What Makes Role-playing Game Combat Good?

In Joystiq’s latest WRPG-focused weekly column Rowan Kaiser wonders what makes an RPG combat good, and analyzes the factor that he considers to be the most important, like responsiveness and variety. Here’s a snip:

Good RPG combat also tends to have a sense of variety to keep the combat from growing too repetitive. Japanese RPGs tended to add boss fights to do this, but that strategy has been less common in the west. Instead, variety has tended to come through character progression and usage, as well as more intricate combat design. (There’s even some variety of form, demonstrated by games like Puzzle Quest which attach Bejeweled-style puzzles to RPG-style progression and narrative.)

In Wizardry VI and Wizardry VII, a complex class-changing system combined with new skills meant that almost every fight could lead to a character gaining a level, a new skill, an improved spell, or even a new class. It’s a delight when you face a group of enemies who may have given you trouble before, but now? Now your alchemist can lob poison bombs with a chance to choke enemies to death. Or, in a completely different form of progression, your ability to customize your characters in Fallout and Deus Ex allow you to approach enemies how you felt like approaching them. When progression is slow, though, combat turns into a slog. High encounter rates combined with limited character skills can make those late-1980s Gold Box games a test of patience, fighting the same fight over and over.

More recently, games using the BioWare model of one player character combined with a variety of recruitable and swappable party members create differences in combat. In Dragon Age: Origins, the key decision of whether to use the mages Morrigan and Wynne, and if they should be healers or damage dispensers, would dramatically affect each party’s balance. Or in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, using Lydia as a heavy fighter or Aela as an archer changes enemy responses.

Beyond that, a well-designed combat system will keep you on your toes, making different decisions about how to proceed on a consistent basis. Wizardry 8 may have dropped the complex class-switching mechanic, but it added a tactical component to its predecessor’s menu-based fighting, forcing you to consider your party members’ positioning in relation to constantly-moving enemies. Jagged Alliance 2, for example, forces you to consider how much of a turn you want to spend aiming each shot, every time you shoot. The issue I have with most old-fashioned menu-based games is that they don’t give these different kinds of combat. It’s usually launching your strongest spells at the largest enemy group and having your fighters mop up the remnants, over and over.