The Jedi Knight 2 lightsaber cheat was really the best way to play the game. It made the lightsaber brutally effective and allowed you to sever limbs at the polygon level. You could easily detach hands, heads, feet, legs or torso with a single stroke.

It also made the lightsaber duels much more interesting. You could rapidly kill or be killed by a single lightsaber-wielding enemy.

Bushido Blade?

I've always been slightly put off by the way all media has removed the sense of threat from weapons. In games you need not be concerned that the enemy has a rocket launcher because your health will regenerate after a second behind cover. In television and film, martial arts heavy fight scenes encourage protagonists to run in the direction of people with guns, knives, etc. The net effect is to the diminish the impact and lethality of weapons as a whole.

Perhaps my favorite counter-example, which I think of as the exception that proves the rule, is Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. In the fight scenes where large groups of bandits with swords rush at each other they do so tentatively, showing genuine concern for the danger they are putting themselves in. The effect is almost comical when compared with the devil may care attitude of other films but I think it does a great job at emphasizing the fact that swords are really, really sharp.

You bring up an interesting point of view. When you're on the other side, it's difficult to balance the level of threat with the level of fun. In the BattleTech campaign I'm running I have to try to create situations the feel legitimately threatening but are still winnable without killing off my players and making it so they don't want to keep playing.

Seems like it should be possible to model the inside of a person/monster within the external skin. I started thinking about this a few months back when I was into The Hunter. In that game, they had the CNS, lungs, heart and abdominal viscera modeled inside the animals. The internal organs you hit, and how hard you hit them determined how long it took for the animal to drop. If you disregarded the protective property of the skeleton, I would imagine that it would not be too hard to model the main pipes of the circulatory system and the individual abdominal organs. A shot through the intestines may not stop the fight, but if that shot nicks the inferior Vena Cava, you would be face down in less than 10 seconds. I guess this is a long, rambling way of saying that making game entities respond realistically to damage would be dependent on the level of detail you were willing to put into the anatomical model. It would be interesting to see how a detailed model would feel in action. Would people appreciate being able to aim for the femoral artery? Sounds like you would get the biggest pay-off in a stealth/assassin game (which is probably why it felt so right in The Hunter.) At the very least...it would make a nice bullet point on the back of the game box.

Assassin's Creed actually did a pretty good job with this as I recall. When they didn't parry, enemies went down fast, and there was a really nice, crunchy feeling to the sword hits. A little too much dependence on canned counter-attack animations, though. And they obviously didn't apply the same system to when the player gets hit (and used the wacky sci-fi thing to justify it).

Didn't Daikatana use a "deadlier" system like this?

+1 vote for a realism mode in future lightsabre-inclusive games. It would actually make the whole foresight/reaction-time thing that jedis (especially when fighting each other) really important and cool. Plus it'd stop all those stupid "normals" from holding you back.

Personally i'd love to see what i think of as a proper Jedi game: i.e. Space noir. Lots of roleplaying/solving situations and finding clues and a little but intense fighting/action.

Mmm Bushido Blade. Another favorite that I have kept on my shelves all these years.

I've always been fond of hit locations and more realistic combat in table top RPGs - I find that it even lends to crafting a more interesting story when players have to deal with real injury and not just a pile of hit points. Trying to save a comrade who just took an arrow to the throat has always been more interesting to me than tossing someone a potion to restore 1D8 hit points because they look a little tired.

As for Dragon Age - I love the special killing blow animations but I wish in some way they were a bit more varied and frequent when I am fighting basic thugs/critters. Give me a sense that my 3 feet of sharp, flaming steel is actually doing something other than making them so tired or cross with me that they eventually fall over from boredom.

Man, I'm trying to remember a game that I played years ago that had the ability to sever you opponents limbs with a well timed and executed strike. The control scheme was atrocious and nigh unplayable (every strike was accomplished by holding down a numpad key, then clicking or hitting enter or something,) but when you actually managed to pull something off the effect was devastating. Blade of Darkness? I think that might have been it. High fantasy setting, Conan lookalike characters, orcs, skeletons. Somebody else must have played it?

This made me think immediately of Time Killers. I know it's not what you're grasping for, but it instantly sprang to mind.

Henry the psychotic farmer violently agrees!

I've often thought that I would be happiest if RPG's where sword (or lightsaber) combat was the norm would implement some sort of stamina or guard meter that would lower throughout a fight, in addition to the HP meter. Then you could essentially fill in the majority of battle with good looking parry and dodge animations that wore down the stamina / guard meter (and in which the characters actually interact with each others' swords and armor, which almost never happens), and then actual contact with the blade could be seriously damaging and/or lethal, and reflected in the HP gauge.

Every video I've seen of The Old Republic where a jedi is involved just makes me laugh, because they're choosing to let everyone who wants one have a lightsaber, but they're making them not lightsabers. If I hit a guy with a lightsaber and they just go "oof", it's not a damned lightsaber.

The default interaction between two skilled combatants with almost any weapon really should be "parry" or "dodge" anyhow - any fight where weapons are actually striking ends quickly. And there's no reason that can't still be exciting; personally I think it's more exciting to know that the first hit that gets through might be the last.

This is something that has always bothered me about D&D in general, and I came up with a simple yet elegant solution. Picture this:

Combat begins, initiative is rolled (if necessary) and attack rolls are done. If your attack roll determines a hit, the animation would show a weapon impact against the armor. If it was a particularily brutal hit (resulting in stun, knockdown, etc) animations would be shown as necessary. Battles would continue with animations for whiffing, near misses, and hits until the "hit points" are drained. Once hit points are out, the killing blow animation will be determined by the severity of the attack roll and damage dealt, with a large variety of killing blow animations.

I always had a problem with the idea of "hit points" and would much prefer a system that replaces them with "stamina". As a character takes a heavy blow his stamina will be reduced accordingly. This also makes sense in leveling, since as you gain experience in battle you are able to fight harder and longer than a lower experience character. This would make battles much more exciting and dynamic than what we have now. Sure it would take a TON of time to get all the animations and syncronizations, but damn would that ever be worth it.

De ja vu! I'm currently listening to you say the same things on the immortal machines podcast - but wishing you'd stop talking about mmo's. I'm one of those that said "Awesome, down with the MMO's" and then you lost me here.

Also, most enemies go down in 1 or 2 blows in Mount & Blade, and definitely 1 blow if your momentum is behind you (couched lance gets em every time!).

I read it as directed at you, too.