A 3D Combat System that actually suits Sonic

[Candescence]

For when you want to see Sonic fight something other than one of Eggman's machines. Another silly thought exercise from me! It's just me trying to use my overly-sparky imagination for something 'productive', don't mind me.

Okay, in 2D, fighting anything that isn't a machine with just Sonic's basic moveset is perfectly fine, to an extent, as long as you know how to design things so it doesn't get boring, (for example, Knuckles in Sonic 3&K and Pocket Adventure), Nack doesn't count because he was basically in machines like Eggman for his debut game. However, in 3D, um... How should I put this? It gets a lot more boring. There's a reason why Mario bosses in 3D very rarely have Mario actually jump on the enemy. SA1's "vs. other player characters" boss rounds sucked and generally were piss easy. SA2 was a bit better because... Well, the computer tended to be a cheating bastard, especially in the final battles of both stories, so at least it wasn't piss easy. And even then, Sonic Vs. Shadow was basically a homing attack fest.

Right, so, if you want to have Sonic fight something about his size and doesn't fight totally predictably, and if you were to remove the homing attack so it doesn't turn into a spam-fest... Let's see, here. There are two main ways I can think of that are both relatively simplistic and don't turn into God of War clones. Oh, and they both only use 2 extra buttons at the least. THE HORROR.

Lugaru Style

"Ooh, you were quick as a little bunny, weren't you?"

- The Spy

Anyone played Lugaru? Anyone? Bah. You should. It's fun. I've also pre-ordered the sequel, Overgrowth, mucking around in the alpha is fun.

ANYWAY. Lugaru shares more than a few similarities with Sonic, being a fast furry creature who can perform absurd aerial stunts. Of course, that's where the similarities end, because Sonic isn't a kung-fu ninja bunny who can slaughter wolves with his bare hands.

He can fight like one, though.

Lugaru's fighting system is fairly simple. There's a button for attacking, and another for both ducking and countering. The former is generally just held in place until the fight ends. No, seriously. In Lugaru, while the attack button is held, Turner will just attack automatically when an enemy is in range - how he attacks is based on position, and how he's moving at the time. If he's ducking, it's a leg sweep. Stand in place, quick double punch to the chest. Moving forward, roundhouse kick. As for the second button, aside from the ducking, pressing it at the right time allows the player to both reverse incoming attacks using throws and such, and recover when your opponent reverses your attacks. It's all about positioning and strategy, rather than remembering a move list. It's simple, intuitive, and I've heard someone say it's more like actual martial arts than any other game ever. It's not easy to master, but, a lot of games are like that.

Okay, yes, you can jump off walls and kick enemies in mid-air, and then there's the aerial kick in Overgrowth, but neither of those add much complexity at all either. Oh, yeah, and for extra points, you can basically issue a coup de grace when your enemy is down by using the spin-dash. Hey, Sonic can fight dirty when he wants to.

Scissors-Paper-Rock May Cry

"This party's gettin' crazy! LET'S ROCK!"

- Dante

This is something of my own design, back when Project S was still active. It was an attempt to have a simplistic combat style with only one button for attacking. This was before I even heard about Lugaru, but let's follow on. My main inspiration was Devil May Cry, hence the name. Besides the gameplay being fun as heck, Dante was basically an M-rated Sonic. They, along with Spider-Man, could form a comedy trio based completely around making wise-cracks and making fun of their enemies.

Now, forget that DMC has a button for guns. Let's focus on the main attack button for close-ranged weapons. Unlike God of War, which copied off it in multiple ways (and its designer admitted as much, and even admits GoD's combat system still ended up inferior to DMC's), DMC relies more on timing and stick movements rather than memorising a pattern of button presses, which works much better for a fast-paced style of game like Sonic. There's probably only two attacks in the entire series that use more than one attack button, and they both belong to Nero's Devil Trigger, not to mention it's just a simultaneous button press. But I digress.

Okay, let's say we only kept that one attack button, and the button used to switch weapons. However, rather than switching weapons, we switch attack types. There were four attack types I had come up with:

Melee: Punches, kicks, throws, blunt weapons, etc. You know how this works.

Blade: Sonic's spin-dash, or for the sake of another example, Caliburn.

Projectile: HADOUKEN! Or Sonic could toss rings. Whatever works.

Defense: Barriers, shields, etc. Sonic curling up into a ball for protection. WHATEVER.

Now, this works in a rock-paper scissors manner.

Melee <- Sword <- Projectile <- Defense <- Melee <- etc.

Basically, blades beat punches, never bring a knife to a gun fight, ranged attacks don't do jack against shields, and blocking doesn't do jack when you can throw.

Basically, you add an element of strategy to the whole thing. Projectiles generally overwhelm both melee and blade unless the former is in close to the attacker, and the close-ranged attacks would quickly degrade defense.

Anyway, it's three in the morning, and I'll expand on this whole thing later. And perhaps heavily revise it if I, with a much clearer mind, wonder what the hell I wrote the night before.

[Streak Thunderstorm]

Second one is sort of flawed. Youd need an enemy targeting/toggle system.

[DimensionWarped]

Honestly, I think that having an elaborate fighting system in a Sonic game is wasteful since most of the time you don't need to fight enemies nor gain anything of significant value from doing so (exempting Sonic Rush where it fills your boost meter, but those pawns are hardly a threat) and to require the player to fight enemies just to exercise that battle system (like what they do in Sonic Heroes for instance) tends to do a lot of damage to the action.

[Streak Thunderstorm]

Play some Mecha Madness :B

[DimensionWarped]

Like I haven't... I'm not trying to say it isn't fun in a unique way, all I'm saying is that it's something contrary to a Sonic game. It's an entirely different species of game.

[Nemox]

I think a 3D combat system, particularly a Hack 'n' Slash system, could be done. If you think about Sonic's abilities from all the cartoon, comic, and several game renditions, he's able to spin and throw himself at an enemy, ala homing attack.

The homing attack is essentially Sonic's way of fighting since he's more skilled with his body as a whole than he is with his arms.

As we see in Colours, he has a couple more methods; the kick (either sliding or downwardly-thrusting), or the dash (horizontal). These are also ways of thrusting his body toward an enemy, albeit with less control than the homing attack.

He also has these methods in Brawl, though they are drastically reduced to fit the map. It does feel a great deal different, even accounting for the smaller scale.

In Brawl, he is doing definite attacks with parts of his body as opposed to throwing his body into the strike

I remember a fighting style in Kingdom Hearts that really felt nice for Sonic. It involved the character's entire body whooshing across the enemy, striking along the way. It felt very unusual, but very fun.

Other characters aren't based around speed and total-body control, so they would use different attacks that simply involve colliding against the enemy rather than across it. Knuckles is very fast and very strong, for instance, so he could run and plow into the enemy with strong strikes, losing very little speed.

Vector, however, might not be as fast, but just as strong. His style might be to trample enemies.

Hack 'n' Slash may not sound like the deepest of combat systems, but it really can have a lot of emergent qualities that enhance a character's strengths.

Sorry if that seemed like undirected rambling at all.

[DimensionWarped]

I didn't say it couldn't be done. I just don't think it's a good direction for the series, that's all.

[Nemox]

I didn't say it couldn't be done. I just don't think it's a good direction for the series, that's all.

There have been those instances of mixed opinions toward alternative gameplay styles.

I personally loved the idea of playing as Big. Execution was bad, but the fishing was a fun idea to me....

...and only me. ;_;

[DimensionWarped]

If I wanted to play a fishing game, I probably would have gone out and bought a fishing game.

A good one. That didn't suck. And actually you know... allowed you to do some fishing rather than just throw a rod in some puddles and wait for weird shit to grab your hook.

[Nemox]

Might have gone over better if it wasn't mandatory to use Big to finish the game.

Another one is Unleashed's night levels. That one could have been more well-received if gameplay wasn't so... night-and-day different. Effectively, make the Werehog faster and speed up the rate at which one can beat the enemies, and you've got something close to Knuckles: Familiar running-about gameplay with deeper combat than usual.

[Candescence]

The Werehog was a bad God of War clone, and God of War's combat doesn't really hold up on its own, the Werehog lacked what made God of War a good game.

Second one is sort of flawed. Youd need an enemy targeting/toggle system.

Well, that's mainly because at the time the system was being designed for a PC game, where the camera control was done via the mouse. Yes, one would need a "Z-Targeting" system for consoles, unless one was using something like the Wiimote's IR pointer. However, for a PC game, completely and utterly unnecessary.

I am perfectly aware that quite a few people don't believe that a combat system doesn't really "work" with Sonic-style gameplay most of the time, though previous attempts at trying to do that haven't really been successful... Heroes, for instance. That being said, it could add on to the gameplay if one were to design things carefully. Rather than focus on giving enemies big life bars, make them immune to certain attacks, and make the player think about the most effective method of dealing with a group of enemies as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Say, we went with the Lugaru style. Some enemies might be susceptible to the sweep kick. Others might be easily dispatched by a jumping kick. And, since reversals tend to be throws, a well-timed reversal could use the attacker as projectile to take out a whole group of enemies in one fell swoop, allowing Sonic to keep moving.

Or, for the second one, certain enemies might be focused on a certain kind of attack type, which should be fairly obvious visually, and thus the player should switch to a certain attack type and use it against them. Say a group of bots were using laser guns. Sonic could switch to his "defense" move, and plow straight through without missing a beat. A bunch of bots using blunt weapons? Spin-dash! Swords? Toss something at 'em. Shields? ATATATATATATATATA. They are already dead. Pretty much all of these options don't result in Sonic having to stop in his tracks.

Well, it's just an idea on how to incorporate such things into regular gameplay, anyway...

[OverbounD]

The trick to 3D boss battles is they have to be varied, not rely on one attack, and have some work of recoil after being hit (so you can't spam attack). Sonic Adventure had some good examples of that such as the Chaos bosses and the last eggman battle for Sonic. As for a combat system, the beatuy of simple platformmers like Mario and Sonic is they do a lot with simple accurate controls adding a combat system with several move would over complicate things even if they were mapped to one or two buttons. Simplicity is what makes platformmers platformmer I think a combat system makes it something else.

[Serephim]

No, you can have a combat system in a platformer. All it makes it is a platformer with a combat system. In the case of Sonic...well Mario is a platform-heavy game, but i think even it would benefit from a combat system better than Sonic would. Why? Well, because Sonic doesn't fight. He rolls into a ball and slams into things. Combat system? Not so much. If i was in charge of designing combat for a Sonic game, assuming I was required to anyway, i would do something a bit different.

Think about it -- in what animated cutscene, drawn or CGI, have you ever seen sonic waste time continuously pounding enemies with homing attacks? He usually just either a) rolls into a ball and goes through the bastard, or quickly out maneuvers the robots, causing them to either kill themselves, their friends, or be killed by their friends. Well, since they are going for something new, it might as well be depicted in a way that suits sonic.I believe what would be better for them would be something along the lines of a "rock-paper-scissors" moveset. Something where doing the correct move on the correct enemy will quickly dispatch of the enemy and allow you to keep moving without the hindrance of health bars and pesky invincibility times to prevent homing attack spam.

Imagine sonic having a moveset like such:

Grounded

- Spindash (revs into a ball and goes in a direction rully fast)

- Sonic Movement (Evades gunfire and attacks. does an agile, quick movement in your direction, going under low hanging objects as he approaches them. Animation is dependent on whether or not you're colliding with a damaging attack. Cancels itself into his regular movement, and can allow quick changes in velocity. Amount of an angle you can change to is dependent on your current speed. (in other words, faster you go, the less direction you can get out of this move.

- Blur Attack **Homing attack button while during Sonic Movement ** (Sonic will do a short-range attack, resembling a short-range burst. Destroys lighter units, disarms heavier ones, disorients and confuses giant ones. Small Range, only lasts a short second.)

Aerial

- Insta Shield (sonic spins multiple times faster than he already is, creating local winds and force that both increase his attack range and deflect attacks. Hitting an enemy will cause sonic to bounce vertically. )

-Homing Attack (sonic bursts out, diagonally downwards, in the direction of an enemy. Upon hitting the enemy, holding down the button will let you go through the enemy.)

-Homing Perch (While doing a homing attack, let go of the button. When Sonic collides with an enemy, he will stop for a short second, and hop off again in the direction of your choosing. The kickoff from the jump will kill, stun, or not affect the enemy, depending on its weight class. The jump gives more horizontal distance than vertical.)

Thinking off the top of my head here.

Here, sonic has 1) an attack that affects enemies around him, 2) an attack that quickly closes gaps between him and his enemy, and 3) a maneuver that gets him under and away things. Also, 4) a simple attack that both a) keeps you safe and makes simple head hoppers way easier to dispatch.

Now, note that all of these dont necessarily have to be attack techniques. They can very well be used to interact with gimmicks, pick up momentum, and maneuver the level, respectfully. However, if you really want to have a "battle system" without having one, you can simply take these moves and give them meaning based on your enemy.

Instead of enemies with huge, annoying health bars on multiple parts of their bodies, allow the combat to be more "platformer" based. Take sonic's abilities from being simple, predictable moves, and turn them into enemy specific attacks. When the correct move is used, Sonic triggers a different move and dispatches the enemy in a quick, pretty and stylish manner. You know, kind of like a QTE...but minus the button presses. The move itself is the trigger for the event. This way, you can take these 4 moves, and make them Sonic's offense, defense, and platforming tools all in one, as well as making killing badnicks (that aren't simple head hoppers) a bit more interesting.

Well, examples.

Egg Pawn - usual bastard with a lance. Any damaging attack will finish him.

Egg Pawn w/Stone Shield - Frontal rolling without significant momentum wont kill him, but will break the shield. Any additive force will still OHKO, be it a spindash or Insta Shield. Any homing attack will kill. Blur Attack will strip enemy of shield.

Medium Egg Pawn w/Metal Shield - Heavier. Insta Shield and Homing Attacks are parried. Blur Attack causes sonic to run around the enemy creating a small tornado. This strips the enemy of its shield and tosses the pawn at other enemies in range, destroying them. In the case of stronger enemies, the projectile enemy has crushes defenses. Spindash still overpowers with impact and OHKO's.

Large enemy with weakspot in back - all attacks other than weakspot exploits are repelled. Either attack from the back, or somersault under his legs to trigger an event that lands the enemy on it's back, allowing for an easy hop kill.

Heavy Armor enemy with sensor laser - Impenetrable. Homing Attacking the head will result in the enemy shielding itself. Uses a tracking laser to lock-on and blast sonic. Using the Blur on the enemy will make sonic run circles around it causing an overflow, and it's defenses will go down, allowing for a Homing Attack finish.

Giant slow bastards with shields and laser guns - Always fights in pairs. Impenetrable. All offensive attacks are parried. Coordinates attacks with one another. Dodge during attacks, and Homing Perch one of their heads to force one to kill the other. Same tactic with solo one will cause a quick scene leading to a suicide.

Large groups of enemies with guns - Sonic Movement through the bursts of gunfire, and plow through the bastards.

Weak Enemy with plasma barrier- All attacks will result in you being stunned and losing your rings. Using an Insta Shield will burst the plasma barrier, allowing it to be attacked.

Stronger Enemy with plasma barrier - Same as other, except Insta Shielding the barrier will only briefly remove the barrier. Insta-Shield and then homing attack while in the air to kill.

A small hint icon system or something would make this way easier, that gives hints of what to do and when. Of course these examples aren't all that hot. Mix those in with some not so specific enemy types that encourage use of your other abilities.

But you get where im going with this? Basically, instead of a large list of moves that are used to overpower the enemy, you are given a small, moldable amount, and maneuvering around the enemy is the key aspect. With a hint system, the type of attack you're required to use will be obvious. This way, the game can still be a platformer at heart. You spend the whole game learning the physics and how to control sonic, and this is even reflected in some of the enemies you face as well as bosses. Your whole moveset is given to you at the beginning -- your playing skill helps you to get through stages with it, and it's function changes itself depending on what situation's you're dealing with. Afterall, Sonic stages were all about being immersed in the location.

Add in a "Stylish Ranking System" (similar to SA2), and finding the quickest, coolest looking ways of dispatching all the enemies in combos AND time attacking the stage could add a whole feel to the endgame content

One more thing -- I think that if something like this was to be done, there should be a button (im thinking a trigger button) that would trigger a "slower" sonic speed and "faster" sonic speed. It doesn't change Sonic's acceleration at all, but instead puts a cap on his speed to "regular" platforming movement speeds. It isn't needed, but i think the faster sonic gets, the easier it is for precise platforming segments to get annoying. (On inclines, the speed will normally accelerate, but outside the influence of slopes sonic should slowly begin to decelerate if the trigger isn't held down. Just something i was thinking about.)

well, all of this is just speculation. Not like the game needs a combat system anyway, its Sonic. I just think it'd look cool if they did it right though.

[Nemox]

Thinking about Mario, I feel like taking a slightly deeper look into his combat. Mario 64 specifically, since he had more varied moves there.

He actually had a lot of attacks in that game, but they weren't all just attacks. Many of them actually involved moving Mario around, and served to keep him going.

There's the regular punch-punch-kick combo which works well as a defensive sort of move. It creates a little barrier between you and an enemy in the form of attacks. You don't have a lot of flexible motion while using it, but it has its uses.

The dive attack propels Mario forward, almost as well as his long jump. It attacks some enemies, and even lets him grab stuff. This is fairly Sonic-esque, as it makes the character continue his movement without delay while still attacking.

However, it does leave him more open.

The slide-kick lets you do a more powerful attack than the dive attack, which hurts many more enemies and leaves you slightly less open to attack. The only downside is that it doesn't flow as well as the dive.

The ground-pound is a nice platformer move, and even Sonic does one similar to this in Colours; that downward kick move.

Not only makes you attack, but also gives you a little more control over your character.

Given, if you miss with Mario you're often screwed.

A combat system doesn't have to be in-depth combo moves and such, and it doesn't even have to feel like a combat system to be there and useful.

[DimensionWarped]

They sure didn't waste any time in getting rid of all of those punches and kicks. Even the dive attack is gone as of Galaxy.

As for the slide kick, almost no one ever used it. I didn't even know about it until a good while after I had 120 stars.

[Serephim]

Mario never needed anything like that. I dont think it really needs it. The only thing mario ever suffered from for me was too easy bosses. But that has nothing to do with them not allowing Mario to punch, kick, or do aerial combos or any shit like that.

[Nemox]

I really made great use of the dive attack for both attacking and getting places. Even punches came in handy while using Wario on the DS version.

I'm almost done with my universal 3D character motor, so perhaps I could do some experimenting with this.

Hell, maybe I could even make the combat aspect open-source and extremely flexible, so anybody could experiment with it.

[DimensionWarped]

Only reason I ever used Dive attack was to get aligned for the sliding sections. Other than that the long jump and the running back flip thingy were pretty much all I needed. Hell, I think I spent more time long jumping than walking/running.