I have played a lot of martial arts-themed games, but I always feel that when the game shows martial arts battles, it is a bit scratchy.
This is not entirely a problem with the game. To put it bluntly, fighting in martial arts is inherently difficult to express.
Novels and storytelling can describe martial arts moves miraculously. For martial arts such as the Eighteen Palms of Subduing the Dragon and the Nine Swords of Dugu, people’s recognition of them is often limited to a domineering name, and other things are abstract and ethereal.
Later, when people made martial arts novels into movies, they needed to use their creativity to visualize the moves in their minds, and use computer special effects and movie techniques to show their power. But the battles in martial arts films are still relatively illusory, and there is no need to explain every move very clearly-the director can control the audience’s attention, use the language of the lens to show the intensity of the battle, and then cut a few close-ups of the body and slow I really don’t know how to shoot the action, and I can use the montage method to capture it in one stroke.
But in the game, the player needs to witness the whole process of the battle, so every move needs to be done in real life, and it can’t be fooled.
Under such circumstances, it is really difficult to make the battle look good and fun.
Martial arts battles often take place between lightning and flint. The hero in the story can rely on superhuman reflexes and judgment to read through the opponent’s moves in an instant and make a corresponding counterattack, but the player is not a hero after all. , it is impossible for the game to require the player to make such a reaction, otherwise, it will only be a game that looks powerful but is actually not fun.
Therefore, for a long time, domestic martial arts games have always been the next best thing in combat, using a turn-based design to give players enough time to think about move strategies.
Martial arts have become magic in Western fantasy RPGs. Players only need to choose moves, and then watch the protagonist make moves.
But in my heart, the contest should not be a contest like your fireball technique or my lightning strike, but a more subtle and fluid one.
Martial arts is a huge system of its own, and many concepts and thinking are not found in other cultures. It is convenient to apply existing designs in other systems, but it is impossible to fully adapt after all.
Therefore, many games are looking for a combat mode that belongs to Chinese martial arts.
What impressed me most was “Huanhua Xijianlu” when I was a child.
Although it is still a turn-based battle, both the enemy and the enemy will first arrange and combine their own moves for this round. The moves are divided into three ways: upper, middle and lower, and there is a restraint relationship between them. After deciding on the routine, the two sides will make moves together, and match points in turn according to the restraint relationship of the moves.
In the traditional turn-based combat, it feels like a martial arts game.
In recent years, there have been more and more similar explorations.
For example, the semi-real-time combat system of “Taiwu Painting Scroll” puts a lot of thought into the performance of martial arts combat: it does not use HP bars, but flaw bars. In this way, the characteristics of different schools and different martial arts can be displayed.
There is also a system that combines attack distance, turning weapon length, lightness skills, and changing moves into effective elements, which is very interesting to play.
The combat system of a recently launched martial arts game “Jianghu Eleven” is not only more complicated than that of “Taiwu Painted Scroll”, but also puts these mechanisms directly on the surface as one of its own characteristics.
Routine, moves, and flaws interact with each other, and there is even a bickering session of spamming each other in the middle of the force duel. The screen-full attributes and text bring together various elements in martial arts works, and can even achieve some behaviors that only exist in novels and movies, such as shooting down opponents’ weapons.
Although judging from the response, there are still problems with this system, but at least it is an active exploration of the martial arts combat mode.
Another recently launched martial arts game is Heluo’s “Wildness Outside the Sky”, which inherits the card battle gameplay of “Slaying the Spire” and tries to embody the feeling of martial arts combat in it. All kinds of routines and moves are disassembled into individual cards. Different cards can form a combo, and after playing the combo, you can get extra reward cards. There is a sense of kung fu that is ever-changing and integrated.
But all these games have only touched one side of martial arts. The rhythm of the turn-based game is still too slow, turning the martial arts battle into a game of thinking. If you want to show the flowing feeling of kung fu, you still need some action elements to combine action and games.
At present, the most reliable ones may be realistic action games like “Master”, which use the motion capture of real people to integrate the movements of Chinese kung fu into action games.
However, the inside of “Master” is still a typed action game. We are already quite familiar with the combat system based on the defensive counterattack and execution system. There will be no problem if you replace Baimeiquan with Batman or Spiderman.
The systems of other action games are directly applied to martial arts games, and it seems that they are not perfect. Whether it is execution with a knife like a wolf, or dodging into slow motion like a witch, it is not enough to completely cover the battle of martial arts.
I sometimes think that maybe I can find some ideas in sports games.
Sports games face a similar core problem. The game needs to eliminate the ability gap between professional athletes and ordinary players. For example, in a basketball game, players need to make a lot of judgments in an attack, read the form on the court, understand various tactics, and at the same time make decisions. Various technical actions, such as dribbling, passing, and shooting. If you restore all of these to the game, the player will become confused.
At the very beginning, sports games were handled by seizing control from the player. The player’s actions were automatically selected by the computer based on the field, and the player only had simple control and behavior choices.
But later, basketball games gave players more and more freedom of operation, and players’ control over players became more and more precise.
The trick is to hand over the key operations to the player to call the shots, such as cross-stepping when passing or dribbling behind the back? Use the ground pass or the lob pass? Layup with Eurostep or forced dunk? Make the player feel like they have complete control over the player.
At the same time, some trivial, complex and critical judgments are actually still made by the game system, such as which dunk position to choose, how high to take off, and which hand to use to block shots. The instructions of the auxiliary player can be effectively executed.
This not only ensures that players can have a sufficient sense of participation, but also ensures the overall smoothness of the game.
Of course, you can do whatever you want on the keyboard. If you really try to make such a gameplay demo, you may find that this is a stupid idea.
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