But drama and large-scale strategy are examples of things that do not mix well with lots of repeated tiny damage notifications anyway, so that seems like just the type of combat I can see a point in having clever generated text for.
If there is a lot going on I definitely prefer if the game keeps saying “The zombie hits you for X damage” multiple times rather than trying to say it in different insignificant ways just to be different.
It’s satisfying in action games to see all those numbers fall off the creature like particles. It’d be cool if you stylized a game where the font and text did fun stuff like that. You damage the “Orc” and the letters sparkle out hit points. Poison it, the letters turn green. Behead it, the O falls off…
Right, that’s kind of what I’m saying. If you’re doing a tactical hit-by-hit combat system, where there are a lot of repeated actions and incremental status updates and the player is effectively just looking at messages like they’d look at the board in a board game, you want things to be concise and consistent. If you have a more strategic, drama-oriented design, you want more complicated text generation.
My broader point, though, is that there are a lot of opportunities for doing interesting combat that isn’t built on repeated actions and incremental status updates; systems where the subjective details of the description itself help you understand what is going on, on a deeper level than just observing the value of a status variable. I personally think that subjective, descriptive combat like
…is way more engaging than “computational” combat like
…although you can make that work too, if the tactics are interesting enough.
One thing to note though is that “descriptive” combat will get just as old if it’s repeated often as “computational” combat, and it might run into problems of being unclear to the player about what exactly is going on.
I love this idea!