quote: Original post by felonius
Have any of you played the old Bitmap Brothers game, GODS? In it the system tried to estimate the players ability and change the difficulty during the game to accomodate for it.

I have not even heard of the game, but I have seen other games adjust the difficulty based on the character''s abilities. More popular games that have implemented this include Diablo and Final Fantasy 8.

quote: felonius continued
This reminds my of the the social security system in many countries. Here people with no job are given money to survive but it isn''t fun, while people earning money must pay a lot while still being rich. Having a job should be a benifit, but the due to the scheme of taking money from the rich and giving to the poor the difference isn''t so great.

(OFF TOIC RANT ->) I wish our social security {and welfare} systems worked as well. Here in the U.S. social security is for tose over the age of 65. There are many of them who don''t need or want it, but when they try to give it back the goverment won''t let them. The worst part is that those who have a portion of their paycheck cut out for this program now most likely will never see even a penny back. The reason; the system only works on a pyramid [scheme] of population growth.

Welfare is supposed to be a temporary support for those who can''t pay for all their nescesities. Unfortunately the system is widely abused with the recipients wasting the money on cable TV, direct digital broadcast dishes, Nike shoes, FuBu wear, sports team jackets, gold jewelry and the such. And yet they complain about not being able to heat their homes, having poor nutrition, not being able to pay for medicine, etc. To top it off, the system truly is not a temporary help, but permanent, and in every instance a time limit is proposed it is instantly criticised {by those abusing the system] and eliminated from serious discussion.

The moral of this rant? Not everybody likes a fair, balanced system, but those who would benefit from one will.

what about a system where the skills that aren''t used get leveled down but the skills that are used get leveled up this way the characters starts to conform to the way the player plays him.

Ketchaval Quote :"Dungeon Master Quote: "You have to put severe restrictions on the use of magic else, there is no fun playing. Gandalf could tear mountains, eradicate whole armies"

How about resource based Magic, like in Magic: the Gathering ytou have to play land cards to use creatures / spells etc.

But what if the power came not just from controlling something (Dungeon Keeper - Bullfrog), but from HOW MANY EXIST ! So if you had a good Orc killing spell, the more Orcs that you kill with it the Weaker it gets, because there are less Orcs. Or a mountain tearing spell wouldn''t work if there weren''t anymore mountains.
A bit like levelling down though.

(Annoying?).

hrm, when I read the title of this thread I got an idea, when I skim read the rest of the post I noticed that it wasn''t mentioned, so here goes.. (Igonre at will)

what about instead of your skill level increasing you decrease the difficulty of a task? and do it so logarithmically so you can never reach "difficulty zero"... the fabled godness of the skill? and the difficulty would have to be a floating point number...

Dæmin
(Dominik Grabiec)
sdgrab@eisa.net.au

I have often thought a similar thing - It has always been the way to make the game harder (more/stronger baddies) as it progresses. But is this really necessary?

Take an FPS for example. Why not start with all (or at least most) of the weapons, right at the start of the game. Keep the actual difficulty of the game relatively constant, but strictly ration the ammo available, particularly for the big weapons. Hence the player could progress very easily through the first few levels, but sooner or later he will run out of ammo and will have to resort to the weaker guns, making the game harder.



Edited by - Sandman on October 5, 2000 8:49:18 PM