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9 Dragons: Dev Journal #1: Combat
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Ken Johnston, the CEO of Presistent Worlds, explains combat in their upcoming martial arts MMORPG. Presistent Worlds is the European partner of Acclaim. These articles will appear every two weeks here. There are also nine exclusive images with this article.
;) Firstly your character starts with no fighting ability at all. When you attack at the beginning of the game all you can do is flail around with your fists. As in real life, if you dont know how to fight you dont really do much damage. So you need to find a master who can teach you some basic moves. Fortunately just outside each of the clans temples are some trainers who know basic moves.
Luckily for you, for just a few coins they will not only teach you, but also let you use their sparring dummies to learn properly. In game this is done by finding the teacher and then asking him to teach you the basic skill. Each basic trainer may know a few easy moves. Two or three for unarmed combat and a couple for a sword or exotic weapon training. This is where it gets interesting! Lets say that you are learning an unarmed routine of say a punch, kick, kick combination. First you need to complete the in game minigame that allows you to acquire the skill. If you fail the minigame you have to go back to the trainer and pay again to get him to explain it to you. This screen shot below shows you the minigame in progress. |
You can read the article here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Sounds very interesting, looking forward to the next installment.
Increased my hype rating accordinly.
Also good to see the US and European partners work together so we (hopefully) we get the game at the same time.
Nice one.
SS
The Motherland Burns Strong...
MyBrute = addicting mini online game!
For example, FFXI uses team work and timing, if a mage time the spell right, he'll get a burst, if melee times their specials right, and in the right order, there will be a chain. It is not hard to do, but it still requires real skill rather than just mashing buttons. Or for games like WoW or FlyFF (any game that grinds), you can concentrate on certain attack or defense moves or attributes to be more efficient than other players at grinding, so you don't sit down and rest as often. But that only achieves less grinding, not more FUN. Games like Guild Wars are suppose to use "real" skills, but since you can copy someone else's build, it doesn't take any skills for players to "build" a good character.
As of right now, I'd say FFXI actually requires more skills than any other game although I haven't played that many. I've only played FFXI, WoW, Guild Wars, FlyFF, Silk Road, Knights Online. I hope this game requires some kind of skills to play (not just obtaining the combo moves). If there is a party system, hopefully it'll require team work, not just everyone take an enemy and do their own stuff. For FFXI, if my party have an add, the black mage casts escape immediatedly, but the team knows we have to get the hate off of him or he'll get interrupted. Some people don't know that, which ends up wiping out the entire party. So team work requires the team knowing exactly what the members are doing and they act ACCORDINGLY to actions of other members. Guild Wars is also pretty good in Team work in the arenas. WoW just plain sux unless you're doing one end boss, even then people just do whatever they do normally, like single players bunched together rather than a team.
If you want to see what the combat is like, I highly suggest checking out http://www.ninedragons.co.kr/data/movie.asp there are some ingame movies aswell as a few cgi pieces. compared to other mmorpg's this has some awesome animations.