One of our major inspirations for the core combat mechanics for this game is Dark Souls. If you’re familiar with any of the Souls games (or Bloodborne for that matter), you already know that they all use a stamina system to create a resource that the player must manage during combat. You spend stamina whenever you take an action such as dodging or attacking. This is a pretty straight forward system and it works quite well to force the player to make decisions throughout a fight. We’d like to bring some of the advantages of this resource system over into our game.
However, one thing I’ve noticed with the PvP in the Souls games (and especially Bloodborne) is that the games tend to make offense far more expensive than defense/evasion. Evasion as a whole is generally easy to pull off in response to seeing another player wind up an attack. This can be so consistently pulled off that, if one player partaking in a duel decides that they’re no longer going to fight back and spend all their effort evading, it can become almost impossible to kill them, especially with some of the larger and slower weapons. This is something we’d definitely like to avoid… it can cause tediously long drawn out fights that end up feeling very frustrating.
Another thing we’d like to address with our stamina system is how well it’s tuned to allow players to really take advantage of poor stamina managerment (allowing you to pressure your opponent when they waste stamina), while not allowing you to utterly dominate them for making any mistakes with how they spend it.
We’re trying out a few different things to see if we can address these scenarios and really refine the sense of tactical tug of war that this a stamina system can provide.
Generally smaller stamina pool:
Most attacks or actions will take a quite a significant portion of your stamina. There won’t be any significant attacks or actions that can be easily spammed with out spending a significant portion of your stamina.
Relatively fast overall regeneration rate:
If you can back away from your opponent for a second, you should be able to get most of your stamina back fairly quickly. This will force you to back out sometimes to allow yourself to recouperate between bouts (and gives players time to think), but it won’t take so long that you feel the need to constantly delay. We want to keep you engaged with your opponent as much as possible.
Short time before stamina begins to regenerate:
Even with 1% stamina, you can still execute any action. So, if we allow you to regenerate back to 1% quickly after running out, this allows you to keep fighting back to some degree even when your opponent is on top of you pressuring you. This means that even when you’ve made a mistake, your opponent doesn’t get absolute free reign to unleash a torrent of damage upon you. There’s still counterplay and reading to be had.
Certain actions can cause stamina regeneration to take much longer to begin:
We’re currently experimenting with having certian actions (specifically dodging while you have less stamina than the dodge costs) that will make your stamina have a longer delay before regenerating. The purpose of this is to make it far more difficult to continually dodge away from your opponent. If you decide to dodge away from your opponent while low on stamina, you better make it count. You won’t be able to keep spamming it again and again to easily recover from your mistakes.
(we’re also toying with the idea of making dodging delay your stamina regeneration EVERY time you use it, not just when you over use it. This will most likely make the stamina delay feel more consistent, and it allows us to reduce the base cost of dodging while retaining the tactical depth gained by trying to nerf it)
Map Design:
This is a very important point. With well designed maps, it will be a lot more difficult for a player to continually run/dodge away from the fight with out cornering themselves.
