Creating a combat post since the idea of “what exactly is a combat balance/revamp” has been talked a lot on Discord. What makes good combat? Basically, only two things:
- Fair. Combat should feel fair, nothing being too overpowered or underpowered. Players should have adequate information as to why they are or are not succeeding in combat. As well as not being punished excessively, players should not be unchallenged by the AI. There shouldn’t be a one-punch item.
- Diversity. Branching from fairness, there should be multiple types of strategies when it comes to combat. Halo on Legendary difficulty is sometimes described as dull because you desperately need a plasma gun; Halo on the difficulty level below that, though less challenging, is made so that you can utilize most weapons and have a good time.
“Fairness” largely manifests itself through balancing – health bars shouldn’t be spongey, there shouldn’t be a bazooka cannon that makes everything else worthless, and players shouldn’t be one-shot by every single weapon. Another big aspect of fairness though is information accessibility. Getting one-shot by a sniper in a shooter multiple times sucks if you have no idea where the sniper is; that’s why kill-cams are so universal in FPS games. In Skyrim, if you take damage from poison, burn, frost, etc. the game lets you know. In other words, the player needs to know enough to understand what is going on, and how to respond.
“Diversity” is oftentimes what is more thought of when it comes to designing a good combat system, but that doesn’t mean slap a hundred different abilities and call it a day. Skyrim has hundreds of different types of weapons, abilities, and status effects - but its combat is oftentimes described as dry because it ultimately is just clicking and watching a health bar go down. Meanwhile, God of War has three weapons, and maybe a dozen different yet similar abilities for each weapon in total. And yet, it is regarded as one of the best combat games of all time due to a diversity in control, not necessarily in weapon variety. Classic Halo games, which have relatively few yet distinct guns, are also hailed as peaks in the history of FPS games. In other words, minimal abilities can be presented to the player as long as those abilities are able to be “styled” towards the player’s preferred strategies, or said abilities are distinct.
This will be a bit of a rehash of above discussion, so if you are familiar with this thread, it’s the same old. But in the vast majority of games which have some sort of combat, there tend to be several archetypes of abilities:
- Normal – These tend to be the baseline of enemies, establishing expectations and introducing the player to the way combat works.
- Brawler – Usually have similar abilities to normal, just are souped up a bit and made to be more difficult.
- Quick – Tend to be physically weak, but difficult to attack or evade.
- Shielded – Are able to deflect damage, but usually have an exposed area that otherwise makes them very vulnerable.
- Heavy – Are usually very slow, but spongey and have high damage output.
- Ranged – Tend to be weak and otherwise slow, but are able to project damage at distance.
- Bombers – Have little capabilities other than an attack that generally destroys themselves as well.
Looking explicitly at Thrive, I think we can keep a few things in mind to create a solid combat system, as well as a few immediate action items.
- Ironing Out “Annoyances” – This will be likely be something we will have to continuously do, but there are a few friction points which can lead to frustrating moments of gameplay. Something that comes to mind immediately is how starving will immediately disable engulfment, which essentially is a death sentence for heterotrophic organisms in a moment that should generally be a high dopamine release moment (“woooow I found food just as I was about to starve!”). Ejecting engulfed organisms as well.
- Health Regeneration Refactor – It is probably best if health doesn’t regenerate for a small amount of time after receiving damage, maybe 5 seconds or so. This allows poison to be more of a factor (DPS doesn’t make sense if regeneration is constant) and creates a more attentive state in the player when damage is received.
- Membrane Refactor – Strongly increasing external damage resistance for several membrane types and making them weak to probiscus or toxin pilus will both make the latter two parts useful and make membranes more than just flavor or visual changes.
- Toxin Immunity & Endotoxins – Implementing toxin immunity will both provide a counter for players to the effects of toxin and allow us to make toxins a bit more potent, as players will have a valid resistance measure. Endotoxins are also an important biological phenomenon relevant to combat yet to be implemented.
As a bonus feature, implementing the nematocyst and corresponding abilities above could be a nice addition to ranged abilities, though it is not essential for having a “sufficient” combat system in game. We have the model and animation somewhere, I think on the dev cloud, though I’m not sure where exactly.