I'll keep this short and sweet otherwise it would turn into a short story. I've rarely seen games which make it so limb damage affects gameplay. If, for example, you're fighting a villain who's power comes from the gauntlets on his arms, and if you inflicted enough damage to his arms, you may decrease the effectiveness of those gauntlets. If these gauntlets are similar to Space Ghost, his aim would be reduced. If they simply give him Super Strength, and you've actually damaged the gauntlets, his strength would be less "super". Now this only includes damage, what about limb specific debuffs? You're an ice controller fighting a super speed demon, you freeze the floor and now his speed matters less because he now suffers from loss of control or perhaps now if he runs too fast he will slip and slam into a wall. To take that a step further, you cover his legs in a fine layer of ice/frost. Now, his movement range is reduced and this limits his max speed or just his acceleration rate. Since he is a super speed demon, he can generate enough heat to which this debuff's duration is shorter than someone who just uses a laser gun or two.
This system could be also a way of allowing multiple styles to take on different bosses. Giant robot coming through town? Have the titanium claw user to slash off the bot's cannons, your own robot short out the giant mech's eyes, and The Hulk wannabe keeps smashing away at the walking tank's joints until they cease to function or focus to merely topple the giant toaster as it one leg is rendered damaged beyond functionality. Now, that is just an example of three types of powers. What possibilities lie with fire affecting metal, magic vs. science, and other means that don't resort to Pokemon level physics where water beats fire but fire beats ice...let's let the mmorpg genre grow up a bit.
This interesting but would you have to target limbs? Do certain attacks hit only certain limbs? Seems cool though for giant enemies cause you could target their limbs a bit easier i think. If the limb breaks or is disabled, does that attack you have been using stop doing any kind of damage. Does the damage itself effect the enemy as a whole or just that limb. Like boss has 10k hp and a limb has 1k. Breaking the limb. Does the boss now have 9k or still have 10k.
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Yeah doing targeted attacks is fun and works well in a PnP setting where there's plenty of time to handle it. Trying to do something like that in a fast-paced MMO seems very problematic unless you only applied it to super-giant boss targets like a Godzilla or some-such. Frankly most of the time anything less than boss-level targets rarely survive in combat more than 5 or 10 seconds anyway.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Hm,... it doens't have to be problematic in a "fast paced MMO"
If you had, for example, your power attacks in your toolbar, but could create a duplicate, right click on it, choose "location damage" and then choose the location. You suffer a damage/accuracy debuff with that attack, but hits have a chance to apply various appropriate debuffs to the enemy (slow, reduced damage, reduced accuract, reduced damage resistance, stun, etc) Some foes' powers may be defined as 'vulnerable to arm attacks', and when fighting these foes, attacks to the arms would have additional benefits.
This could work well for the prolonged fight against a baddie that is overpowered:
In one of the kickstarter updates, they mention being defeated by a big enemy (as part of the story) and then having to track him down for a rematch. While tracking him down, you have a chance to pursue clues into the source of his power, and find that his neuro-helm increases his powers immensely. Armed with that knowledge, you've got a tray full of head attacks ready for the next fight.
In a computer game this kind of thing strikes me as an attempt to emulate FPS games. As Lothic said, with PnP games it's not an issue ("I'll take the -5 to hit to strike his left arm."). Even with something like chase's suggestion a player would potentially have dozens of additional buttons to track and shuffle about on their toolbar.
I'd prefer such systems to be optional rather than a requirement. If the status effects/bonuses/penalties from using targeted attacks are significant enough, the devs will have to account for this in balancing the fights (especially against tougher enemies) and that will push targeted attacks strongly toward being mandatory. Make the results too weak and it begs the question whether it's worth the effort to develop and implement such a system.
All this is assuming that the system itself is simple and intuitive enough for most people to want to use it.
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Again I'm not saying it would be impossible to implement in a game like this. I'm just suggesting (with my use of the phase "fast-paced MMO") that the percentage of the time you would actually be able to benefit from this would probably be fairly low given that maybe 95% of the critters you fight in this game die within seconds.
Of the other 5% it would quickly devolve into just one more layer of "tactics" to apply that has questionable long term value. Sure the first time you face the HyperHydra you might not know what its vuneralble spot is. But as soon as it's generally known eveyone will attack it and make the HyperHydra a relative push-over. And as Darth Fez mentioned being able to properly balance the HyperHydra becomes a nightmare for the Devs. Do they make it impossible to kill unless you target a certain point and would they eventually have to make even the vulnerable point hard to get just to keep the critter hard to kill?
Ultimately targetted hit locations are interesting and are certainly fun enough in PnP settings. I'm just not sure it wouldn't become a needless complication in a MMO setting.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Agreed. the predictability/ ability to wiki foes makes vulnerabilities a problem. There are many MMO's that have this issue already- a new foe/environment is virtually impossible to complete-- the "weakness" or "pattern" is found and suddenly it becomes less about "will we defeat x" and more about "how fast can we defeat X." it would work for randomly-assigned weaknesses, but that takes away from the distinction of the foe- what makes them who they are- but not for these situations.
There are some very real issues with how something like this would apply to the larger game (including issues Darth Fez alludes to about adopting these techniques) have very real issues if this were to be integrated into the bigger picture. I was more focusing on the "how" it could fit the ui/gameplay, as I see methods to address those, but the larger impact of how this would be applied