#0 - April 21, 2009, 1:25 a.m.
Are these deaths a result of the Havok physics, or are they hand-crafted by the team? I'm just trying to get my head around how each method would work. The physics engine would probably be the worst of the two - since the attack swings and their implication on a model in-game would only be as varied as the different types of attacks that character can dish out.
I'm thinking mainly of melee attacks for the sake of simplification, and then mainly of the Barbarian swinging a sword or axe at an enemy.
If deaths are animated by the dev team, put together over hours and hours of work - and the game chooses which death to show based on factors like if elemental damage was used, if the final blow was a critical hit, how much over-damage was done onto a creep, etc... then that will make for a most interesting system!
Which leads me to my next question - can we hope for dismemberment in Diablo III? It might push the rating up... but if used sparingly it might not. I'm thinking it should only be used on hits that kill a creep, and perhaps only as a critical kill. Then the hardest part would be to make it look convincing. If you design an animation of a creep with its right arm getting chopped off - and your character is attacking on the other side of the body when the creep dies - is the game engine smart enough to know not to play that particular death?
I'd love to see bits coming off the smaller monsters in the game. Would make replaying great fun :)
