Grimrock

i thought the design of special attack can be done better.

At end game,the power of 2-handed heavy weapon's special attack is really strong,but it wastes too much time for other roles.
I can understand it need more time to cast for the role who cast it.
But when a role focus on his special attack,the others just do nothing.
This is not reasonable.

A similar problem happens when Wizard cast magic.
The better thing is you can wait for an opportunity and control the other roles in the same time.

There are more efficient design which can avoid this problem.

Perhaps the goal is not maximum efficiency but to have actions with different advantages and downsides, adding some variety into the game.

Exactly.

um, no. that's NOT what the OP is talking about.

what they are talking about is that YOU have to hold down the mouse button to wait for that one attack to power up. you probably COULD do other things with your other characters...if you could hotkey their attacks, or spells, or anything.

it's a bad design, and the OP is correct in their assessment. this is not an issue of one character spending the time to charge up their attack, it's an issue of the design basically forces all your other characters to sit around with their thumb up their butts because you can't actually give them any actions.

it is indeed, a bad design. And I'm not the first one to suggest that attacks should be hotkeyable for each of your characters. it would make combat so much more enjoyable and smooth.

hell, I might even be able to look away from the buttons to see what I'm actually hitting for a change.

seriously, it is by far and away the single biggest weakness of this combat system, and it would be SO incredibly easy to fix.

Whether or not it is bad design is debatable and subjective but this is indeed the intended design. The goal for the combat in Grimrock was a game of rhythm, tactics and reaction instead of trying realistically simulate a group of four individuals.

I'm not saying that what we chose to do was inherently a better choice, I'm just saying that it's what we felt was most suitable for the style of game we wanted to make. We very seldom chose to strive for accurate simulation of reality with Grimrock.

Ichthyic wrote:And I'm not the first one to suggest that attacks should be hotkeyable for each of your characters. it would make combat so much more enjoyable and smooth.

Nope it won't because you don't have enough hands and fingers to do that.

Let's discuss this a little bit. Right now we have 5 combat-relevant hotkeys: 4 for character selection and 1 to swap weapon sets. Now if you want hotkeys for attacks a.k.a. right clicks you will need 2 hotkeys per character due to them having 2 hands each. This leads us to 8 additional hotkeys alone for attack substitution. Now just add the regular movement and rest buttons which are 7 keys and we are already at a whooping 20 hotkeys without anything else like magic, alchemy, inventory management and so on.

I like the way it works. It's a risk vs reward thing, do I keep hacking away with everybody? Or try to pull off a charged attack?

It is very useful as an opening strike too, you can also charge while moving/dodging.

Nope it won't because you don't have enough hands and fingers to do that.

so, i must have grown extra digits for all the other games I have played where that's how it works?

funny, I don't recall doing that.

you have two hands. frankly, in combat, you'd be better off using your right hand to key attacks and your left hand to move. but that isn't even an option here.

The goal for the combat in Grimrock was a game of rhythm,

then it's a failed design, as like I said, the rhythm IS the problem.

if you won't even consider the issue, then you're simply being stubborn for stubborn's sake, and you'll never reach the real potential this game could have.

I think it works pretty well. It's simple and easy to use. It's not the best design if you want to give the player maximum efficiency, but that does not appear to have been the goal of the design.

In the old Grimrock your characters would use their special attacks automatically now and then, if they had the Energy for it. But the new way lets the player be more involved, which I like.

I agree it would be great to spend more time looking at the monsters you're fighting, but even with hotkeys you still gotta look at the characters to see if their cooldown is off. Something more would be needed for this.

Ichthyic wrote:then it's a failed design, as like I said, the rhythm IS the problem.
if you won't even consider the issue, then you're simply being stubborn for stubborn's sake, and you'll never reach the real potential this game could have.

This is not about being stubborn, it's just that we really like it this way. Same thing with e.g. turn-based vs. realtime and plethora of other design decisions. It's just a matter of our personal preference.