Locales And Enemies

[Nice Save]

Both Nice Save and C4sc4 mention you can choose a character to play from different time periods, and I think Nice Save even mentions 'abandoning' your character if you want another character before you die.

I suppose i will find out soon enough, but was wondering, since i was seeing Chris's different characters all named Terrance Crow, if that meant we could 'rename' our characters?

Or if it meant something different, like Chris 'jumped' into different NPC's using the same character name? 

Or perhaps that this was all 'different' games and Chris was just renaming his characters to keep track of them for the screen shots?

   Was it Nice Save that said he would miss having another character with the name of Kizzee Street?
I must admit, that is a rather cool name.   

Anyway, also, just as a last quick thought before we get into beta on Monday, if we can rename our characters, perhaps i could 'unofficially' make families, like Heather Bliss, Garrett Bliss, Caitlin Bliss, etc...    Mother, Husband, Daughter... as i trace my characters across the history of the world. 

Just my rather wishful thinking,    But it would be nice to have a choice of one or the other, because not everyone will care to do that. 

Thanks for listening,

-Teal

Chris was using dev tools to change his character without dying and selecting another, at least that's how I read it.

I don't know if you can change your own characters' names, but you can change the names of NPCs in the settlements, so you can give them all the same second name if you want to simulate your characters family. Just bear in mind that your adventurer will almost certainly end up dead eventually, so their 'family' will be left without them.

[c4sc4]

Thanks for clarifying that, I've not lost many chars... yet.

Heh, I died a lot in the beginning but had kept the same character for a long time recently, until I decided to adventure in the lava flats that were about 6 levels above my own. It didn't end very well.

[Deekay]

Some good information, thanks a lot guys

[x4000]

Thanks for the note on the typo, I've fixed that here and on the blog and on the website page.

And thanks for fielding the questions, c4sc4 and Nice Save, too -- pretty awesome that someone other than Arcen staff can answer that sort of thing at this point.   And: holy heck I had no idea that alpha testers were putting in so much time.  I was actually referring to Admiral, who has somewhere around 30 hours into the game (as of a couple of days ago, so it's more now).  And I know Lancefighter has a solid number of hours, too, though I don't know exactly how much.  Spikey00 is one of the ones with the least amount of time in it, and he still has 5 hours.

Anyway... wow.  I had really been stressing about there not being enough content, because the difference between where it is and where I want it to be at 1.0 is pretty astronomical.  But I guess there really are more monsters in this than there were in the entirety of the game Demon Stalkers, which I sunk hundreds of hours into as a kid, so I can see it in that light.  And I'm not sure how many monsters were in Metroid or Super Metroid either, but I don't think it's hugely more than this.  Zelda games tend to have a lot more, and Final Fantasy games have a LOT more, and those are more the figures I've been having in my head as ideal targets. 

As you might guess from AI War, I like big games.  I just didn't fully realize how big it already was, until the last couple of days.  When you've been working on something for so long, you tend to minimize everything except the parts that are brand-new to you.

[Nalgas]

And: holy heck I had no idea that alpha testers were putting in so much time.

I think I've probably put in something approaching a couple dozen hours overall (and quite a few just on writing an endless deluge of feedback/bug reports), but the majority of that was in the first week to week and a half.  It's kind of dropped off a bunch since then while I've been busy doing other things.  I'm also not entirely sure how much of it I'd split up between actually playing it as a game and attempting to find/reproduce bugs or verify fixes for them.

Sometimes I got distracted from game-playing by trying to break things when I happen to be in that state of mind, while other times I got distracted from testing by playing the game, which probably says something good about the game's progress.  There may still be plenty of things obviously missing/incomplete at this stage, but if you're willing to go look around, there's also a decent amount of stuff already there, too (as long as you don't fall into the trap of feeling the need to explore every room of every building of every screen of every region of the entire map, or else it'll get a bit repetitive going through "Generic Ice Age Building with No Furniture Yet #15976346" after a while; do yourself a favor and use your scouts/maps to find things that are worth your time, heh).

[tigersfan]

There may still be plenty of things obviously missing/incomplete at this stage, but if you're willing to go look around, there's also a decent amount of stuff already there, too (as long as you don't fall into the trap of feeling the need to explore every room of every building of every screen of every region of the entire map, or else it'll get a bit repetitive going through "Generic Ice Age Building with No Furniture Yet #15976346" after a while; do yourself a favor and use your scouts/maps to find things that are worth your time, heh).

IMO, very good advice.

[Entrenched Homperson]

There better be Yeti overlords I can hunt down and make a carpet out of. A really big carpet. Or maybe a bunch of medium carpets. Or a couch. Or a Yeti costume. You can make so many things out of Yetis.

Seriously, if Yetis aren't in yet they need to be. I'm seriously guys.

 I expect a patch tommorow.

[Admiral]

Heh, I died a lot in the beginning but had kept the same character for a long time recently, until I decided to adventure in the lava flats that were about 6 levels above my own. It didn't end very well.

I must be either too good (not likely!), or too much of a wuss, cause I haven't died a single time during my testing. I did find the early game hard (before some of the mid-alpha balance changes) and reset the difficulty level to one easier than normal (2 on a 5 level scale) and never set it back.

The hardest thing I had for a fight was an early fight while I was still on Civ Level 1 and I decided to attack a Lt Boss lair, I used a ton of potions but made like 4 civ levels on that one castle. That also was pre-auto-potion and the higher potion timeout.

I'll probably set difficulty to normal for the last round of alpha before beta, and throughout beta. I want to see some of these ghosts I keep reading release notes about.

I'm also excited to test the OS X native version, but I will miss Chris being teasing me about things being too small anymore.

Cheers!

[Nalgas]

I have had so very many deaths.  Most of the "real" ones were from early on before balance changes when there were a whole lot of one-hit kills lurking around every corner.  The vast majority of them overall, though, were intentional, out of perverse curiosity as to what would happen when my settlement ran out of space for graves.  A lot of characters had to take one for the team for that, because I don't die too much anymore if I'm not running around being a complete idiot.  Heh.

[c4sc4]

Yeah, when the alpha testing first started I died a lot, mostly when bosses would easily one shot me. Also, I think I was conserving my healing potions too much back then, I would tend to die because I didn't heal up and thought I'd be able to take another hit. Once the potion change happened when they were auto used to prevent death, I kind of just stopped dieing. I had the same character for a long time but I wanted to try out the lava flats and I fell to my death in there.

[KDR_11k]

If you keep complaining the next update is going to read "Added AI Hunter/Killers".

[tigersfan]

If you keep complaining the next update is going to read "Added AI Hunter/Killers".

:-)

[tigersfan]

That's actually the reason for the difficulty settings, some people like a really hard game, and some like an easier game. And, we were getting reports that the same enemy was both too hard and too easy from different players.

[x4000]

Yeah, and it's still really easy to die -- I tend to play 5-10 region levels above my civ level, and I play on the 4/5 difficulty level, and I die... quite a bit... that way.  So you can definitely get the experience you want, difficulty-wise, one way or the other I expect.  At the difficulty I play most enemies don't land a shot on me very often, but when they do hit me it's often a one-hit kill.  So if two of those happen in a span of 20 seconds... well, that's curtains for me.  I'm really good at avoiding enemy attacks, so that's the experience that I personally like, but there's a lot of gradations below (and a few above) that.

[Nice Save]

When I first started I put the difficulty down a level, but once I'd gotten used to the game I knocked it up a notch again. I could probably play a game at a higher difficulty without much trouble, but I prefer to play in regions above my level to level up faster and get access to new stuff quicker.

Most of my deaths are just my own stupidity to be honest. My last death was fighting an level 20 crippled dragon overlord as a level 10 transmorgificated bat. I had to refresh my emit light spell so I planned to activate the scroll and then move upwards immediately afterwards to dodge the spells as my transition invulnerability disappeared. Unfortunately I hit the transmorgify scroll instead, which removed my invulnerability and turned me into a human again so I couldn't move upwards anyway.

Can you count the mistakes?

There may still be plenty of things obviously missing/incomplete at this stage, but if you're willing to go look around, there's also a decent amount of stuff already there, too (as long as you don't fall into the trap of feeling the need to explore every room of every building of every screen of every region of the entire map, or else it'll get a bit repetitive going through "Generic Ice Age Building with No Furniture Yet #15976346" after a while; do yourself a favor and use your scouts/maps to find things that are worth your time, heh).

IMO, very good advice.

I did this, but only because I felt like doing it and set out specifically to complete every building and cave in one region. I have played dozens of hours since then and I'm still well stocked for potions. I definitely wouldn't recommend it to everyone though.

Was it Nice Save that said he would miss having another character with the name of Kizzee Street?
I must admit, that is a rather cool name.   

Yeah, that was me. It's ok now though, my newest adventurer is called Elini Mate, so that's even better. In my head she's named after a dyslexic and slightly confused Dalek.