Combat animations

Watching the Darkfall video I realized that what I liked the least about it was how the characters moved in combat. Darkfall is a real time action combat based MMORPG, and the characters move accordingly: fast movements, strafing, circling, the whole deal of typical FPS movements. Which looks *extremely* silly on knights in heavy plate armor. I never tried wearing a real plate armor, but I'm pretty sure that a knight wearing 40 kg of heavy metal didn't strafe and jump around.

The other extreme is classic PvE MMORPG combat, where there is little need to move at all, at least not in soloing. I remember playing games like Anarchy Online, where your weapon was some sort of futuristic gun, and combat consisted of you standing toe to toe with an NPC mob, with you and your enemy firing huge laser guns at each other from very close range for one or two minutes, without moving. Needless to say that this didn't look like realistic combat either.

One of the reasons that I don't like WoW PvP is that I always end up fighting some nervous youngster who is trying all this strafing and jumping nonsense around me. I don't believe that in a real swordfight it would be possible to run around somebody and stab him in the back. In a pen & paper combat system like D&D, you have a "zone of control", and if the enemy tries to move around in that zone, you get free hits on him. That is realistic, because if somebody is attacking you with a sword, you don't really have time to do much fancy footwork.

I can see how a MMORPG combat system in which you had to react more in real time could be popular. But *not* by allowing people to move around at full run speed in combat, without any penalties. The combat in Auto Assault wasn't bad, because trying to race after another car while keeping it in your arc of fire was both fun and feeling realistic. But that only works for shooting games, not for melee combat games. If I would design a real time melee combat system, I would dramatically slow down movement speed whenever you are in combat mode, but allow the opponents to click high, mid, or low on their enemies, and allow targeted defensive moves as well as attacks. Predicting, or reacting very quickly to what you see your opponent doing would be rewarded. See an opening, hit it. Think your opponent will swing high, raise your shield. And so on.

The standard MMORPG auto-combat with special attacks thrown in got better with time, but it is getting a bit stale by now. Special move combos, like the renkai chains of FFXI or the less good heroic opportunities of EQ2 are one way to make MMORPG combat more interesting, but there could be better ways. And ideally a game should have classes which click more in combat, and others which click less, to appeal to the different tastes. That is something that WoW does well, a rogue mashes a lot more buttons per combat than a warrior, for example. Just going back to a Diablo-style click-fest combat is not an improvement. If a MMORPG combat doesn't *look* real, chances are that it isn't much fun in the first place.