Toady: The main thing with the martial arts is just fighting against other people, and 'martial arts' used in the most general sense, so it would include fencing, wrestling, boxing type stuff. So a simple example of martial art moves would just be something like boxing where you'd have people that are unskilled using their hands just throwing these punches where they just do their attack with the punch, and it might be that you can aim your shot - if someone has no skill at all and they're just fighting they can aim at someone's head - so when we put in aimed strikes you could throw a strike at the head, but then there would also be people who have some kind of skill in a particular randomly generated skill who might learn something like a left jab, and then the left jab would be more efficient, faster, have a longer range, than someone going all wild, and it would be better to learn those things. Then there's the idea of having different guards, just in a general sense perhaps, like you're holding your hands in front of your head ... It would be a really loose concept in general, because people generally aren't holding both of their hands to the left of their head, it doesn't need to get like that. Although we were thinking of having it so that you start with a general guard and you could move it higher or lower depending on ... like if you were fighting a dog or something it's not like you should be totally covering up the top of your head ... and then we were thinking ... there's this whole change of the combat flow thing where our overall goal is that if you stick a human in the arena and another human in the arena, and given them the same equipment and the same skills ... Right now if you play one and you assume control and you have those two guys fight each other you still basically do the roguelike thing where you press arrow arrow arrow and fight and you're flipping a coin to see if you're going to live. And there's sometimes when things dodge or when you fall over and you have to decide whether you're going to stand up or throw another strike or step back so that you can wait for the guy to come in so you can get a first strike on him, that kind of thing: so there's some skill involved that isn't just flipping the coins. But it's still the case that ultimately your chances aren't very good. I'm not saying that situation's necessarily going to change that much in terms of your survivability but we should at least make it more fun. You should be more survivable, you should at least be able to be more cautious about things, but basically what we're getting at is that you shouldn't just swing and then have the other person swing back, this is where we're getting at the idea of these reaction moments. So you could be standing there and someone could swing at you, but instead of how it is now where you press the button, it does the attack and then there's a delay of ten steps where you're recovering yourself so that you can attack again, when you attack it would start swinging an attack and then that attack is going to hit after five steps, and so during that time it could bust out and be like you see this incoming swing and you have a chance to react sometimes. So your reaction could be 'I want to try and block this thing' or 'I want to jump out of the way' or 'I'm going to try my little jujitsu move I've been practicing where I grab his wrist and twist him and get him on the ground', where you'd be balancing risks, balancing your skills and being more involved in the combat even though ultimately it's going to come down to some dice rolls still. Because there's that whole thing of if you've got an action game then you've got the player's skill as the determining fact - the player, the user of the program's skill - whereas if you've got an RPG it's more the character's skills that matter in the outcome of the combat and you just make some strategic decisions. The RPG part has to be respected a lot in this game, but you're going to be able to have more decisions to make. So if you end up doing something like someone throws a kick at your head and you have a high guard you'll have a chance to block it, but if you react to it you might be able to block the side of your head that it's coming toward, like how you actually have to be proactive if you want to stop someone from kicking you in the head. And you might then up with something like your left arm guarding the left side of your head ... we don't want to make it too complicated, but if your body is broken up into three zones or something, and your guard can just be general or you might be guarding one of those zones more than others but after you do a specific block or something for a time one of your grasping limbs might be blocking a particular side of your head just briefly. It's not something where you're going to be controlling yourself like a marionette but it's just going to be for text and the situation that it describes the announcements.
Captnastic: 'You raise your hand to block', 'you bring your shield down', that sort of stuff?
Toady: Yeah, and it'll be talking about that in the announcements and it will also lead to situations, so if someone tries to kick you in the side of your head and you raise your arm to block it, it says that, but then if some kobold comes up with a dagger and tries to stab you in the gut then that left hand is not going to be available for your defence without a good reaction roll. So multiple opponents should be harder and you'll be strategically trying to get into situations where you're not surrounded. Even more than usual: right now they get bonuses to attack you but you're not really tied up the same way. So that should help a bit. For people who don't want to deal with that, especially if you're fighting people you know you can beat you can just have it do the thing it's going to do with them which is select the options for you, so if you get attacked it selects an option for you, so you can play it the same way if you want and it'll just have more interesting text for you to read. But you should also be able to make the decisions, and that should change things a lot. We have that advantage in a turn based environment to be able to let you interact more with what's going on and stop and think about things and so on, so we should take advantage of that. It should turn out pretty well, we just don't want to overcomplicate by having directional attacks on each part of the bodies ... but the zones thing is a little tricky too, if you're laying down you'd have your head zone and your body zone and your leg zone but they'd all be low on the ground.
The things we're thinking about is like, we want to be able to do things like blocking head kicks or whatever in specific ways, so it would say what your arms are doing, but you don't want to walk around with ... When you see people fighting they're moving their arms, they might be holding their left arm near their head and their right arm near their body, but then they'll switch it up and they'll have the right arm near their head and the left arm near their body, and it would be really annoying to have to switch every turn to get that behaviour, it's like 'I want to do this and this and then step toward the guy, and we're still twenty feet away from each other, and then I want to do this and this ...' So there'd be just this general guard concept and that kind of specific blocking would be something that you'll only do when you're being attacked. Now there are exceptions to that, like if you want to hold both of your arms blocking the back of your head when you're running away or something ... you run away, you're being shot at, you hold both of your arms over the back of your head, maybe your arms will get shot instead of the back of your head ... It'd just be a funny and embarrassing way to go out, but you'd be able to say 'I want to do that'. That would be in an improved wrestling menu or something where you'd pick the limb and pick what you want to do with it, but we don't want to get too Twistery, we don't want to get too strange. It's unrealistic to have the arms act completely independent of each other, that's just not how it works; there's some independence but you don't want to have 'I want to punch him in the head with my right hand and simultaneously punch him in the gut with my left hand while I'm kicking him with both of my legs' ... It'd be kind of goofy. I guess when people are clapping ears, or whatever happens in the action movies, that would be an attack simultaneously, but it's not like those attacks are knocking anybody out, so you'd get severe minuses for your velocity if you're not putting your body into it, you're just swinging both of your arms at once and your whole body can't be used to increase the momentum in either direction so it ends up being wimpy. So we'll just account for that stuff, and we don't want it to be much more complicated to use than it is now, it's half just getting the text to be good and getting it so that multiple opponents are way more difficult: things like that. So it should be fun, it ultimately comes down to - because we've got character skill to account for - it still ultimately comes down to some coin flipping, but you can build your advantages and take advantage of things and take advantage of the AI making mistakes more than you could previously. We're not going to be satisfied with it until just creating two guys in an arena and having them fight is something that you'd want to do for fun sometimes. Right now you do it just to see them explode, or you're testing a mod, but it doesn't sell itself as a thing to do on its merits as a game. Hopefully when we're done with all the martial arts and guards that'll be a lot more fun, and you'll be able to do things like, when we get the mounts we'll probably allow mounts in the arena then too so you can test them out and have fun with that, learning how to use them.
Rainseeker: How are you going to plan on improving the skills in adventure mode as far as martial arts is concerned. Are there going to be a lot of different martial arts skills or is there just one that you practice, or do you go to seek a trainer, or how are you planning ...
Toady: We're thinking that you'd start with something ... they're probably going to be entity dependent to some extent. There are questions to be answered there. There are general martial art skills, and that's what we just have under skill striker, skill sword; the actual skill that there is in the game right now. And then you tack specific techniques on top of that that aren't part of becoming familiar with sword fighting necessarily but becoming familiar with the particular style of sword fighting, like fencing. The issues come up when you're like ... is a certain move in fencing the same as it would be in kendo, or are they related, are you just using different words for the same stuff, what are the actual differences ... That kind of question is basically going to be answered, that's what sword skill is, that's the commonality, and whether we break that up into more sections or not is an open question, we're probably not going to at first. That means that when you learn a combat style it would basically be an entity thing that would be a specific thing like kung fu or fencing or whatever, and that would be something that if you start as a fighter in an entity you would have some of that information, some of that skill already, some of the specific moves that you can use when you're fighting. Then it's a matter of ... there are a bunch of other skilled fighters in the entity and as you build your reputation just like people would be throwing free items and places to sleep and stuff like that at you and you'll be able to have people join up with you and go on little adventures with you if you have a good reputation because they trust you because you've been defending them against bandits and night creatures and all that kind of thing, then you can just have someone help you out, someone will want to teach you stuff, or you'll be sparring with people or whatever. It's not necessarily something that you're going to act out necessarily, it could just use the farming mechanism where you pass a season and just say 'I want to pass a season hanging out with these crazy mead hall guys and they can teach me about how to kill boars', or 'I want to hang out with these guys and learn how to box' or 'I want to hang out with these guys and learn how to fence' or 'learn how to do judo throws'. Then you'd increase your repertoire, you'd trade in your time and the years of your life for some more skills, and you could then practice them on people as well when you're actually fighting, and you could get better at them that way, but you won't learn new skills that way, unless you fight people long enough and then you suddenly realise 'I know how to do the eagle punch all of a sudden! I understand the deep mystery!' There could be things like that especially if we have universes that are move like Fist of the North Star, then that kind of thing would start to happen, but mostly we're thinking training with warriors and so on.
Rainseeker: Cool.
Toady: I don't remember if I put it up or not, but it would be funny if you learn enough stuff that you'd be able to create your own style and have it live on after you, you could teach it to other people and it'd be kind of cool to have your next guy, and there would be these guys that you were hanging out with in your previous game and they all know the punch that you named after yourself, it would be amusing. It should be pretty cool, and just trying to work that stuff into the fights and getting it so it all works together and isn't too annoying should be pretty cool.
Ollieh: (musical interlude)
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Topic: Suggestion: Shadow of the Coral Mountain-Titan (mounted wrestling) (Read 484 times)