All of this is already in the game. The tactics for companions already use decision engines. All the cutscenes have user prompts. Tracking already occurs with manual combat. The program already checks to see if a companion goes unconcious, or is injured. Bioware at one time had the program's AI controlling all the party members. The program still runs the other three depending on which one the gamer is controlling. The program could literally run the battle itself which basically is an autoresolve. The resources are already spent.
I'd say this is a bit misleading. Saying that decision engines exist within the game, so therefore any future decision engines would require no work is like saying animations for talking already exist in the game, so any new scenes that use animation wouldn't require any work, either. Which we know is not the case.
There is a decision engine so that the companion AI knows when and how to use Tactics, but there is no decision engine to calculate which tactics work best against others or to calculate things like how fast a unit moves across the field of battle, or how far they would have to travel to get to their target, or a number of other factors that the system would have to take into account. Despite logic to the contrary, such auto-resolve systems cannot just "play it all out" in the background without building additional logic and systems that replicate the events that go on in the Production environment.
If you are instead talking about having the action play out, just without player input, that would be nice (and not a huge cost), but it wouldn't speed things up much. Alternatively, if you were to offer an actual "fast-forward" button, this would need to build such a feature into the interface. In addition, there may be a very valid question of if the systems in question (especially the consoles) can HANDLE all of the action in question moving in fast forward, from a graphic-processing point of view. If not, would combat itself need to be scaled back to have less enemies/less active abilities/less visual effects, etc.? Again, you're starting to talk about doing things at a different scale and in a different manner than what the rest of the combat experience currently is.
The problem with having huge damage resistance and huge damage modifiers is that the gamer still has to play through the combat. The point is that some do not wish to play through the combat. Others want to speed up the combat. You suggest speeds up the combat but does not address the option to skip the combat.
It does not, you are correct. I'm arguing that to get a true mechanism to skip combat will require more work and limitations than it brings to the table. To that end, I suggested a method which is easily implemented and resolves most of the concern (long, boring combat that drags on forever because of things like HP bloat and large numbers of enemies).
However, it should be noted that the best solution is not systems interface based, but design based. Namely, make combat more engaging. Make combat more dynamic, not boring. Give more instances of having the player invested in how combat plays out rather than just feeling like a passive bystander who is just bashing buttons. And give us a way to avoid combat altogether with noncombat skills that actually work - sneak skills that you would actually use, trap skills that can be used to skip combat entirely, dialogue options that difuse combat situations so that it is actually viable to play a pacifist character in most cases.
These are the real challenges that should be addressed. Not fast forward buttons or behind the scenes combat simulators.
Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 23 juillet 2013 - 04:33 .
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