700 suits of armor... 60 Swords of Hurting... 5 golden rings... uh, yeah... In most hack & slash games it''s almost like you''re some pscyho killing vacuum cleaner when it comes to dead enemies and item drops. What if you could recycle or melt down the inventory items, and apply their properties to your character in a somewhat generic way? For every one point of armor you convert, for instance, you''d get 1/5 of a point of some resource that you could add to your armor. Yes, there''d still be an inventory limit, and you''d still need to go to town to do other stuff. But in the course of scarfing up various dropped goodies, you''d have the advantage of being able to put to use the tons and tons of redundant items you run across in your typical hack & slash game. -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

Dungeon Siege had a spell which let you convert items into gold...

it also had a mule to haul all those swords of hurting out of the dungeon...

Okay, so I have two ways to look at this:

A) THEY STOLE MY IDEA!

or

B) Hey, cool, I''m thinking like Chris Taylor

Methinks I''ll chose B.

--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Maybe they stole your idea, but decided to recycle it when they found out that they already had one.

For Mother GameDev!

Another cool twist on this idea I encountered whilst playing System Shock 2 (sci-fi theme) was an actual item called "the recycler" which allowed you to convert "trash items" in your inventory that were normally useless (ie. bottles, small plants, cigarrette cartons, etc into "nanites" ie gold.) Nanites are what you used to buy things in SS2. But same basic idea. Whats funny is that in this first person world, there were all these items everywhere.. that i thought were useless for like 3/4''s of the game, because you don''t get to buy a "recycler" till late in the game. Still, i thought it was farely amusing idea.

Eidolon37

Wav, check out Vagrant Story in which you could Take apart your weapons, and build new ones or rebuild old ones by picking the best bits& bobs. A major factor was the material out of which the weapon was made. So you might start the game with a simple bronze shortsword, and over the course of several hundred hours of playing, you''d pick up the bits needed to make a Longsword out of God-Stuff.

An Idea I''ve been playing with for some time is a system of consummation, where your charcater can take an item to a special place, and have all its buffs transfered to another item at the expense of a limited reduction in effectiveness.

For a more die-hard Hack&Slash game (where there are no towns or resting places) you could have players with suitable skills be able to forge weapons out of whatever they find in the dungeons. Melt down crap weapons and then create better ones from the materials.

George D. Filiotis
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

quote: Original post by Hase
it also had a mule to haul all those swords of hurting out of the dungeon...

I loved the mules. I had two. If enemies hurt me, that''s one thing. But when they hurt my mules, I had to whip out Awesome Spell of Pain +10 on their asses.

I found the mules amazingly effective in battle. They have a great deal of health, so you can stick them between your archers and the baddies, and they dish out a great deal of damage on their own. One time, everyone died but my main character and a mule, and I still won the fight, because of that mule.

i''m currently working on a scifi/futuristic "rpg" which will have a similar concept but on a much grander scale. all the items in the game will be made out of components and the player can take stuff apart to make new stuff. hasn''t really got anywhere yet (busy working on physics at the moment but the basic object framework is in place). this won;t just be limited to weapons but the player will be able to make vehicles and stuff out of different components, twill be cool.

Wavinator:
Sounds a lot like the development system for Onimusha 2 , which I just recently had the pleasure of playing. You kill enemies and collect their souls (kind of like Legacy of Kain), and when you reach a save point (shrine), you can "spend" this soul energy on upgrading your weapons and armor. Overall, I think it's a fantastic idea, but better implemented in a metaphysical sense, rather than melting down armor and sticking the points in your body.

[edited by - Tom on September 12, 2002 12:41:43 AM]