Avencast: Rise of the Mage Interview, Part One
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Q: Since you've made a number of references to the type of combat experience you're aiming to offer, what are the significant features and elements you'd like us to know about?
Minh Tri Do Dinh: You could say that combat is the heart and soul of Avencast. While there are plenty of varied quests to keep you challenged and captivated, you will definitely spend a lot of your time fighting. The combat system itself was born out of the observation that a lot of RPGs are, in a way, very reliant on numbers and statistics.
Imagine this typical role-playing scenario:
"... I'm trying to attack him with a spell that costs 10.3 mana and does 38.7 fire damage. My attack rating is 345.7, so there's a 34 percent chance to miss the attack. However, I'm wearing an amulet that raises my skill points by 2.8. So, if I'm lucky, I might be able to kill him before he kills me..."
The point is that for us, other RPG combat systems sometimes felt like math, not magic, and putting the fate of your fabled hero into the hands of a dice-rolling calculator wasn't appealing enough. What we want to do is put the reins of the character right into the hands of the player. This is where our inspiration from all those action games came in.
Basically, your character is controlled by both keyboard and mouse. Movement happens in real time. Spells are triggered by pressing the proper button combinations (e.g. back, forward, right mouse button), so in a way, it plays like a 3D beat 'em up. To make things a bit more accessible, you do have the choice to put some of your favourite spells on shortcut keys.
Everything in combat (the way you move, your attacks, the behaviour of your enemies...) really follows the notion of putting the player right into the moment where it happens, and this allows us to create a style of action that is much more dynamic. The intensity can already be felt on a very intuitive level before you even have to worry about what's written on your hero's statistics sheet.
Mind you, the stats are still there, but there's plenty of tweaking that you can do with your character, your skills and your equipment. Our goal is to make that flow into the combat as organically as possible.
