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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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Cuts, bruises, and bumps are purely cosmetic. Bruises are applied wherever you hit based on how hard you hit. A highly bruised area means you've been hitting that area often or hard, but there's no trauma/pain system tied to specific areas beyond just the whole body (pain) and whole head (trauma). Same for bumps, but those only build up as you hit the specific area where the bump can form.
Cuts can open from any hit to the specific cut graphic areas. They are more bloody when you open them, but they get cleaned up (still there, just as small clean cuts instead of openly bleeding) between rounds. It's just the blood getting wiped off the face. The cuts have been treated, but they are still there.
If you hit hard enough, you'll see a sweat splash. If you hit a cut area, you see a blood splash instead of a sweat splash. The splash itself indicates a decently hard hit, but the whether it's sweat or blood only indicates if you hit an open cut or not, which doesn't matter.
They're on a gradient. Light blue is actually more damaging than dark blue because the gradient goes from dark blue to yellow to red. The blue lightens until it becomes yellow and then transitions through orange as it heads to red.
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General comments:
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If you're looking for a quick read of the effectiveness of any individual punch you throw, the original intent was mainly for you to listen to the impact sound and look how strongly the opponent reacted to the hit. The louder the sound and the bigger the resulting animation, the stronger the hit was. If the opponent reacts by changing their behavior (changing their guard or trying to back away if they have room), then you're likely throwing effective swings. If you throw a solid hit to their head and they look dazed and confused after the hit, then you've really nailed them. An especially effective hit generally gets a grunt out of them, too. Some of this behavior is more noticeable if you have a large enough space for the opponent to have room to move in, and you don't have them trapped in the corner.
The colored splashes directly tell you how damaging your swing was, but the game was designed to work without the colored splashes. They were actually added very late in development as a middle ground solution because some players were asking for explicit health bars or floating damage numbers to be shown. You can turn the colored splashes off in the in-game Settings menu, and I prefer the game that way because it requires you to take in everything that's going on in terms of sights, sounds, and your opponent's behavior instead of just focusing on what color popped up.
The cuts, bruises, and bumps weren't added a game mechanic, but simply just to increase immersion. There's design potential to have them double up as being indicative of underlying game mechanics, but that's a decidedly game-y direction that I didn't take with TotF. Cuts open because your glove happened to catch their skin in a way that opened a cut. During the break their cutman will clean and treat the cut, but the wound is otherwise superficial and doesn't affect anything. The opponent will get bruises and bumps as you beat on them where you beat on them, and they will look appropriately battered when you look at them during the winner announcement at the end of the match, but there's no underlying mechanic for them to represent.
Thank you for the detailed response.
I still have many more questions, but as I have to chew on this a bit first, I don't know what they are yet :)
But one thing stands out immediately here to me as a contradiction to the "official guide".
In it you say under the section "No Health Bars":
"Hits that are too light will not inflict any damage at all. These hits are shown with a light blue impact effect. Hits that are damaging enough to be significant will show an effect that blends between blue to yellow to red, depending on exactly how much damage they land for. "
But in your answer you say:
"They're on a gradient. Light blue is actually more damaging than dark blue because the gradient goes from dark blue to yellow to red. The blue lightens until it becomes yellow and then transitions through orange as it heads to red."
If "light blue" is more damaging than "dark blue" (per your answer), then how can "light blue" signify that I did not do any damage at all (per your official guide)?
Is the guide out of date?
Or are there two separate scenarios, that result in a "light blue impact"-effect?
This would be rather obtuse.
For context, currently I play like this:
Whenever I see the "light blue impact effect", I thought I knew, that I was not punching hard enough. Therefore I make myself punch harder.
And I adjust the multiplier, so that this is possible but not easy.
Thus I average between 70% and 90% of my punches doing damage.
The higher range comes, when I focus and try my very best.
I also want to max the damage number that I see in the after-match statistics.
So throwing a punch that does not inflict any damage feels pointless.
"As a boxer takes damage to their head or body, they will build up trauma or pain, respectively. As trauma or pain build up, that boxer will eventually begin to take an increased amount of damage when they receive hits to the head or body."
In the excerpt from the guide above it says, respectively, which implies to me, that those "trauma" and "pain" are separate damage pools.
You only increase trauma by punching the head.
You only increase pain by punching the body.
"A highly bruised area means you've been hitting that area often or hard, but there's no trauma/pain system tied to specific areas beyond just the whole body (pain) and whole head (trauma)."
But here you use the term "whole body (pain)", which implies to me that a shot to the head would increase "pain" AND "trauma".
Because the "head" is anatomically part of the "whole body".
And a shot to torso would only increase "pain", but NOT "trauma".
I am sorry, to be so nitpicky.
But I just really like exactly what's going on, when I'm playing a skill-based game.
Or using any kind of software. If I don't, it is very frustrating to me.
And contradictory documentation can be frustrating as well.
But I appreciate very much, that you bothered writing a relatively detailed guide at all.
If you hadn't, I'd probably have stopped playing a while ago.
I was mistaken in my reply to you. I misremembered and thought it was blending from pure blue to yellow to red. Instead, it's blending from cyan (#00FFFF or rgb(0, 1, 1)) to yellow to red.
By "whole body", I mean anywhere on the torso. Body shots, using the common boxing definition meaning "a punch to the torso and distinctly not to the head", increase pain. By "whole body", I mean there are no subsections of the body that track their own individual pain level. If you hit anywhere on the body, it adds to the pain of the whole body.
Head shots increase trauma.
Both add to a type of long-term fatigue that I don't have a specific name for that can keep the opponent on the floor a little longer when you knock them down.
Where would you put yourself on the spectrum of "I want to be a better boxer, even if that's not the optimal way to play the game" at one end and "I want to be optimal at the game even if I'm not using good real-world boxing fundamentals" at the other?
Would you be frustrated if a lot of these mechanics were drastically different in the sequel or do you like the idea of having something new to learn?
"Where would you put yourself on the spectrum of "I want to be a better boxer, even if that's not the optimal way to play the game" at one end and "I want to be optimal at the game even if I'm not using good real-world boxing fundamentals" at the other?"
I do not want to be a better boxer at all, because I am not a boxer and was and would never want to be one. Head trauma is scary.
And I'm too vain to suffer a broken nose.
Learning to be a better boxer purely for the art of it, could be interesting and fun, but my playspace is not really large enough for the kind of dynamic movement an actual prize fight has.
Learning "boxing fundamentals" could theoretically be extremely fun if I had a larger space, but I do not see how TotF could possibly accomplish this. Or how any game on the Quest 2 could teach me this. If I had a fancier headset with an outside-in tracking setup and more sensors or full-body tracking, perhaps.
Or a trackable glove instead of a controller. (like... even the grip is wrong)
But at the moment I have none of that.
I am more towards the "want to be optimal at the game"-side, but also in pushing myself physically, which goes hand in hand. For me, seeing "numbers go up" and learning "not to waste motion" are how I know to get better at games. And at the moment, my way of playing works excellently to punch harder and react quicker.
I lift heavy weights, but this is the only kind of HIIT- and cardio activity that I have an easy time doing. Long-distance running or sprinting is hard for me, because of issues with my feet. Also I find those activities terribly boring, whereas punching someone in the face is decidedly not.
It's very motivating seeing punch speed on the bag, because seeing that I can punch up to 11 m/s if try really hard is great motivation.
And shot speed is actually something that can be really measured.
Even if realistically I'd hurt myself more than a theoretical opponent, it's something that's just cool to push as a physical skill.
When it becomes too obvious to me that I can min-max by e.g. abusing the hell out of double punches or some other hack, I'll probably do that for a couple rounds and then abandon them as being a bit cheap.
Perhaps it'll become trivially easy to win every fight, if I abuse all the mechanics, but it can be fun to push the difficulty higher, so I still have to sweat.
I suspect at some point, when the modelling becomes too predictable and thru familiarity exploitable, I probably would ignore the numbers again in the end.
But not knowing the numbers is frustrating.
Not knowing what causes damage or what the effects of my actions are is also frustrating.
Because I want to win, but only when it's a challenge to win. Otherwise there's no point.
But if I am pushing myself to my physical limit, but using the wrong strategy or my punches aren't registering and I'm losing, because the game is hiding its mechanics...
that's where I find frustration.
"Would you be frustrated if a lot of these mechanics were drastically different in the sequel or do you like the idea of having something new to learn?"
"Drastically different" can mean too many things to answer.
If it was like "Creed", which left me utterly cold after having already beaten TotF on Normal-mode, then I'd find it a bit sad and probably not play it.
But I don't think you have that kind of game in mind.
I would not be frustrated with having something new to learn.
This is why I'm asking all those questions after all... because the mechanics are secret and shaded in mystery. And actual understanding would be new to me.