AAS (Auto Attack Syndrome)

[xanax48]

Is it just me or does it seem like many games have some kind of auto attack built in? This is a system wherein you select one action (auto) and watch as AI fights the battle for you. It's flooding the mobile market these days and is nothing new, I remember it's in Suikoden 1, a console games from the 90's.


I personally view "auto attack" as a lazy design choice:


1) If I can kill any enemy with randomly targeted basic attacks why have skills?


2) Is the combat so repetitive and uninteresting that I don't want to actively engage in it?


3) Why have combat at all if I'm just going to watch it like a cut-scene? 


But if any of this is true then why does it seem like more games are not only adding them but focusing on it. Am I missing something here??

 

[kovak]

The addiction part, mainly if you have different auto-attack patterns.


Auto-attacks are also skills and i know many people here will disagree when i consider regular attacks as a viable option.
Reason is simple: most players are not able to use skill properly and they are not willing to do it unless they reach an important battle nor they were educated to expect any propper challenge or reward. You don't need to think about it as an excuse for lazy designs but to think about how to integrate auto-attack patterns in your system instead in a reasonable way.


IMO the only way to avoid it is to build combat around cycling skills or to watch your party being wiped, to make any battle be dangerous because your enemies follows archetypes.


EDIT: Ravenant Gods is a good example of how different auto-attack patterns in a good battle system makes you wonder how fun it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjfQ23MJljQ

 

[Omnimental]

Auto attacks are a blessing in any game that expects you to grind. If I'm supposed to randomly kill monsters for a while to get items/levels/whatever before advancing, I want to get through it as quickly as possible to get back to the story and interesting bits.

 

[kovak]

Indeed but if you have limited encounters it becomes something not boring too because you spend less time finding enemies but each encounter can be engaging.

 

[GatsRoller]

Good thing someone is bringing this up, many of the major fails in modern game making is lack of innovation, everybody knows thats the word of the decade, and its a balance: auto battles can be engaging depending on the approach as Kovak mentioned, or yes auto battles can be a spoiling of an already lazy designed battle system.


 Most good games have a great balance of difficulty and battle engage, so you can tell is something they tested many many times before even launching the first demo, so Im backing up the perception that usually hard work means innovative approach to battles, regardless of grinding level.

 

[Feliaria]

Honestly, I can't stand auto-battles in games, but that's mostly because I just don't like the way they dummy down the combat to fit in such a system, as per your first reason.

 

[Lord Semaj]

Players already do their own form of autoattacking.  Get awesome gear, mash the A button repeatedly, win fight.  Hack and slash is important for games so players don't have to fry their brains beating easy modes.  Autoattack takes it a step further and preserves their A button from getting repeatedly pressed into oblivion.

 

[Milennin]

I make it my mission to prevent regular attack from being a viable option to win battles with, though I might have taken it too far with my most recent games as people complained it felt useless (I disagree with them ). I like auto-attack as an MP-free alternative to do a bit of damage if a character doesn't have enough MP to cast a decent spell or if the last monster in an encounter is almost defeated and it's used as a way to preserve MP for the next fight.

 

[Feliaria]

I make it my mission to prevent regular attack from being a viable option to win battles with, though I might have taken it too far with my most recent games as people complained it felt useless (I disagree with them ). I like auto-attack as an MP-free alternative to do a bit of damage if a character doesn't have enough MP to cast a decent spell or if the last monster in an encounter is almost defeated and it's used as a way to preserve MP for the next fight.

You, sir, are awesome XD


My game goes the opposite way, though. The skills all have cooldowns, so the player has to decide to forgo the bonuses given by accruing resources gained from the spells, or use regular attacks while waiting for the skills that bolster that resource are on cooldown. haha

 

[Kes]

@Feliaria Please do not quote whole posts just to indicate who you are answering.  It makes the page slow to load and slow to scroll down, especially for those accessing this on their phones.  If you want to make it clear who you are replying to, simply use the @username convention as I have done in this post.


Thanks.

 

[Dr. Delibird]

I find the addition of an auto-attack command to be harmless. Especially if it is at the bottom of the list of commands or you have to press some button you normally don't press. Giving players the option to auto-battle is never going to be detrimental to your game, the grinders will love it and everybody else either won't use it much if at all or won't even realise it is there after a while.

 

[Feliaria]

@ksjp17 Okay, sorry!

 

[MysticMagicMan]

It's useful for grinding and finishing up fights, but in general I find the lack of skill usage for defeating your foes somewhat boring. 


The mobile industry IMO is generally terrible (regarding RPGs) - tons of characters with just a tiny difference in stats, few or none skills,


pay-to-win system, upgrading system in which you create characters that are generally the same, and usually no strategy needed for fighting.


Only good gear or whatever you get from hours of grinding and buying stuff.


Revenant Gods battle system seems really interesting and fun to play. 


The battle system I'm working on has no basic attacks - every character (and enemy) will have a set of skills that only have cooldowns and


no mana cost. Balancing seems a ***** though... but I'm really having fun!

 

[Feliaria]

@MysticMagicMan That's the way I'm doing my game, too! I mean, I do have "basic attacks" but they're really not much compared to the others.

 

[Dr. Delibird]

My current project has the regular attack but that is because each of my characters have an equip slot for class mods that augment their class (things like skills, stats and unique bonuses depending on the specific class mod) and that sometimes is the attack skill. My Scoundrel can obtain and equip a "Thief" class mod that makes the regular attack have a 1/3 chance to steal an item from the target but the damage is slightly reduced.

 

[kovak]

I like the idea of changing the attack command with items and states.

 

[Feliaria]

@Dr. Delibird That's actually a really cool way of doing that!


The way my game does it, is each character has a different basic attack depending on certain conditions. I.e., if they're effected by Thaw (an effect that raises Agility at the cost of Defens), their basic attack changes to one thing, while if they're effected by Geology (which makes certain skills stronger and raises Attack at the cost of removing Magic Attack), their basic attack becomes something else.

 

[Doktor_Q]

I'm of the opinion that basic attacks should be useful even when you have skills, if nothing else for being efficient. I find skills that just deal more damage but use MP/TP to be boring, and avoided in favor of situational or functional skills when possible. A very expensive attack that uses a lot of resource could be valid, say, because you have to think hard if it's worth the cost. Replacing the base attack on a condition can definitely help balancing, too, making it something of a skill on its own.


That being said, auto attack isn't something you're generally going to use in a fight that you would ever need skills for- if you can win a fight with only randomly aimed attacks, you're probably vastly overpowered for that area. It's the same concept as games that disable encounters below your level, or let you instantly kill weak enemies without even a fight.


On a different note, the original 7th Dragon, a dungeon crawler, gave the fighters a skill (ominously named Genocide Order) that sets your entire party to auto attack for the remainder of the battle in exchange for a damage buff. The theory behind using it is to wait for the point you have enough advantage to rush them down, rather than popping it on and going off to lunch.

 

[Ultima01]

I am of the opinion that the basic attack is not to be blindly relied on.  It has its place, rest assured.  It's probably one of the most reliable fallbacks a melee character can have.  Heck, even a mage can benefit from something that costs no mana.  That being said, I'm not a huge fan of relying on it for everything.


As a corollary to Doktor_Q's comment above, you're in way over your head if you're spamming basic attacks, and aren't horrendously overpowered.  It's like Mecha-Harold said in the Memory Shield demo: in most cases, if you're resorting to basic attacks, you've already lost.  Auto-attack would just compound the issue.

 

[kovak]

I can't see it as a real reson since it's up to how the combat was designed and not if resorting to basic attacks is a defeat flag.


If basic attacks are so bad then why do we keep adding them as valid options in combat then?