The other thing that is forgotten many times, beyond the possibility of no combat in games we talked a whole lot about combat that is more personal and less repetitive and therefore more meaningful in the context of the game and/or story. Death has a lot more power if it is not overused and systematic. So, making death & combat more personal, meaningful, and less frequent is something else that was discussed just as much as no combat. Diablo was going for meaningless combat, and they designed the whole game around that. That was their decision but we had just wanted to discuss something different. "All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

In Shenmue, every character had a name and a two paragraph blurb. Every last one. While not every combat in the game had a purpose (sometimes they got a teeny bit repetative) therte weren''t many meaningless combat sequences. If they had to write a new name and blurb for every opponant and still include as many battles as your average final fantasy... well.

Violence isn''t always meaningful, even in real life. However, I do agree, we shouldn''t squander it on something as ridiculous as "Random" combat. Think, when in all your life have you ever foought something "randomly"?

Yes, I agree that every combat situation doesn''t have to be this epic struggle or have some symbolism or anything that intense, but something more than endless repetitive actions would be nice.

I think Wav is on to something in the thread about alternatives to fighting though. Giving players many options (fighting perhaps being only one) is the best answer. The reason why Thief had more depth than the typical FPS was because there were many ways of handling situations. Even within using stealth there was many interesting decisions to make along the way.



"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd
Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

Oh, yeah. I''m still waiting for a "Political" interface. Not that politics would have much to do with it, but a system in which you would do better by making better conversational choices. We COULD do this now, but I think it would greatly benefit from a more sophisticated interface (speech recognition anyone?)

15 years, perhaps. 5 if we''re lucky.

Do you really think so, LF? I always consider conversation to be the hopeless pain in our asses as developers until AI can do some serious understanding of language.

That's what is interesting about you, LF. You are constantly talking about things that are contrary to what is already being done, but you are also quite optomistic. Interesting combination





"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd
Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.


Edited by - Nazrix on January 10, 2001 5:36:11 PM

What about doing something like the olde Sierra adventure games, but in full 3D with voice recognition instead of typing in commands. You would still have to say simple stuff like "look at table", "take key", etc. But at least you wouldn''t have to type. Personally, I never had a problem with typing, but I noticed a trend when all those adventure game companies started making mouse-only interfaces (around 1992 or so). I suppose I can see why many people object to typing. I wonder if they would accept the same adventure games with voice support and modern graphics technology... I might do something like that. We''ll see.

What do you guys think?

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CRAZY_DUSIK* pCrazyDuSiK;
pCrazyDuSiK->EatMicroshaft(MS_MUNCH_BILL_GATES | MS_CHEW_BILL_GATES);

i wonder, what would be a good substitute for random battles? i feel ur pain, i hate having to walk around all day just 2 get 2 the next level. but it seems to be the easiest solution. what if, as mentioned before, there were options opposed to fighting? maybe negotiation of some sort? but with this i think u would have 2 get rid of the random generation. the battles are tedious, but they might become more so if u had 2 choose to fight or talk, just more steps to resolve the action. maybe limiting battles and making them personal or meaningful as nazrix said, but this sets a limit on the amount of battles because they are all important. maybe there should be a gym where the PC''s could work out? i don''t know, what do u think?

quote: Original post by Landfish

Violence isn''t always meaningful, even in real life. However, I do agree, we shouldn''t squander it on something as ridiculous as "Random" combat. Think, when in all your life have you ever foought something "randomly"?

When did you ever live in a medieval time period filled with magic? Or when did you last run around the world map?

My only problem with "random" encounters is that you can''t see monsters on the world map. As you walk around, you notice things.. bird, etc. Well.. i''d like a world map which showed things of interest if i walked upon them. Regardless of if i was at that point in the storyline of the game or not. What if i happened across the ruins of some ancient place? The story might tell you it''s there in the 4th chapter or whatever.. but if you find it early, what then?
But no, that never happens. And neither does showing enemies on the map. The best game which did it was FF9. You could SEE the random monsters in the "dungeons".. and there were no random fights in the world map. Admittedly, most of the monsters ran faster than you could, so you usually HAD to do battle still.. but not always.
As for Shenmue.. one of, if not the, most boring games i''ve ever played in my life. Pong is more exciting.

The real question in development is the fact that how many ways will you allow to accomplish a goal? I''ve been playing project IGI lately, good game, and you can choose to be stealthy, or outright obtrusive. The game tends to cater towards stealth, but if you''re a good shot, you can accomplish things much faster by blasting. I personally love the way the game plays like this. If you don''t own it, go buy it.. one of the best strategy games on the market by far.
But, as Nazrix said.. you can develop a game around a principle with death at it''s core. Sometimes that''s not so bad.. see carmageddon. Great stress relief.

J

quote: Original post by Dynamite
i hate having to walk around all day just 2 get 2 the next level. but it seems to be the easiest solution.

Well, first of all if you want to get rid of meaningless fighting, you don''t make character growth depend upon killing to gain levels. You can use skills that increase with use or even something else that hasn''t been tried before.

One thought I had was having your character get better in certain parts of the story. Although, someone said this had already been done in Planescape Torment. I haven''t played that one yet though.




"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd
Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

quote: Original post by Niphty
The real question in development is the fact that how many ways will you allow to accomplish a goal?

Yes, I think so too. Repetition of anything can get old especially if it is something that many games use such as combat.

quote:
But, as Nazrix said.. you can develop a game around a principle with death at it''s core. Sometimes that''s not so bad.. see carmageddon. Great stress relief.

Yeah, I was just thinking last night that a good meaninglessly violent game is not a bad thing if that''s is the intentions of the developers and carmageddon was the first game to come to mind. It''s just plain fun





"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd
Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.