Fallen Earth: QotW#30: Let's Talk Combat!

Another week, and another quality entry by Cynagin detailing the combat system in Fallen Earth:

Combat

Lately we've seen a number of questions pop up about general features of combat, so I figured I'd take a week to, I hope, clear some things up. These are more concerns I've seen on the boards as opposed to dealing with one person's question.

Hit Determination

Our hit determination is based on having a target in your reticle. There is no sticky targeting.

The prime component of aiming is the reticle, which is used in 1st and 3rd person views. Our reticle is made up of four equal sized lines at right angles to each other with a space in the center. The size of the space at the center of your reticle is based on a number of conditions, such as stance, movement rate, and skill with the weapon you are using. If you are moving quickly and using a weapon you are not skilled in, your reticle will be larger, leaving a large space at the center of the reticle. Each time you attack with your weapon, the system picks a random point within the space at the center of your reticle for the attack. This means the higher your skill is with the weapon, and the slower you move, the tighter your grouping will be and the more accurate your attacks will be. If you're running full speed with a weapon you barely know how to use you won't hit much except at close range. Obviously this is more a concern for ranged weapons than for melee weapons.

When you attack, the system checks the point selected within the reticle and sees if there is a target there. If there is, you hit it. If not, you hit nothing. This means you don't lead targets; the point picked for the attack has to be on the target when you fire your weapon. This is where some of the confusion has probably come from, but just to be clear, there is no sticky targeting. We have checking on the back end and movement predictors to make up for lag and hacking attempts.

On a related note, excellent progress is being made on hit boxes. We have all the pieces to make it work; now we just need to put them together.

Gear vs. Aiming

Folks have been curious about what is more important, gear or ability to aim. Really, they are equally important. If you can't line up a target you won't inflict any damage, but if your gear is substandard you probably won't do enough damage to kill your target before they get you (assuming their gear isn't substandard). Keeping your gear up to date is an important part of gameplay because someone armed with a fireplace poker or a wine opener isn't going to do well against someone armed with a spiked baseball bat or an assault rifle. As gear progresses through the game, players will go from things that were never meant to be deadly weapons to things that were obviously meant to be deadly weapons, and their effectiveness in combat increases along with it. Throughout the game, though, if you can't hit the broadside of a barn, it doesn't matter how powerful your sniper rifle is.

We're in the process of adjusting the role of armor in damage mitigation so armor will never reduce damage to 0, so you'll always be able to do damage to someone, even if it is a very small amount.

Also, people shouldn't expect this to be the sort of game where you're getting a new weapon or piece of armor every level and have to leave behind your cool looking axe just because it's not effective anymore. Equipment upgrades come in tiers every five or ten levels (10-50 hours of gameplay) so you don't have to worry about upgrading your gear constantly; once you get one of the next tier, you're good for awhile. Also, in addition to regularly introducing new weapon models, players can upgrade their existing weapons (adding scopes, silencers, etc) or get new weapons using the same model.

Hit Points

A few weeks ago some folks were concerned about the hit point totals displayed in the screenshots Vivox posted. The character displayed is around 200th level, and was raised to that point through cheat codes. You could theoretically get 1055 hit points at 141st level by maxing out your Endurance and Strength at a cost of 700 APs (the base hit points at 141st level is 705).

A starting character has a base of 55 hit points and gains 5 hit points per level (assuming no APs are spent on Strength or Endurance). This change can be somewhat important at low level since going from 55 to 60 hit points is a 9% increase; at higher levels it means much less. For example, going from 50th to 51st level, or from 250 to 255 hit points, is an increase of 2%, and it only gets lower. These numbers can be increased by 50% if you were to max out your Strength and Endurance, but doing so can be a significant chunk of APs. This means, while starting characters will see some marked difference in their hit points and survivability in combat as they go up levels, at higher levels this difference becomes less and less. This is why, especially at higher levels, how you've spent your APs becomes much more important than your level.

Expect a new Official Fiction this Friday!