The elephant in the room

This topic came up fairly early in the R34 postmortem and it's something that kinda needs to be hammered out at this early stage if this game has any chance of having a real "identity" in the gaming community.

The relationship and use of combat mode with the default non-combat state.

The nuance of introducing the complexity of the kind of possibilities these states are capable of are generally explained with gratuitous tutorial areas in traditional game design, and since we're playing the spiritual successor to Ultima, it seems fairly obvious to me that there should be a fair degree of nuance towards choosing to enter combat from unsheathing, and from using a preemptive skill.

If someone is attacked and takes damage, that initiates combat, but people may not necessarily want to respond to combat with violence, so theoretically non-combat skills, emotes, and trying to talk would all be possible responses the avatar could also take in response to combat, but the genuine benefit to the user would depend heavily on the context and nuance in the use of the 'ability'.

Obviously npc responses are completely dependent on the devs ability to add in these kinds of social based puzzles into context sensitive areas of the game, but in PvP these responses are completely useless outside of pure Role-Playing scenarios.

I like the idea of people trying to role play their virtue even in combat, but from a technical standpoint I'm not sure any type of programmed numeric game mechanic would be capable of reflecting the complexity of trying to use non-combat skills to avoid confrontation.

I do like the idea of also giving people the option of initiating combat with a combat skill in the non-combat UI, since it's the same as unsheathing, but certainly it needs to be balanced so only the least complicated skills are the only technically practical choices for this task.

So yeah, I'm in favor of putting in options in the combat UI to allow for non-combat skills to be used in combat mode, but in no way does the use of those skills break someone out of combat mode.

The engagement needs to be stopped for combat mode to end. I wouldn't mind having a 'flee' skill in the tactics tree specifically designed around checking for one's capability of escaping active threat and disengaging combat mode, but that also needs to be heavily balanced to prevent exploitation.

What do the rest of you think? Is adding non-combat responses in the middle of combat muddying combat too much? Is it too complicated or time consuming to pursue introducing this kind of dynamic to the game? Is the value of this approach worth it to this audience? I would like to think it could be, but I don't want to add too much of an added workload to the devs either, since we're approaching release.

 

Awesome feedback and ideas!

 

Bard skill tree.

 

I would love this idea. It would make it so crafters that have high social stats would be able to stave off attacks from some sentient creatures. It wouldn't necessarily stop all attacks, but paying off bandits for passage or something similar would be so much more fun in my opinion.