Arcen Games
General Category => A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 => Topic started by: Nice Save on January 27, 2011, 07:23:54 pm
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I have a question: how are you going about leveling in an unlimited world? Are you going to have a level cap or will you be able to keep leveling indefinitely? I can see problems with either, but of all the developers in the world you guys will most likely find the best solution.
Also are you planning to open a forum specifically for AVWW discussion?
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I have a question: how are you going about leveling in an unlimited world? Are you going to have a level cap or will you be able to keep leveling indefinitely? I can see problems with either, but of all the developers in the world you guys will most likely find the best solution.
Maybe make experience needed to advance to the next level grow at a higher order of magnitude than experience gained by killing an enemy. Something like (with n being the relevant level) making level needed to advance to the next level can be O(n^3), but experience gained by killing an enemy would only by O(n^2).
Thus after some point, trying to level up by killing enemies becomes impractical, but at that point you should be improving your skill at the game, not your stats. (Of course, this point would need to be pretty high)
Just an idea.
Also are you planning to open a forum specifically for AVWW discussion?
EDIT: Oops, forgot this part
Already let them know of this.
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=2592
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Well... there are certain things we're not quite ready to talk about, just as fair warning with questions like that. That opens a whole can of worms, and to explain how we've solved the problem requires explaining the "five main pillars" of new ideas to the game, which I've only really hinted at so far.
That said, the incomplete answer is that there will be a level cap, but it's insanely high: 9999. The world itself will gradually gain in levels as you do, but at a much slower rate. And, lastly, you can sort of set your own difficulty by which regions you choose to explore. There's a sort of natural fast-travel system in the form of an overworld, and the four compass directions have different meanings. Traveling east gets linearly harder. Traveling west has a sort of mottled difficulty range, with pockets of very hard stuff amongst generally easier stuff. Going north and south at whatever X coordinate keeps the same general difficulty. And of course, rewards and experience gained from killing lower-level stuff is lesser, that goes without saying.
Again, that's the incomplete answer, but hopefully that should set your mind somewhat at ease. I know that even just saying the above raises a whole lot of other questions, though, most of which I'm not ready to get into discussion about. ;)
We'll have a forum for AVWW really soon, I just haven't gotten to it yet. To some extent we're not really looking for community feedback on things like game mechanics prior to alpha, because, well, we generally are never interested in feedback from people that haven't played the game in question. And we just need a kind of quiet time with the project to experiment in peace, and see what works and what doesn't in practice without getting players attached to one mechanic only to take it out later, etc.
Granted, after alpha things will still change a ton, and to a large degree based on that very sort of player feedback, but we have to get sort of a cohesive core in place before we're ready to hit that point. We're super excited about it all, though, and will be sharing an increasing amount of info as we get closer and closer to alpha, and as we nail various design questions down as "our theory definitely seems to work," etc. Hope that makes sense!
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Wow, I didn't think it was possible to get an answer that put my fears to rest so well. That sounds awesome.
Just to make it clear, I am immensely excited about this game, and the price of it is my money in your bank as soon as you are willing to take it.
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That said, the incomplete answer is that there will be a level cap, but it's insanely high: 9999.
Ah, going with the Disgaea approach to leveling I see. ;)
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Directional difficulty sounds very fascinating. I'll be interested to see how that plays out. Is the difficulty going to be static once it is set? Like if I go west for a while and pass through a few varied areas, then hit something that I decide is too hard, if I go back east will it still get linearly harder, or am I going to pass through the same difficulties that I have already 'set' by my previous passing? Do I have to get back to my 0,0 point before going east will again effect the difficulty level? So many questions! Also you mention that the world will level up as well. That sounds interesting. My only worry there is that it doesn't get into something like what Oblivion did, where everything leveled up with you to the point that leveling really had no meaning. I got bored in that game quickly because the challenge was basically always the same no matter where you went. I like to be able to go back to the starting areas sometimes and stomp the monsters that once gave me trouble. If everything in the world gets stronger just the same as you do, that's not possible.
Anyway, I know you're not soliciting feedback, so I'll try to restrain myself. But I am intensely curious about what's planned. On the other hand, I'm sure you don't want to release too much while the game is still fluid so people aren't coming back at you three months down the line quoting your own words back at you and asking where features X, Y, and Z are.
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Wow, I didn't think it was possible to get an answer that put my fears to rest so well. That sounds awesome.
Just to make it clear, I am immensely excited about this game, and the price of it is my money in your bank as soon as you are willing to take it.
If its one thing about Arcen I love (there are more then one thing), its their ability to actually think things through and focus on delivering solid quality.
Its a reason I much perfer AI War over Sracraft II to say it like that ;)
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Wow, I didn't think it was possible to get an answer that put my fears to rest so well. That sounds awesome.
Just to make it clear, I am immensely excited about this game, and the price of it is my money in your bank as soon as you are willing to take it.
Oh, I should echo this. As soon as you are willing to take my money, you have it. For some reason I'm already more excited about it than I can remember being about a game in the past.
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Wow is all I can say after reading the aims for this game it sounds really interesting and I wait with bated breath for more snippets. This will be a day one purchase for me and if possible I would like to help during the alpha and beta phases.
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Directional difficulty sounds very fascinating. I'll be interested to see how that plays out. Is the difficulty going to be static once it is set? Like if I go west for a while and pass through a few varied areas, then hit something that I decide is too hard, if I go back east will it still get linearly harder, or am I going to pass through the same difficulties that I have already 'set' by my previous passing? Do I have to get back to my 0,0 point before going east will again effect the difficulty level?
Yes, the difficulty level is basically set by tile on the overworld. Each tile is called a "region" and contains a lot of territory inside itself, hence the sort of "fast travel" aspect. You don't travel through all the space in the region each tile, you travel over the overworld instead, so that means you can cover an immense amount of ground pretty quickly. On the flip side, though, the world is even more immense, so that's really needed.
So if you travel in one direction and get into a dangerous spot, you first have to escape from the region you are in, and then make it back across the overworld to a safer area. Or if you die, then your new character will... wait, I'm not going to get into that just quite yet. ;)
Also you mention that the world will level up as well. That sounds interesting. My only worry there is that it doesn't get into something like what Oblivion did, where everything leveled up with you to the point that leveling really had no meaning. I got bored in that game quickly because the challenge was basically always the same no matter where you went. I like to be able to go back to the starting areas sometimes and stomp the monsters that once gave me trouble. If everything in the world gets stronger just the same as you do, that's not possible.
Yes, I hate that sense of "treading water," too, no worries. As I noted in my original post, the world gains in levels slower than you do. So the starting area will always be pretty easy, but it won't always be as easy as when you first encountered it.
Anyway, I know you're not soliciting feedback, so I'll try to restrain myself. But I am intensely curious about what's planned. On the other hand, I'm sure you don't want to release too much while the game is still fluid so people aren't coming back at you three months down the line quoting your own words back at you and asking where features X, Y, and Z are.
No worries. And you're right, that's a big part of why we aren't answering certain questions yet. There's a lot of stuff that sounds great on paper, but that will need to change at implementation time. A lot of the best ideas for AI War weren't thought up until we ran into problems during implementation (actually, pretty much the whole game as you know it came about in that fashion). We're very excited about it, too, though. :)
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The dying mechanic sounds somewhat more forgiving than nethack, but less forgiving then every other save-scumming adventure out there. Should be a nice balance, since having the pressure to keep your character alive does add a sense of urgency when something in the game threatens your character. And Nethack style deaths are not for everyone...just leads to frustration and rage-quits for many. An with unlimited lives/replay, it is too easy to feel "detached" from the game, and thus lose interest.
Or maybe this was completely off the mark, I'm just guessing.
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Well, I've honestly not played nethack so I can't comment. But my wife is the sort who really doesn't like things that cause too much loss of progress and/or which are "hair trigger losses" type of games. She's a hardcore gamer in the sense that she likes Left 4 Dead and such and will play AI War with me on a very occasional basis, and she was into games like Baldur's Gate and Pharaoh and such before I even knew her. Anyway, she's the sort that would absolutely hate even something like Super Meat Boy, as she'd just find it frustrating.
All that said, when I explained the mechanic of how we're doing death to her for this game, she really liked the sound of it right from the start. I was surprised, because I thought I'd have to defend it to her. The mechanic isn't all that amazingly unique, but it is slightly different from anything else I've personally encountered, and we're really excited about it. But to explain that would require explaining several other large aspects of the game that we're not ready to divulge quite yet, so I'm going to contain myself and leave it at that.
I'm honestly not trying to tease and torture you guys, I'm just trying not to get myself into trouble if one of these aspects has to change, or if some of the design descriptions get taken out of context elsewhere when there isn't a playable version of the game people can point to, etc.
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The idea of being able to just go explore anything I see in the game is fantastic. That's been my bane since the first games I ever played. No matter what it was, there was something on the horizon that I wanted to go poke around in, even if it was just a single jagged glowing pixel line doing its best to represent mountains. I look forward to the ability to go explore everything and anything I see. When I played WoW (no longer, I'm on the patch now) I was always the one trying to climb over the mountains that were supposed to mark the zone edge and get into the blank spots between zones, simply because I wasn't supposed to be there. I guess that's pointless if they made it so you can fly everywhere now. Oh well, I digress.
Minecraft sort of does the infinite exploration thing, but it doesn't exactly scratch that itch when you know that everything is going to be made up of certain block types stacked on one another in various patterns. Once you've explored a few caves, you've pretty much gotten the gist of what you can get out of it. The crafting of your own things is really the draw there, of course, not so much the exploration.
Is AVWW going to reward exploration? If I poke through those 300 different floors worth of office buildings, am I going to see the same offices with a slightly different moldering chair in them over and over, or is there really going to be a variety of interesting things to find? Not that I'm opposed to the aesthetic value of desolate crumbling cityscapes, but the occasional interesting knick-knack to find is always appreciated.
And since I'm fishing for information, any word on what sort of combat system we might be looking at? RPG style combat scenes? Real time? Turn based? Strategy style with a pseudo-board game look? Something with cards and dice? Mini-games for special attacks? Sitting down and trying diplomacy?
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The idea of being able to just go explore anything I see in the game is fantastic. That's been my bane since the first games I ever played. No matter what it was, there was something on the horizon that I wanted to go poke around in, even if it was just a single jagged glowing pixel line doing its best to represent mountains. I look forward to the ability to go explore everything and anything I see. When I played WoW (no longer, I'm on the patch now) I was always the one trying to climb over the mountains that were supposed to mark the zone edge and get into the blank spots between zones, simply because I wasn't supposed to be there. I guess that's pointless if they made it so you can fly everywhere now. Oh well, I digress.
Minecraft sort of does the infinite exploration thing, but it doesn't exactly scratch that itch when you know that everything is going to be made up of certain block types stacked on one another in various patterns. Once you've explored a few caves, you've pretty much gotten the gist of what you can get out of it. The crafting of your own things is really the draw there, of course, not so much the exploration.
I definitely feel the same on all of that. Never played WoW, though -- I knew I'd get addicted, so stayed away!
Is AVWW going to reward exploration? If I poke through those 300 different floors worth of office buildings, am I going to see the same offices with a slightly different moldering chair in them over and over, or is there really going to be a variety of interesting things to find? Not that I'm opposed to the aesthetic value of desolate crumbling cityscapes, but the occasional interesting knick-knack to find is always appreciated.
The idea is that you always get something. Our scavenging mechanics are not something that I'd talked much about yet (because then that gets into our light crafting mechanics, which gets into the character classes, which gets into... wow, that's a lot of stuff we're not ready to talk about yet!). ;) But, the general idea is that it will be simple and immediate (no riffling through 30 lockers in every hall you come into -- that sort of thing killed my interest in finishing Fallout 3, though it was fun at first). And so even if you go into an office building that has not much of anything in it, you can at least pick up some low-value crafting materials that will be of use later.
And all of the best items and such are found by exploring, so a lot of times you'll find something very valuable. Certain types of books that you can find are very valuable, and underground there are crystals that give you new magic spells, and there's all sorts of stuff for crafting various types of consumables, weapons, armor, and traps.
The goal is also to have widely varying art, but that is one of those things that depends on player adoption as to how far we're really able to push it. That said, it's way cheaper for us to make a new chair sprite than it is for Fallout 3 to get a new chair object. So there should be more variety than your average 3D game, or at least that's the goal. Exploration is the prime focus of this game above all else, though, so most of the reward structure is focused around that fact.
And since I'm fishing for information, any word on what sort of combat system we might be looking at? RPG style combat scenes? Real time? Turn based? Strategy style with a pseudo-board game look? Something with cards and dice? Mini-games for special attacks? Sitting down and trying diplomacy?
Realtime -- think Zelda, Crystalis, or similar. This is an adventure game through and through, with some other stuff layered on top. The JRPG aspects integrate with the game as they do in Crystalis or Secret of Mana, that sort of thing. Except we do plan to have some riffs and twists on the good 'ol standbys, but some of that is TBD during implementation. The idea is for everything to be more surface-accessible, though, so that you aren't looking at a page of character stats that are 80% useless clutter, heh.
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Hi Guys,
I haven't read all the inputs on leveling, but wanted to throw my two cents in. I have seen high caps and low caps and played many games where the difficulty increased, or decreased according to where you went, what section of the city, say, or in a neighborhood that you load when you cross over.
Anyway, the short of it is this.
Is it possible to have characters that don't level at all?
I mean, say i am in the woods, in the dark, in the cold, and it takes me x amount of time, to draw together wood, light tinder and some way to make fire, say flint. So my character has to find this stuff, has to go into the woods and find broken branches, go out across the meadow to find dried grass and smaller twigs for tinder and go down to the stream and dig in the rocks at the edge of the water to find flint.
But once its done, i can make fire, now i've got a way to stay warm, a way to ward off some smaller animals when it gets really dark, a way to cook food so that i don't get sick from eating uncooked food that still has germs in it and it hasn't been killed by raising the temperature of the meat. Anyway, once done this skill goes in my basket. Since that is my first one, i'm really glad, it now means that i can travel further from the encampment because i won't freeze.
Second skill is probably how to use a tool, or weapon, like using a club to kill a slow moving beaver, then skin it and cook it, the furs could be accumulative, like say i get five and now i can learn how to sew and so i make a fur coat. Keeps me alot warmer, which means i can stay out in the weather longer before having to find shelter to bring my body temperature back up.
If i don't then i die.
Then my husband sets out to find me, he comes across my now cold campsite and finds nothing, the animals probably wouldn't leave anything anyway. But he does find a bracelet of mine, which gives him a value that he can trade with other people he runs across if he has to. Or lose if he is robbed. He finds my flint stones and tinder in a pouch and so he acquires the skill that i had for making fire. In addition he travels farther south, getting into thick woods and taking limbs and rocks from the stream he smashes one stone against another and creates a sharp edged stone, which he uses as a hand axe and later fastens it to a sturdy tree limb and fashions a handled axe, which allows him to cut down larger trees and build a shelter that lasts longer than the grass and tree limb lean to's that the village where we came from uses.
So now i have two characters, one which was me and lost when i was out in the cold without shelter too long, and my husband who has acquired 'some' of my skills, the flint stones and a bracelet, however the fur coat and the sewing skill that i learned after accumulating five or so furs he doesn't get because he didn't find my coat, nor the sewing kit in the leather pouch in the pocket.
The first ten days he is out traveling after he has left the village, is the hardest, his body isn't used to it, but as time goes on, he gets strength in his legs, he can now walk 5 miles a day easily, can ration a single waterskin of water for three days and rations his travel food to hard cured jerky and water. Which means he uses less the longer he is out in the country traveling. Which means those all go into his skill basket. Walking strength, less water and food usage as time passes. He is also tougher by about 20 days out, and his stamina against smaller animals is better. Large animals are still a problem, he either has to run, or have higher ground and use heavy boulders, or sharpened sticks, that he later learns to burn the scraped ends of, and eventually to fastening with leather strips sharp cut stones to the ends of long limber sticks which he uses for spears, and adds that to his inventory of skills, so even if he loses his supply, given an area that contains the right materials he can re-fashion spears, or find food, or water, or travel far afoot.
Staying in villages, offers other things, like being able to trade, or to meet other people and learn other skills, like singing, or banjo playing, which means he is less depressed after months in the countryside, because he has a way to entertain himself.
But the longer he stays in a village, the softer the skills get that he uses in the countryside, he can't walk as far, he gets tired quicker and drinks more water and eats more food and he doesn't move as fast and it takes him longer to get a shelter built.
What all of this is, is my way of saying, why level at all? Why not implement a system where skills are learned and go into an inventory, and each has a purpose, and it goes up when its used and down in slow degrees when it isn't. And for bears and mountain lions or wolves in the wild, maybe there isn't a good counter that a person can carry on themselves, except perhaps to climb trees, or to work yourself into a wedge and use a spear to get the mountain lion before it can get all the way into the wedge and get you. Or digging a hole and covering it over with twigs and leaves as a hole trap for larger animals?
If some animals are close to the stats of humans, and some are not, i mean no way is a man ever going to take on a bear, except with his wits and a trap, or using spear after spear on him from a safe vantage.
But what i mean is, in this way, the terrain right outside the village is still dangerous, even if i've been gone for three months and have a dozen skills in my basket. And the valley on the other side of the mountains is harder and will kill me quicker in some places or is easier and less dangerous in other areas in that same valley, as much as if i was standing on the edge of the village itself. In this way, the acquiring of skills is what broadens and enables a character to better deal with the world, but it doesn't mean that once leaving the village that i can come back and everything is way easy to solve or kill, because there is no level. And places are always a mix, by the natural disasters or swamps, or rock falls or dangerous animals that migrate through there at different times of the year.
Not to offend anyone, but to be honest, i really don't care for this leveling thing. And wonder why no one has figured out something like what i propose and make it fun and interesting, but not have to worry, oh, i'm level 85 now and i can't go back across the mountains because i can whip everything there.
Seriously, i'm just a player. I'm not half as smart or inventive as developers are.
But to be honest, i haven't seen anything like this yet.
I still hope.
I'm looking forward to AVWW and want to buy it as soon as it is available.
Even if it doesn't have my dream of a level-less world.
One of these days somebody is gonna do it, haha, maybe i'll have to learn how to code and do it myself. :)
Sorry if i sound antagonistic on levels, it has always been such a bother when i thought something else might have been more fun.
Just my opinion though,
Thanks for listening guys,
Cheers!
-Teal
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Is it possible to have characters that don't level at all?
See, this is why I tend not to want to discuss game design stuff too much before the game is actually done. The short answer to the question is: no, that's not the game we're making. Your explanation is well thought out and well intentioned, it's just not what we're doing.
I appreciate your enthusiasm and your taking the time out to type all of that, but we have our vision for the game and are sticking with it. There will always be people that don't like this or that mechanism that we choose, but that's true of anything we do. In terms of levels, we feel like it will give the most organic flow of progression given the rest of the game design (most of which hasn't been revealed yet because we don't want to get into debates with anyone over the death mechanic or whatever else).
One of these days somebody is gonna do it, haha, maybe i'll have to learn how to code and do it myself. :)
Suffice it to say, that's where we're coming from, too. Nobody else makes the games we most want to play, so we have to do them. And in this case, that includes levels. Sorry! :)
Sorry if i sound antagonistic on levels, it has always been such a bother when i thought something else might have been more fun.
It's okay, and I understand where you're coming from. There's a huge range of what people value most in games, of course, and at the core of this one are what we the game creators value most. Anything else would be a bit dishonest and trend-following, I think. Anyway -- thanks, as always, for your support!
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Sorry to sound ungrateful, I didn't mean to, and i know i talked 'alot' but, please don't feel that i feel it has to be that way. You guys have made some really, really cool games, and AI War probably counts as three 4 games just in itself for everything you put into the expasions, and Tidalis is a beautiful jewel of a game. I didn't mean to sound like AVWW has to have this, and more than anything i want you guys to make what you think is cool, that way your heart is in it, and that will show when it is released, and we can enjoy the polish and looks and the way it plays because of what you think is best.
I was just sorta ranting in general about levels, not you guys fault, haha, my apologies.
Please forgive for the 'tone', didn't mean it to sound bad.
I will still buy it and probably love the heck out of it. :)
I still play Guild Wars, even with the levels, but i'm just out of my depth in it. Takes me too long to level and i sorta hang out in the same areas just to not get in over my head.
Sorry to sound bad Chris, you guys are doing a wonderful job. Please just forgive my slip for sounding well, haha, probably demanding, didn't mean it to.
Thank you for listening and for your response, it nice to hear how things are looking and going,
Take care,
-Teal
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I don't take any offense whatsoever -- please don't feel bad about anything you said. Your opinion is just as valid as mine, and what you described is a valid game design. I'm just trying to lay the boundaries of what I'll negotiate on at this stage, and you had the unlucky chance of being the first to cross that boundaries. Not that that is a huge deal or means I think you're "ungrateful" or anything else. Keith and I have different opinions about the game all the time, and have to work it out between us -- that's just the nature of these things. Lars and I had the same challenge on Tidalis.
The trouble is, that works with 2 people, but not a dozen or a hundred. Since I don't subscribe to the "design by committee" approach, there are simply some aspects that I'm not going to negotiate with anyone except Keith over. But that doesn't mean we don't like hearing from people, because often players have great ideas, and it's no harm mentioning them. There's always the chance we'll see an idea like that and just fall all over ourselves thinking it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. When we don't, it's mostly a matter of taste, or how it fits into the larger game design of this specific game.
And for time reasons, there's no way we can spend our time justifying every last decision we make to anyone who takes umbrage (not that you were asking us to, but it's inevitable that someone will come along before long who does). Really, the best reason that we have levels is that "we like levels in general, and felt they were the appropriate design abstraction for this specific game." How does one defend that? Having levels or not is a matter of taste, and so there's no empirical way to prove one is better or more pure than the other. Again, not that you were asking us to; but these sort of discussions, depending on the personalities involved (again, not you) can often quickly devolve into a battle of wills.
My message from the start is: I abstain from such battles. ;) They are profit-less and boil down to taste. We always read every suggestion, but in cases where we don't agree it's often not defensible any more than why my favorite colors are red and white are. This is something I have realized recently, after a year and a half of occasional battles about various design decisions with AI War. When a huge majority of players feel one way often they are right, but not always, etc. Anyway: tangent.
I just wanted to let you know where my response was coming from, and that I didn't take anything you said personally or as an insult. Cheers!
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:) Thanks!!
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You bet. :)
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The more you keep comparing things in AVWW to the elements from NES/SNES-era games that I really liked and don't see enough of anymore, the more interested I keep getting. I'm starting to get a strange feeling that I'm your target audience. Like, literally me personally/specifically, not just people in general with tastes similar to mine. If you can somehow work something Star Control 2-related into one of your comparisons/explanations, I may have to just give you all my money on the spot.
Well, I've honestly not played nethack so I can't comment. But my wife is the sort who really doesn't like things that cause too much loss of progress and/or which are "hair trigger losses" type of games. She's a hardcore gamer in the sense that she likes Left 4 Dead and such and will play AI War with me on a very occasional basis, and she was into games like Baldur's Gate and Pharaoh and such before I even knew her. Anyway, she's the sort that would absolutely hate even something like Super Meat Boy, as she'd just find it frustrating.
The funny thing about that is that Super Meat Boy has zero penalty for death, or as close as you can realistically get without the game beating itself for you, aside from the handful of glitch/WAAAAAAAAAAARP ZOOOOOOOOOOONE levels. If you're not pretty good at platform games and don't actively enjoy beating your head against a challenge, though, yeah, it could get pretty amazingly frustrating. I think it's great fun, but I always very carefully qualify any recommendations I've made for it. I think I ended up describing it to my AI War group as "the demon spawn of Ninja Gaiden and Battletoads" and "recommended if too many of your controllers still work and you don't have enough holes in your walls yet".
Also, NetHack can eat a dick. I really, really like so many things about the game and how much detail they went into with a lot of features (the dev team really does think of everything), but I've finally accepted that I will never enjoy playing it. You will die (over and over and over and....), and you will lose everything, and it will frequently be for the stupidest of reasons. It's like the exact opposite of Super Meat Boy, where instead of learning through failure what you shouldn't do and getting to try again a split second later, the spacing between obvious-in-hindsight lessons is generally measured in hours, and at the cost of losing all progress for each one. Very few games make me angry, but it has no close competition for first place on that very short list. Heh.
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On the leveling mechanic in general in games, I'm of the opinion that it's the worst system for character advancement except for all the other ones. Yes, it's arbitrary and not exactly immersive to kill X things or solve X puzzles and suddenly become stronger in multiple aspects. However, the alternatives are inevitably worse. The upside of leveling is that it gives you a clear close goal to work towards. If your overall plot is to kill the dragon or save the princess, you can get exhausted if that goal is dozens of hours of gameplay away. But if you know you're going to get another level if you just kill 10 more vampires, well then you have something close by to work on, and when you get there the level-up always provides that little bit of fun that comes with accomplishment. Along with, of course, any new skills or access to new equipment or whatever, depending on the game you're playing.
Games that have tried alternative systems to leveling always feel like too much of a grind. Sure, it makes more sense if you use a dagger a lot that your skill with daggers will get better. But then you find a better sword. Oops, now you have to stab things with a sword for an hour to make it worthwhile. And if in the process of grinding sword skills, you find a better axe...? It just gets aggravating. I suppose it would be possible to design the game around this somehow, so that you always have the skills you need ahead of time for every encounter, but that game would probably be very much on rails and with no potential for branching narratives or quests. Plus, skill specific leveling systems can be just as bizarre and arbitrary as standard leveling. I'm again reminded of Oblivion, where you could level specific skills like jumping. I tend to jump everywhere I go in 3rd person RPGs; I don't know why. The result was that after a few hours I could just about leap from the ground to the top of a house. That just makes no sense, no matter how you look at it.
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The more you keep comparing things in AVWW to the elements from NES/SNES-era games that I really liked and don't see enough of anymore, the more interested I keep getting. I'm starting to get a strange feeling that I'm your target audience. Like, literally me personally/specifically, not just people in general with tastes similar to mine. If you can somehow work something Star Control 2-related into one of your comparisons/explanations, I may have to just give you all my money on the spot.
Hahaha. :) I really did like Star Control 2, actually, and it was mildly an inspiration for AI War (in terms of having a lot of space to explore with new things always cropping up). I only got to play it very occasionally at a friend's house growing up, though, so my experience with it is somewhat limite.d
[The funny thing about that is that Super Meat Boy has zero penalty for death, or as close as you can realistically get without the game beating itself for you, aside from the handful of glitch/WAAAAAAAAAAARP ZOOOOOOOOOOONE levels. If you're not pretty good at platform games and don't actively enjoy beating your head against a challenge, though, yeah, it could get pretty amazingly frustrating.
Well, even though there's no death penalty, you wind up playing the exact same segment repeatedly. That's what would turn my wife off, is what I meant.
I think it's great fun, but I always very carefully qualify any recommendations I've made for it. I think I ended up describing it to my AI War group as "the demon spawn of Ninja Gaiden and Battletoads" and "recommended if too many of your controllers still work and you don't have enough holes in your walls yet".
Hahaha. I... guess I'll take that as a compliment. ;)
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On the leveling mechanic in general in games, I'm of the opinion that it's the worst system for character advancement except for all the other ones.
That's a great way to put it, actually. :)
But if you know you're going to get another level if you just kill 10 more vampires, well then you have something close by to work on, and when you get there the level-up always provides that little bit of fun that comes with accomplishment. Along with, of course, any new skills or access to new equipment or whatever, depending on the game you're playing.
Right, exactly. That "one more turn" aspect crept into AI War to some extent with having a fair number of sub-objectives (take this planet, get this unlock, etc). In AVWW, we're going to have layer over layer of possible sub-objectives you could pursue and that are just close into reach. We're not intentionally trying to make it artificially addictive, but that sort of "always something right around the bend" style just seems the most rewarding to me personally, and matches with the sort of games I like to play.
I'm again reminded of Oblivion, where you could level specific skills like jumping. I tend to jump everywhere I go in 3rd person RPGs; I don't know why. The result was that after a few hours I could just about leap from the ground to the top of a house. That just makes no sense, no matter how you look at it.
That's pretty hilarious, I didn't know that about Oblivion. That was one I skipped. I also have the bunny-hopping tendency, I think out of frustration that my character is moving too slowly against the backdrop, and wanting to have something, anything, to do as I travel. Then that becomes a habit in turn, and we wind up doing it even in games where the character moves at a pretty good clip. That's my theory, anyway.
Of course, in my case it might also be some training from Unreal Tournament, where you had to jump and writhe and translocate constantly to avoid getting sniped on Facing Worlds or similar.
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Of course, in my case it might also be some training from Unreal Tournament, where you had to jump and writhe and translocate constantly to avoid getting sniped on Facing Worlds or similar.
hahaha, I laughed at this :D
unreal tournament has been my fave game for years and it's because of that game that I have the jumping habit too. You should try searching for "bunnytrack" servers online. It's something entirely different where you don't have to kill any other players or bots... it's just a matter of dodging and jumping all the time to reach your destination.. like a race to the target sort of thing with all kinds of traps and obstacles. that's mainly where I got the jumping (and especially dodging) habit from :P
back to topic:
I am one of the players who really enjoys a leveling mechanic. I have played many many rpg's and mmorpg's.... And once a found a game I could get really into, I would always find myself trying to reach the lvl cap (in which I have succeeded several times). Like stated above, it's a great way to keep players entertained. It's a (side)objective that will not only make your character stronger over time, but also puts you one step closer to the ultimate goal; clearing the game.
the downside is that in a lot of games, this can also be quite a drag.... and bore players with the endless grinding. This only applied to the online rpg's though, because there is no ultimate goal in those.... you can't "clear" the game, it will go on forever.
fortunately, that has never been a problem for me :D
I'm really looking forward to AVWW and I'll be sure to get it the moment you guys publish it ^^
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I'm sure it will have little bearing on how AVWW will actually be, but for some reason this discussion brought this (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/3/12/) Penny Arcade comic to mind. :)
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It's definitely a funny comic. I sure do love PA. Doesn't change a thing, though. ;)
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Bearing in mind that onlooker feedback is not being solicited for AVWW, the leveling concept is pretty important. I hope it's OK if I toss out some thoughts on the subject.
Specifically, I'd like to note the general design principle of not mistaking the goal for the mechanic. Leveling is a mechanic -- it's one means among many to a particular end, not an innately desirable end in itself.
In this case, the goal in question is to provide a reward system that keeps players wanting to play a computer game. A good such system will be simple (i.e., easy for players to understand and for developers to implement) and will generally remain effective as player mastery increases.
The beauty of the leveling mechanic in a character-based game (such as an RPG or an action-adventure game) is that it's an abstraction that neatly satisfies those requirements for many gamers. The downside is that there are plenty of gamers for whom it's not optimal -- for these gamers, other mechanics might serve as well or better, but very few games provide such mechanics.
In particular, there are gamers for whom a "magic number" (even if it's attached to the player rather than to the current character) is rather offputting -- it just "feels mechanical." These games are usually DikuMUD descendants, which are designed to cater to the gamer who enjoys overcoming simple, clear goals in return for tangible, collectible status markers of some kind. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that playstyle... but not everybody shares that playstyle.
It's these Other Gamers who usually call for character-based games to implement some reward schedule system other than leveling. They may not have a specific alternative mechanic in mind, but they know they're tired of being treated as though they'll be satisfied by yet another game based on "kill it and take its stuff." (I'm not suggesting that AVWW will be such a game; I'm just making a general point.)
So what about a specific idea for a reward mechanic that isn't simply to expose a magical "level" number, then? For gamers who enjoy exploring character (e.g., roleplaying), a desirable reward might be access to participation in more complex stories, or stories involving particular subjects or themes. Naturally there'd be "magic numbers" representing these options, but those numbers would be internal. Externally they'd be abstracted out to descriptive terms: completing easy stories such as "A Simple Request" could lead to opportunities such as "A Challenging Quest for an Artifact" or "An Epic Struggle Against Social Injustice." As with the "level" mechanic this approach would scale with player mastery, but the emphasis would clearly be to reward participation in the NPC social network rather than "the more stuff I kill, the more stuff I can kill" gameplay that most of today's RPGs are designed to emphasize.
Another mechanic could in fact be the elimination of the "leveling" concept completely, letting the exploration of a vast gameworld be its own reward. A game like this would need to be designed so that the gameworld itself is structurally complex -- in other words, there would need to be a great variety of systems to explore in both number and depth. (Making the world visually attractive is probably also important for a game like this.) High explorability would satisfy the requirement that there are always short-, medium- and long-term rewards just on the horizon, yielding that highly sought-after "just one more turn!" feel.
Of course game design is a process of generating and selecting among action systems for both aesthetics and functionality, one result of which is that you can't please everybody. If AVWW is meant to appeal to more traditional RPG players, then a leveling model of some kind is a perfectly reasonable way to go. It'll mean that the game loses some appeal for the gamers who are tired of what they perceive as "grindy" games where sheer persistence is all that's required to "win." But a game designed to appeal to non-traditional gamers, who enjoy more abstract rewards, would undoubtedly produce a lot of "WTF?" (and worse) comments from gamers who have always lived in a world where characters must advance and where that advancement is tracked as a tangible numeric asset.
So I'm not about to criticize the choice for AVWW to use character/player leveling (in some form) -- at least not until I've played the game in some form. If that mechanic really does turn out to be the optimal way to achieve the goal of persuading players to keep playing in the otherwise non-traditional AVWW gameworld, then I'll be happy to have it.
If not... well, then, with the indulgence of the forum masters I might have a word or two to say on the subject of alternative reward models. :D
--Flatfingers
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Forgive me for being glib but didn't you just take a finely distilled three panel Penny Arcade strip and convert it into 800 words of prose? ;D
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I prefer to think of it as PA taking 800 words containing lots of ideas worth exploring and reducing it to a sequence of caveman-like grunts. ;)
It's quick, sure, but sometimes getting into the nuts and bolts of a game's design can be fun, too. Admittedly that's not everyone's cup of tea, but what a boring old world it would be if the most complex conversation that we could have about a game was limited to whatever snarkage could fit in a three-panel comic strip....
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I appreciate the thoughts -- really -- but this is exactly the sort of debate that would derail us from actually even making it to alpha. Lots of people like levels, including us, and for now that's the way we're going. Things change, of course, but one of the reasons we're not soliciting feedback at the moment on gameplay designs is that everyone has a different opinion. If we tried to go with the average opinion or the majority opinion, that would really be design by committee and probably would be a game we ourselves wouldn't want to play. For the broad design, we're going with our own opinions and testing feedback, which has served us well in the past.
I understand the arguments about leveling, and depending on the context I agree, but when it comes to certain genres I expect me some levels there. ;)
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Hahaha. :) I really did like Star Control 2, actually, and it was mildly an inspiration for AI War (in terms of having a lot of space to explore with new things always cropping up). I only got to play it very occasionally at a friend's house growing up, though, so my experience with it is somewhat limite.d
Just saw this again when this thread popped back up. If you somehow have any free time left with all the other stuff going on right now, the entire game got released for free a few years ago: http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/) The original developers were able to dig up ancient copies of the source code and art files, and people have ported it to run on modern computers. They only thing missing is that they don't own the name anymore.
Kind of interesting to go back and look at it and see what things about it have held up over time (most of it, surprisingly, especially the gameplay, music, and writing/humor, and a decent amount of the graphics) and what hasn't aged well (some of the UI stuff is a bit awkward or missing newer features we take for granted these days, but it's actually a lot easier to get back into than even some things that are several years newer like Fallout). There still haven't been many things in the nearly 20 years since then that have combined multiple genres as well, and few games have ever managed to make so many different races/species feel so unique (which they pulled off with just a handful of frames of animation for their background images, unique fonts and background music for each, and a metric crapload of clever writing).
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That's not fair man, you get me all excited about being able to grab SC2, then your link is broken!!! That's just mean man! :-)
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That's not fair man, you get me all excited about being able to grab SC2, then your link is broken!!! That's just mean man! :-)
Weird. It ate my link and kind of mangled it a bit. I guess the url tag works slightly differently from what I'm used to in this forum software's version of BBCode. It should work now, though.
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From what I understand, the leveling happens to -you- rather than your character, and your character takes on that level and when it dies, your next one takes on the level, which seems kind of weird to me, though it is understandable in combating the hardcore stigma of permadeath. But the weirdness is that it is kind of like being possessed by a ghost or something and then becoming super competent.
Its just my opinion, but it would seem less weird (IE, more in line with the theme of the game) if individual character leveling was individual, but your overall level was the level of the towns you've controlled and developed, and thus, the technology and training centers those within them have. So like, if you develop the crafting skills, or commission a certain kind of training building that brings everyone's level up to 5 or 10 or whatever, or get access to your town for a certain kind of resource, your character would be more well-equipped when you pop into them after an old one dies, but it wouldn't be like you were possessing them with your own level. It seems to me it'd strike a balance between permadeath being too punishing and not punishing enough, as well as tie the game more closely within its theme. Though I'd have to play the game obviously to see if that was true or not :D
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It's actually global for all your NPCs, and all the players on the server, to make it less odd.
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It's actually global for all your NPCs, and all the players on the server, to make it less odd.
In some ways that is weirder, in the sense that character A killing a werewolf and gaining a level has nothing to do with NPC B gaining a level, but they both gain it from the act :D. In some ways it makes sense though, because the leveling system seems to just be representing a time progression where your NPCs get stronger as you do stuff. I guess I'll really just have to see it in action in the Alpha to see how it actually works out.
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Yep, it's about the time progression, and an overall indication of how well your recovering civilization is doing as a whole. We thought about calling it a "civilization level," but that seemed too foreign.
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Yep, it's about the time progression, and an overall indication of how well your recovering civilization is doing as a whole. We thought about calling it a "civilization level," but that seemed too foreign.
In all honesty, I think calling it a civilization level is actually more intuitive than foreign :D
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If the player and world level only go up, is there any concept of replay? Is there a end to the game, a final objective?
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If the player and world level only go up, is there any concept of replay? Is there a end to the game, a final objective?
Check out the interviews and the AVWW page for a lot more info about that. It's hard to explain briefly, and it's been gone into in great depth other places. But the idea is that you should never have to start over, and the game never ends. You might complete one adventure and save one part of the world, but there's always more to do. You can start over in a fresh world if you really want, but there's no incentive to do so and hopefully most players only start one world even if they play the game for years and years heavily.
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I'll be interested to see if that's true. I know a lot of the people around here suffer from chronic restartitis. I'll admit, I do see myself restarting to get rid of all the settlements or whatever other effects I've had on the world. I tend to do that sort of thing quite a lot. But like I said, I'll be interested to see if you have cured it.
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I don't understand why you'd do that, though -- why do you want your settlements gone? If you're tired of them, just go somewhere else in the world. You can do whatever you like, I just don't understand the motivation.
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There's some little borderline OCD thing about wiping the slate clean if you didn't do things right the first time. I do this all the time with, say, Civ or AI War, where there's a point and it's actually logical to get the best possible start. But I've also caught myself doing it when there's not much of a point. . . It remains to be seen if I will with AVWW, though I'm going to make an effort not to :p
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I don't understand why you'd do that, though -- why do you want your settlements gone? If you're tired of them, just go somewhere else in the world. You can do whatever you like, I just don't understand the motivation.
That's an interesting question. One idea between wiping the slate clean is the aspect of self-imposed challenge. You might say to yourself, this time I won't use that overpowered weapon or strategy. Another idea is that by starting a clean slate, you can see how different your experience would have been than it was othertimes, ie, saying this time you'll see what the early game would be like if you found different magic than the one you used. The early game comes with it certain limitations because you haven't equipped your character or built up your settlements, but limitations aren't always a bad thing. And also, think of what happens when you finally have all the toys to play with in AI wars. You've captured your fabricators, advanced factories and advanced research stations and mined all your planets for knowledge and have all these toys, so what's your instinct then but to go on and take the AI home bases? You aren't really left with anything but that epic confrontation. I think it can be potentially frustrating to having none of those limitations but no end game in sight either. What would happen to AI war if you had every toy available to you and everything unlocked, but instead of a core planet to unlock, you were given infinite planets to take over? But this is probably an apples and oranges comparison.
One question I have though, even if it is only slightly related, is as a developer, isn't making every savestate backwards compatible really really hard? And what if you decided to integrate an expansion into the game?
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Well, to some extent there is no "doing it right." And part of the cool thing about this is having the history of everything that happened. I think that's really interesting with Dwarf Fortress, how histories like Boatmurdered developed.
In terms of how you want to play, do what you will. But the game will certainly encourage you to stick around. In terms of the comparisons to "having everything" in the game, that simply won't ever happen here. You max out at level 9999, and that's true for all the items and stats and such, too.
There is ALWAYS more to do, unless you've logged the equivalent of about 208 straight days of gametime (~4500 game hours). If that happens, yeah, you'll probably want to start a new world unless we up the level cap. That's assuming a new level roughly every 30 minutes of gameplay, or thereabouts.
In terms of making every savegame backwards compatible: that's no challenge at all if you do it from the start. AI War has changed massively, including three complete savegame format revamps. However, it is still compatible with the pre-release alpha savegames (which I consistently use for testing, actually). It doesn't even cause much in the way of code bloat (one extra method for the REALLY old versions), it just requires good programming practices for what we do have.
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Oh, I fully intend to try to play the way you are intending. I think this game has a better chance of it than most!
In terms of motivation behind that sort of thing, I think my main motivations behind it are:
1) Coyotetheclever was bang on with one of them- sometimes I just like going back to the early stage of a game, where I was powerless, and everything was new and pristine- a blank canvas of sorts.
2) Getting bored of a playstyle/ wanting to try a new character build/ thought of some things that I would have done differently that are niggling me.
3) In the case of a randomly generated world (like minecraft), seeing if I can get a more interesting map seed, discovering new vistas and so on.
4) And this is probably the one that gets me the most, dropping a game for a month or two, going back to it and losing connection to the game/character in progress, or forgetting some aspects of the story, or just planning on experiencing the whole thing in a proper run through (however unlikely a full run through might be).
5) Just on a whim.
There may be others, but after having a think, these are the main ones that come to mind. I am aware that not all (maybe none) of the apply to AVWW, but I figured seeing as you asked, a little insight into my motivations might be interesting or helpful to you. I should make it clear- these aren't points I want you to "MAKE NOT HAPPEN" in AVWW, I'm just chipping in on the discussion.
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#1 is a very good point. From that angle I probably would start a new world myself at some point, though I'd probably always keep my "main" world, too.
For #2, in this particular game there's nothing that should cause you to do that. With other games -- Neverwinter Nights comes to mind -- I can definitely sympathize on this point, though. That's definitely where a lot of the replay value. In AVWW, it wraps all that right into the main game, though.
For #3, that's fair enough. Though in both Minecraft and AVWW you can just explore more and more to find those interesting vistas. They just might not be close to your original start or whatever. In Minecraft that can be a problem unless you use one of the third party servers to let you set a new start position, so you're not having to truck it back from world center every time you die. In AVWW, that will be part of the game itself to take care of making sure you don't spawn ten lightyears away from your current area of interest.
For #4, fair enough. I tend to devalue this one because time is so limited for me that I'd never finish a game if I restarted it every time this happened to me, so I just wind up exploring around lost for a bit when I come back. It took me six years to finish FFX, for instance, with multi-year gaps between some of my play sessions. That took... some adjusting to remember what was going on. ;) When I was a kid, I played every game many times, though, so I wouldn't have thought twice of it then. I must have started 30+ games of FF1, and logged 10+ hours on each of them, before ever beating the game. Not long after getting the upgrades to the improved classes from Bahamut, I'd lose interest and drift off to Zelda or something, and then I'd come back days or weeks or months later and decide I liked the earlier part of the game better, so I'd play it again with a different party. So the more I think about it, the more I can relate; I just don't think of AVWW as that sort of game.
For #5, definitely can't argue. ;)
All good, and thanks for providing the details and clarity. In reality I don't really care how many worlds people create -- if you want to create a new world every week or every day, knock yourself out. Maybe for some strange reason, like me with FF1, you just like playing the first ten hours when everything is relatively low-level and the world seems broader and more tame. Maybe that's just so compelling you want to play that over and over again instead of getting things more built up, or even building things up and going off for a new adventure in some new wild area. That's cool with me.
But for those who want a sense of constancy, to have a really long-term amount of play without restarting and losing progress, you can do it, and that's what is different and nifty here. In the most extreme of completionist circumstances, I might get 120 hours out of the largest Final Fantasy game. On the shorter end, some of the older ones are closer to 20 or even less. That's a long, long time in any stretch, and those are all great games that I love, but once you pass a certain point... that's it. Your involvement with the world ends, unless you want to relive the same experience again. It's the same with books and movies, of course. They are a finite experience.
In the case of AVWW, the goal is to make that not be so. That there's never a point where you have to just be done, because everything is static now and nothing is new or interesting. We'll see how we do. ;)
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I guess I'm not used to the idea that a game won't run out of content. In most games, when you (or the world) reach a certain level plateau, even though that might not be the absolute highest level, there's nothing new to see. Things might still get more difficult, but there are no more unique abilities, items, or creatures to find. In a game like Titan Quest or Diablo 2, this is when you start over with a new character; the many different character types you can build makes each a brand new experience. So, I'm curious to see how AVWW keeps the experience fresh aside from generating new terrain. Sure it has 9999 levels, but will there be a huge difference say for example between level 1000 and 2000? How is that different than the first 1000 levels? I guess what I'm saying is that even though a game has a level cap, there is usually some point much lower than that where the game actually stops revealing new content.
Or maybe not. :) I'm really interested to see how it turns out. I'm just a little skeptical at this point. :)
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Well, assuming that the game hits it off reasonably well with players, we intend to keep adding content like we have with AI War. Free DLC and paid expansions, the works.
But in terms of the actual core question, assuming that we just hit 1.0 and then for some reason utterly abandoned the game (for the sake of argument, not that we at all plan to do that), I think the game would still have an edge on a lot of other similar ones. There will be no central storyline, for instance. Nothing hard-coded that is "the one story that when it's done you've won." It's a lot more open ended than that, with various storylines that can pop up in various regions, with different characters and circumstances and all that.
Does that mean that after some point, assuming we for some reason stopped adding content, that you'd get into a repeating cycle? Sure, in that case. But that's no different from starting the game over and then being level 1, and seeing that repeating cycle from lower levels rather than higher ones.
Given the players' ability to shape the world, the mere fact of having been there and created this legacy and all these settlements, etc, may help to create new and meaningful circumstances at the higher levels compared to just starting over. We'll see how much we are able to do with that, but given enough time and player support I think it's something Keith and I both want to focus on.
Will all that happen? Who knows. It's dependent on player involvement and support, and if we can keep ourselves in business developing out content like that. What I do know is that this will be a damn good adventure game with a ton of content well beyond its price point (as with AI War) even if we don't make it substantially past 1.0 for some reason. But if it really takes off... we're doing everything we can to lay the groundwork for making this even larger than AI War. Immensely larger than AI War. It just depends on if that's something that people really are interested in, when it comes down to it. And that's something we have yet to fully find out. There certainly seems to be a heaping load of interest in this judging by comments and forums posts, though.
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The "content problem" will probably deserve its own thread at some point, but to tie it into leveling....
There really are only about three distinct ways to keep adding content to a published game:
1. Developer-created. Because there are only a handful of developers, but they know all the tricks of the content editor, this approach usually results in a small number of large and high-quality expansions to the base game. The benefit here is that the quality of the overall game is perceived to remain high; the downside is that users will always, always consume new content far faster than it can be created.
2. Procedurally-generated. ("Randomly-generated" is more accurate, but never mind.) This approach tries to create a system whereby new content can be generated by code, either on-the-fly and complete on the client or as a starting point for developer hand-tweaking. Random content generation has the advantage of being able to produce lots of new things to do very quickly, which helps to keep up with the insatiable craving of many users for new things to do in a game. On the other hand, it's insanely difficult to build a content generator that produces good content. If it was easy, somebody would have written a general-purpose storytelling and asset management program, and human content creators would be out of a job... but that hasn't exactly happened yet. Most random content generators can only produce very simple one-task activities -- to tell a good story, humans are still required.
3. User-generated content (UGC). Pros: since there are a lot more players of a game than developers, this creates the opportunity for a lot more content creation than what the devs alone can generate. Done smartly, this can also be a good PR tool. And if you're very lucky, you may find a handful of users whose content is absurdly high-quality -- this is a great way to help bring new talent and fresh ideas into the industry. Cons: Only about 10% of the total user base will ever take the time to develop significant content (i.e., more detailed than what a random content generator could produce). And of that 10%, 90% will probably fall victim to Sturgeon's Law, but it's bad PR to tell people that their creative work is not of sufficient quality to become an official part of the game. In this case, it may work (as some MMORPGs are currently attempting) to let every user upload their content to a central server and allow any user to try that content and rate it for quality. This way the good stuff filters to the top without the developer having to be the "bad guy" deciding whose stuff is good and whose isn't.
With respect to leveling, it should be possible to design the content creation system such that objects scale to a "level" number (whether that's a character level, a world level, or what-have-you). There'd need to be a way to select an object type, rather than a specific object, and the run-time content interpreter would know to dynamically replace that type designator with a randomly-selected object of the appropriate type (usually meaning an enemy mob whose level is within a reasonable range).
That's relatively straightforward. The real question is, who gets to create that content? The developer? Some chunk of code? Or J. Random User? (Or a combination, perhaps?)
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Sounds like they're going for a smart mix of all three. And the big advantage here is that these three areas are multipliers to each other rather than just adding up:
If Arcen create a bunch of new content for AVWW, then this gets munched up and spat out as many times that level of new content (mechanics, environments, experiences) by the procedural generation the game uses. And then the players take the tools given to them and interpret the new content in all sorts of creative and unforeseen ways and "multiply" this chunk of content again.
So, speaking in some kind of abstract terms, if Arcen put n amount of "work" into new content, the procedural generation stuff does n amount of "work" also and the community contributes n amount of "work", then players end up playing with n^3 amount of stuff rather than just 3n. A beautiful thing!
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Yeah, that's more or less what happens with ai war to a lesser degree. With avww, we're going whole hog for that.
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Well, to some extent there is no "doing it right." And part of the cool thing about this is having the history of everything that happened. I think that's really interesting with Dwarf Fortress, how histories like Boatmurdered developed.
By the way, thanks for mentioning Boatmurdered. It prompted me to go look it up. I'd heard it vaguely referenced before, and I knew it had something to do with dwarf fortress, but that was it. Now I've read through the whole thing on lparchive and it was great. I'll probably have to go try to play dwarf fortress now. As if I needed another game with ridiculously complex mechanics to learn my way through.
For more of that fascinating quality of people finding their own fun in games, I would recommend the yogscast minecraft videos, for the three people on the internet who haven't heard of them. They took the idea of a sandbox game and went all-in on it. Fantastic stuff.
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By the way, thanks for mentioning Boatmurdered. It prompted me to go look it up. I'd heard it vaguely referenced before, and I knew it had something to do with dwarf fortress, but that was it.
My pleasure. That was basically where I was a few months ago, and Keith kept talking about it and giving little references in AI War like the "pull the level" cheat. Eventually I was compelled to seek it out. :)
Now I've read through the whole thing on lparchive and it was great. I'll probably have to go try to play dwarf fortress now. As if I needed another game with ridiculously complex mechanics to learn my way through.
Basically my reaction when I finished reading it in December. I spent a few days figuring out the basics, and getting my first fortress set up. It's quite a game. It turned out that I liked reading about it better than playing it, but that's true of a lot of simulation games and me. If you at all like simulation games, though, DF is basically second to none.
Check out their wiki for some starting tutorials, though -- you'll need them. I figured that after reading Boatmurdered I'd have a pretty good understanding of the basic gameplay at least, but that is now quite old by the standards of DF, it turns out. Back then DF was only 2D and side-view, but now it has a Z-axis that makes for a 3D world shown through a series of 2D slices. That, plus a ton of the gameplay mechanics clearly changed.
It took me literally 6 hours to select a starting location in the game. I guess I'm just kind of anal about stuff like that, but man -- once I finally found a region without an aquifer and with this and that other attributes, things proceeded a lot more smoothly.
For more of that fascinating quality of people finding their own fun in games, I would recommend the yogscast minecraft videos, for the three people on the internet who haven't heard of them. They took the idea of a sandbox game and went all-in on it. Fantastic stuff.
Oh, neat -- I've not heard of that, I'll have to look it up. :)
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I believe this is the link, for your convenience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UdEFmxRmNE&list=SL
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That would be the very first one, yes. There are quite a few videos now. I wouldn't suggest trying to watch them all in one go. Something to watch on your down-time. But I wouldn't suggest skipping ahead either, you'd miss half the fun.
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Yeah, i'm watching them in the background while doing other stuff (autoplay = awesome). They're pretty funny - the initial attempt to fight skeleton archers was great! Heh, and by "great" i mean "disasterous" ;)
Remember folks: Losing is Fun!
And now for something completely different - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cglLJJ0Czo8