The amount of work needed to go into decapitations and the such may be too taxing on the game. With their ambitious 1-server goal that thing (and our PCs) would need to be able to handle potentially hundreds of detached limbs simultaenously. Even more so if said limbs had physics/jigglebones.
Well let's go over how the game could play out. Let's say we are in one of the 500 on 500 battles. We can easily say that these battle could go on for some time and players are not all going to die at one. Let's say the battle is as chaotic a said match of Team fortress 2 king of the hill match. Let's scale that up and say every minute roughly 200-300 people(people are mostly going to be reinforcing(respawning)) die and half have something happy to their body on death. Now this battle isn't going to be happen in a map the size of TF2 so you mostly will only be rendering a maybe 1/3 on the high end of everything going on in just that battle. 66-100 body parts flying off a minute. The server are just running the back ground data to allow the player to interact. Transmit data of what everyone is doing. All the rendering is done on the player's pc and once some has gone gore it will be rendered in their sim of the world. The gore won't mean anything to the server almost because rendering is done independent of the server. It can also be turned off client side or reduce how often it happens. Short version: There won't be added load to the servers if everything is done client side for ragdolls. There is no reason for the server to track where body parts are going. You also won't be needing to render the whole battle only what is around you so that cuts done on a lot. There is also the option for lower end system to turn it down or just off.
From the stream I saw that vehicle wrecks remain, would be cool if bodies remained too... Up to threshhold or sophisticated engine that would work only with the "shell" of the bodies pile.
If I recall correctly, the devs stated that severing limbs as a gameplay element won't be in. That being said, I could very well imagine decapicitations and the like as special execution moves, seeing how the latter are little more than scripted animations.
Yeah, I think that dismemberment will be too much to ask at the moment, even if we all really appreciate that. Blood stains on armor are otherwise simple to include and will contribute to add a bit of immersion.
Well, look at the sync-kills in DoW. There was no dismemberment in the original, but it still managed to be ultra violent and bloody just by the sync-kills. Blood would literally be spewing out of people when they died, and the animations looked particularly painful.
"Buboes, phlegm, blood and guts! Boils, bogeys, rot and pus! Blisters, fevers, weeping sores! From your wounds the fester pours!" Bring on the gore, let Nurgle rejoice with each death that befalls the denizens of Arkhona.
