I’ve been wanting to discuss an issue that I seem to find with games like Diablo II, Torchlight and Torchlight 2. Each of these games have two systems that deal with fighting enemies, a normal combat system and ability system. The main issue I’ve found is that the ability system overshadows the normal combat system and the normal combat system isn’t able to stand on its own. The only time that you would use normal combat system is if your mana is completely drained while fighting. There’s only a handful of instances where this would happen unless you were a bit reckless in managing your mana and even then you can take 2 seconds to drink a mana potion or find some way to regenerate it. So the normal combat ends up rarely ever being used. My question is could the normal combat system be ditched entirely or are there ways developers of these games could’ve improve their normal combat systems?
I know what you mean. I feel the same way about League of Legends. Everyone just spams abilities then recalls back to their base to replenish their mana, then they rinse and repeat… It’s still fun but it does get a bit old. The only thing I can think of is to make either abilities weaker or normal combat stronger. I personally would make ability combat weaker. I think that if abilities are weaker, then there is much more need for both normal combat and more teamwork.
I can see your points. Maybe instead, limit how it’s used. Perhaps no auto regen. Where regen is from items that you are rewarded through combat. You could even make it more effective with limited use.
No one does that in League of Legends.
I do think it’s boring because of the control scheme and auto-attacks though.
Then idk what version of League of Legends you’re playing, because I NEVER die by the hands of auto-attack. 
maybe I exaggerated when I said abilities were spammed. But I wouldn’t be lying when I say abilities DO make or break the match in League of Legends. Usually the team that won is the team with the most powerful champions on its side and I think that’s what the OP wants to address; abilities being the focal point of recent RPGs and RPG based games.
What I’m trying to do is balance out these systems out by making normal combat more appealing to use and adding more features to normal combat to make you consider using normal combat . I think I might need to revamp how ability combat it works. The way it stands you can just spam abilities pretty much nonstop except the five second mana break which breaks the flow of combat and you never consider using normal combat because its weaker then your abilities. Do you guys have any suggestions?
Balance is difficult in many types of game. In every RPG, you often find that one specific strategy is overpowered and you end up sticking with it. I have often wondered if game balance could be made dynamic and automatic. Could you have some factor that effects how effective spells/abilities/combat/range and adjust this factor very slowly by usage, so that if a player overuses one approach they will be disadvantaged. I can see some issues with this if the player is too aware of it, but has anyone heard of such an approach? Do any first person shooters out there do something like this for weapon balance in multiplayer?
Sounds like a script that would count and store how often a certain spell is used would work. If ability X is used Y amount of times then decrease Ability X’s effectiveness by Y.
Rather than artificially gimping it player-side, it’d be far more interesting to have the AI respond to it appropriately. Lets say the player is overusing a flamethrower, maybe the enemies become aware of this and start using fireproof armor? The player is then at a disadvantage and needs to react appropriately by varying, the game is staying entirely in-character, and it adds an interesting scenario rather than slapping the player in the face.
As a player, I’d be annoyed at a designer who forced my hand by using arbitrary meta-game punshment to make me play their way. On the other hand, I’d respect one who paid attention to how I played and threw appropriate challenges at me which also encouraged me to play with more variety. The former is lazy and disrespectful (couldn’t be assed encouraging me to do something, so they just punish me for not doing it - all stick and no carrot), where the other is creative and positive. It also plays to the strengths of RPGs, being about choice and consequence and whatnot.
Also, it removes one of the things that annoys me about some games. Bioshock: Infinite had a great variety of weapons, but I (and many others) ended up sticking to just two weapons because we got so strong with them that switching to anything else meant giving up advantages. But by not switching to other things we were giving up variety. The context of that game encouraged you to specialise exclusively in one or two things. But the above would encourage players to spread out more and, even if they did specialise heavily on one thing, to keep using other stuff lest they lose the advantage by making every enemy aware of it. Instead of just thinking about the current scenario they also have to think about the future - “sure, I could kick everyone’s ass in 30 seconds flat if I used my specced up pistol, but if I do that too often everyone’s going to be ready for it later and I won’t have invested into anything else. So I’ll use my gauntlets instead, because I’m pretty sure I can still win, it’ll get me some more gauntlets experience, and it means I can get more mileage out of my pistols later”. Isn’t that way more interesting?
Edit: It could also lead to some really interesting emergent gameplay. Lets say a player maxes out pistols and gauntlets. In the late game they’ll knowingly be coming up against a mixture of enemies who are strong against gauntlets or pistols… kind of a polarizing effect. So even in a single encounter they’ll be switching between the two to deal with individual enemies. Next time they play they could end up with encounters being very mechanically different because they instead played with bows and daggers, or magic and swords, or whatever.
Yeah, I think you are right, I would find it annoying too if I felt like the game was cheating to make me vary my tactics. Making the game alter what it throws at you would be really cool, much harder to implement, but really, really cool. If done right, this would be a massive unique selling point for any game.
I am still interested in the “lazy” way, subtle automatic balance is attractive because it is automatic, mathematical (perfect?, too perfect?)- has anyone attempted any kind of dynamic game balance? I think the problem faced by online multiplayer FPS is similar, here you often end up with one weapon/combo that is used more often than others. What about if the system detects how many people are using each weapon and very slowly adjusts its performance., Done right, you would be quite unaware of it, I wonder if it would eventually settle in an equilibrium. Currently this is done manually during play testing, and game-updates often adjust weapon balance - this is just making the process automatic and continuous? Or is it cheating?
I wonder, if your RPG is played by a large number of people could you use all of their weapon/ability usage stats to adjust a global setting, so its really the world auto-optimizing for balance and not reacting to the single player? Again, probably annoying if players are aware of it.
Isn’t that basically what diablo 3 did? Seemed to work pretty well for them, as much as I dislike about some aspects about the game, I love the combat system. In fact, it makes it really hard for me to play other action rpg’s, that in all other aspects are probably better on paper (eg: better systems, character advancement, better story, bigger world/sandbox). The combat never stacks up to D3.
My favorite combat system was probably the system used in Age of Conan. For those unfamiliar it involved doing “combo’s” which were directional regular attacks in a certain order. If you did it correctly with the last hit you would do the special finishing combo move which was animated. So normal attacks hit decently hard and were required(since they were part of combos), but chaining them together into a combo in the correct order was really what it was about.
I really like what they’ve done with Dead Rising 3 on Xbox One. It’s mostly a traditional combat system except for some weapons that you can set down and they act like turrets (like the Boom Bear). Now… the weapons are a little bit ridiculous but that’s what makes it so fun. I find myself often using things like the Party Gloves… even though they’re not as powerful in clearing groups of zombies as weapons like the Fire Reaper, they are just hilarious and fun to use.
+1 for building a more interesting AI. If you remove “regular” combat, your special abilities then become the new “regular” combat and you’ll eventually end up creating a new “super” combat .Orange is the new Black and size 0 is the new size 2… so you’ll have to make a size -4 instead of calling it “childsized”. Next thing you know, combat games will simulate how we would have played if we were capable of pressing buttons for ourselves…
So better to make an AI and gameplay that knows how to respond to too much usage of a special skill. Playing Splinter Cell Blacklist, anytime someone uses Merc too much, opposing teams always go Spy. Too much spy and teams that know how to use Merc just waste them. Granted… everyone prefers to play as a spy… it’s just too much fun… but every once and awhile you gotta’ send a heavy in. 
If you think about what happens in online multiplayer like CoD, BF, and others… anyone camping gets fragged. Anyone using too many frags gets sniped or knifed. Anyone using too much stealth gets some form of anti-stealth, anyone doing too much running and gunning gets fragged. Always change tactics to beat your opponent, and change it up randomly just to throw them off during respawns.
That’s what a good AI should notice and respond to. Same thing should apply to RPG’s and dungeon crawlers. Even playing through a game like “Orcs Must Die 2” means you can’t just use one type of trap all the time, or one weapon all the time.
I will admit I am a big hater of all these button-mashing combat systems. I’d like to see more combat systems as in Asssassins Creed and in Sleeping Dogs where it actually takes more skill and timing over seeing which icon on the screen is charged up and applying your finger to that button.
I love Assassin’s Creed, but its combat system does not require much of anything I’d call “skill”, at least up to Revelations. Counter everything that’s not too heavy to counter, smoke bombs and/or block-breakers (mostly kicks) for the rest. As long as you press the right button he does everything for you, and while there’s nothing wrong with that (pressing a button is nothing like anything that pressing a button does in most cases anyway) it’s balanced to be approachable rather than to require hardcore skill.
Edit: I had to head off before finishing the above. What I wanted to get at is that Assassin’s Creed’s combat system is designed more to look nice than to be challenging. Making it more challenging would almost certainly lead to either combos having more buttons or having to press buttons more quickly, both of which would take it in the direction of “button-mashing”.
I’m pretty sure Diablo 3 had normal combat. It still had the same problem with the normal combat system being outweighed by the ability system. What I meant by ditching it entirely was by not creating the option to use a normal default attack and convert the system to abilities only. With abilities you hardly ever use normal combat in the first place. So why have it? Either the ability system needs to be balanced more to make normal combat more of an option to use or they need to be kept separately.
But isn’t the concept of a “default attack” equivalent a cheap or free “ability” anyway? It’s more a matter of how the controls are hooked up than anything else, right?
With mana potions you can regenerate mana almost instantly. Why would I go for the normal combat system when I can take a second to drink a mana potion and go back to using my primary focus?
Who knows? But it’s beside the point, which is that I don’t think the “primary attack” should be treated any differently to anything else when it comes to game design decisions. Which is to say, it should be understood as a part of the whole system. As a designer, why would I remove the “primary attack” instead of tweaking the mana system*? Why is there a “primary attack” in the first place? What, if anything, makes the “primary attack” different to any other skill? (And I’m really thinking it’s more the control binding than anything else.)
For what it’s worth, I do seem to remember using the primary attack a reasonable amount when I played Diablo 3. So maybe it depends on class? I only played one class and didn’t even finish the game, so I’m not really sure.
- Also, why is there a mana system if it’s as self-defeating as you imply?