We are doing several things to add more OMG moments to combat

We are doing several things to add more OMG moments to combat. The new ultimate abilities are – frankly – awesome, and everyone in the office is amazed by what the graphics team have achieved. It’s been a pleasure to see these ideas come to life: huge tidal waves cascading from the mage; explosions blasting your opponent from afar; massive aerial bombardments from the ranger; a rain of arrows pinning your target to the ground; cleaving blows from the warrior, so big that they rupture the very ground around you; or calling great destructive meteors from the sky. There’s a real plethora of choice, too, with over 20 abilities to pick from within each combat method. We are also adding critical hits to combat, to add a new dimension to damage with crit-hit splats. Overall, your rate of damage will be massively increased.

Of course, it’s not all about how hard you can hit things. Maximum life points will be raised by the armour you’re wearing, so life points will effectively increase by over 15 times of previous amounts for defensively geared players, with a 10 times increase for those equipped with offense in mind. Currently, a common source of disappointment is being killed very quickly in PvP with little chance to react. With larger life pool, players will be encouraged to think tactically rather than relying on lucky, big hits.

Making Combat about Player Skill

To bring us back to the idea of gaming skill that I was discussing at the beginning of this blog, we are building a system to reward the player who makes good use of their knowledge and understanding of combat. Those players who truly master the new abilities, equipment rebalancing and target-strengths and weaknesses will find new rewards from the game – not only in terms of fun, but also in treasure and progression. Players who master the system will have the best XP and GP rates available through combat.

Naturally, there are several aspects of the game that need rebalancing in order to achieve this sense of reward. Things like healing via food have been modified to relate more to the new and increased life points of the player; potions and prayers are being modified to allow for high-level features in the future; and massive changes are being made to encourage players to train all combat skills, including the neglected Defence skill. More information on that will follow in a later blog.

As mentioned previously, the action bar we are adding to the game allows the player to quickly access the features they want to use, rather than force them to navigate between tabs to find them. This means more time engaging with combat itself, not the interfaces that contain the right buttons. Players will load the 12 slot action bar with all the abilities, potions, food, prayers, spells etc they want to, and have all the features they wish to use in one place. It’s really easy to set up your action bar and define your own hotkeys to access the bar, and once defined it can be locked, remaining the same until you decide to change it. Players will also have access to multiple action bars, so you can define your optimum setup for whatever situation you find yourself in, even outside of combat. The abilities we are adding give the player a wealth of choices to use in PvE and PvP combat, and the way those abilities relate to each other will bring a new sense of tactical depth to the game. It’s shaping up to be truly jaw-dropping.

More Og-blogging next week!