Damage System

[Hesha]

First of all: Outstanding! TDM is amazing. This is the direction I wanted the Franchise to take. Better than T1, T2, T3.... 4 I haven't played, so I don't know, but I guess it's not so good.

 

 

I love how archery has become more challenging now with armor in place and functional. I am wondering, however, about how the damage system works. It seems as if a shot to the face is only lethal when it comes unexpected, in combat it takes two arrows to the face to kill a guard. Why is that? Isn't it already so much harder to hit an alarmed enemy, why increase the damage tolerance as well?

[Bikerdude]

Welcome to the forums Hesha.

[SteveL]

Indeed, welcome! I don't know the damage system works exactly but I suspect this is a case of the general rule that any attack will do more damage if your opponent is unsuspecting and unprepared. I appreciate it'd feel fair to be more rewarded than that for a successful arrow to the face of an alerted opponent :-)

[Springheel]

Welcome Hesha. Part of the reason is because more damage is dealt when an opponent is unaware--when alert, they are assumed to be dodging slightly at the last minute in a way that lessens the damage (even though the animations don't cover subtle behaviour like that). In terms of gameplay it was far too easy for the player to shoot the face of a charging guard, since they run at you in a straight line (making it easy to aim), so you need two shots by default (though if you put the combat difficulty to Easy I believe you can still do it in one).

[AluminumHaste]

There was a video floating around of a player headshotting guards, pulling the arrow out, using that arrow to head shot another etc. All the while they were chasing him around.

It was pretty obvious that it's too easy to take advantage of.

[RPGista]

Yeah, that whole thing... The design choice is that combat, as a rule, is to be penalised, or not encouraged. There were discussions about this at the time, and if I recall, the same adjustments happened to sword blows. That is understandable, its a sneaking game after all. Indeed, some very legitimate questions arose to keep players from being able to "rambo" missions, exploiting some clear faults in AIs behaviour (at the time, perhaps a lot of those issues might have been corrected by now). Some proposals were put foward to address them, like better reaction time for AI drawing and defending themselves, or making firing arrows slower.

 

What I disagree in this view however, that sneaking should be actively supported, is that the neutrality of the game physics looses a bit of its credibilitity, its coherence. The whole point of avoiding alerting people for me was always, not that I would loose any bonuses, but because I didnt want to cause this whole commotion that would bring me problems (by attracting loads of enemies my way). The guards themselves need not become harder once alerted, as if theres something bad about it, alerts go around and having to face a group of angry people should be enough of a bad consequence to not being stealthy.

Edited March 10, 2015 by RPGista

[Morat]

You'll find that the Dark Mod in general is much tougher than regular Thief, which I admit turned me off at first. It grows on you, though. After ghosting Heart of Lone Salvation, going back through T1 and T2 is easy as pie.

 

Remember also that the AI in the original Thief games could withstand at least a couple of arrows to the face when alerted.

Edited March 10, 2015 by Morat

[RPGista]

You ghosted Heart? Damn... That takes a LOT of work.

[Morat]

You ghosted Heart? Damn... That takes a LOT of work.

A LOT of quick loading, more like. I confess that nowadays I play most dark mod missions with enemy AI set to nearly blind because it feels closer to original Thief.

[Springheel]

not that I would loose any bonuses, but because I didnt want to cause this whole commotion that would bring me problems (by attracting loads of enemies my way).

 

The issue is that enemies aren't a problem if you can drop them with single arrows while they charge at you. That video AH mentioned was a prime example of people casually walking around, taking out multiple guards as if they were Legolas. You can still do that on Easy, if you like, but it's not the default experience we want.

[Obsttorte]

Regarding the damage system:

 

Once a projectile or weapon collides with the visual mesh, the code checks for the closest point of the collision mesh and checks which body it belongs to. For each body there is a damage multiplier set which gets multiplied with the damge defined on the weapon/projectile. If the ai was unalerted, there is another multiplier which increases the damage (it usually gets doubled iirc).

 

The multiplier values are defined in the entity definitions of the ai and can therefore be read out and altered in DR.

 

Regarding the arrow question, all has been said. The aforementioned video as well as many comments made clear the old system needs some adjustment, and there were basically two possibilities. Either we let the ai survive one headshot if alerted or we remove the arrow retrieving feature.

[RPGista]

The current system literally penalises players for alerting guards (by doubling their health bar, or halving your weapons damage halved, however you wanna put it). I guess this is, at botton, what I was trying to say. Its an unfair knock on an Assassin playstyle. It also happens to make melee less interesting than it was in 1.6 or 1.8 versions. Though I understand this is the official design choice, I still believe a more subtle solution could have been achieved as well. The legolas rapid fire issue could have been solved by making it fairly slower to draw arrows, coupled with a bit more swing untill you achieve perfect accuracy - this would have no impact in stealth shots, where a couple more seconds wouldnt matter since your hidden, but would make it much harder to down a charging enemy (but not impossible, in the right situation); sneaky sword thrusts to the head could be solved by increasing AI's defensive reflexes accordingly, and faster weapon drawing from them (I believe the latter was done by grayman already?).

 

So yes, the stronger-when-alerted-guards work to solve the loopholes and to encourage players to never face an enemy, but hopefully in the future this could be evaluated again and a more complex solution achieved. By tweaking the player and AI mechanics, you could potentially achieve the same functional state without loosing the neutrality of the world setting.

 

PS: to morat, I urge you not to do that man , alerting guards and dealing with their reactions is the most fun part of playing TDM, they can be quite surprising sometimes. I still dont know why so many people seem to be allergic to doing that, they are missing out IMO.

Edited March 12, 2015 by RPGista

[Xarg]

I still dont know why so many people seem to be allergic to doing that, they are missing out IMO.

 

Probably because a few missions fail if you get detected above X level, HoLS being one that comes to mind, there are some others. Add that to the player's strongest combat asset (barring mastery of the sword system) being stealth, it's a dual incentive to keep things quiet.. our thief can't just drop a sack and get his own pro guard armour out of it if things get loud.

[Wallace]

Welcome Hesha. Part of the reason is because more damage is dealt when an opponent is unaware--when alert, they are assumed to be dodging slightly at the last minute in a way that lessens the damage (even though the animations don't cover subtle behaviour like that). In terms of gameplay it was far too easy for the player to shoot the face of a charging guard, since they run at you in a straight line (making it easy to aim), so you need two shots by default (though if you put the combat difficulty to Easy I believe you can still do it in one).

 

Really great reasoning. I hadn't thought of it like that.

Edited March 12, 2015 by Wallace

[Springheel]

The current system literally penalises players for alerting guards (by doubling their health bar, or halving your weapons damage halved, however you wanna put it). I guess this is, at botton, what I was trying to say. Its an unfair knock on an Assassin playstyle

 

 

It's not that the system penalizes you for alerting guards, but it rewards you from striking while your opponent is unaware. This "backstab bonus" has been part of a thief's arsenal since the original D&D. I also don't see how that is "unfair" to the Assassin playstyle, since assassins are supposed to rely on sneak attacks, not prolonged combat.

 

The legolas rapid fire issue could have been solved by making it fairly slower to draw arrows, coupled with a bit more swing untill you achieve perfect accuracy - this would have no impact in stealth shots, where a couple more seconds wouldnt matter since your hidden,

 

 

I think that option was discussed. But since so much of the game revolves around your bow, it didn't seem like it would take very long before people got annoyed waiting an extra few seconds every time they want to shoot torches or rope arrows.

 

I still believe a more subtle solution could have been achieved as well.

 

 

 

 

No doubt. We even had a different solution in the design docs originally. But as always, limited time and all that.

[Morat]

PS: to morat, I urge you not to do that man , alerting guards and dealing with their reactions is the most fun part of playing TDM, they can be quite surprising sometimes. I still dont know why so many people seem to be allergic to doing that, they are missing out IMO.

 

I know, I know, it's part of the fun, and I do like to iron man some missions. I just really wanted to get those optional ghost objectives that Heart has. I bet that trying to get those while iron-manning with hardcore AI is sheer masochism.