DCUO goes beyond questing pt. 2
Jens: Now, not only can I pick up physics objects in the environment, as you can see here, I can walk over and it tells me I need to use my – whoops, I got stunned when I picked that up. The cool thing here is I could have withdrawn if I wanted to, but if I also... We don't have a death mechanic, we have knock out. It's called a 'rally mechanic'. It allows me to get up on the spot if I feel the situation is going to be safe enough. I don't have to run away and spawn somewhere else all the time. I can if I want to, if I'm surrounded by five guys, but if my friends are still here fighting, I can clear the cobwebs and pop right back up again.
Chris: We can talk a bit about why we decided to have a timer mechanic instead of a death mechanic. Like how the death penalty isn't really necessary, with the timer mechanic?
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Jens: Right. I mean, the fact is that these characters, they're like real characters, right? For the fiction of it, how many times have you seen Superman get knocked back into a brick wall? Everything falls on him, and the enemy's like 'ah ha, I defeated you.' Up he comes out of the rubble and right back into it. So that whole back-and-forth of a superhero fight, where you get to rally back and get back into the fight, is really important. Also, we don't want corpse runs in the game. It doesn't make sense that (spooky voice) 'I am the disembodied spirit of Freon! I go back and I run to my corpse and I jump back in there and all is good!' We can't really play around with death the same way. We have to be more creative with it.
Chris:
But the knockout is still an obstacle and still an issue, because you have timers on all your encounters. So when you get knocked out, it's costing you a chance at success. When that timer goes away, that encounter goes away. So the death penalty is more: you don't have as much time as you did have. So it's a challenge mechanic, rather than 'we're going to beat you with a stick after you get knocked out.'
In a team situation, every time a team member goes down, the whole team's bar gets knocked back a little bit?
Chris: Well, think of it as the timer's going regardless. So when a guy goes down, you don't have a guy to engage that. You see what I'm saying? You lose capacity.
So the encounter becomes harder because someone went down.
Chris: Because the timer's still going.
Jens: So we can not only use physics objects that are lying around in the world, we can create physics objects as well. I'm an ice guy, and I can actually take Bizarro over here for instance, and I can go ahead and use my ability to freeze him in a block of ice, and then while he's frozen I can pick him up and... that other guy, he's frozen somebody as well. So again, somebody has created this ice boulder, I can pick it up now after they've attacked with it, use it as a physics object, so I can totally repurpose people's attacks that were originally for something else and use them for a totally new attack.
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