So here I am working away on several games that include combat in them. Just coming off of Spider-Man 3 and realizing that at least from the critics point of view, we missed the mark on combat and the typical comment you see in 90-95% of reviews "Repetitive, forgettable, mashy, just plain horrible combat experiences".
Why is the such a prevalent problem and why is it so hard to fix. Some games have gotten it right:
- Ninja Guidan
- God of War
- The Persia series, etc
At least that is what the critics and consumers think.
So why is it that the above mentioned games get high scores for their combat, when others (even those who copy their systems) are not rewarded? Well I put a lot of thought and effort into this problem. I played the three games above again and again to see why I wasn't seeing the magic. Why do I think these are button mashy as well? Because they are. They all are in varying degrees.
So what is the difference? I started to break these games, that people love, down into nice bite size chunks and I kept coming up with the same outcome. Weapons!
Guidan and Persia have swords and GOW has a chain weapon. It must be the weapons/gore/etc.
Then I had an epiphany. I was wrong and a lot of others were wrong along with me.
The difference between these games considered good combat games and all of the others is........
SPACING!
I know it seems very simple, but after an exhaustive review of a bunch of other games I found one consistent thread. If you need to stay away from the enemies or attack from a distance, your combat system was considered good.
So if you look at Spider-Man as an example, we did it all wrong. Spider-Man should not be fighting thugs hand to hand most of the time, running into battle guns-a-blazing, he should be keeping his distance and using his webs or swinging into battle with flying attacks and even more importantly the AI response in these "good" games is to knock you back into the "right" distance to continue to do damage to them the right way if you do get to close.
Even if you look at a game like Street Fighter. This is about running up to the guy and swing away. It is about strategy, position and pulling off moves that start at distance and hit the enemy at range or better yet, knock them down, so you can then come in and juggle them to death.
As you know if you played Spider-Man or any of the other games that "you thought combat sucked in" you will see that the enemies just knock you down, so you can get up to get punched again. At that point as designers we start putting in jumping attacks and clearing moves and block attacks, etc. We start trying to fix the problem by adding more complexity.
So here is the solution to everyone's problem who is working on combat. Please listen.
1) Make sure that your primary attacks are distance/dash/jumping/etc - Keep that distance
2) Make sure that the hero recoils back/flips back or generally moves out of hit range after said attack, back into the outer ring
3) If you don't get back out of the close combat zone and get hit, make sure that the enemy hits you back to where you need to be to attack them at distance.
4) Look at this in your own game and if management is complaining it is mashy or repetitive, then tell them you have a solution.
I know this all sounds very simple, but take a look at your own game and other games and let me know if you don't come to the same conclusion. I think it was so obvious for so long that we never noticed it, at least I and 95% of you didn't.
Thanks for the great topic guys and my current games are going to be a lot better in combat because of these findings. Lets open it up for discussion. What do you think? Am I nuts? Stupid for not noticing earlier?
