Lulgrim wrote:There was an optional TW2 combat mod made by one of the original developers but I haven't had time to go back to replay EE with that enabled. IMO mostly the high difficulties were not much fun as enemies would 1-shot you so you had to roll roll roll and do silly hit/run attacks. On normal/hard it's fine. If you could deal with SM then TW2 should be ok.
That's the point, in this particular case difficulty doesn't make the game more fun or anything. Normally when we are talking about fun in challenge higher difficulty setting offers, we mean that we actually have to use every trick in character's sleeve to win. The problem is that here it provides nothing as there aren't many useful (or even useable) tricks beyond what you normally do. You've put it well though.
I think I've seen rather decent mod (that edited a lot of stuff other than combat btw, and those are mostly good changes as well), and while it's an improvement, I don't think that it's what TW3's combat should look like. They should really look into player's tasks and options more.
Introducing basic principles like different attack/defense levels, better distinction between tracking/non-tracking blows (basically, a spacing game change, so that roll/sidestep isn't universal answer to everything anymore, but is still an important tool), adding more fencing moves to accomodate those and also means to sustain/reverse pressure in melee (mostly having to do with speed of blows and recovery from blocked strike of both parties, see term "frame data") and such. In fact, traditional "swift, heavy and block" triada of moves used in many action games with CQC is just shades of what I'm describing here, it's just its minimalistic variant.
Then we probably need more utility and less bruteforce from items and spells, more practical setups with traps and their proxies, some meaningful choices with alchemy and potions (and better UI for crafting, pretty please?) should be a good start.
Add some layers like extermely basic adaptation from AI, like enabling/disabling some of their scripts so that they don't step into your Yrden twice, but without making the spell useless, or so that you could condition them to defend in a certain manner then open them up by changing your attack pattern (sounds more complicated than it actually is) and the like.
Things like these could keep people entertained for at least maybe 2 playthroughs (so that it's not only a matter of storyline-related choices that keeps things interesting), which is, after all, the point of combat system in action-RPGs like that.
It sounds like a wall of complicated stuff right there, but it's nothing that can't be explained in 5 minutes of combat tutorial really. If anything, we have difficulty settings exactly for that case when people cba getting into combat mech and just want to go through a story, and that's just fine.
From designing standpoint, heck, it's all invented and put to use already, all you have to do is to pick barebones and implement them in your game about mutant master swordsman
On a related note, since you've mentioned that, Space Marine, of all things, had more diverse gameplay that TW series IMO.
