I've been watching too many Extra Credits videos. So many that my head is now full of random game design ideas and if I don't write some down, it's gonna explode. Here is as good a place as any. To keep it topical, why not use something like this for DA4? It could be used for any action or RPG type game, really.
DIFFICULTY LEVELS (REALLY, MODES)
There should only be two levels, story-driven and action-driven. Don't call them Casual and Normal or Easy and Hard, those names are misleading.
The story-driven level is for players that want to focus on the story, where combat is the price you pay to get to the next bit of content. That doesn't mean combat should be skipped or skimped on, far from it. It should support the story and provide an interactive cinematic experience. Combat should be like an interactive cutscene. Most of the control over what happens is in the hands of the game developer through the combat AI, but the player still has a role to play, as described below.
The action-driven level puts the player in control of combat details, like what actions to take and what enemy to target, and even how enemies behave, their stats, and how many there are. Combat should be challenging and should be the showpiece of game mechanics. The emphasis is somewhat inverted here, where content is the price you pay to get to the next battle. Within the action-driven level, there should be knobs and dials that can be used to fine-tune the experience: think Trials, but expanded to a greater depth of detail. Essentially, let players tune the threat AI to the level of difficulty they want and the level of complexity their game hardware can handle, thus avoiding the whole dumbed-down for console issue.
STORY-DRIVEN
Every combat situation becomes an interactive cutscene, where the player influences the style of combat that each character uses. Everything else is driven by the combat AI, friends and enemies alike. It's basically a bot vs bot battle, including the main/controlled character.
For each character, there are four axes of combat style, each with one of two settings:
- Defense: Block or Evade
- Threat: Taunt or Reduce
- Attack: Slow-and-Powerful or Quick-and-Deadly
- Targetting: Stand-Your-Ground or Chase
The style of combat performed by each character can be described as the four settings in order. Some examples:
A tank might be set to: Block/Taunt/Slow-and-Powerful/Stand-Your-Ground
A sneaky assassin might be set to: Evade/Reduce/Quick-and-Deadly/Chase
A ranged attacking mage using a defensive barrier while preparing a big ritual attack might be set to: Block/Reduce/Slow-and-Powerful/Stand-Your-Ground
And so on.
The combat AI will select from all available abilities in the character's build that match the styles selected. No active ability slots are needed, the player can't choose abilities anyway, just the four settings above. So where does the interactivity come from?
These settings can be defined before combat begins and can be changed at any time during combat. That's where the interactive part comes in. These changes happen in real-time, with no pause in action. On a controller, it would be easy to map the first two settings to the left D-pad, and the last two settings to the right control pad.
Being able to change settings in the middle of combat lets the player influence the cinematic action scene being played out, with fancy camera angles and kill shots all handled by the software. Don't like that the enemies are hit-and-running your tank? Change Stand-Your-Ground to Chase. Don't think your assassin is doing enough damage? Change Quick-and-Deadly to Slow-and-Powerful. Your mage's barrier getting torn down too much? Change Block to Evade.
I decided to let Range be decided by the type of weapon the character uses, rather than by a setting. If a rogue has a bow, she will stick to ranged attacks. For a rogue using daggers, he will stick to close combat.
Since everything is software driven, the game developers can design specific moves for each combination of settings, and ideally for each pairing of settings with enemies following similar settings. The set of attack animations for an Evade/Quick character vs. a Block/Slow enemy might be totally different from the set used vs. another Evade/Quick enemy. All those combinations provide for a great variety of action shots and animations that the player can enjoy.
The player should also be able move the camera around in some way (joysticks on the controller?), to focus on different things happening. Maybe follow one character and switch to another, or park the camera in one wide-angle shot and watch the whole battle develop, or whatever. The player should even be able to speed up or slow down the action, like slow-mo of a key football play. Pause and instant-replay should also be supported. We miss so much great action in DAI when someone in the party is off-camera. Who knows what great combo they just did? If we had instant-replay, we wouldn't have to wonder.
Done right, this could make for a great extension to the narrative cutscenes that form the story.
ACTION-DRIVEN
This is easier to describe than story-driven: Take the ten to twenty most important variables that control the combat AI and expose them as game settings. Add a few presets, like for Hard, Nightmare and Insanity, and that's it.
Here are some possible settings for random encounters:
- Minimum number of enemies in a wave: (slider from 1 to 30)
- Maximum number of enemies in a wave: (slider from 1 to 30)
- Percentage of elite enemies in a wave: (slider from 0 to 100)
- Number of boss enemies in the last wave: (slider from 0 to 3)
- Minimum number of reinforcement waves: (slider from 0 to 10)
- Maximum number of reinforcement waves: (slider from 0 to 10)
- Percentage threat increase per wave: (slider from 0 to 1000)
- Surprise factor: (slider from 1 to 5)
- Scale enemies? (yes or no)
- Percentage health buff enemies: (slider from 0 to 1000)
- Percentage attack buff enemies: (slider from 0 to 1000)
Most are self-explanatory, but for those that aren't:
Number of boss enemies: tosses a boss or three into the last reinforcement wave, like an Ice Troll or Emissary Alpha.
Percentage threat increase per wave: rather than have each wave be the same, each reinforcement wave should be more challenging, by increasing the mix of enemy types. First wave might be infantry mooks, second might mix in some archers, third has elite archers and assassins, that sort of thing.
Surprise factor: How about tossing in a wandering Great Bear into the second reinforcement wave of Red Templars? Or a wandering RT Behemoth into the third wave of demons in a rift? Or maybe some elite dude you killed in the first wave gets resurrected by an enemy shaman in the last wave? Something random and unexpected thrown in to keep things interesting.
Scale enemies: Basically, the Even Ground Trial. As characters level up, so do enemies.
You'll notice that these settings only apply to random encounters. There might be a more limited set for set-piece battles, like the Haven raid, or boss battles, like the Envy demon. Set-piece battles need to be balanced to fit the narrative, so there can't be as much player control over their AI settings. This does lead to situations like we have now, where you can breeze through WEWH, but struggle with a random rift with Walk Softly enabled. This system doesn't fix that problem.
PRESETS
The presets are just a selection of settings that the game developers have tested and balanced against some predefined set of criteria.
The preset for Hard might be something like:
- Minimum number of enemies in a wave: 3
- Maximum number of enemies in a wave: 9
- Percentage of elite enemies in a wave: 10
- Number of boss enemies in the last wave: 0
- Minimum number of reinforcement waves: 1
- Maximum number of reinforcement waves: 3
- Percentage threat increase per wave: 20
- Surprise factor: 2
- Scale enemies? Yes
- Percentage health buff enemies: 150
- Percentage attack buff enemies: 120
The preset for Nightmare might be something like:
- Minimum number of enemies in a wave: 5
- Maximum number of enemies in a wave: 12
- Percentage of elite enemies in a wave: 33
- Number of boss enemies in the last wave: 1
- Minimum number of reinforcement waves: 2
- Maximum number of reinforcement waves: 4
- Percentage threat increase per wave: 50
- Surprise factor: 3
- Scale enemies? Yes
- Percentage health buff enemies: 300
- Percentage attack buff enemies: 200
The preset for Insanity might be something like:
- Minimum number of enemies in a wave: 20
- Maximum number of enemies in a wave: 20
- Percentage of elite enemies in a wave: 100
- Number of boss enemies in the last wave: 3
- Minimum number of reinforcement waves: 5
- Maximum number of reinforcement waves: 10
- Percentage threat increase per wave: 100
- Surprise factor: 5
- Scale enemies? Yes
- Percentage health buff enemies: 1000
- Percentage attack buff enemies: 500
PC vs CONSOLE
It will be natural for some players to immediately slam all of the settings over to max. That's fine, except that consoles and some PCs can't handle the full range of settings. Instead of dumbing down to the least common denominator, each of the sliders and settings should have a "red zone" displayed prominently. If you try to push a slider into a red zone, a warning will pop up that says something like, "Your game system may not be able to handle this setting. You may experience problems like framerate lag, AI breakdowns (stand and do nothing bug), graphics glitches and full crashes."
The red zones are calculated at install time based on the underlying hardware. If you have an 16 core 4Ghz PC with 32 gig of ram, SSD, and a top tier graphics card, you should have few or no red zones. If you are on a last generation console or a laptop, you might have really large red zones that prevent you from even doing Nightmare, let alone Insanity or maxing everything out.
Leave the choice up to the player with an appropriate warning. Don't penalize people with good systems in order to make the game accessible to everyone.
Retour en haut
