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Damage number art
cosmictimber
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 0 Arc User
Ok, so this is random, but I just wanted to say that I REALLY love the art/text style of the damage numbers that I have seen in videos. I hope they run with it.
they are crisp, clean and very appealing to my eyes.
Its minor, but I have played games where the numbers weren't as "exciting". Makes a production value difference. Also, it helps create that addictive factor when you get a sexy looking big crit on the screen.
It's the little things that are going to make this game great just as much as the big.
they are crisp, clean and very appealing to my eyes.
Its minor, but I have played games where the numbers weren't as "exciting". Makes a production value difference. Also, it helps create that addictive factor when you get a sexy looking big crit on the screen.
It's the little things that are going to make this game great just as much as the big.
Post edited by cosmictimber on
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I absolutely agree with you on that. I really don't need huge numbers... and prefer not having them... but as they used to say on espn "chicks dig the long ball". I guess the mentality is that you have to have the big numbers to show your game is awesome? no idea.
I always thought a game like wow in which i played from vanilla-pandas got WAY out of hand with their numbers. It also stunk too when they made the +1 to agility or whatever you got for rolling specific races a complete non-factor.
It is a little jarring at first, but the small numbers won't work in an MMO. The big numbers allow some real fine tuning.
As far as the OP, I have to admit, while I generally hate overhead damage/healing spam, they do look better than what I'm used to. Pretty sure we'll be able to turn them off, (pretty standard in MMO UI controls), but if not it's not a game killer.
I don't think its just that. Think how much turns a standard pnp fights last, and how many "turns" would a computer game take to make it interesting. 20 hits just won't do for a decent or tough encounter.
Also there is no d100 dice which can be rolled in PnP. Because of this, having big numbers actually scales up pnp more properly and lets you have a "true-er" implementation of PnP imo.
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right, i see your point, as well as the point of bigger numbers giving more room for fine tuning. That all makes sense. But there has to be a middle ground somewhere. As I mentioned I have seen this with WOW (the easiest example for me) --- in the beginning you are getting +5 stat to gear (hypothetically...) and by your latest xpac you have gear with absolutely silly numbers. the damage gets silly, the numbers are absurd imo.
I would rather have had all that done in the background and then have it masked by dividing all numbers by 1000 (or whatever necessary). But that's just me of course. I thought GW1 always had fairly reasonable numbers, but then again their gear was capped... so progress wasn't really measured in terms of gear.
When it comes down to it though, I have a preference, but i don't really care that much. I was more in love with how the numbers looked as opposed to their value.
or two 10 sided... representing ones and tens place.
i had a buddy with a 100-sided die... the damn thing nearly rolled away.
They break if the fall from too high. I know from experience. At $8 a pop you gotta be careful with those suckers.
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*~Serixil Kor'hedron- Drow Trickster~*
Spam em your opinion in the CBT. Maybe they'll listen.
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nah, no one listens to me
As cosmictimber mentioned the point of larger numbers is to enable fine tuning. In Pen-n-paper you'd be hitting for 1-8 damage +3 for your strength (4-11 total) at first level. Then at higher level you might be hitting for 3d8 + 8 (11-32), for example. In leveling up you'd get a +1 sword which would add one to your damage. A couple of play sessions later you may get a different weapon which was +2. That's like 8 hours of gameplay between weapon upgrades.
Let's think of that in terms of a video game: If you had to go EIGHT HOURS between each weapon upgrade, that means that you were probably going a full hour between each piece of other gear that you upgraded. And that's at first or second level when the gear upgrades are fast and easy. At that rate, all but the most die hard players would quit the game.
In a video game, everything goes faster. The combats are over much quicker and there are more of them. And you'll probably expect to level up at low level a couple of times in an hour, and you'll expect that you may be presented with several upgrades in that much time.
So now how do you balance the game if you're throwing out upgrades left and right in order to keep the player interested? One way is to increase the damage scale. For example, if we increased the scale by ten, then our low level character will be hitting for 40-110 instead of 4-11 damage. On this new scale a +10 weapon is now the equivalent of a lower-scaled +1 weapon. So then the designers can give you say six upgrades (+3, +5, +9, +12, +15, +20) in the first couple levels which would work thier way up to a total bonus of +20, or the same as the lower scaled +2 weapon that took you 8 hours to get in pen-n-paper. The fact that you're getting upgrades more often will keep you interested at low level so that you may actually keep playing to a higher level.
The fact that the damage numbers are bigger doesn't affect the pacing of gameplay because everything has more hit points and should take roughly the same number of hits to take down. Of course they may have tweaked those numbers a bit to make the game more of a challenge or more fun to play.
D&D on paper was not defined by the numbers that it used. Instead, is LIMITED by them. Pen-n-paper used the smaller numbers because of the dice and the limitations of average people in quickly adding and subtracting 2 or 3 digit numbers or counting larger pools of dice. It would just bog down the game if every hit you'd have to count the numbers on a big handful of dice and then decide if the sum of all of those dice plus the giant bonus you have to hit was equal to or greater than the monster's armor class of 2784. So they limited it to using mostly 1 or 2 dice at a time and the biggest to-hit bonuses are still likely just 2 digits. (Granted, it was good mental exercize, but everyone knows geeks hate exercize.)
In a video game these limitations on bogging down gameplay are removed because the computer can do those calculations in a millionth of a second to figure out if you hit or not. It isn't that your brain can't comprehend the larger numbers involved. Its just that you can't add and subtract them fast enough. With any scale of damage in a video game it will take 5 minutes or less to come to grips with what a good hit looks like, how much a normal damage number takes off of the enemy's health bar, etc. By the time you reach level 10 you'll be bragging about how your character can hit for 456 damage with one swing.
There does come a limitation on the human brain to comprehend much larger numbers. When you are displayed a number for only one second and can't figure out if it was a six digit normal hit or a seven digit crit then you've got a problem.
Another limitation with a hundred-sided die is that after it stops rolling then you've got to stare at it for a moment to figure out exactly which side is up.
yes and yes! hilarious, i have gone through that with the 100-sided.
maybe if both of us spam them
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While I really don't care too much about the big vs little numbers... i do think the little numbers are more in the DnD spirit of things. I think it would be cool to have a cosmetic "Divide by 1000-ish" option aka "Old School Damage"--- worth suggesting, but I wouldn't want to see them waste dev time on it or anything as a big issue.
I really like this idea. I think a slider would be a good idea so you could set it to divide by 10 or 100 or 1000.
The problem with this is that when you're chatting with a guildie who says: "I just hit that sucker for 100 damage!" and you're thinking "Man, I hit for TEN TIMES what he does. What a loser." ... because you're using different scales.
Not really a problem though if they were to implement it. I'm sure it would wind up being a common question--- where are you on the slider? Plus you could have the real numbers exist (and they would have to), they could even live in the dmg log... just the onscreen display would be divided and rounded off --- simply cosmetic.
A slider would be less likely though than a flat out setting i would guess. I don't think cryptic games support addons, but that's the sort of thing an addon could accomplish.
Attacking X monster, Hit 1000 Damage, Damage slider 10
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If you have to divide your damage numbers by a thousand then that's when you either:
A.) Could care less whether you're hitting for 2000 damage or 2499 damage, as only a 2 shows up on your screen. That sounds pretty boring to me.
B.) Have numbers that are much, much too large. If the designers can't work in enough incremental gear and level upgrades and still keep the numbers under 10,000 (or better yet 5,000) then they've failed.
In WoW the damage numbers didn't get that high till they'd mucked up the gear upgrades for a couple of expansions. I'd think that if Neverwinter keeps expanding then after 10,000 damage they might as well knock two zeroes off the number and change it to bright blue damage numbers.
I get you point but you may not understand how if I play and MMO and say 10 was a good DPS fine getting a 10 is exciting. More so if I crit.
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totally agree with crowbar,
also if we "have" to ahve these big numbers, i would like to see (2K) pop up rather than 2000. this is to much yellow or red on the screen. I fully intend on turning it off if i have the choice, but i too would like to see pnp type number damage.
Longsword +1 not Longsword +100
Oh, I'll definitely turn it off, I always do. Chat/Bars is enough for me to know whats going on.
Compared to some side scrollers I've seen though, this games numbers are quite subdued.
*~Serixil Kor'hedron- Drow Trickster~*
MMO mechanics and PnP mechanic...does...not...work together. PnP does not have scaling nearly to the degree of MMOs. People get uber gear, get all kinds of buffs they normally won't get, find exploitable tactics, and want a challenge. That's the nature of MMOs.
Every MMO I've come across has to option of floating combat text which I'd wager we'll have so if it bothers you then disable it.
However the dmg does seem a bit excessive. In the 100s or 1,000s sure but 10k... especially in the lvling stage... bit extreme. But then they could have ramped up the dmg because it was beta or a demo.
Is there footage or dev commentary that suggests this could be the case?
it would be hilarious if it was lv 1 char damage. my pc would crash on the intensive number display by level 20