cRPG Combat Encounter Design
cRPG Combat Encounter Design Definition
By Combat Encounter Design (CED) in cRPGs, I mean how combat encounters (battles) are presented to the player, what they are composed of, and how they play out. Along with the combat system, combat encounter design is an important aspect of cRPG Design, yet its art and science has gone by largely ignored throughout cRPG History.
What the genre needs is coders, combat system engineers and combat encounter designers, not more narrative designers and other useless layabouts such as failed or wannabe novelists.
What facilitates top-notch combat encounter design is ruleset (AD&D 2nd Edition), perspective and combat system. If we have those three honed, we can start crafting great combat encounters.
Of course, we need balanced cRPG itemization as well.
Cite: Kill Frog Morton Fallout 2.
Note that party-based tactics or full party control are not necessarily prerequisites to great CED; it is conceivable that cRPGs in which we only control one combatant can have great CED; indeed, this has already been proven by Swordflight.
I identify three main forms of CED: duel-based, mob-based and horde-based.
Duel-based Combat Encounter Design
Duel-based combat encounter design involves two combatants going toe-to-toe in a duel to the death. I think it is the most satisfying kind of CED; there is nothing quite like 1-on-1.
Duels can be melee-based, ranged-based or perhaps -- best of all -- we can engage in spellcasting duels which were made famous by and have their seminal employment in Baldur's Gate.
Due to the ability of enemy spellcasters to immobilize and incinerate parties, or turn party members against each other, party mages usually tell everyone else to stand back and stay the hell out of the way when they take on the rival mage by themselves.
While not always true, what I declared serves as a good warning: The only way to take on a Mage, is with another Mage.
And actually, at least in theory, Neverwinter Nights is one of the best cRPGs for duel-based CED. It has many cool activated feats, nice dodge and parry animations, and of course the famous dance of death.
In order for duel-based CED to be good, the enemy AI should do more than blindly rage on and attack its rival. It should employ a range of abilities, items and spells, and it should attempt to move about and reposition itself (mobility). If it's losing in melee, it should try to flee; maybe quaff a haste potion, whip out a bow, and attempt to kite.
Ideally, there is an initial parley possibly followed by a mid-combat parley (e.g., a chance for surrender, negotiation or feigned attempts thereof; treachery).
Mob-based Combat Encounter Design
Mob-based is the most common form of combat encounter design. In mob-based CED, we go up against discrete packs of enemies or monster mobs which may or may not be related factionally.
Unfortunately, mob-based CED is rarely employed well in cRPGs: the lack of rest restrictions allows parties to rest-spam between each pack unless the packs have the potential to bleed into one another, and become a horde.
Ideally, mobs of monsters roam about their lairs, camps or the wilderness, with one monster occasionally getting side-tracked and breaking off from the pack, thereby becoming an easier kill or presenting a dueling opportunity.
Orderly patrols should also be employed where appropriate, with the guards moving together in formation. This sort of thing is rarely if ever seen in cRPGs. In most cases mobs are simply spammed about the area, waiting around for the party to come and slay them.
Indeed, that is this genre's CED in a nutshell.
[Baldur's Gate 2: de'Arnise Stronghold]
Those trolls screencapped above? They don't move an inch, they don't react to the screams of pain that echo through the halls of the keep they're supposedly guarding, they don't give a damn what's going on until they catch sight of the party. Note how they're huddled together, just begging for that Fireball.
Under the heading of "mobs" can also come rival adventuring parties. The original Baldur's Gate did these best.
cRPG Trashmobs
Trashmobs do not constitute bad combat encounter design unless they are overly prevalent. Even at higher levels, there is nothing wrong with throwing the odd pack of orcs at the party. Why? Because putting a few mooks into the middle of a campaign allows the player to gauge their power progression and feel the growth of their character and party.
An enemy we formerly needed to take seriously now invokes laughter on-sight. Plus, it's realistic to have mooks still getting about.
Horde-based Combat Encounter Design
Horde-based combat encounter design is the rarest of all because the genre wandered off from its wargaming roots and got lost in the woods. In horde-based, our party of heroes or squad of commandos -- totally outmatched in terms of numbers -- goes up against an orderly army of soldiers or a chaotic horde of wretches. The horde does not have to be represented on the battlefield all at once; it is enough that they flow onto the battlefield, in intervals, and scores at a time, sustaining a marathon-length battle that exhausts party resources.
[Icewind Dale: Dragon's Eye: Persistently-summoned horde]
Horde-based also includes siege warfare. This was an unforgettable siege:
[Aielund Saga: Siege of Fort Highmarch]
Terrain Advantage
The lay of the land can easily facilitate interesting combat encounter design. By that I mean obstructions, height-mapped terrain and such landmarks as bridges or over-passes, which create bottlenecks. Take the following examples from Icewind Dale, which show how to make weak enemies dangerous by simply giving them positional advantage:
Note how the above-left character is in scout-/stealth-mode. CED that disallows scouting and instead dumps parties in the face of aggro -- especially after lengthy cutscenes -- should be outlawed.
We barely ever see archers placed in elevated positions or hard-to-reach ones, forcing the tanks to go the long way around while being stung by arrow-hail, or forcing us to break out bows, guns and ranged spells ourselves. Barely ever is our avenue of approach impaired. Indeed, do I struggle to find examples to cite.
The above combat encounter could be made more lethal by increasing the number of enemy archers and increasing the hitpoints and damage reduction of the placeable barricades, which are destructible.
cRPGs rarely employ winding, narrow corridors because their pathfinding routines usually suck. However, designing wide-open areas and wider corridors to circumvent poorly-coded pathfinding routines is just taking the easy way out, because such environments are not as interesting or as dangerous as the two screencapped below.
z-levels in cRPGs
Of course I'm talking about gameplay verticality, not just visual verticality or the mere representation of height for aesthetic purposes. It is understandable that many cRPGs do not feature CED that takes into account verticality and airborne combat units (e.g, wizards levitating). Afterall, cRPG developers have always been by far the absolute worst coders in the gaming industry. I mean, the vast majority of them can't even code a passable pathfinding routine even on terrain that isn't height-mapped, so imagine asking them to code battlescapes that feature nine levels of verticality as well as seamless transition between indoors and outdoors?
Imagine being able to reshape the landscape, impact the environment and alter the flow of battles with spells, grenades and high-powered weapons... Imagine being able to drill tunnels through rock with laser cannons and completely level buildings in order to get at the enemies holed up within them? Well, destructibility is the province of only a few tactical cRPGs.
Level Scaling in cRPGs
Level scaling is a general term that includes combat encounter scaling and itemization scaling to player or party power progression attained (usually, "character level").
As I've always said, a bandit should be a bandit regardless of player character or party power progression or size. A bandit does not suddenly gain more hit points, a higher attack rate or more allies just because the party is bigger or more powerful.
Scaling CED to player character or party power progression is an unsatisfactory and immersion-breaking solution to the problem presented by the non-linear or open-world cRPG structure.
A much better solution is to hand-craft all CED but give the player a way to assess the difficulty of an encounter, such as by means of scouting, tracking and divination. Or the party receives warnings because the environment becomes increasingly inhospitable, and the enemies gradually become harder to tame. The party can back out and return once they have powered up, which is much more rewarding in the long run: the enemy we couldn't beat before can now be dealt with.
At worst, when taken to the limit, what level scaling does is rob the player of discernable character power progression. If all enemies are matched evenly to the party at all times, the difference between a mook and an epic is as nothing, and leveling loses almost all meaning.
The party never gets to challenge itself on harder enemies:
"Wow, we actually managed to beat those guys!"
And never gets to cakewalk easier ones:
"Those guys gave us trouble earlier in the game, but now they're a joke! We're improving!"
This is a Baby's First Design Principle that many cRPG "developers" don't even understand.
cRPG Combat Difficulty
Balancing the scales of cRPG combat encounter design is not a huge problem if designers are free to tailor encounters to players of a certain gaming pedigree or aptitude. For example, designers can assume players to be experts on the lineage, engine and ruleset of certain cRPGs, thereby providing a refined experience for dedicated gamers who know how to build characters, employ tactics and manage their resources for extended periods, such as during cRPG dungeon crawls.
Due to the yawning gulf that exists between experts and casual players, it is barely possible to design cRPGs that accommodate both; usually, there is only a middleground that doesn't satisfy either: one player finds the cRPG too hard whereas the other cakewalks it.
Being broad-brush in nature, the inclusion of difficulty settings rarely solves the problem. While much could be written about difficulty settings, it is an incredibly boring subject to treat and I'm actually against their inclusion entirely.
I generally play on Core aka Normal difficulty settings. If I find the combat too hard, I "get gud". If I find combat too easy, I write the cRPG off, self-impose restrictions (No Reload Run Baldur's Gate) or install tactics mods (SCS BG2).
Enemy Variety
This is an overrated concern voiced by foolish fans with attention spans akin to lightning bolts: they need to see new things every second or they become bored. They don't just want elves and dwarves, but furries and other abominations as well.
To these people, it's not an cRPG unless there are 300 different monsters in there.
But ToEE and Jagged Alliance 2 do just fine being human-centric. If the humans have different abilities and employ all kinds of tactics, then there is no need for grotesque distortions and exaggerations of human traits through invented monsters.
[ToEE: Broken Tower CE]
Combat encounter-wise, nothing competes with Jagged Alliance 2. While we mostly go up against human soldiers and mercenaries, there are different kinds and there are also unusual specimens such as bloodcats and crepitus.
You see, we don't need 300 different monsters in a game to make CED interesting. The tactics in JA2 comes from enemies and the player's squad being able to wield knives, guns, mortars, LAWs, grenades and gasses of different kinds. Variety also comes in the form of stances: not many cRPGs let combat units crouch much less climb, sprint, jump, duckwalk, army crawl and backpedal.
Not only that, but the area design is tactical, features verticality, and its destructibility allows for the structural reshaping of the environment during combat encounters, which can impact and even dictate their outcomes. In cRPG History, the ability to reshape our landscape is unique to JA2, Silent Storm and X-COM.
In conclusion, the object of Combat Encounter Design (CED) should be to present players with interesting, tactical and challenging scenarios but, as a rule of thumb, cRPGs don't exhibit CED that shows any insight into the genre's wargaming roots. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that CED in most cRPGs is a laughing stock, and a shameful disgrace.
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