I recently upgraded my graphics card and got to playing through some of my backlog. In particular I've thrown a lot of hours into the Witcher 3. Now as a fan of The Witcher 2 there where still some things in that game that bothered me. Mostly it was the combat. The Witcher 2 did a bang up job of making playstyles that revolved around item crafting or spell-weaving feel cool and strong, a feat many action rpgs fail at, but when it came to traditional sword fighting the game fell flat on its face. It wasn't unusable by any means, but it lacked flow and felt more punishing than realism demanded. So when I moved onto the Witcher 3 I was surprised that although they used the same style of combat without adding any new features, that they had still improved the combat significantly and it was all down to quality-of-life changes. While there were a lot of changes made for brevity's sake I'll just talk about the one that stuck out the most to me.

• Invincibility Frames/IFrames Now Invincibility Frames are, rather self-explanatorily, frames of animation in which a character is invincible. They're mostly talked about in competitive beat-em-up games but they're applications are also used in many single player games. Their most common use is allowing the player to dodge enemy attacks that they actually got hit by. By giving the player invincibility frames during a dodge animation a player can focus much more so on the timing of the dodge rather than the direction. This also allows the developer to get away with enemy swing animations that are technically impossible for the player to dodge naturally. Without IFrames, the creation of an enemies attack animation has to be meticulous, for fear of making an impossible to defeat enemy.

Because of how much easier enemy design is whilst using IFrames, pretty much every action game from Kingdom Hearts to Dark Souls uses them. Developers can also use IFrames as a lever to adjust an enemies difficulty and what approach a player should take. By knowing how long a players momentary invincibility lasts they can adjust the speed and size of an enemies attack accordingly. EG: If they want the player to dodge away from an enemies swing they can give the enemy a wide slow attack, so that if the player dodges into the swing their invincibility wears off in the middle of the damage zone. Conversely if the devs want the player to dodge into the attack, they can make it quick, so that by dodging into it the players invincibility wears off well after the damage zone has passed by them. Another way to mess around with IFrames is to make specific attacks that injure the player regardless of whether or not they were dodging. Most of the time this little trick is used for projectiles and zoning, yet again forcing the player to move in certain ways to avoid these guaranteed hits. A great example of a player Utilizing IFrames is The Sephiroth fight from kingdom hearts. I of course know that there are some games where Invincibility frames wouldn't be helpful, but those have to be specifically designed with that in mind to begin with. I did a video harping on about IFrames in more detail here for anyone interested.

Anyways, that's just one Quality-of-life feature that had a big impact on how much I preferred the Witcher 3's combat to the Witcher 2's, which got me to wondering...

*What Quality-of-life features have a big impact on whether or not you enjoy a game?