Animating is easier with guns, sure. But that's not what I was talking about, and animating a character walking is far harder than either, really, so in the kind of game where you're likely to be animating such things, it's not really that much of an issue.fortaat wrote:Really? I thought guns are a much easier option. Animating a gun being fired is infinitely easier than animating a character using a sword.
In terms of game design, it's much easier to write a fantasy battle system that's fun to play because you can utilise movement quite easily; characters generally need to be right next to the enemy to attack them, and thus you can create interesting battlefield terrain with meaningful bottlenecks quite easily. If you give everyone a ranged weapon rather than restricting them to a few specialists (bowmen, magic users, etc.) then your battlefield flows completely differently, cover is more important than motility, and you have to try harder to make interesting varied battlefields. Look at Jeanne d'Arc, for example, on the PSP: there are very very few ranged weapons, one or two guys with bows and a few more with magic, despite the fact that in the real-life Hundred Years War, pivotal battles like Crécy and Agincourt were won by massed bowmen.
For a simple battle system with no movement component, there's really no difference between guns and swords mechanically speaking, and dropping back to the lower-tech option means you don't have to answer awkward questions like "why are all my soldiers standing up in a line waiting to get shot and not hiding behind barricades or something". And battles with gun-armed heroes against wild creatures fighting with tooth and claw should by rights be over before the monsters get within striking distance pretty much every time, so again, dropping down to a fantasy setting avoids breaking suspension of disbelief.
