Do you think you could choose a specific limb or body part to aim at?
Based on my experience playing Dead Space, my answer is yes. Yes I can.
Example scenario:
"Boy, that freakishly fast bad guy is barreling towards me much too quickly for me to kill him in time. I know! I shall shoot his leg off, thus rendering his speed moot."
Now, if I were to actually VERBALIZE that in the midst of combat, I would die immediately. But it is instinctual! Once you know that you CAN do something, you're good to go. Besides, a damage system that complex could truly reward player skill. Give a new player a +10 sword of instagibbing and put him against a veteran with a dagger - the newbie will learn that it's hard to swing a sword without tendons.
True, true. But that's with a ranged weapon, and a highly-accurate hitscan weapon. Trying to strike a body part while it's flailing around a half-foot away from your face is completely different from leveling a plasma cutter at a Necromorph's leg from the far side of the room.
(And arrows, given that they have both travel time and projectile arcing, aren't exactly a great alternative.)
Detailed combat would fail in a non-turn-based environment. In DF, you can spend a few minutes analyzing every minute injury that you've suffered, because the goblins will kindly wait until your next input before resuming Operation Dismemberment. In a realtime game, you don't have that luxury. While you're wondering whether that last attack fractured your target's upper arm, your opponent will be swinging wildly and handily killing you. Imagine if DF was realtime - you'd spam the standard "bump into the target" attack, and if you were victorious, you'd then worry about the awesome damage system.
Being one hundred percent intentional every time is not a prerequisite for being interesting or functional. If a zombie's arm abruptly comes off, evidently you've severed its arm and that now has an impact on battle- the fact that you weren't necessarily trying for that or that your response to this is to continue to flail at it in hopes of finishing it off doesn't mean there's no effect, or that the effect isn't interesting. This is only more true of yourself, since the aftereffects can be relevant in more than just battle, and especially more than that one battle.
Now, here we've got a slight disagreement. As far as I'm concerned, if a zombie's arm suddenly comes off during combat, and you didn't
intend for said arm to come off, then that's no better than random chance. It's the same as applying a "X% chance to remove a random limb on hit" ability. Which, in turn, manifests as a "25% chance to cause X effect" ability. Which certainly doesn't require some overly complex wound simulation to implement!
Heck, even something as abstract as registering that "your arm has been injured!" would require the ability to aim at discrete limbs. Do you think you could choose a specific limb or body part to aim at? Without precision aiming, a complex damage system is nothing more than a difficult-to-understand hit point system - if you can't aim at specific regions, then you're gaining nothing but useless 'realism'.
Yes, I do. Probably not every time on all enemies, but I'd consider that a good thing anyway.
Hehe, that'll teach me to ask rhetorical questions. I've never fought a battle in Minecraft that didn't come down to "OSHI OSHI KILL IT KILL IT!!!", followed by considerable random flailing.
I'll admit, though, that a slower-paced combat system might allow for specific targeting. Likewise, while I've been assuming that the combat would be similar to Minecraft, FantasyScape is obviously its own game and it's not entirely reasonable to assume their combat will be as similar as the rest of the game seems to be. I'm just not convinced that anything beyond the simplest "damage to limbs" systems would be of any benefit in a non-turn-based game.
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Topic: FantasyScape - The new Minecraft? (Read 16355 times)