How it should have been done

[Darth Darth]

I just bought the game a few days ago, and while it is great, I am disapointed with the lightsaber controls. The number of attacks you can pull off is pretty limited, but more importantly, the attack you pull is dependant on the direction you are moving. A better way to do it would have been to have players hold the mouse button down, and drag the mouse in the direction they wanted to swing. This way, the lightsaber controls would be completely intuitive, and you would not have to choose between making the swing you want, and moving in the direction you want. Obi-wan for the PC was going to have something like this before it was canned. Anyway, you drag the mouse in the direction you want to swing, and tap the mouse button for a jabbing motion, double tap it for a backstab. You could move in any direction while making any attack, for a large combination of possible moves. For instance, click to mouse, then hold it down and drag it upwards, while moving forward, to do something like the light lunge. Dragging the blade to the side and pressing the keyboard button that turns in the same direction would do a spin attack.

 

In one of the Star Wars novels, Luke explains lightsaber combat to his class at the jedi academy. There are 3 basic stances, but they are not based on speed vs power. They are outer, middle and inner, based on how far from your body you hold the saber. You could have these as the 3 stances. The speed of an attack would depend on how fast you move the mouse, possibly combined with a new lightsaber ability called saber speed. The power of an attack would depend on how far the saber moves in that swing. So, for a really powerful attack you would start facing to the side of the enemy and swing around 90 degrees, baseball style. Blocking shots and swings would not automatically happen if the shots came from a 90-180 degree arc in front of you, but would happen if the shots came within a certain distance of your blade. This distance would depend on how many levels you have in saber defense. You would have to swing the saber in the general direction of incoming shots in order to block them. This way, defense would really be based on skill.

 

Another thing is the instant use force powers. Rather than have you press the button, taking a set amount of energy to do a set amount of results, you would hold the button down to exert more energy, rather like is done with force jump, and lighting. So, simply tapping the force push/pull button would only move a target a little, while holding it would move the target more. Healing would work the same way, as would team healing and team energize. The only powers that should not be scalable like this are level 1 lighting and drain, because if they started out scalable than they would be a bit unbalanced. This way, you could shoose howhard you want to push or pull an enemy, how much you want to heal, etc. Also, push/pull should have more effect on smaller objects, since everyone knows that exerting the same force on a smaller object will cause a greater change in velocity. So, while just tapping the force button may only push a person a meter, it would push a pair of flechette grenades a dozen meters.

 

It would improve the force powers considerably if you made them scalable like that, especcially the push/pull powers. Using a mouse-based attack system rather than a movement key-based one would have made the ligtsaber combat revolutionary, rather than evolutionary. That said, the game is still great how it is. I only hope I see some sweet controls like that in Jedi Knight 3. Meanwhile, I think I'll go push some people off some walkways.

 

[Stempest]

Very much liking some of those ideas mate. I was particularly impressed by the ideas for sabre combat. I'd personally love to have to block the swings off opponents, rather than having them blocked for me. On the force powers issues, I'm not too bothered by that one, so either way I don't care. Good ideas for the sabre though.

[Darth Darth]

Thanks. I just realized I posted this in the wrong forum. Time to use my m4d copy and paste sk1llz0rz.