Arcen Games
General Category => A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 => Topic started by: BobTheJanitor on February 28, 2012, 10:14:45 pm
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In relation to some discussion on this mantis issue (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=6238), I thought I'd take Chris's suggestion and throw up a poll about this. The background is that before this version, falling calculated damage based on your base health. So a 100% damage fall would only kill you if you'd not applied any upgrade stone health buffs. This was an artifact of the previous upgrade system, where losing 100% health meant losing a 'health tank'. The newest beta version now changes this to calculate fall damage from your total health, so a 100% fall is just that, a killing fall.
So the question is whether this is what people want. Should fall damage max out at instant death, or should it be more forgiving?
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In every other game I've seen with fall damage, fall damage can be lethal if you land hard enough. I don't see any reason why AVWW should be different.
Something I am a bit more on the fence about is how fall damage interacts with health buffs.
In most games I've seen with fall damage, health buffs increase the distance you can fall (though if you are using a polynomial equation to determine fall damage, a large amount a extra health may only net you a little extra fall distance)
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I'd prefer tamer damage; honestly I don't feel any happier about the game because of it. It doesn't really bother me but I don't care for it.
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As has been said before, dying should be the result of a series of mistakes, not a single one. I would be slightly annoyed if I accidentally slipped off a ledge and died just because of that.
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Falling damage doesn't usually give me a challenge in games exactly. It only acts to inhibit me and make me more cautious.
Not saying it shouldn't be there, but I would like to be defeated by an enemy rather than making one wrong step and being totally annihilated (1 hit ko) by the ground. It isn't fun and it isn't clever.
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In every other game I've seen with fall damage, fall damage can be lethal if you land hard enough. I don't see any reason why AVWW should be different.
Something I am a bit more on the fence about is how fall damage interacts with health buffs.
In most games I've seen with fall damage, health buffs increase the distance you can fall (though if you are using a polynomial equation to determine fall damage, a large amount a extra health may only net you a little extra fall distance)
I agree with all of this. I think that losing three quarters of your health rather than all of it, on account of having upgraded it a few times, is as much preparing for the fall as equipping an enchant which will help you float down.
Furthermore, since there's no way to accurately judge quite how much any given distance is going to hurt, it's inherently more risky just to throw yourself off and hope your health soaks it up.
Spending all your upgrades on health should make you feel more resilient to the environment, although it needn't be as tame as before. If you choose to forgo a proper falling enchant in order to max out other stats because you have spent so much on health, that strikes me as a perfectly balanced choice, given the inherent drawbacks of throwing yourself off cliffs with no way to directly heal yourself at the bottom.
In short, I'm all for the idea that on standard health (or on any health, given a long enough fall) you might kill yourself - but it should be based on neither a % of base nor a % of total health. A fixed amount of damage seems more sensible. Same goes for water/lava/etc.
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Please don't make it any worse than it is. I like to spend some health to be able to move around more quickly. What I would not like to do is having to slowly wood-platform down every time I see a ledge and don't know now long of a fall it will be.
On a sort of relevant topic, does anyone find the 10000% damage storm dash a bit too painful? That along with fall damage and lava are like the only things I ever died to. While I'm not sure you're supposed to be able quickly bypass areas with enemies (though I wouldn't mind that), you can just randomly double-tap into someone and get hit for 30x damage. Not especially nice. And can definitely be the single mistake that you make before dying.
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Please don't make it any worse than it is. I like to spend some health to be able to move around more quickly. What I would not like to do is having to slowly wood-platform down every time I see a ledge and don't know now long of a fall it will be.
On a sort of relevant topic, does anyone find the 10000% damage storm dash a bit too painful? That along with fall damage and lava are like the only things I ever died to. While I'm not sure you're supposed to be able quickly bypass areas with enemies (though I wouldn't mind that), you can just randomly double-tap into someone and get hit for 30x damage. Not especially nice. And can definitely be the single mistake that you make before dying.
Edit: and five minutes later I slip through a crack during a bossfight and die from 300+ health. Annoying? Oh god yes. Really want this to be a fixed amount.
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In short, I'm all for the idea that on standard health (or on any health, given a long enough fall) you might kill yourself - but it should be based on neither a % of base nor a % of total health. A fixed amount of damage seems more sensible. Same goes for water/lava/etc.
Unfortunately doing it as a discrete number probably wouldn't work, rather the lowest base heath i have seen for a character is 13, and the max about 200, how do you pick a number that isn't trivial to one end of the scale and instant murder to the other? Which is obviously why we get percentages.
That said I'd agree with having health upgrades increase your resistance, but maybe not to the massive degree it did before, maybe each upgrade increasing the distance you can fall by 10% (I was going to frame it as simply decreasing the damage by 10% but this seems more interesting)
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Falling damage doesn't usually give me a challenge in games exactly. It only acts to inhibit me and make me more cautious.
Not saying it shouldn't be there, but I would like to be defeated by an enemy rather than making one wrong step and being totally annihilated (1 hit ko) by the ground. It isn't fun and it isn't clever.
I'm with this point of view. I don't especially find it unfair, just find myself annoyed by it.
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To be fair it's not as if there are many 100% damage cliffs, in fact are there any? I mean I fell of a huge cliff, one I readily expected to be a instant death and only took 80% damage (the old 80% but still)
Additionally there are a fair few ways to avoid accidental fall damage, enchants, double jumps....
maybe we need a featherfall spell, something that only lasts just about long enough for you to put a platform beneath you.
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Doesn't it make sense that a character with 13 base health would be worse at surviving falls that one at 200?
Isn't that, in fact, what a health stat attempts to represent in a game? A character's general durability?
I'm still all for discrete values - it just seems to make more sense if health is also displayed as a discrete value...
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Doesn't it make sense that a character with 12 base health would be worse at surviving falls that one at 200?
Isn't that, in fact, what a health stat attempts to represent in a game? A character's general durability?
I'm still all for discrete values - it just seems to make more sense if health is also displayed as a discrete value...
Does it make sense? yes obviously. is fair to the person playing the character? Not in the least.
My point is that with discrete values a 13 healther will likely die from everything, these people would be dying from what would currently be 10% damage falls, and those are pretty short.
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Then surely that's a comment on the fact that there are characters with so little health!
By the same token, it wouldn't be fair that some monsters could one-hit-kill that player!
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There aren't any characters with double digit base health, are there? I presume the 13 was a typo. Right now the range is about 130-200.
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No, there are, and I put it in Mantis and was told it was supposed to be like that and wasn't going to change.
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If you go to a settlement and open the list of settlers, you can see their base health. I've seen as low as 38 I think, but that hardly means there isn't anything lower.
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Oh well then, guess I didn't hit any of those yet.
Could go back to the 'unintended' behaviour: % of base HP, 100% max. I wouldn't mind that.
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To be fair it's not as if there are many 100% damage cliffs, in fact are there any?
Possibly not, but what about being mid fight with some fairies and already 20-30% injured and misjudging your double jump over a deep pit? Wave goodbye, Wile E. Coyote.
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IMO, fall damage (the actual amount, not the ratio) should NOT scale with the current max health. Falling from a certain distance (enough to trigger fall damage of course) with no enchants should do the same amount of numerical health damage no matter what your current max health is.
Of course, fall damage should be allowed to surpass your base max health, and if you fall far enough, maybe even surpass your current max health. That way upgrading your health can impact how far you can fall. (This would only be fair if the double digit base health characters are no longer generated, which from what I have heard, their existence is a bug)
However, to prevent abuse, the amount of fall damage you take should be super-linear to the amount of distance you fall (or how hard you fall, or whatever the variable it scales over is). After all, doesn't kinetic energy scale squared to your velocity?
This way, if you double your health, you don't get to be able to double how far you fall, but rather, say 1.2x the distance you can fall. And the returns get even more diminishing as you go on. This should allow boosts in health to increase fall durability without leading to "I can fall from the stratosphere and still live" without using an absolutely insane number of enchants. (Possibly, never reaching that, if the amount of distance you can fall turns out to be asymptotically bounded given the fall damage equation)
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To be fair it's not as if there are many 100% damage cliffs, in fact are there any?
Possibly not, but what about being mid fight with some fairies and already 20-30% injured and misjudging your double jump over a deep pit? Wave goodbye, Wile E. Coyote.
Obnoxious, yes, but something I see entirely fair in other games with fall damage that also have bosses. I get frustrated, but not at the game, but at myself for forgetting about the hole, or misjudging it, or whatever. (Unless the fall damage equation is completely out of wack for that game, which right now it may be for this game, but that can change)
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To be fair it's not as if there are many 100% damage cliffs, in fact are there any?
Possibly not, but what about being mid fight with some fairies and already 20-30% injured and misjudging your double jump over a deep pit? Wave goodbye, Wile E. Coyote.
Personally I feel that is an entirely valid way to die, that makes your death the result of a combination of skill, environment and enemies.
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For the next version:
* The amount of falling damage, lava damage, water damage, and temperature damage, etc, that players take has been reverted to the amounts prior to the last release. The consensus wasn't exactly universal on this, but it does make good sense that having upgraded health should make you more resilient to various environmental factors as well as to enemies.
** Thanks to BobTheJanitor for pushing this one.
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As has been said before, dying should be the result of a series of mistakes, not a single one. I would be slightly annoyed if I accidentally slipped off a ledge and died just because of that.
This. Absolutely this. I'm honestly quite against any substantial falling damage just for this very reason.
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I will throw my hat in there as also feeling that %basehp damage values are a sub-optimal solution. A character with low health should be punished by being fragile; a character with high health should be rewarded by being durable. Percentage based damage makes your actual health matter less.
Certainly upgrading your health should make you more resistant to falling, but I feel that picking a high-hp character should also make you more resistant to falling/water/lava/etc.
I also feel the 13hp-character is an extreme edge case - I don't think the game should be balanced with hyper-low-hp characters in mind. Someone who picks such a character is making a conscious (and highly visible) decision to risk dying to a single blow.
EDIT: I also, though, agree with dying-as-a-series-of-mistakes. Fall damage from a reasonably long fall should probably be about 80-100: Enough to be a serious injury, especially if you have low base-hp and haven't upgraded it, but not typically enough to kill the average character.
I also think %basehp results in too much increase in durability: With only one health upgrade, a fall that would have killed you before only does 50% of your hp in damage.
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I also think %basehp results in too much increase in durability: With only one health upgrade, a fall that would have killed you before only does 50% of your hp in damage.
I don't know. That seems reasonable to me. Double the HP means half the total HP ratio lost on the same amount of fall damage, because the amount of "hurt" you can take doubled, but in this case, the "hurt" inflicted stayed the same.
What wouldn't be reasonable if after only one health upgrade you could now fall double the distance before being killed.
Incidentally, is there any way to get your actual remaining HP, in raw HP value and not the percentage? Not nessecarily on the main HUD, but a status screen of some sort? (I haven't played for several versions, so I wouldn't know)
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Incidentally, is there any way to get your actual remaining HP, in raw HP value and not the percentage? Not nessecarily on the main HUD, but a status screen of some sort? (I haven't played for several versions, so I wouldn't know)
They already ditched the percentages, now it is just the actual numbers.
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Incidentally, is there any way to get your actual remaining HP, in raw HP value and not the percentage? Not nessecarily on the main HUD, but a status screen of some sort? (I haven't played for several versions, so I wouldn't know)
They already ditched the percentages, now it is just the actual numbers.
Yea, I see it now, way back in .548
I stopped playing this around where missions were first introduced, showing how behind I am on actual experience of the game. Everything I've suggested/commented on so far has been on principal, reading release notes, and/or reactions from other players.
Once beta series 3 starts, I plan on at least trying the game again.
Why did I stop playing?
Not because, at the time I stopped, there was little sense of progression or goals, but rather because it kinda hurts you hands to play a shooter/platformer hybrid on a lap-top keyboard, and with only a touchpad for a mouse.
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I wanted to see if consensus was forthcoming about the formulation of environmental damage in general, so I made a poll for that:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9964.msg94572.html#msg94572 (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9964.msg94572.html#msg94572)
I've tried to not step on Bob's poll's toes as I think they both measure a different thing (how much people want to get hurt vs. the method by which they do).
And it covers all kinds of environmental damage at the moment - falling, water, cold, heat, lava, etc.