I don't get the motivation behind the defense design

[Shadowfury333]

With the Lugaru campaign added to Overgrowth, I've finally been able to get an idea of how the combat system operates in a real campaign context, as well as having another game to compare it to more readily. However, at this point Overgrowth's combat system no longer makes sense to me.

In Lugaru, your defensive key was also crouch. There were also no blocks, so if you failed to do a reversal, you'd still crouch, which meant the only attacks that would likely hit you were also crouching attacks, which dealt minimal damage. It also meant that hitting enemies was reliable, unless they did a reversal on you, which was an event you could respond to. Also, reversals are very discrete events, so if your attack failed, you knew exactly why and could deal with it, and if you were attacked, whether or not your response worked is crystal clear.

In Overgrowth, but contrast, defense is now bound to RMB. However, because blocking is a timing game, there is no fallback if you fail the timing game, and AFAICT there's also a high-low component too. Also, if you do block, it's not that clear until a bit later that you succeeded, assuming you hold down RMB to throw, rather than letting go to disengage in case you got hit already, and it's easy for another attack to come in in that time.

What I don't get mainly is why, given the apparent high-low component to blocking, and the general thrust of this game being about context-sensitive actions, is blocking not just the default action for a held down RMB, with reversals being the timing game? It's not like there isn't a way around constant blocking, and enemy AI seems to block near perfectly anyway, so it just seems like a messy system that's frustrating to use at worst and tedious at best.

As a side note, I kinda like how Lugaru specifically makes the fallback to reversals crouching, since that's also where the weakest attacks come from, but I don't see that as being necessarily the better option.

[mrtehnoms]

You seem to be very familiar with the game, so I don't wanna seem preachy.
For starters, your crouch being bound to the block button is weird. I've never seen that, and you may wanna check you bindings If nothing else, start using a gamepad?

But I get what you mean about the defense. Against AI, they have a high low component to blocking, forcing you to switch up high and low attacks and using the different directions to change the timing of your attacks. Though, for the player, all you gotta do is press block the moment before impact, no matter what kind of unarmed, non-wolf attack it is. For the duration the block animation lasts is what you got for the timing. This makes me think the devs didn't really intend for multiplayer to be in the game.

If you pull the block way too early, you can still dodge any attack (actually dodge, not roll away). They didn't want crouch to be a fallback for missing a block because a connecting sweep will always hurt.

But, combat has been just like this for as long as I've been playing this game. It's odd that you're getting changes.

[Shadowfury333]

I might not have been clear, but I was comparing Lugaru to Overgrowth. In Lugaru (not Overgrowth) crouch and reversal are the same button, so you get crouching as a backup to reversing a move, and blocking doesn't exist. Also, I haven't played much OG since around the time when Arena mode got multiple stages.