Combat And Objectives Ux

Combat UX & Objectives UX

Combat User Experience

Combat user experience is understanding how player attacks feel during combat. It is also determined by how engaging the player versus player or player versus monster experience feels.

Engagement Questions

• Does the player versus player offer a fair competitive environment?
• Are the enemies you fight challenging and have variety?
• Do boss encounters offer interesting fights to overcome?

Combat as Problem-Solving

You can think of combat design as a puzzle for the player to solve - a series of steps the player has to remember in order to avoid damage while attacking the enemy. By remembering the steps, players will progress farther and farther until they defeat that encounter.

Combat Feel Analysis

Let’s take a look at the player’s thought process as they initiate combat:

Core Combat Feel

The first and foremost thing players will think about is the combat feel. Combat feel is a combination of:

Visual Elements

• Animations - character and enemy movements
• Visual effects - impacts, spell effects, particles

Audio Elements

• Sound effects - weapon impacts, ability sounds

Control Elements

• Controls - responsiveness and accuracy
• Damage and healing effectiveness - meaningful impact

Camera Elements

• Camera shake - impact feedback
• Field of view changes
• Zoom effects (like sniper rifles)

All these come together to give that “oomph” that players love to experience.

Combat Interaction Analysis

The next step is to analyze how a player is interacting with their opponents:

Difficulty Balance

It’s important to find a good balance for combat difficulty:

• Too easy and a player can get bored
• Too hard and they might give up

Control Responsiveness

• How do the controls feel?
• If you can swap your weapons, is it fast and responsive?
• Can you properly complete your character’s combo or skill rotation without much difficulty?

Combat Accuracy

And finally, this is a big one - how accurate does the combat feel?

Melee Combat

If I swing my sword, do all monsters in the path get hit?

Ranged Combat

Does my gun shoot in a straight line, or is there a recoil to plan for?

Enemy Attacks

Do enemy attacks promptly show their boundaries, also known as a telegraph, so it can avoid their damage in time?

The Ultimate Question

How does the combat feel? It will be important to listen to feedback and try to break down where problems might be occurring.

Tip

Fine-Tuning Impact Making an animation slightly faster or enhancing the visual effect can completely change the feel of an ability. Sometimes it’s not all about changing the damage values to increase the gameplay feel of a combat action.

Objectives User Experience

Objective-based user experience can be broken down into:

• Quests or missions - structured tasks
• Achievements - skill and exploration rewards
• Collectibles - exploration incentives
• Story progression - narrative advancement

All of these typically have the same purpose: to give the player a task to complete.

Purpose of Each Objective Type

Quests

Can be used to give experience, loot and currency

Achievements

Reward the player for engaging in many different systems and challenges throughout your game

Collectibles

Reward exploration, as you travel the world looking for key objects

Story Progression

Lets the player get immersed into the lore and narrative of the game

The Repetition Challenge

The big question for most of these is: How repetitive are these tasks?

This is where it’s a good idea to break down all the possible options you have for the current objective-based content.

Types of Objective Tasks

Let’s break down several different types of tasks usually found in the form of quests:

Combat-Based Objectives

• Defeat or kill quests - where you have to take down an enemy
• Loot quests - that require you to get loot off an enemy

Escort Objectives

• Escort, spawn and follow - where an NPC is spawned and follows you as you accept the quest. From there, you have to guide the NPC to its destination
• Escort, walk to and defend - where you must follow an NPC and protect them on their, sometimes, painfully slow journey

Delivery and Exploration

• Delivery quests - where an NPC gives you an item to deliver to a different NPC
• Explore - where a quest sends you to a specific location on the map

Defense and Interaction

• Defend - where you interact with an object only to be ambushed by waves of monsters. Typically, you have a set amount of time to defeat the waves before failing the quest
• Interact - where you interact with an object in the world. Note that this is not loot based and does not go into your inventory

Creation and Gathering

• Craft - where you are instructed to create a specific item
• Gather - where you are sent off to collect various items from the world

More Options

And there are more such as getting into vehicles or mini games.

Objective Categories

• Achievements can have very specific game tasks
• Collectibles fall under both the explore and gather category
• Story progression sits in its own category

Story Progression Questions

How has the story progressed?

• Are there branching narratives where your choices make a difference in the future gameplay?
• Are there multiple endings to the story?

Player Reward Analysis

As the player experiences many of these objectives:

• How is the player being rewarded?
• Do the rewards feel valuable to the player?
• Does this section of the game have too much of the same task such as defeat 50 bears followed by defeat 50 wolves?
• Does the player get annoyed by running back and forth between objectives?

Caution

Time Waste Warning There is a point where it will feel like the player is wasting their time if the rewards are not strong enough.

These are just some of the many questions that you’ll be asking when testing your user experience for objective design.

Both combat and objectives work together to create engaging gameplay loops - combat provides the mechanical satisfaction while objectives provide direction and motivation for continued play.