Contact Damage

[Koh]

This aspect of game design many rely on has become more and more irritating to me these days.  I've some reasons against this design decision, that I'll quote from my post on Soul Saver Online's forum below.

I've been playing this game for a little while now, and am Level 53.  The gameplay itself is decent, but as I've been playing, the levels of frustration have been increasing more and more because of this design aspect.  Contact damage for enemies in no way compliments the gameplay, nor the map design of this game.  Here's a couple of reasons to support my claim.

1.  In general, contact damage is a dated and lazy way out of making defined attack animations for each and every enemy.  Back in the early days of gaming and the 8-bit era, memory was very expensive and limited, meaning there was only so much memory available to use to have all the graphics required to make a complete game, such as tile graphics, character graphics, Heads Up Display (HUD) graphics, and so on.  So contact damage was a way to save resources such that memory could be used for other aspects of the game.  Since the 16-bit era, however, games have arisen that no longer ran into the issue of memory in regards to contact damage, such as Secret of Mana, a game released nearly 20 years ago.  This game, along with many others, did not have to rely on contact damage to save memory; every enemy had a defined attack animation and range, such that the player can clearly see when and where an enemy is attacking.  If a nearly 20 year old game can accomplish this with far less resources available than we have today, there's absolutely no excuse for games in this day and age to rely on contact damage.  This game already sports defined attack animations for enemies, so that's already in place.  There's no need to have contact damage stacked with this, unless it makes sense for the enemy's design.  For example, Keburi monsters that are basically living fires.  Touching fire hurts, so it makes sense there, or a monster covered in spikes.

2.  In most cases, it does not compliment the game design.  Especially in regards to MMOs like this one, Soul Saver Online, where enemies are randomly respawning on the current map.  Since they hurt by touch and do that, unsuspecting players take unnecessary damage, which could even kill them, just because they didn't have any reaction time, nor could they see, the enemy spawning on top of them.  That in and of itself is a bad game design aspect.  Also, the map design in this game features of lot of areas with tight corridors, or even just a bunch of enemies on platforms, where it's near impossible to traverse the map without taking damage.  Assassins have the great solution of Hiding to this, but that's not available to every class, nor can you use it in the Avatar form.

Contact damage was a necessity on early consoles and 8-bit machines for memory reasons.  The 16 bit era proved it is no longer necessary, so there's no reason one would need to rely on it in this day and age.