When will you upgrade the game?

We have dynamic lighting - our areas are procedurally generated so baked in lightmaps aren't an option.

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Stratohero wrote:

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

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NeroNoah wrote:

Ragdoll would be nice, though. It makes skills feel more impactful. It's just that PoE shouldn't go over the top easily.

Pay close attention to what happens to zombies when you kill them. It's one of those quiet, overlooked always-improving things the game has undergone since CB.

Disagree re ragdoll. That shit is shorthand for good death animation. PoE already has those.

There is no amount of death animation that can compensate for a realistic rag-doll interaction of bodies with the environment, you obviously haven't played Titan Quest.

I disagree - ragdolls on their own often look silly and fake, because the thing you're fighting just drops like a puppet that had its strings cut regardless of what it was or how you killed it.

On the other hand, you can convey a lot of flavour and tone with a good death animation, even if it's not that adaptable to the environment.

A game where I've seen this problem tackled well is Left 4 Dead, which does a really cool hybrid system where they play a death animation and blend into a ragdoll as it ends so you get the best of both worlds.

This isn't the official line on ragdolls in our game or anything, just something to consider.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

How about Dark Messiah of Might and Magic? Now that was some extreme ragdoll shit. Suddenly people in full plate were behaving as though they were nothing but marionettes full of sand.

As Dan said, there needs to be a compromise, a hybrid. That point at which the silliness of full-bore ragdoll physics is met with genuine craft and understanding of WEIGHT. Unfortunately a lot of game developers are nerds at heart and nerds are horribly susceptible to a mentality where more=better so obviously full-on ragdoll physics must be AWESOME....right?

To be fair, Dark Messiah's ragdoll physics owned, and booting enemies across the room into conveniently placed spike traps never got old.

It most certainly wasn't realistic or immersive, but I can't fault them for using ragdolls in the way that best served their game. As you say though, that isn't going to always be the way to guarantee best results in other games.