Rise of the Argonauts Interview
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"I think the combat mechanics in most RPGs suck ass! There's no other way to say it. This concept that I can trade blows ad infinitum with no impact until the last blow is just something that's bizarre to me. I grew up with D&D since I was 12, so I'm very familiar with this hit point concept, but from a visual storytelling perspective, from a cinematic perspective, you look at a movie and they don't do that in a movie. It's like chopping down a tree. How is that fun? It's not fun to watch someone chopping down a tree. And that's what we force our player to do. We force them to watch him chop down another flesh tree."
Surely Ed's talking about Blizzard's fantasy MMO phenomenon World of Warcraft? "Any RPG at all," he says. "They all have health bars. It's in every one! So we said look, step one, we're lethal combat. We're going to take our inspiration from the movies. When people don't die, it's not because they have more health, it's because they parried, they dodged, they blocked, they moved out of the way, they healed themselves with some magic, any good reason, but not no reason, which is what currently exists. Now, that obviously has some exceptions, like Jason. Heroes in movies have a nasty tendency of being able to survive all sorts of s$!t. They get stabbed and they live, they get shot and they don't die. So heroes have this resilience. So yeah, we gave Jason health, we break the rules, but we break the rules in a very specific and a very inspired way, as opposed to, oh well, everybody else does it like this. We thought about it. Once upon a time we had Jason die with one hit. It wasn't very fun, let me tell you! It was very Bushido Blade."
