Going against the whole “feature” organization plan I had come up with…I’m just going to throw out ideas in an explosion of words… So here goes!
Attack and Animation Flow
This topic is mainly here to address the choppy-repetitiveness of most animations in games, specifically animation blending and believable animation loops. For myself, if there is one thing that breaks immersion, it’s the unrealistic and sometimes simply impossible-looking movements of game characters. Like I said before, most – if not all – games share these common problems, but I’ll be using the Action RPG genre to pick out the issues one by one. For example, the “regular” attack. Most of you reading, whether hardcore or casual gamer, know what I’m talking about. It’s that one move you can perform, regardless of character movement speed, orientation, or current situation that has that same exact animation or effect in whatever direction you’re facing. This repetitive consistency is irritating to me to say the least. Although it reminds me of Vince and the slap-chop: “chop – chop – chop – chop…” the pleasantries end there. Sadly the rhythm and satisfying techno beats do not apply here (but very likely could…eventually I’ll rant about potential sound/music integration in games.)
From a general standpoint, there is only one way to counter this, and anyone that knows anything about game design should see this one coming: give the player choices. I hate to conform, because every book/article I’ve read on the subject brings this up, but its relevancy, even today, is sort of remarkable. As the famous Sid Meier once said, “…a game [in its simplest form] is a series of interesting choices.” To provide these choices to the player, while minimizing the amount of limits, the designer has two choices: button/input combos, and context-sensitive actions.
Now with the Wii’s recently released motion-plus, and the upcoming Natal and motion control attachments for the 360 and PS3, the first option could very well be more viable: where the movements and actions of the player could be mapped directly to the movements of the player…potentially…but we’re not here to get into that. The issue with popular game controllers (I.E. Gamepads, Mouse and Keyboard) is that there is no way to comfortably map potentially thousands of movements. Even if there was, who would want to sit down, “relax”, and play a game like that? If you would, you just received a virtual high-five from me, but chances are most of you didn’t.
The more feasible option would be contextual controls. Depending on where you are, what you’re doing, and the environment and what inhabits it around you, you will have a different “attack” and animation: mapped to a single button press. This is very possible with todays level of technology in procedural animation and collision/physics systems. Although it wouldn’t be the most time or wallet friendly option, it would have the highest quality – if done right.
The reason I brought up these issues is to talk about something that I think could take advantage of contextual abilities, and could help counter the evilness of repetitive animations/attacks and still give the player to customize their attack sequence. By minimizing the amount of button presses and combinations required to pull of a higher variety of abilities, this allows you to combine the ridiculous amount of strategy and variety of skills such as those in World of Warcraft, with the hands-on controls and simplicity of an Action RPG such as Fable or Mass Effect (2).
The “Solution” I’ve come up with is something I like to call Streams. To give a gameplay example…the player will have a Pool of abilities to choose from, stemming from several different Styles with their own trees of skills. These abilities/skills can be pulled into a Stream. To allow the player advancement and something to look forward to, this Stream starts with a small amount of slots, and can increase in size and amount – I.E. the player will eventually have several different Streams with several different sizes to choose from during combat. While not in combat, the player can take his time in deciding rotations he would like to follow, setting up combos that can be pulled off by activating one skill at a time in the Stream(circular queue). To make this work, each skill will have a potential beginning and end point, however, some could be placed in between any other abilities – and some will be contextual and do the best skill for the player in the given situation.
The goal of this system is to give the player a system to combat to allow the player to flow from attack to attack. As you can see with the naming convention, the goal when having a character use this system is to make them seem as smooth and consistent as flowing water.
That is a basic explanation, so if you’d like to know more please ask.
What do you think of this idea…would you think it would work in the current state of the MMORPG/action RPG market? Did I explain it simply enough…?
