Constructive Criticism

[Professor Paul1290]

I'm in a similar boat really. At the moment I've sort of stalled around lv 140 in my single player game.

When it comes to deciding what game I'll play, AVWW is increasingly losing it's competitive edge against other games I'm yet to finish. I think the main problem is the game does start feeling very formulaic and "and again and again and again" after a while.

The multiplayer has helped a lot though.

Well to be fair, if you played to lvl 140 then you probably got more out of it than you would out of most games anyway.

I was kind of astonished that you were spending that much time with it reading your posts and I was wondering when you were going to "burn out", so I actually take the fact you went so far as a positive sign. 

I'm still around lvl 40 something and have been nibbling away a bit more slowly.

[Mánagarmr]

That's amazing! I'm 23 and burned out :/

[Toll]

I played the first world to 35, but after that the world just got too big to keep track of with the various seeding-bugs and changes. After that I've started a few more worlds and played them to 15-20, but the lack of new and shiny stuff has kinda kept me from playing for a while now.

[eRe4s3r]

Agree i also kinda got burned out way too soon imo, whats missing for me so far is

1) A good random loot system that really creates procedurally better loot the longer you play
2) A good loot system with loot to actually equip (laugh, but creating the avatar is 50% of the pull with these games)
3) Some kind of gameplay system where you have overarching and more complex goals besides "explore and exterminate"
4) A changing world (i find the static nature of the game due its "once generated, always generated" nature a pretty strong turn-off after a while) it actually punishes us for exploring in a sense (makes more and more "boring/irrelevant" tiles )
5) strong story, and even stronger NPC interactions.
6) Ability to tame monsters, feed them crystals and have them gain power and act as pet. (Note how this should be procedural.. see Dungeon Siege 2)
7) Ability to assign defenders for settlements (the need to travel to each and every settlement to look for monsters close by is a huge drag..) also these should be upgradeable like pets
8 ) Romances, Wars between settlements, politics, religions, natural disasters and stronger effect of weather (i feel the weather has nearly no effect once you hit a certain level..)
9) An actual connection between strategic turns and normal gameplay, that part of the game doesn't even feel remotely connected right now.. stuff like overlord lairs spreading monsters to adjacent regions. And ability to build guard towers and man them to prevent enemies from coming close to a city

Anyway, the MP obviously blocked progress for now - as i am nearly 100% SP gamer I want more SP related changes so yeah ;p

[superking]

lvl 140, jesus!

[eRe4s3r]

In reply to keiths PM i just wanted to attach this image

its an idea i had how to do loot without the need for it to be character specific.. notice this ain't exactly pretty and it has a pretty random flow and ideas.. its just that this is 10 times easier to explain with an image

Also it needs to be said, but this is not a "1:1 to game" idea. its a general idea or a framework for how loot could kinda work (its fairly close to how ANNO 2070 does persistent loot by way, just more advanced and with some form of synergistic effect system (like in magicka?))

Also technically speaking, since theres already these huge floating crystals with souls.. it might be an interesting idea to have bosses drop "souls" that we can craft into focus crystals (just saying ,p) could even be extended to make souls literally reside inside the crystal and have things to do and say ;p Like Pokemon.. just less.. ehm, silly.

Also don't be confused by the exact arrangement or whatever name i call a box. If loot is done with synergies and craftable "focus" points it is really an open process what loot works and what doesn't.

Also last but not least, it would be even more awesome if this focus crystal (and all the loot embedded) was persistent throughout continents and characters

[Cyborg]

I object to a loot grind. I explained this in a different thread, but other games do this better. If this is just supposed to be a mindless quest for better loot and to look like Gandalf at the end, why not play any of the 1000 clones for Diablo? Are we giving up on some kind of strategic hook that takes decision-making and brainpower?

[eRe4s3r]

In one of your last posts you said you wanted your level 60 character to be different than someone else's That won't happen without loot collection and deep crafting system

And this proposed system isn't at all like Diablo... and it certainly would not allow for grinding - but rest assured that keith has ideas that go beyond this ;P

[Cyborg]

In one of your last posts you said you wanted your level 60 character to be different than someone else's That won't happen without loot collection and deep crafting system

And this proposed system isn't at all like Diablo... and it certainly would not allow for grinding - but rest assured that keith has ideas that go beyond this ;P

In the same way that my 20 hour level 8 AI war game is different than yours. You can make meaningful decisions that differentiate you without hunting loot.

[keith.lamothe]

I object to a loot grind. I explained this in a different thread, but other games do this better. If this is just supposed to be a mindless quest for better loot and to look like Gandalf at the end, why not play any of the 1000 clones for Diablo?

It would need to not be a grind, basically it could be that in the process of doing the things you'd already want to do for accomplishing missions you would pick up various bits of "gear" (not armor or weapons, just stuff to improve your capabilities; there are a couple different concrete categories I'm thinking of but not sure which if either will actually go this route) and also some bits that let you customize that stuff.  Your choice of what gear and what customizations to use would be a significant bit of decision-making, and would impact your capabilities when facing challenges.

Preventing that from being a grind, in my mind, is a matter of making it so that you get enough of that stuff in the normal course of playing the game, and that repeatedly doing the same mundane thing over (killing trash, etc) doesn't grant a significant advantage in that category.  If you mean something else by grind please let me know, it can be hard to pin down exactly what's meant by that term nowadays.

Are we giving up on some kind of strategic hook that takes decision-making and brainpower?

I don't think that adding loot necessarily involves giving anything else up.  But if you mean the strategy game and the citybuilding game: we realized that we were trying to make too many games at once, and that the core game is not as compelling as it needs to be and thus needs more focused attention.  Also, the strategy and citybuilding ones were also shaping up to be pretty mediocre.  With time and player-feedback-iteration they could have been good, but in order to save my sanity (and efficiency) I need to not have to redesign them for the 11th time because something major changed about the core game or the world map or whatever   So when the core is more settled we may revisit those (and they'll still be there in the background even in 1.0, but you won't be making decisions for the NPCs so it doesn't directly contribute to strategy).

But that doesn't mean that the strategic and decision-making is going away.  Honestly the strategy and citybuilding parts didn't have a lot of that anyway, it was more a matter of figuring out where the various buttons and levers were and pushing them.  An active opponent was necessary and not really compatible with the then-design of the overall game (except as an optionally provoked thing).

With what Chris is planning with the missions I think there'll be a fair bit of strategic thought that has to go in to deciding what to do with limited time (in terms of number of missions, not wall-clock time), as well as the lower-level deciding how to best do that (configuring your character, picking spells, etc).

but rest assured that keith has ideas that go beyond this ;P

I do appreciate the vote of confidence, but I wouldn't ask Cyborg or anyone else to rest assured simply because I have ideas.  Frankly, I've "had ideas" waaaay more than I've delivered on them.  I try to not publicly talk about stuff I'm going to do because I have a history of then not doing it.  The not-doing-it is generally for good reasons but that doesn't prevent players from feeling disappointed about it.  If/when we get to the point of implementing lootable customizing stuff I think it would probably be good for me to start a brainstorming thread on it and maybe get a headstart on the player-feedback-iteration, but before then I don't want to just blow out reams of hot air   But the confidence is appreciated

In the same way that my 20 hour level 8 AI war game is different than yours. You can make meaningful decisions that differentiate you without hunting loot.

I think he was referring specifically to character/avatar, rather than the gamestate as a whole.  I don't think AIW has any equivalent.  Many players have a very strong psychological pull towards avatar customization in-specific.  There's also a pretty strong pull towards "the world is this way because of something I chose" and we want that too, but I'd prefer both

[keith.lamothe]

On the subject of looting: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-05/

[eRe4s3r]

In one of your last posts you said you wanted your level 60 character to be different than someone else's That won't happen without loot collection and deep crafting system

And this proposed system isn't at all like Diablo... and it certainly would not allow for grinding - but rest assured that keith has ideas that go beyond this ;P

In the same way that my 20 hour level 8 AI war game is different than yours. You can make meaningful decisions that differentiate you without hunting loot.

Taking research labs and finding buildings like datacenters and caches is the AI War equivalent of random loot And what else but grinding is taking Research labs in AI War? Sure its strategically important, but its still grinding by your logic (because it certainly is not a simple target and capture procedure) ;p So its a bit confusing what you mean to me.

If you are against grinding or loot you would essentially be against any gameplay system that rewards strategic decisions and mixes them with a bit of chance - because nothing else is taking a research lab I fought through 5 useless planets to get to just get a random unlock...

Only difference really is frequency and effect.

[superking]

^ yup, loot. loot is very important. humans are capitalist magpies, we like amassing wealth & power

[Dizzard]

I don't mind going out of my way for certain loot if the effort put into getting it equals the reward.

I don't want to be in a position where I feel like I'm jumping through hoops for something I need but ultimately isn't that special.

[Cyborg]

In one of your last posts you said you wanted your level 60 character to be different than someone else's That won't happen without loot collection and deep crafting system

And this proposed system isn't at all like Diablo... and it certainly would not allow for grinding - but rest assured that keith has ideas that go beyond this ;P

In the same way that my 20 hour level 8 AI war game is different than yours. You can make meaningful decisions that differentiate you without hunting loot.

Taking research labs and finding buildings like datacenters and caches is the AI War equivalent of random loot

Actually, no it isn't   I think you should clarify what grinding is before you announce that every reward system in gaming is grinding  .

The act of grinding is repeating yourself over and over again, often for marginal gain. In AI war, different situations are kind of like puzzles that you have to adapt to. A lot of those puzzles are optional. And just like in chess, the board almost always looks different at some point. So that is not grinding. In Valley (and this has been said many times), people are feeling repetition. You jump around using the same spells over and over. I used the same 2 spells for the first 10 hours. Every once in a while I would find some marginal treasure, but it was definitely repetitious. That's grinding. I don't want to continue on that path where we do the same thing over and over and definitely not for some avatar graphics. The gameplay has to be meaningful. I don't object to decorating the character, but if the object of the game is to repeat yourself over and over for a awesome avatar, that's grinding, that's boring, and that is what I'm objecting to.

I want the game to offer some intellectual stimulation. If this was Zelda, we would have a story and an overlord. Over time, you unlock all kinds of abilities that allow you to explore even greater dungeons. Eventually, there is the moment where you finally take on Ganon. We don't have that here. We do have some bosses, but we don't have these handcrafted dungeons with bosses that reward us with some ability to progress to the next dungeon. We just get some shards to make version number five of some spell. I was hoping that the city building was going to offer that piece of intellectual gameplay, but maybe it's not. Maybe people are just going to be hunting down cartoon helmets That just seems like a simple goal to settle for. That's all right once in a while, something like Diablo or Titan quest can be fun, but I didn't think this was going to be that game.