Poll about exploration: blocked passages, full realism, or game-ified buildings?

[Cyborg]

I like Paul's idea, although I think this goes back to what Chris said about players not wanting to read. Most people don't bother to read the manual until something goes wrong, and at that point, the experience is already in trouble. I fully support more complex modes of gaming that require thought and intuition, and I think that Chris may provide a special challenge for us in the lava levels (I'm assuming that would be where torture may be inflicted upon the player, willingly). However, as a general rule, that is just not going to work for a large audience.

[Flatfingers]

As someone who picked Option 3 (but, as noted, who's good with the design direction generally commented on thus far), I'd like to come back to the loot question for a moment.

I got done with playing Two Worlds II a while back. I'd really been looking forward to it as a sequel to the original Two Worlds, which turned out to be a rather nice open-world game with some clever gameplay elements.

Unfortunately the sequel didn't feel as much fun to me. I won't belabor all the reasons; the point here is that as I was playing TW2 I found that I would get to the end of some dungeon, having obliterated all the enemies, only to discover that the reward was often an object I already had or, in numerous cases, nothing at all!

I'm not a highly loot-driven gamer. I enjoy seeing the sights, and can enjoy the journey as much as (or more than) the destination. But to hand-build some dungeon-based mission, to set up a bunch of progressively more difficult challenges, and then at the end provide the player with no interesting reward at all... even I found that not really fair, and less than fun. It felt like an unspoken agreement had been breached: "If you'll wade through all these puzzles and enemies, I'll make it worth your while at the end." (XP is usually not enough unless it happens to ding you to the next level.)

Which brings me back to A Valley Without Wind. Even if AVWW is not designed to be a highly loot-centric game, there's still that unstated promise that a game developer makes to potential players that the quality of the rewards will be proportional to the difficulty of the challenges. So how does the question of building sizes bear on that (or maybe the other way around)?

Small buildings can't be expected to provide much challenge; they're probably best treated as brief breaks from overworld and major dungeon exploration. Loot can be random stuff with the occasional nice bit (if you search for it) and most folks should be OK with that.

"Blocked" buildings could probably be treated relatively simply: to the extent that there's loot at all, the best stuff -- guarded by the toughest challenges -- should usually be found (or generated) near the point that's farthest from the entrance(s). If you made it there, it's not unreasonable to expect some relatively shiny bauble. Not a major game-changer, but a few goodies whose total value will help the player deal with new challenges.

Full-sized buildings, though... what kind of reward is proportional to the labor of clearing out the Augean stables of a 1000-room complex? For those souls who choose to take on such a challenge and actually complete it, should there be some special reward (especially if these big buildings are extremely rare)? Or is the total amount of "stuff" one may collect in such a building (including XP or its equivalent) sufficient?

To put it another way: if there's not some great prize waiting somewhere inside a 1500-room tower, are such buildings even worth implementing? I'm not rhetorically suggesting either "yes" or "no"; I'm interested in hearing what others think about it.

(Side note: speaking of loot, the original Two Worlds had a couple of really interesting features that the sequel didn't effectively follow up on. First, individual weapons and pieces of armor were numbered by type, and you could combine similar types to create objects with better stats. Secondly, armor came in "sets": if you could find and put on the Type 334 helm, chestplate, leggings, boots, and gloves, not only did it look nice, you got some useful special effect. The combination of these two features meant that even I wound up getting interested in loot as a kind of "gotta catch 'em all!" collection sub-game. In fact, the pull of this was incredibly powerful. I have no idea whether something like this would feel like a good fit for AVWW; I mention it because no mention of loot and Two Worlds would be complete without praising the effectiveness of these features at encouraging continued gameplay.)

[Hunam]

I voted for option 1 because it seems like it would be very difficult to make these huge buildings interesting to explore and having some blocked corridors/rooms may actually make for more variability between buildings.

However; what Paul mentioned in a previous post was interesting in that you could somehow have areas of increased interest within a building that may be more beneficial to explore than others.  These areas could be marked somehow and randomly placed in the buildings. For instance, you might be walking down a hall and notice a pile of bones or something outside a door. This could indicate that some really dangerous creature has moved in to that area and maybe that could change the loot you may find also. Maybe if you choose to explore that area the rewards are higher but there's always a chance the monster will return.

Other areas of the building could also have similar things added that change how you would approach them, and many different areas could be present in a single building. Other quick possibilities would be an area of increased technology where more skelebots were. Maybe certain environmental factors could be added in as well like a floor that is darker than normal or areas that dampen certain spells. Environmental factors could be combined with various creature din things to add more interesting play.

These areas would not be too terribly common but would enable a player to focus on exploring areas that may be more high yield, interesting, and have loot of a specific type. Something like this would go a long way in making each building a little more unique especially if enough content was there.

[Hearteater]

Oddly, this discussion reminded me of AI War.  For things like bosses, a larger lair/building/dungeon can be nice if their are multiple paths to get to them, but each has varying obstacles.  Much like there are many ways to get to the AI's home worlds that each require different tools, strategy and have varying levels of risk.  This would really only work if you have a lot of good scouting ability so you don't need to manually travel down each approach path and after the forth slog through 200 rooms decide you liked the first path best.

[superking]

imo:

in RPGs, game like buildings are infinitely prefferable to overlarge and sparse real buildings. see FF7 for example: building inners are small and functional- not many large spaces to get lost in.

in FPS (CSsource), relatively small maps with tight but intelligent layouts eg. DE_Dust2 play much better than 'realistic' sized maps eg. Docks.

in RTS, tighter, feature packed maps are infinitely more interesting than wide open deserts.

I cant think of any genre where big emptiness is prefferable.

and on the subject of using blocked passages to give the impression of a larger space, I would vote hell no.. there is nothing more infuriating than bouncing from locked door to dead end to waist high unjumpable walls like you get in FPS games to limit map size.

[x4000]

Okay, I'm locking this poll and topic because it's been essentially answered, and now we're just getting lots of people posting things that have already been posted elsewhere in the topic, so this is just going in a cycle of repetitive discussion.  I'm sure this will get discussed more once people can see it in practice, but we're good to go pre-beta for now, anyway.  Thanks for weighing in, everyone!  It was a definite help.