Visual Feedback Instead of Text, Healthbars and What-not.

[Rhygar]

Originally Posted by dawnofdeath

True and I'm not saying otherwise, but items will still have some advantages. Having good gear wont mean victory if the other player is more skilled (like I have said so many times already) but it will give a little advantage nevertheless

Slight advantage is fine. As long as there is no such thing as an impossible fight due to gear or that I spend the majority of my time worrying about accumulating gold so that I can buy a certain weapon merely so that I can compete.

Before a battle you should be concerned with having a decent weapon rather than the best weapon.

[Stump]

Ofcourse the gear will mean something. If you pick up a sword, but you dont have skill in it (character skill also will do alot) it will be useles. But there will be no uber gears that would give you too much advantage (there will be unique items, that will be stronger than simple items).
And for that wow phrase, it is just popular in this forum these times :P

[Edit] Agree with Rhygar.

[dawnofdeath]

Originally Posted by Rhygar

Slight advantage is fine. As long as there is no such thing as an impossible fight due to gear or that I spend the majority of my time worrying about accumulating gold so that I can buy a certain weapon merely so that I can compete.

Before a battle you should be concerned with having a decent weapon rather than the best weapon.

Exactly, I never meant for gear to have a huge advantage. If you thought so you missunderstood me. And also is it confirmed yet by the devs that MO will have full pvp loot? If so I reckon "uber" gear wont even exist. Would be no point since no one is going to want risking loosing that uber gear of yours x)
But the devs said that you will be able to craft good gear from ingredients dropped from raid bosses and such and I can imagine with rare materials the weapon should be quite good, but myself would never wear it out in the open if a group of ganker would just come and steal it ^^ I can imagine the gankfest of loot horny ganker raping lowbies lol. But then again one good thing is theres no lvl and the ganker have to take a chance etc (but if they are a group you don't really stand a chance anyway)

[auutumn]

Visual combat is the way to go; I'd much rather see the damage on myself and my enemies and decied how to proceed rather than always looking at health points. *Real* injuries would look real cool, as I imagine them, along with players/NPCs having to close the distance in melee combat to land a hit. Physical effects like staggering, knockback, dodges, parrys, etc before, during, and after an attack.

[Doomtrain]

I think you are all forget one mayor thing this game is all skillz (in game) so a warrior with 100% weapon skill and rusty dagger will pound player B in epic armor of ubernes and sword of killnes and weapon skill of 10% :P

You need to add skill level in this calculation .

[Stump]

Originally Posted by Doomtrain

I think you are all forget one mayor thing this game is all skillz (in game) so a warrior with 100% weapon skill and rusty dagger will pound player B in epic armor of ubernes and sword of killnes and weapon skill of 10% :P

You need to add skill level in this calculation .

....and there should be real player skill if he could identificate other characters health status just looking at him (I mean not character skill, but player skill).
But ofcourse I trust the devs, that they will make some realy good system

[lazyasian224]

ah wow i had to come back and read that entire flamefest back there...
anyway, back to what Lachrymose said a while back, where blurred vision effects, slowed movement, weakened attacks... all those effects should be based off of body boxes. I dont think you should automatically suffer from all of these when you're getting low on health. Since people need to hit you in order to kill you, by choosing where to hit you they are also choosing what effect their attacks will have on you. If Victor decides that he wants to bash my head open during our entire fight, i dont wanna have slowed movement, blurred vision, slowed attack speed, increased damage, and all that. make it so that people actually choose what they wanna do with u, aka i only get blurred vision. This will at least give people some chance to fight back instead of just completely incapacitated mid-way thru the fight

[Victor]

Wth, they merged the threads? Ack!

[Lachrymose]

Originally Posted by lazyasian224

ah wow i had to come back and read that entire flamefest back there...
anyway, back to what Lachrymose said a while back, where blurred vision effects, slowed movement, weakened attacks... all those effects should be based off of body boxes. I dont think you should automatically suffer from all of these when you're getting low on health. Since people need to hit you in order to kill you, by choosing where to hit you they are also choosing what effect their attacks will have on you. If Victor decides that he wants to bash my head open during our entire fight, i dont wanna have slowed movement, blurred vision, slowed attack speed, increased damage, and all that. make it so that people actually choose what they wanna do with u, aka i only get blurred vision. This will at least give people some chance to fight back instead of just completely incapacitated mid-way thru the fight

haha, yea, if you sift through all the OT discussion on uber/epic gear (not sure how it all got started..) you'll find the true nature of this thread..

i remember catmorbid pointing this out in another thread (maybe this one since they merged threads).. just like you were saying.. if there are hitboxes, there's no point to ever aim for the arms, legs, or torso if you can hit them in the head to deal the most damage and disorient them the most. it should be balanced:

head: deals most damage, blurs vision slightly for a few seconds.. maybe even have blood drip in your eyes and cover some of the screen for a while, or get tunnel vision or something, maybe even make casting time increase or something (since it would be harder to concentrate if you just got your face smashed in)

legs: slows down movement speed, decreases jump height, maybe makes them stagger so it's harder for them to control their movements and aim since they're legs are wobbling

arms: slows attack speed, makes attacks weaker, blocking is less effective

torso: deals more damage than appendages, but less than the head. could cause internal damage affecting your lungs, making it harder to breath, so stamina would go down faster (since you aren't able to catch your breath) the heart might be affected, making your heart race faster so it would be more difficult to aim a bow...

the thing is to make it balanced, so that you don't always go for the head.. maybe against a caster, go straight for the head to break his concentration and screw his casting time, a ranged fighter you may want to go for the torso to throw off his aim, and a warrior, you could go for the arms to make his blocks/attacks less effective.. and someone with high agility that moves around a lot, you'd want to go for their legs...

[Rathius]

Excellent summary Lachrymose. It would make sense to have things affected in that way, it would also give people a little bit more to think about when they armor their character.

[Victor]

Indeed, nice summary Lachrymose.

Have the devs said anything concerning hitboxes on the bodies?

[Lachrymose]

Originally Posted by Victor

Indeed, nice summary Lachrymose.

Have the devs said anything concerning hitboxes on the bodies?

lialith's comment from her visit to leipzig:

Originally Posted by Lialith

There will be body boxes and hit boxes are separated into different body zones, so that you deal more damage if you for example manage to hit the head of your foe.

and mats response:

Originally Posted by Mats Persson

Yes, this is definitely what we are going for (but this is really intense in a mmo, remember no promises). This also means the more regions we manage to have the more the individual armor pieces will affect the outcome of a blow, not just adding to some "general Defence/Resistance/AC stat".

hope that excites you as much as it does me.

[Victor]

Originally Posted by Lachrymose

lialith's comment from her visit to leipzig:
and mats response:


hope that excites you as much as it does me.

Indeed it does.

[lazyasian224]

Originally Posted by Lachrymose

hope that excites you as much as it does me.

it does... lets hope that they can pull it off...

[Ashton]

I personally are all for Health bars. I liked the way health worked in Morrowind and Oblivion, it wouldn't regen over time and you either had to rest or take a potion to regen it.

I think not having health bars and instead having a CoD2 style would make the game imbalanced. You could nuke a target, get to low health, run away, regen to max and go back in. Feels unnatural.

(pasted from another thread)

[Ogremoch]

I'm for health bars, after all this is a very fast visual method. But i have an open mind, if something else come and make the same job and have less visual impact on the screen, are welcome

[Cye]

Originally Posted by Zwackelzahn

For plain practicallity I vote healthbar! until today I havent seen a better impementation and why invent the wheel from scratch?! Certain things evolve like the typicall controls with mouse and wasd etc... and you simply keep what has prooven to be intuitive and practical...

saying that, if you can convince me about the advantages of a diffrent system am all ears...

For me personally am not distractet by a health bar at all, i have it in my peripheral vision and concentrate on the action while making strategic decisions based on th eamount of health I do have compared to my opponent and the tricks I still have up my sleeves(moves, energy, mana, potions, cooldowns and whatnot)
So I vote healthbar: never change the winning team kinda spirit, but give me a better system and I am all up for it! BUT it has to be better!

I completely agree with this post. Healthbars WORK. It doesn't corrupt your playing experience to use peripheral vision. If you do find yourself glancing at the healthbar, it should require the bare minimum amount of time to assess your health. It is an exact visual representation, not an equation.

I welcome any feasible suggestion regarding alternative methods of "health-awareness" but for the time being (and having read most of the posts in this preposterously long thread) I stand by my original declaration:

"If your sunblock works just fine, don't be too quick to lather yourself in orangutang feces."

[BlackOrc]

Why not Dimming Vision and a Heartbeat?

Have you ever been working physically so hard you essentially lose your hearing, and can only hear your heart racing?

Personally, I would think the dimming vision in addition to a quickening heart beat (As you near the end of your health. Also dampening sound around you as stated above) would lead to a more all-round, more immersive experience.

For example. When playing a mod for Battlefield 2 (I know it's an FPS but bear with me!), There are no meters or bars. Health is displayed with pulsating red vision for minor wounds, and black and white blurry vision for bleeding out-near death.

It depends on what immersion factor Mortal Online is going for. If they want battles to be fought based on constantly checking of your health bar such as WoW, or if they want you to be thinking: "I definitely need to get out of here, I'm going to die, I can barely see my opponent."

In the end it all comes down to the question: "Do I want this health system to be easy to manage by placing a hideous bar of red on the screen, or do I want the player to feel totally immersed?"

[Cye]

A game represents a fantasy simulation where the playerbase opts to play based on their tolerance for "realism." There's a certain point where realism impedes gameplay, not enhances it. For example, if your character were to spontaneously develop skin cancer, that would probably ruin your gaming experience. An aspect of "immersion" that we generally agree should be left out. If your character was created with asthma, impeding your battle efficiency, that aspect of realism would likely bother the player.


The real question is, what point do we, the playerbase, consider the aspect of "immersion" to be detrimental to the gameplay. I maintain that distorting a player's vision is, while "immersive," is not preferred among most gamers.

Ultimately your argument is fundamentally flawed for two reasons.
A. The healthbar is not necessarily "hideous," and an MMO will not be playable without some form of visible interface.
B. A player will never feel "fully immersed" because they will still be operating a mouse-and-keyboard while their virtual representation is taking sharp metal objects to the face.

[Lachrymose]

cye, i agree with you, there definitely has to be some balance between realism and good gameplay. the problem is, no one person can just draw the line and say "here it is." everyone will have different tolerance levels for realism, and everyone will have different expectations in terms of gameplay. some people may desperately want aging to be a feature, for example, (*cought* rhygar *cough*), but i personally think that's going a little overboard.

no, we will never get full immersion until they start making MMO's like the matrix, but the devs can still do their best to create a healthy balance between making things realistic enough to make the game more immersive and keeping the gameplay fun and interesting.

and now that you mention it... in-game cancer.. hmm....

[Ashton]

Originally Posted by BlackOrc

Why not Dimming Vision and a Heartbeat?

Have you ever been working physically so hard you essentially lose your hearing, and can only hear your heart racing?

Personally, I would think the dimming vision in addition to a quickening heart beat (As you near the end of your health. Also dampening sound around you as stated above) would lead to a more all-round, more immersive experience.

For example. When playing a mod for Battlefield 2 (I know it's an FPS but bear with me!), There are no meters or bars. Health is displayed with pulsating red vision for minor wounds, and black and white blurry vision for bleeding out-near death.

It depends on what immersion factor Mortal Online is going for. If they want battles to be fought based on constantly checking of your health bar such as WoW, or if they want you to be thinking: "I definitely need to get out of here, I'm going to die, I can barely see my opponent."

In the end it all comes down to the question: "Do I want this health system to be easy to manage by placing a hideous bar of red on the screen, or do I want the player to feel totally immersed?"

Oh i can see the joy now. My thief jumps a tank, he beats me down because hes higher level, my screen starts flashing, my heart starts beating, i run away, hide behind a rock and "ba ding" my health is back to full, he catches up with me and you end up in a endless battle.

Healthbars in a MMORPG is the only real way to go. Take your CoD2 style imba health regen with no health bars with you.

Besides, Oblivions front end interface with immersion UI is a pretty damn good ui.

[Doomtrain]

Originally Posted by Ashton

Oh i can see the joy now. My thief jumps a tank, he beats me down because hes higher level, my screen starts flashing, my heart starts beating, i run away, hide behind a rock and "ba ding" my health is back to full, he catches up with me and you end up in a endless battle.

Healthbars in a MMORPG is the only real way to go. Take your CoD2 style imba health regen with no health bars with you.

Besides, Oblivions front end interface with immersion UI is a pretty damn good ui.

Now here you just assumed that health regeneration is the same way 5sek with no dmg done and your back up 100%

There is another thread about regen here http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/2...ge-better.html

[Osiris`Mooon]

I would deafeningly go with health bar.I don`t think their is a better way to display your health in a mmorpg or a normal rpg.

[Cye]

Originally Posted by Lachrymose

cye, i agree with you, there definitely has to be some balance between realism and good gameplay. the problem is, no one person can just draw the line and say "here it is." everyone will have different tolerance levels for realism, and everyone will have different expectations in terms of gameplay. some people may desperately want aging to be a feature, for example, (*cought* rhygar *cough*), but i personally think that's going a little overboard.

no, we will never get full immersion until they start making MMO's like the matrix, but the devs can still do their best to create a healthy balance between making things realistic enough to make the game more immersive and keeping the gameplay fun and interesting.

and now that you mention it... in-game cancer.. hmm....

I agree, of course. You can never please everybody. But I have to think that through choices, you can please most. Like first/third person view... if you leave the choice to the player in his options/settings, everyone is happy. So likewise with the health, maybe they could keep the visual impairment, and leave the healthbar visibility up to the player?

[Danach]

I really like the idea. For a game that is leaning towards realism, I think a lack of a health bar would be fantastic.

However, the slowed reactions or any other negitive effect I feel would throw balance out the window. I believe to actually see that you are close to death would be a good enough indicator.