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Quote: About setting, I'd rather fight orcs etc than some random creature you made up, solely because I can judge the relative strength of creatures from a mythos I know. When you use a traditional mythos, your game has a much easier learning curve because players just need to learn your combat/interaction system instead of your whole set of creature and the like. Now that's a soft of answer I was willing to read! Thank you, Extrarius!

No no no no why does every fantasy game have to have the same old boring monsters, orcs goblins, elves, dwarves etc... How unoriginal is that, think up something new and original. Orcs etc.. are so cliche nowadays, yeah focus on the gameplay side of things but don't skimp on the rest, don't just give up and use what's been done before. Yeah you can make a succesful game based on the tolkien/d&d mythos but if your going to steal ideas from other people theres so much out there that hasn't been used in a game you don't have to settle for whats been done a million times before.

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Will aliens and other unhuman creatures bother you if they speak broken English (or French, or Spanish or whatever your language is) with poor accent :)

how about instead of aliens speaking broken english(or whatever language) why not try something else like having the computer do the voices for the aliens say it's a translator that would be a lot more convincing (at least for me), if aliens didn't know how to speak english, although if they have been around long enough they could be speaking english fluently. A good example of what i'm trying to get is the Orz(I think this is the right race the fishy ones from the fourth dimension) from Star Control 2, they spoke there own language; however some of their language/concepts couldn't be translated into english so you ended up with a lot of wierd sounding sentances that made them feel like they were alien.

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how about instead of aliens speaking broken english(or whatever language) why not try something else like having the computer do the voices for the aliens say it's a translator that would be a lot more convincing (at least for me), if aliens didn't know how to speak english, although if they have been around long enough

I have thought about that I have thought about many more things :) but generating ideas is one thing and generating real stuff is another. Unfortunately I don't the resources and time to implement most of what I can think of. If I have any real designer talent I'll be able to combine a few cool ideas into something small but great.

One of the things I won't do in a game is to make the hero start as a weakling and then getting thougher and tougher. This is done too many times. And even if there is some XP system I won't make a game where the player starts saving the world with just his two bare hands or with a weapon worth for crates bashing only.

I hope this topic is useful not just to me!

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Original post by Anonymous Poster I don't think you've really gotten the point. No matter what you do, if you have a combat system or any type of conflict you've created a good vs. bad scenario no matter how you try and explain it away. Games are based on conflict, especially those which conatian a story line because, as we all know, all stories have a type of conflict. Well any one that's worth its salt and is going to make any type of transition into a game does. You can't not have a good vs. evil theme to your game. It's impossible. You mention fighting so there you have a conflict and all conflict resides around one party vs another. good vs evil, evil vs. evil good vs whatever, it all boils down to the same thing.

I'll quote the same posting as a preamble [grin]:

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[...] STOP!

It doest not boil down to the same thing. Good and evil are relative concepts. Basically, the code of ethics of the western culture is more or less a dichotomy, where everything is either good or evil, but nothing in between. Having conflict in the game does not immediately imply a "good vs. evil scenario", as the term itself implies a variation of such a dichotomy, as opposed to having different degrees of "goodness" or "evilness". While conflict does imply that there is a moral system (people have personal opinions about the "goodness" of things) and probably an ethical system (there is an "universal" code of ethics, or at least there are factions of people with similar moral opinions) of some sort, the "good vs. evil" scenario is just an extreme case.

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Original post by NamelessTwo What do you find annoying in modern games? (shooters, adventure games & RPGs)

Well, as I tend to find reasons to complain about almost anything, I could give "everything" as an answer, but that's not completely true and probably not what you were after. But here's a list of things that happened to annoy me at the time of writing [grin]: too epic an atmosphere, implied codes of ethics, pre-written stories, photorealistic graphics, perspective projection and bad controls with silly degrees of directness.

Atmosphere: Too often the game world is inherently a beautifully harmonious, epic paradise that just unluckily happens to be infested with evil dudes and the evil maniacal lord of havoc. Then the player is invariably a very noble heroic person indeed, who will always want to cure the plague, end the reign of suffering, and raise into demigodhood as a reward. You can actually light up a whole castle at midnight with a mere candle and even the rats living in the city sewers are polished every hour to make everything look so good and harmonious. In evil places, on the other hand, you will have to walk knee-deep in blood and guts and no matter how many candles you light at that den of evil, it still stays dark and gloomy.

How about a game that constantly forces you to decide between two evil actions that are not justified by any standards of the game world, even if you ultimately want to be good? A world that is not inherently so beautifully harmonious, but without resorting to making it a global bloodbath (e.g. the Diabloesque variant)? A game where the castles of lords and kings are slowly decaying, because that is the way the world works (as in the Terry Gilliam movie Jabberwocky, where the castle of the king is very dark and in a very bad shape indeed)? A game where noble deeds are actually difficult to perform? The world tries to inherently reach a chaotic state, which is not evil. After all, while it is sad that we all eventually die, it's like that and that's the way it is. There is no reason to leave bits like that out just to make it look like the world was a big happy place for us all.

Ethics: Why is killing an evil act? Why are undead always evil? While making an attempt to have no code of ethics at all will lead into anarchy, why would I be so fundamentally and inherently a true manifestation of evil if I wanted to turn corpses that once were living, breathing mortal entities into automata that obey my commands? Ethics should be much more than just a binary value.

Pre-written stories: I'd rather have a game with a lot of meaningless, unconnected small random quests than one big huge pre-written plot to cure the plague or what have you. You can't have replayability without a lot of choices.

Photorealism: I don't like photorealism. While I have nothing against it per se, I find it extremely contradictory to have these real-looking graphics and then the NPC start walking into walls and dead bodies fade out in a very lame manner half a minute after they have cooled off. Also, photorealism usually leads into perspective projection, which sucks.

Perspective projection: Well, for first person games this is really a necessity, but for games to be played from a more "traditional" point of view (as in an isometric view), a parallel projection is much better, whether it be e.g. the isometric projection or (say) the military projection. Having a perspective makes it difficult to determine distances and you really don't gain anything from it (in my not-so-humble opinion). Note that you can still have a rotating view with zoom, you don't have to go all the way to "2d" with sprites and tile graphics; just set up the projection matrix properly to make it a parallel projection and voilà — you get all the benefits of 3d without the vicious perspective projection.

Controls: When the whole game emphasizes the link between the player and the character, controlling the character should be as direct as humanly possible. The other day I played Diablo 2 once again and got really annoyed (once again) by the fact that you have to give orders to the main character (as if he was your subordinate) instead of actually being able to control him directly. It kills the flow of the game and separates me from the character.

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What do you want to see in a game that developers forget to implement usually?

Replayability. Having 20 levels that are fun to play only the first time in a FPS is not my idea of having great replayability. A story that doesn't allow exploring the game world but forces you to watch trough 200 of cinematic scenes is not replayability. And having replayability doesn't have to make the game overly simplistic in the way Unreal Tournament and many similar replayability-oriented games do. In RPGs, creating the game world randomly is a must if you want replayability. Note that random is quite a vague word. I don't mean that you just generate a random bit string and memcpy that to the world data structure, but I'm saying that level design should not be actually defining the concrete levels, but rather defining the rules how the levels are generated (e.g. defining how a certain ambience can be achieved using a certain level generator).

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Would you buy a game that has 5h of gameplay and is very cheap but offers many add-ons (modules) that can be bought later on.

As an idea I like it, provisionally (see the paragraph after this one). Whether I'd actually buy it, well, it's difficult to say, as you didn't say how replayable those 5h are. If you're going to make it heavily plot-driven (as in having a pre-written script that the add-ons add to), I'd rather buy a game that has 5000+h of very shallow gameplay and is very cheap but offers later on many add-ons (modules) that add depth to the system.

I know I'm starting to rave maniacally about replayability again, but I just think it's silly to make 1000 user interfaces and 1000 rulesets for one story (kill-the-ultimate-bad-guy). Making 1 ruleset and 1 user interface but reusing that for 100 different games with 10000 different stories (with add-ons, if you like, and preferably with some degree of randomness so even the pre-written plots are fun to play again) is a much better idea. And I'm talking about leaving the ruleset and the UI alone, completely. Just add content, and not in the form of having pre-written quests of length 1000h or requiring that all the previous add-ons must have been completed.

And I would most certainly like to see a game that uses hatching.

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How about a game that constantly forces you to decide between two evil actions that are not justified by any standards of the game world, even if you ultimately want to be good? A world that is not inherently so beautifully harmonious, but without resorting to making it a global bloodbath (e.g. the Diabloesque variant)?

My idea is that nobody has any moral values. Everyone is selfish and cares about nobody else but himself. The world is a hostile rocky desert, with no vegetation and a few oceans and seas. The only real valuables are booze and food. (NB: that's the world not the story).

I have already such story on paper, thought it needs some modifications and it could be a beginning of a game. Also I think that such type.

I have some ideas how to make a replayable game but that task is at the bottom of my list and I'll look into it only when anything else is in place (there is a working demo and people like it).

:) What I find extremely idiotic in games. You are asked to save a village but you still have to buy your equipment and potions, etc. You have to bribe locals to give you more information, etc.

More oppinionis are greately appreciated!

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Original post by NamelessTwo My idea is that nobody has any moral values. Everyone is selfish and cares about nobody else but himself. The world is a hostile rocky desert, with no vegetation and a few oceans and seas. The only real valuables are booze and food. (NB: that's the world not the story).

As an idea I like this, as it really opposes the too often used epic and heroic theme, where everyone is good and noble.

However, for the sake of pedantry (since it is really only for pedantry; getting stuck on semantics of words is not really useful in most discussions), everybody will have moral values, or otherwise you'll have a world of nihilists, who are not selfish but rather oblivious to everything that happens around them as if they had gone through a lobotomy (I'm making quite huge assumptions on semantics here, but if people are selfish, then they care about themselves, and that means they hold themselves in some value, which implies moral values, e.g. survival is a moral thing). As for ethics, well, you can still have a code of ethics even if nobody cared about each other. Maybe it is the ethical thing to do in this world. Who am I to judge? [grin]

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:) What I find extremely idiotic in games. You are asked to save a village but you still have to buy your equipment and potions, etc. You have to bribe locals to give you more information, etc.

That is idiotic, and not any less idiotic than the fact that after you have cured the plague, conquered the land of the damned, ascended to demi-godhood, and rescued the daughter of the lord of the valorous, you still have to pay the full price for anything you want to buy.

...or the fact that even if you were on the brink of death, the local healer will not heal you unless you pay a hefty sum of money. And you say your game has no moral values. [lol]

Good point, Grim. Thank you!