Visceral
784 Words
Combat in Respawn was not like other MMORPGs. I had designed it that way deliberately, with considerable pride.
No standing still and trading hits while cooldown timers ticked. No tab-targeting, no auto-attacks, no rotation of abilities executed with mechanical patience while your character did the actual work. I had wanted players to feel like they were actually fighting, not managing a spreadsheet with a fantasy skin over it. Real-time physics, real collision detection, every hit determined by angle and force and weapon stats rather than a dice roll happening invisibly behind the interface.
I had called it "the most physically honest combat system in the MMORPG genre" in the pitch deck. I had been very proud of that sentence.
I had never been in a real fight before. I want to be clear about that, because it is relevant context for what happened next.
The leader came at me first, which was correct AI behavior: highest threat assessment goes to the target that fought back. His rusty blade came in at chest height, fast and direct, and I got my practice sword up through some combination of tutorial training and pure terror. The impact ran from my wrists to my shoulders, a jarring, bone-deep shock that nearly knocked the weapon out of my grip. I staggered backward two steps, directly into the reach of the second bandit.
"No, no, no," I said out loud, which was not a combat callout I had programmed but felt extremely relevant.
The second bandit swung wide, trying to catch me off-balance. I dropped under the blade on instinct, felt the wind from its passage ruffle my hair close enough to be a genuine near-miss, and countered with a strike to his ribs that had all the commitment of someone who had been training for one hour against stationary targets.
BANDIT THUG LV.2 TAKES 3 DAMAGE.
"Three," I said, still moving, trying to keep all three of them in my eyeline. "Three damage. He has sixty hit points. That is outstanding."
The third bandit was circling left, looking for the angle that would put him behind me. I knew that because I had programmed that exact behavior, the flanker always circles to the target's weak side, always waits for engagement with another attacker before committing. Knowing it and stopping it were different problems. Every time I turned to face him I put my back to one of the other two.
The leader's blade caught my shoulder.
I had received complaints during beta testing that the pain feedback was calibrated too high. Eleven separate bug reports, in fact, which I had read, acknowledged, and marked as "working as intended" because I wanted players to understand that injury was serious.
I understood now.
It felt like someone had dragged a brand across my skin, immediate and total, a white-hot line of agony that overrode everything else in my nervous system for a full second. I heard myself make a sound that I would prefer not to describe. My left arm went weak and clumsy, the shoulder screaming every time I tried to raise it.
LEE ZHANG TAKES 25 DAMAGE. HP: 85/110.
"Twenty-five," I gasped, repositioning, keeping myself moving because stopping meant dying. "From one hit. Great balance. Really well-tuned encounter, this."
The wound was bleeding. Actually bleeding, warm and real, soaking through the starter tunic in a way that the HUD damage number made somehow worse by appearing cheerfully in my peripheral vision at the same time. I had programmed the blood to look realistic. I had been proud of the fluid simulation.
I was significantly less proud of it now.
Think. These bandits were coordinated but they were also predictable. I had given them specific behavior patterns because unpredictable AI was harder to playtest and I had been working to a deadline. Patterns could be exploited. That was the entire design philosophy of Respawn's combat: read the pattern, find the gap, punish it.
The gap was the tree line. The pathfinding system I had built would bottleneck them around obstacles, and the forest edge was full of obstacles. If I could pull them toward the trees, their coordination would break down into a queue whether they wanted it to or not.
I feinted toward the leader, watched his guard come up, then broke right and ran for the nearest cluster of oaks.
They followed. Of course they followed. And exactly as I had designed, their pathfinding routed them single-file around the trunk of the largest tree, the flanker falling behind, the second thug bunching up behind the leader, and for three seconds there was only one of them who could reach me.
I turned and thrust with everything I had.
- Writer
