>> Though I agree with the OP that walking out of an entirely empty dungeon is boring, for me the solution isn't to teleport the player out of the dungeon, but to make the dungeon exit lead back to the world in general, or to make the way back interesting. Perhaps one 'inspiration' as a designer would be to try and make the way out of a dungeon be even more enjoyable than the way in. If your entrance route got caved in, now you have to locate a different exit entirely out of this cave network

fully encumbered, when you want to avoid encounters, and are just trying to get the f out, maybe you're low on HP and healing potions too - that would REALLY suck!

If by "fully encumbered" you mean terribly slowed down when you reach an arbitrary tipping point? Wouldn't exist in my game. Either you'd have a hard limit, or you'd linearly slow down the more you exceed the limit.

As far as low HP and out of healing potions go, that's where the rubber meets the road for me. That's where things switch over from effortlessly steamrolling mooks to actual survival. In my ideal adventure/survival/exploration RPG, you'd only be able to take a fixed number of potions with you into the dungeon, and you'd have zero mana regen, and very limited health regen.

Glad you were never my DM ! <g>.

I'm a cat-and-mouse designer. :P

>> Or a mini-boss you beat earlier gathered some friends and is waiting to jump you on your way out...

if i beat them, they're dead. you can't leave loose strings to bushwhack you later when you're laden with loot and low on health. dungeon adventuring 101.

Players shouldn't die from stupid "Surprise!"/"Gotcha!" events. That'd also be a "Bad Game Designer, No Twinky!", for sure.

I don't want enemies to suddenly drop from the ceiling and kill you before you even realized what happened - there's no fun in that, and that is no different than (annoying) spike traps.

But I'm willing to throw one more challenge at the player when he's not expecting it, and when he's tired and exhausted, as long as it doesn't insta-kill him. He can fight through it, run around it, jump over it, etc... and adds to the player-experience of survival, IMO.

Indiana Jones can walk through an open tomb exit. (Boring)
The tomb door can slam shut and Indiana Jones is trapped there to die. (Annoying)
Or Indiana Jones can roll under the door right before it shuts. (Exhilarating) <-- This is the kind of experience I want to cultivate.

I want the player to barely make it. Not be able to magically fly to safety whenever the going gets tough.

Part of my design thinking is trying to come up with ways that makes it so the player does succeed, but with the rapturous delight of almost not succeeding. I think Director AI can help with this.
Beating a boss is fine. Beating a tough boss is better. Beating a tough boss with your final strike, knowing that the boss is about to kill you? That is euphoria.

One of foundational form of humor is laughing out of relief of disaster not occurring, the laughing being a release of nervous tension. I think one form of play-related pleasure is the same: euphoric release of tension, the tension being focused intensity at trying to overcome a challenge when you appear to be on the verge of failure. I'm not a sports player, but I imagine narrowly-won sporting victories have a similar feel (possibly even for those merely watching a football game at home, if they are invested enough in their team's outcome).

>> This "tunnel-dungeon" is actually something I feel open world games could benefit more from.

almost every dungeon in a Bethesda game is linear with a shortcut from the end back to the entrance, or a separate exit right past the end. IE a tunnel, or a tunnel bent into a loop so the two ends connect at/near the entrance / exit to the world. the "quick exit when done" is a nice dungeon design feature (about their only good one if you ask me), but only useful when at the end of the dungeon.

My Bethesda experience basically is centered on TES 3: Morrowind. I didn't like Oblivion, so only spent a few hours there, and haven't gotten around to Skyrim yet, though I own a copy and have watched others play it. So you can accurately say I'm 15 years out of date when it comes to open-world games.

In Morrowind, they had a few loop dungeons (mostly bandit caves), and a few branching tree dungeons (like dwemmer ruins and some caves) that were ultimately 'mineshaft' dungeons (go down to the end, then come back up).

Loop dungeons don't have quite the same experience to me as tunnel dungeons - tunnel dungeons have the added benefit of emerging in a different part of the world (usually a place you've never been), and often 'unlock' new areas to explore (preferably your choice of several new areas to go to next). These exist even in games like linear old-school RPGs, but I don't remember a single one in Morrowind. A few dungeons had an exit in a different location (as a one-way shortcut out), but the goal wasn't to get through the dungeon to a new area, but to get or do something in the dungeon.

Some of the dislikes I have with Morrowind's dungeons are:

A) They weren't laid out very well. It was mostly slapped together procedural shapes (or at least, it was so bad it seemed procedural), with almost arbitrarily placed objects and enemies. Morrowind's dungeon-design feels as if they were created by "idea guys" rather than people who studied how to do it well. Their dungeon design seems to be missing the 'design' part.

There was no cohesion of design - no big picture plan, as if they just gave every employee access to their level editor and said, "Make some dungeons!" without the employees knowing much of anything about level design. This was my view for a long time - what Morrowind 'felt' like. Then I read a post-mortem of Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, and it turned out they did exactly that. :rolleyes:

B) The dungeons weren't very creative either. There were very few good ideas being displayed. Very few dungeons that were actually memorable to me. Only a few dungeons actually made me go, "This place is cool". Most of the Morrowind "cool" factor for me was the idea of exploring, and being in new areas that I hadn't seen before, but the quality of the areas I actually was exploring were mostly bland with only a few creative places in-between.

C) The dungeons also suffered because Morrowind's core gameplay wasn't good, but that's not explicitly the dungeons' fault. Being able to reload-reload-reload every time a battle goes wrong also made the dungeons much less fun, taking the challenge out of them (and being pre-teen at the time, it hadn't occured to me that not save-scumming was even an option).

D) The dungeons themselves were mostly linear, most of the time, and didn't provide many choices, making exploration itself less pleasant (not unpleasant, just less pleasant). Linearity on its own isn't a problem for me, but layout-bland and visually-repetitive and linear and poor gameplay and difficulty killed by save-scumming...

For the record: exploring Vvardenfall (Morrowind's world) is still one of my fondest gaming memories, and I immensely enjoyed the game (and would re-enjoy it if I permitted myself to reinstall it, but I'd get addicted and waste too much time :wink:). The macro design of the world made up for the micro failures (which are numerous), and the ambiance was incredible enough to give me rose-colored glasses even while playing it.

>> If by "fully encumbered" you mean terribly slowed down when you reach an arbitrary tipping point?

yep, that's bethesda design. once carried wt == max wt, you can only walk, not run, and you can't fast travel (without a perk).

>> "Wouldn't exist in my game. Either you'd have a hard limit, or you'd linearly slow down the more you exceed the limit."

in Caveman i do both - linear slowdown and max limit. in bethesda games there's no max limit, you can walk around over encumbered with the gear from 1000 slain enemies in your backpack.

"Verily! Woulds't thou bee so kind aff to hold mine 50 sets of iron armor for the moment? for i wish to stuffeth yon castle unto mee backpack! Yeah, tho we be walking back a' town then. Tis no matter - for i'll wager yon Castle shall fetch a good asking at the shops!" <g>. (eh - not that impressive - i don't seem to be in an old english state of mind this morning. i tend to do much better when waxing priatical <g>)

>> Or Indiana Jones can roll under the door right before it shuts. (Exhilarating) <-- This is the kind of experience I want to cultivate. I want the player to barely make it. Not be able to magically fly to safety whenever the going gets tough. Part of my design thinking is trying to come up with ways that makes it so the player does succeed, but with the rapturous delight of almost not succeeding. I think Director AI can help with this. Beating a boss is fine. Beating a tough boss is better. Beating a tough boss with your final strike, knowing that the boss is about to kill you? That is euphoria.

the big problem is that it then becomes a dexterity minigame - slide under the door before it closes. "dang! got squished again, ok, relaod saved game for 7th time and try again!".

or you code it so comes down to the wire, but then the player discovers that combat is rigged. you can't kill them until you're almost dead, and likewise for them - or they may not be able to actually kill you at all.

you can setup "close calls", and let them play out - for better or for worse. but it seems that "rigging" close calls doesn't really work if you look too closely. "you may fool some of the people all of the time, but..."

one way to do it might be to setup multiple close calls, say 3. if the player fails the first, they can try the second, if that fails, the third. if that fails, it resets the first so thy can try it again, and so on. eventually they get out with a close call. but that may play out as being "contrived".

>> I think one form of play-related pleasure is the same: euphoric release of tension, the tension being focused intensity at trying to overcome a challenge when you appear to be on the verge of failure.

you're talking about "Phew! I made it!". you only get that when the game is "almost too hard". pick whatever fpsrpg you're best at, and take a few hours (3 hours) playing it at the highest difficulty you can at all times (you'll have to tweak difficulty often - especially between mooks and bosses). i find that right around two hits and your dead is about right. maybe three hits to be killed you'll fin that every moment is "phew! i made it!". the sad fact is the average gamer isn't up to the challenge. hard core dungeon adventurers like me (i delved into my first dungeon in 1977) - sure. that's the kind of challenge i want. most players are just looking for the skinner box payoff.

you know what they say:

"Hallelujah Noel, be it Heaven or Hell, the Christmas you get, you deserve." - Emmerson, Lake, and Palmer.

same goes for games. we get the games we deserve, cause we demand no better.

i really need to make a hard core D&D game. i keep saying that. something tells me there's going to be one in my future - after i swore i'd never do another "really too big for just one developer" game again.

well, the next two titles are military flight sims. i can kick them out in short order. then i can worry about it.

>> Original four vs current eight:

can anyone find the Bartle test? the link i found was dead. while i was reading about it, there was empirical evidence that the player type you'd think would make a good DM wasn't the player type that usually did. can't recall the type that did, but it sounded like me. i'd like to take the test. back in the D&D days they always wanted to play in my world - i never got to play! <g>. computers were an opportunity for me to write a program that would let me play.

>> Or Indiana Jones can roll under the door right before it shuts. (Exhilarating) <-- This is the kind of experience I want to cultivate. I want the player to barely make it. Not be able to magically fly to safety whenever the going gets tough. Part of my design thinking is trying to come up with ways that makes it so the player does succeed, but with the rapturous delight of almost not succeeding. I think Director AI can help with this. Beating a boss is fine. Beating a tough boss is better. Beating a tough boss with your final strike, knowing that the boss is about to kill you? That is euphoria.

or you code it so comes down to the wire, but then the player discovers that combat is rigged. you can't kill them until you're almost dead, and likewise for them - or they may not be able to actually kill you at all.

you can setup "close calls", and let them play out - for better or for worse. but it seems that "rigging" close calls doesn't really work if you look too closely. "you may fool some of the people all of the time, but..."

one way to do it might be to setup multiple close calls, say 3. if the player fails the first, they can try the second, if that fails, the third. if that fails, it resets the first so thy can try it again, and so on. eventually they get out with a close call. but that may play out as being "contrived".

I see several ways that can help cheat those moments in the player's favor, without making the player feel tricked:

A) For enemies (random encounter or walking towards the player from elsewhere in the dungeon) that are approaching the player, but that he hasn't encountered yet, the Director AI can tweak the number of enemies, their stats, and their individual AI and group-tactic AI, to keep the player on their toes but also have ebbs and flows of difficulty, so the player has easy kills, breathing space, and also sequences of tough challenges that makes the player think, 'I won't make it out of here alive'. The goal of the Director AI is to make the player feel outnumbered and overwhelmed, but make those overwhelming moments be exactly the ones the player survives but just barely.

B) The Director AI can also cheat player accuracy and enemy accuracy, player critical hits and enemy critical hits. The Director AI can also 'fudge' numbers one way or another (so a powerful attack that would've done 57 dmg and kill the player's remaining 54 health, only does 51 dmg, giving the player 3 health remaining). It doesn't outright cheat, but the Director AI can be the player's "luck" that fudges things in dire circumstances.

C) When the player is low on health, the numbers automatically get fudged. This can be explicit and known. When players are under 10% HP, their agility is multiplied by 1.5 and their critical hit chance increases. Maybe their speed and acrobatics increase as well. This can be explained explicitly and themed as "adrenaline" in-game. Also, it can be a known feature of the game that an enemy's strike can't bring you to 0% health unless you were already under 5% HP, unless the enemy's strike was so powerful it would've done more than 15% of your max HP.

(And to give a weak player some escape leeway when encountering a powerful enemy for the first time, no strike can deal more than 60% of the player's HP in one hit, and if the player's HP is over 25%, no strike can bring him to 0%).

Jesus Christ the quoting on this forum software is still shocking. Grrrr. Anyway, about 20 edits later...

most games have automap and a compass with the next quest waypoint always showing the exit, so no "finding your way out"

(...)

most games have hard coded spawn points that don't respawn for a while or at all, and do not have periodic random encounters, so "safely" is a given.

That's not my experience. Dungeons that aren't entirely linear, or which have traps, or areas that can't be easily traversed in both directions, all make for interesting navigation, even with a map.

I might have to make a difficult decision between pressing on or turning back

you've already decided to turn back, cause you're mining the dungeon for loot, and you've reached max encumbrance - time to go to the store and sell it all off.

Well, no. You're assigning your motivations onto me and other players, which doesn't apply in the general case. If I reach max encumbrance I often continue into the dungeon and drop things as necessary. I don't want to view dungeon exploration as 'mining for loot', I want to view it as 'dungeon exploration', and the choice between minimizing time and distance travelled vs maximizing loot sold at the shop is an interesting choice I enjoy making.

dropping all loot then continuing is one strategy, you're still left having to come back later and walk to pick it up again.

Except I'm not mining for loot, I'm exploring the dungeon. I might not come back if I'm not short on gold. And if I am, I suck it up. That's gameplay.

i can get into that too. but i come from the flight simulator demographic. sometimes you just want to accelerate time and get to the action. games have this capability, but don't typically let the user use it, or limit how much you can accelerate the game to the point its little better than real time.

The problem with allowing the player to choose is that it's very easy to turn your game into a Skinner box where you're just clicking away and watching numbers go up. I find that if I'm able to streamline a game then I usually do so, and it's less fun than times when I can't do that. I need the game to provide some discipline for me.

>> That's not my experience. Dungeons that aren't entirely linear, or which have traps, or areas that can't be easily traversed in both directions, all make for interesting navigation, even with a map.

i wish Bethesda understood that.

>> Well, no. You're assigning your motivations onto me and other players, which doesn't apply in the general case. If I reach max encumbrance I often continue into the dungeon and drop things as necessary. I don't want to view dungeon exploration as 'mining for loot', I want to view it as 'dungeon exploration', and the choice between minimizing time and distance travelled vs maximizing loot sold at the shop is an interesting choice I enjoy making.

no, you're assigning your gameplay style to all players. some want to mine dungeons for loot. in such cases, no fast travel out of the dungeon is an inconvenience at best, and disrespectful at worst. different players like to play different ways. as designers we have to cater to them all - or exclude them from our target audience. i've often times noticed that the answers i get about rpg design questions are often tinted by the responder's personal gameplay style. most folks don't think in terms of "all players", just "me as player". no problem with that as long as your sample is big enough. but i suspect that "folks who happen to respond to rpg questions on gamedev" is a skewed sample though. we seem to have a lot of bartle's "explorer" types here.

>> The problem with allowing the player to choose is that it's very easy to turn your game into a Skinner box where you're just clicking away and watching numbers go up. I find that if I'm able to streamline a game then I usually do so, and it's less fun than times when I can't do that. I need the game to provide some discipline for me.

one thing i've noticed is that a lot of games, like SIMwhatever and city builders and rts's and such - if you speed up the game really fast, you realize the game really isn't that much fun or does not do a whole lot. which you wouldn't normally notice for a long time, simply because the game runs so slow. so it would seem that a "slow game" is a good way to hide "not much of a game". note that this does not mean that all slow games are not much of a game. it also leads me to suspect that games should be able to pass the accelerated time test. its a good way to get far along in the game quickly for playtesting - to see if you really have enough game there or not.

the biggest problem i find with accelerated time is the players running the game so fast they die of starvation and such.

no, you're assigning your gameplay style to all players. some want to mine dungeons for loot. in such cases, no fast travel out of the dungeon is an inconvenience at best, and disrespectful at worst. different players like to play different ways. as designers we have to cater to them all - or exclude them from our target audience.

See, I disagree with that, which is why I don't think this conversation will go anywhere. Accommodating different play styles is great, if that's what you want to do, and usually you have an idea of the styles in question - eg. the lethal/non-lethal or stealth/action axes of a Deus Ex or Thief type of game. But you can't please everyone, nor is there an easy way to exclude people you aren't going to please. Making an RPG that caters primarily to explorers rather than achievers (to use the Bartle terminology again) is a reasonable decision and that means taking some decisions that achievers won't like. Offering extra fast travel to suit achievers in that situation can make explorers feel like they're being punished for playing the game their way. It's a tradeoff.

>> Offering extra fast travel to suit achievers in that situation can make explorers feel like they're being punished for playing the game their way. It's a tradeoff.

ah. i see your point. in that particular case, the feature that caters to one game play style detracts from or conflicts with another game play style - at least in your opinion. me personally, i'd just ignore the feature if i was exploring, but that's neither here nor there.

hmm... interesting concept. it would seem that explorer types have particular desires in an rpg. perhaps a somewhat more demanding type of player, or one with higher expectations? especially with respect to immersion. even extending as far as optional gameplay features such as fast travel even being available? often times i'll forego certain game play features in Skyrim for purposes of role playing (i always try to play in character with every character and play a wide variety of character types), immersion (no fast travel), challenge (switch to light armor), or to avoid a game breaking dominant strategy (such as smithing plus enchanting). ii'm really bummed i can't do an unarmed monk type character. there are no real skills or items for it. just one item, i think.

in my current rpg project i've decided to give the player choice. x-country travel, adjustable difficulty levels for different aspects of the game, plus all built in cheats and testing tools, like teleport, instant healing of all stats, game editor, you name it. use it if you want, if you don't, just ignore it. none of it is obtrusive. some settings accessed from the in-game menu, right click on the maps for teleport instead of left click for cross-country travel, built-in tools on the main menu, and ALT-F12 for in-game playtest menus that let you do almost anything, spawn critters, edit stats, used to be able to edit the current map square - watch the terrain change right before you eyes. might have to make it do that gain. that was kind of cool! <g>. cross country travel is more immersive than fast travel. its continuous move with auto-steer to destination, collisions ignored, and movement rate based on terrain type. you can then accelerate time until you reach your destination or something of interest happens. a 3rd person view camera tracks the player as they move along, almost like a canned animation camera angle. you can also do 3rd person view, continuous move, steer manually, and accelerate time to manually walk across the world more quickly.

I really love exploring and poking around in places in games, but that sure doesn't mean I love having to walk for hours to get somewhere. I find that Baluder's Gate feels far larger and more epic in scale than pretty much any of the modern Elder Scroll games do.

I want to explore, and I want to have things to explore, but please for the love of god don't make levels and designs which are big for no other reason than to make them big. If there is a central city that I will be visiting frequently, then by all means give me a large space that is spread out and has things to explore and interesting stuff to discover, but don't make me wander over the whole bloody thing to buy more arrows, then back to the other side to top up on healing potions, and then a half hour of climbing stairs to buy bottles for my Mana potions which is followed by a twenty minute jumping puzzle to fill them. Let me walk up to the fletcher in the main market square, hit a few buttons to top things off, move for five seconds, and then buy what I need from the armourer, move another five seconds and shop for potions.

By all means let me go on an adventure deeper into the less traveled parts of a huge city, but please don't expect me to keep making those trips over the same parts over and over and over again throughout the course of your game. Let me go on a quest which takes me on a long winding path throughout the city to get to the "Super Secret and advanced Apothecary of Fun and Adventure", but if it is a place that I'm going to be coming back to again and again and again, then hide a "Back door" to it in the basement of the blacksmith in the main market that I can use once I've put the work into finding it.

If I consistently go diving deep into your dungeons, and then consistently spend twenty minutes walking back out of each one and nothing ever happens, then you have a design bug.

If I have finished your game and can't tell my friends about more than one or two interesting or cool specific points of the dungeons because they all looked and felt alike, then you have a design bug.

Having a huge grand stairs or mountain to climb that leaves the player in awe is something they should be climbing once. If there aren't more details for me to see, things for me to find or explore, something New, then why are you (as a designer) bringing me (as the player) back to it? Things like that are awesome the first time. Kind of impressive the second time, and frankly just bloody annoying the third time, and the rest of your game had better be amazing for me to put up with going over it a fourth time or more.

>> If I consistently go diving deep into your dungeons, and then consistently spend twenty minutes walking back out of each one and nothing ever happens, then you have a design bug.

this happens to me every time, unless i make it all the way to the door at the far end without being over-encumbered. which usually doesn't happen until the second or third trip back to finish cleaning out the dungeon. that is exactly what made me think of this topic in the first place.