Interesting question? There are dark woods filled with evil spirits and monsters, how do you make the player NOT want to go there? My thoughts are to make it actively dangerous to the player character, and not in a save/reload way. You don't want the player just going in there. How about a.) there are no rewards in there. b) The spirits in there are able to DRAIN away your posessions or even EXPERIENCE points. (even if only on a temporary basis). c.) have it mess with you and chuck you out, you think you are going into the forest but suddenly find yourself coming out of it. I think what I'm trying to get at is ways of stopping the player breaking all of the mysteries of a game and think that there is more to the game than they can see in the game.

er....not letting them go in there

i presume have NPC's give them warning of it i guess.

Is there any particular reason they cant or shouldnt go in asside from trying to preserve a feeling of mystery?

IMHO that would just strike me as a point of annoyance. To have somewhere I cant go in a game but then im the type of player that must beat everything, find everything, max everything ect.

Any game which has a way for something to take your possessions is frustrating.

Best method - make the enemies high level, make the forest very dark and evil looking with strange sounds coming from it, NPC warnings.

NPCs warning... all the more tempting to go in.

In my opinion, if you have areas that aren't meant for players to go in, don't put them there. There is no point to spending time making an area but not wanting players to go in there. Players will just get frustrated and that will affect their entire game experience, in addition to repelling them from that forest.

Useless areas are also frustrating in my experience, for example a ledge that looks like you could just barely get to it. Players could spend hours trying to get there, and when they finally do they discover that it's just an empty ledge? Same with your forest here.

If you don't want players to go in until they reach a higher level, a gate guard of some sort should solve that easily.

Cheers!

Quote:

Original post by fyhuang If you don't want players to go in until they reach a higher level, a gate guard of some sort should solve that easily.

Diablo II had people "guarding" certain areas, when you attempted to pass they would say something like "you are not powerful enough to enter here" or some-such. You could still go through, but generally you would just get your ass kicked (unless you had some uber-skills and knew how to make the enemy AI do stupid things).

I concur that if you don't want people in an area, don't make it - just have a representation of it, possibly behind a wall - though that would annoy the hell outta me.

Make the area, but don't show that it even exists until the player is supposed to be there.

For example: when they player is high enough level, open a portal to the area.

Since the woods are filled with evil spirits, make the player fear evil spirits.

For example, make it that all the spirit type enemies that he fights are a pain in the ass to deal with. I remember this game, where ghouls would drain my MaxHp 1 point at a time, for a not so long time. I would get to next town, and still lack the 3-5 points that it would be able to take from me. Then next town and still lacking. But around the time I get to the third town, I got my points back(and no, it wasn't because of a level up.. the behavior of these temporaly taken points was explained in the documentation).

But the thing is, after that I got so afraid of ghouls that everytime I saw more than 1 ghoul I ran away from them. I would only go into ghoul-infested woods if I had to.

Note that of all the 5 spiritual types of monsters there, the ghoul was the only one who took away points, but usually where normal ghosts were, some ghouls would be too.. so I ran away from ghost, too, just in case a ghoul or too doesn't appears in the middle of a fight I wouldn't be able to scape from.

Make it a "magic forest" where you can go forward forever but never get there, while going one square back (or as many as you went forward) take you back.

Any why not just instantly kill the player upon entering ;)? Perhaps slowing the player down progressively while applying various temporary negative status ailments before that.

I guess I just don't understand the point of making such a place. Will it eventually be accessible? Is there anything at all worthwhile inside? Is it an obstacle to be overcome, or is it just a feature of the world?

I think that an area where you'll NEVER be able to go would be rather novel in terms of video games.

There's always a point in your character's development where you become The Most Powerful Being in the Universe(tm). Diablo II is an excellent example of this: What sort of person are you that you can stroll through Hell, slaying the hordes of demons that dwell there? Ancient beasts that have dwelt in the abyss since the dawn of time fall like grass before you, and monsters so mighty that the angels themselves cannot best them are transfixed upon your blade. Holy crap, that's insane.

I would like to see a dark forest where you cannot go, and if you do, you're freaking boned, no matter what. Making it so dark you cannot see would be nice, but you could bring light with you, perhaps. Add a howling wind that extinguishes torches, a dark miasma that neutralizes magical light sources, and some kind of crazy labyrinthine terrain that would stymie adventurers that manage to build SureFires. Then fill it with monsters that weapons cannot touch, traps that magic cannot detect, and enchantments that cannot be countered. Heck, build in a jealous deity, so that the lucky few who manage by some miracle to survive for more than a minute or so in there get a solid smiting.

I think that a world in which every feature and location can be categorized as "experience farm" or "marketplace" has a sense of artificiality. This dark forest idea could be a big step toward more impressive worlds in video games.