Swift Strike: The player teleports a medium distance onto an enemy and performs a melee attack.Endure: Prevents stagger on the player and reduces damage taken for a short duration.Blowback: A heavy attack that knocks enemies back and down.The players can select two abilities that they’re locked into, and each ability is on a 6 second cooldown. We’ll say the main character is a swashbuckler with a sword and a pistol. All players have a melee and a ranged attack, a dodge dash/roll, and move at run speed. Let’s build a hypothetical ARPG that has the player selecting one of six abilities-three different “trees” of two abilities each. Each build has a variety of strategies the player can take to deal with the situation that is similarly effective. This requires the player to either have a melee weapon in reserve or to use very precise dodge timing. Most magics’ cast times are too long if the dogs get close, and the dog’s rapid movement makes them very difficult to hit even if a spell gets fired off. The standard strategy would be to block the dogs, counter attack since they die in a few hits, then use the ranged weapon between dodge rolls to take out the enemy ranged units. So, we’ll say Player 1 has a standard setup: fast melee weapon, medium armor, and a shield with a ranged weapon in reserve. Characters move slower or faster depending on how much protection their armor gives and can use a shield to block attacks or gain invincibility frames with a dodge roll. Spells tend to have even longer startup times with shorter range, but do significantly more damage than a ranged weapon. Ranged weapons generally have a long startup, but have no active or recovery frames on the player side, and can be effectively fired at mid to extreme ranges. Melee weapons have differing startup length, very similar active length (the part that can hit enemies), and similar recovery times, with a few exceptions. Let’s look at the player’s character customization options they can bring to this fight.įor our purposes, there are three general types of interactions a player’s DS3 character can have with the enemy: melee weapons, ranged weapons, and spells. Both types of attacks will stagger and interrupt the player if they hit. The dogs move quickly, attack frequently, but do low damage. The ranged enemies have a slow rate of fire and their bolts travel at a moderate speed, but can deal significant damage if they hit the player. There’s an encounter where the player walks into several dogs guarding a handful of archers, who stand on raised ledges the player needs to go around the archer’s position to access.
#Dark soul 3 character creation series
The Souls series makes a good case study for this, but in interest of brevity, we’ll just focus on the design in Dark Souls 3, with interest in encounters with multiple enemy types. If the enemies in a game are varied, then you can get more mileage out of fewer abilities for the options players have for approaching challenges. Differences in the recurring strategies players use, or playstyles, tend to arise more from the challenges that the players expect to overcome rather than the options presented in character customization. Even in games with heavy RPG elements, enemies tend to have more influence on how players interact with a game than the options the players choose for their characters.