in that any number of not-knockout blows can slowly bang away at a fighter as their face starts to take on the appearance of tenderised meat while they still manage to continue fighting and being a dangerous opponent (Shamrock vs Ortiz would be a good example). Or any number of more-famous boxing matches where the same happens.

"Lucky blows". Essentially they're your critical strikes. That's where you and I dance around, missing or tapping one another, then I get a decent-force hit to your face or head which doesn't do the knockout damage, but in fact causes a stun, and if I'm fast enough I move in for the kill while you're stunned and then you're fucked. Though in computer games of nearly all types, a critical will just take a bunch of HP off the big red bar and not be anything like that.

Oh, and I liked this article a lot more than your "RP'ers are teh Gayz0rz" one, which seemed to mostly be about you saying that you're not homophobic, but you're also not a fag. And that RP stuff is gay.

I would agree here, except that most games consider an "evade" different from a "miss".  City of Heroes is the exception that I can think of, where anything that doesn't land is considered a miss whether it's because you suck or they dodged, but Dark Age of Camelot would be a counter-example.  If you are Evaded, that is different from Missing.

If the dodging party did some sort of dodge animation when avoiding an attack, it would go a long way toward adding some level of interest and drama to the combat.  How a fight looks is important.

And regarding all the above "realistic fights" comments:
I believe it's been said a bunch of times already, but we're talking about "dramatic" fights, not "realistic" ones.  Most of the things that happened in, for instance, The Lord Of the Rings were not "realistic".  They were "dramatic".

The confusion is my fault because I drew a realistic example (throwing a rock at something) before drawing a dramatic example (Legolas fires his bow at Drizzt!).

I made the additional mistake of using the word "Realism" when it wasn't exactly what I was describing.  So, my bad on that one.  MMG fights shouldn't be like real fights, or most fights would be resolved with one hit.

I know what you mean by dodge/evade being different to "miss", and I understand that unarmed combat is different to swinging at each other with pointy sticks, but really, watch some UFC and you'll see plenty of real misses as well as evades and dodges. Would those shots have hit if the target was standing there unawares, sure. But a miss in combat, against an active opponent is still a miss.

As well as that, I left in the bit of my quote above that's importnat in this discussion, since we're dealing with the Legolasses of the (fantasy) world, their "evade" or "dodge" skill would represent the superhuman dodges as opposed to the regular combat ones which (IMO) are mixed in with the regular misses. Those are your near-bullet-time super-duper punch-dodges and parries as opposed to your regular ones. Your dramatic ones instead of your mundane ones, if you weel.

Animation could be nice, but it's the kind of thing that really owes it's feasability to the speed of the game's combat spam. It wouldn't work in EQ1 for example with it's highspeed combat spam, but maybe Vanguard with it's slowed-down combat could pull something like that off.

And yeah, with Legolas shooting his bow at Drizzt, dramatically Drizzt might go bullet-time on us and doge the arrow, while realistically, it's like a rifle shot that hits or misses dependant on the shooter.

Sorry, we are talking about different things.

When you mean synchronized animations I thought you meant basic synchronization like timing and such. For example if you play FFXI vs WoW the basic timing and look of combat is a lot better in FFXI, but it doesn't do what are you are saying. There is one shield block animation and if you block it always plays.

That *is* a hard problem. What is not a hard problem is just getting the timing about right, and a lot of games don't even do that.

But really even 3D fighting games, which are ALL about combat, don't do that. That sort of thing can be faked with good animation, hit sparks, etc. If non-online games that are ONLY fighting can't do that I wouldn't hold my breath for it to happen in MMORPGs.

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About missing in general. I agree that missing adds extra complexity. In FFXI a Thief that has really high evasion can tank certain types of mobs that other tanks can't, because those mobs have bad aim but high damage. Ninjas tank with a combination of evasion and shadows that absorb damage - if enemies never missed the shadows would be absorbed way too fast and the entire system would need dramatic modification.

IMO very simple rules in MMORPGs lead to things like the tank, nuker, healer trinity. In FFXI you have different types of tanks, guys that control hate, guys that gain TP and can start skill-chains, etc, because the rules allow for that. Miss/hit is just on more dimension that you can differentiate based on.

I am a fan of simple rules for most things. Simple tactics are fine are long as there is some depth in strategy. But most MMORPGs don't have a lot of depth of strategy, they are mostly numbers based on want to have as many items/weapons/classes/spells etc as possible.

It's like the difference between Go and Magic:The Gathering. Go has a lot of depth, magic has a lot of breadth. Go with a bunch of extra rules wouldn't be any better, and Magic with most of the rules taken out would be worse. Simplicity works when the rules you do have allow for a lot of rules interaction and depth.

Also it may be my perspective as someone with some martial arts training and knowledge and casual fan of things like UFC and boxing but missing doesn't make me feel weak or underpowered. That's just life - a lot of the time you miss.

Just to be clear, I'm not claiming that anything less than movie quality animation is bad, and a sign of slothful, incompetent animators.  But there is a HUGE gulf between, say, fighting game quality animation and the animation in a lot of roleplaying games (WoW included among them), and I DO think that it would be both feasible and effective to narrow that gap a little bit, at least.  When I'm standing fifteen feet away from a Tauren, I can't tell if every finger on his hand is individually modelled or not, but when he swings his weapon at an enemy and that enemy doesn't react like he's just been hit with a weapon, I do notice that.  If your goal is to design an immersive game that feels like a real place, then an important step is making the parts of that world look like they realistically interact with each other, and animation is a crucial component of that.  I'm not arguing that we need dynamic animations for every possible scenario that must sync perfectly with every possible action of every possible character in every possible circumstance.  I AM saying that a lot of games, most obviously WoW, could stand some serious improvement to their animation, and that this would help a lot in making combat seem more like actual fighting and less like someone rolling dice and telling you whether you hit or not.

Yeah I agree. There is no reason why it can't look like guys are actually fighting.

This topic is one reason it's great having a non-gamer girlfriend who hasn't ever watched games being played, but enjoys watching me play games. She is always quick to point out things we tend to ignore, like "Why are you swinging your sword a foot left of that orc?" or how beautiful ingame water is (EQ2 and Oblivion), but how shitty the transition between water and land is. You know, I never thought about that.

It's also funny when I stop to marvel at some cool trick, like bloom or an especially nice normal map, and she just expects it to look like that, not having seen the loooong progression to get to where we are.

I went through something similar with my wife. After plunking down 3+ bills for a new video card to run Oblivion, I showed it to my wife in all its high res glory (I had been playing it at 800x600 before). Her comment? "It looks the same to me."

I never read GU, but this is a good illustration of what I was talking about with this:
http://www.gucomics.com/archives/view.php?cdate=20060501

One of the things that initially excited me about MxO was the claim that fighting animations would be dynamic, and that a "hit' would actually be animated as a "hit" by ensuring that the fist/foot of one character connected with a predetermined "contact point" on the opponent's model.

Sadly, when I saw MxO in beta, it was running at about 1 FPS with horrible lag, so I never got to see any of those snazzy animations.  Ah well.