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Original post by grbrg
I just realized that a graphical representation would be very difficult, if items can have more than one special property. Imagine a "+2 Longsword, +3 against Goblins, fire-resistance +10, +2d6 fire damage". Finding a unique representation for this (that players can easily identify) is at least very difficult.

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Very true. However, taking NWN as an example, there may be several swords that glow red and drip (very cool feature) however on examination you then have individual runes to differentiate like someone else said.

I know when I pick up a new item I always looked that the details page for it. Of course, there will always be a race on the net as to who gets the most complete set of rune meanings first and so going to all that trouble can easily be thwarted.

Perhaps a level of randomisation that gets set per installation might overcome this. Some runes can be fixed (for graphical and practical usage/playability reasons) and some can be interchangable. Changing this per game might just end up peeving a player off when they have to restart coz their player died or they just wanted a fresh start to do things better.


R

Perhaps we are going a little too far. Numbers do get annoying, and really can muck things up,, ruin immersiveness, etc. However, we''re getting to the point where we display no numbers (in this discussion I mean) at all. I really don''t think it''s necessary to go that far. If the lack of numbers can detract from the amount of items, etc. then some numbers *should* be thrown in for the sake of content.

By the way, in reply to Siolis, in my game, when an arm is lost for instance, all inventory items on the arm and in the hand are dropped, and the character cannot use it. A lost leg slows movement and gives a random "fall" factor based on a few skills. Limbs are regenerated over time (the characters are sort of immortals) but only for main characters that have that capability.

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Original post by BiggerStaff


In NWN a weapon that does additional acid damage would be slightly green, and acid would drop from it slowly, which was a cool effect in my opinion.

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I think that this all comes down to two different types of play ''dramatic'' play which tries to generate different feelings (ie. dread as you see the acid blade coming closer) and uses immersion via sound and graphics. Versus, the game as a game ie. choose the right weapons and the right strategy to do the most effective damage.
Not that they don''t overlap, FF can be tense but I think that it is a different kind of tension.

I think *some* numbers (or bars, at least) should be explicit, while others should be implicit.

This can be seen in a multitude of Enix RPGs (also in Enix-developed games now released under the Square-Enix brand - it''s not that hard to tell apart Square''s and Enix''s games). Most of them include the physical usage of a weapon/spell into the mix.

As example, Valkyrie Profile. You have this spear that gives your 3 strikes, and boosts your character attack power to 60. But during battle, you need to hit the character buttom 3 times to get all strikes, and each strike is different, depending on the characters AND sometimes in weapon (some weapons contain exclusive attacks). To attack, the character will dash towards the enemy, and perform the attack animation, that might take a while to be executed. When the attack hits, the enemy might be pushed back, and if you lose the timing of the 2nd strike, it will not hit the enemy, or it''ll get past it (because the spear is long and you should''ve waited the enemy be pushed away by the first strike before attacking again).

And since you can press all character buttons and send all 4 party members towards the same foe at once, you need to check your timing to keep a character attack from taking the enemy away from another character. As example a explosive spell can put the enemy mid-air, and you should wait it hit the ground before striking with other characters.

There are numbers behind all that (damage rectangles, delays, etc), but they are not exposed to the player, but they blend in an almost action-game way, so the player CAN perceive them, and learn how to manage them.

"For things like weapon stats, maybe part of the problem can be traced to the fact that there are swords that can make a novice warrior extremely deadly. How is it that a poor swordsman can pick up a sword that makes him three times as dangerous as he would be with a different sword?"

Yeah, I''ve always hated things like that. That''s one reason I''ve always liked UO, even if I no longer play it. The skill system was great, however I can think of many ways to exploit that... it comes down to being able to curb exploiting of a skill-type system as much as possible.

"I think that weapons should certainly have an impact on your fighting potential, but not a terribly large one. One way to circumnavigate the need to call it a +3 Estoc of Whacking is to simply use the higher graphical capabilities of modern computers to reflect its quality. Have finer steel be shinier, sharper blades look sharper, and any magical enchantments they might have could be determined by reading magical runes on the blade. So you''ve got a really sweet-looking short sword with a steel hilt and a nice shiny rust-free blade with three runes on it: One for "mankiller", one for "ever-sharp", and one for "unbreakable"."

That is an excellent combination of ideas. Art teams will hate it, though


Personally, I think the best thing to do would be to add an option of sorts - to see numbers / formulas if checked, or not if otherwise. However, with that, you would need the reasonable option of being able to use a graphical explaination of the numbers and formulas, such as the sword''s shine and runes on the blade.

-Greven

It is a sign of weakness in a game''s design to have to give too many options to the player. Letting a player choose how in-game information is revealed to him is a dereliction of duties on the part of the game''s designer. If the player wants to control the nuts and bolts of the game, then they should make a mod for it. Out of the box, a video game should be a cohesive experience.

I love this topic, and love the discussion so far. I'm not sure I'll be adding much original insight here, but I figure I'll toss in my 2 cents anyway.

There is a build-in limitation when you take a pen & paper game and try to turn it into a computer game -- in a pen & paper game you can't have your players doing differential equations to see if their firebomb bounces off the correct walls to hit that party of monsters around the corner. If you are true to the same ruleset, then you can't be doing that in the computer game either, even though computers are meant to handle such things with ease.

A few years ago myself and a friend started to design a miniature-based table top game (much like Warhammer). We noticed we were losing a ton of time balancing rules, abilities, and stats. At the time I was playing around with some game programming so I decided to build a prototype of the game on the computer so we could run simulations and rapidly make stat changes. Almost immediately I started to see areas where I could add calculations in the game to make the experience much more realistic and rewarding...the only probblem being that these extra calculations just wouldn't translate back to the pen & paper version.

I think an ideal RPG engine is one that handles an exhastive number of calculations automatically, on behalf of the player. If you are playing pen & paper D&D, it would be very hard for a player to keep track of how many times they tried to pick a lock, or swing a sword. In a computer game, this is trivial, and allows for a much more realistic game experience if done properly.

I could go on and on with this topic. :-)

[edited by - HarryC on March 22, 2004 12:58:51 PM]

hi how ru?

Maths can be fun, ie. in Final Fantasy where you can work out which attack / defence will be the best at that time.

In other games it can just get in the way.

I think that adding explicit numbers makes a lot of sense if you''re trying to make a strategic game. For example, what happens in an RTS game whenever a company doesn''t release the full stats of the units and the combat damage calculations and the bonuses of each upgrade is that the players test these things themselves and post them on websites. In multiplayer games of other genres, the same thing is true, because players have to compete based on skills and planning and thus look for all the information they can get in order to make it easier. And there''s nothing wrong with strategic gameplay - it can be fun to gamble based on chance or figure out how to optimize some strategy when you have all the information available.

Thus the only way to remove this need for explicit numbers is to either make a game where the focus is much more on exploring the world than on applying some skills (like Myst, or a singleplayer RPG), or make a game where there are no entities that the user will have to know hidden numbers about, and players must compete starting from the same situation (like Chess, or an FPS game).