Dev Diary: Mad ramblings

[theTrav]

The only games I can think of where you have more or less the same enemies throughout the entire game are games where you really don't level up at all. SMB3 and the like.

racoon tail and star power plox!

[Potjeh]

Unreal World

[jorb]

Unreal World

Yes, strangely enough. But why is that? Is it just that the skill increments are so very, very small?

EDIT: Because a model like that I could definitely get behind.

[SinJin]

I love your ideas and thoughts for future updates, J&L.

I was a huge SWG fan in its early days. What drew me in were the Scout and Ranger professions.

Trapping and camping in the wild were fun.

Do you have plans to develop snares and traps?
It might help avoid the whole level thingy in regards to PvE. The more time a player invests into killing a creature, the more likely that player will succeed.

As you know, currently, if a player cannot kill a Bear solo he/she simply traps it and then kills it over time without fear of being hit back.
So why not make this a supported method? Create blueprints for traps and snares. This can support both solo and group hunting.

Time = Reward

[Jackard]

also, in terms of danger/strength enemies should probably be tiered more like

prey < predators < monsters

with the last being maneaters

Yes, obviously so. Their relative danger should reflect RL. Rabbits, for obvious reasons, should be less dangerous than foxes.

by this i meant creatures on the same tier should be equal in strength, just differing in tactics

a bear should be roughly equal a wolf pack... and itd be nice if there was some way to keep them challenging no matter your stats

I agree. I haven't been able to think of one. The only games I can think of where you have more or less the same enemies throughout the entire game are games where you really don't level up at all. SMB3 and the like. There are of course level scaling monsters like in oblivion, but I would rather throw myself to the hyenas than implement that kind of level scaling.

its possible you might avoid domination by setting a relative min/max on attacks or other things, in some games there is only so much one character can do before they need support from others. like in wesnoth, chances of hitting someone can only go as high as 70%

prey should be soloable but for predators that should be pretty risky and just suicidal for monsters

[Lman8786]

sweet

[Nemu]

The only games I can think of where you have more or less the same enemies throughout the entire game are games where you really don't level up at all. SMB3 and the like.

In my experiance, games made by big produciton companies dont have the kind of mechanics that you are wanting, i believe that they decide what the players want and rarely actualy listen to them. Now, they may be right for most people, but I know there are at least a hand full of people that have high passions for games and clear ideas of what they want in a game but can never find it, they themselves, may have had fantastic and uniquie ideas for games but do not have the knowledge or skills or resources to bring them to life and the big companies would never chance to make them. I also believe that H&H is one of these games and your unexpected dedicated players are these people that I'm talking about.
So instead of looking to the big market games, you must come up with new and fresh ideas to keep the spirit of this game and these players alive.

Oo
...
/scratches head and wonders where that came from then goes onto the original idea

How about if you heavily restrict development of HP numbers, and instead focus more on damage resistance and avoidance, with caps so that you can never get 90% dmg resistance or something stupid.
I mean, why would a more experienced fighter simply be able to take more wounds before they fall. It makes more sense that as they become more accomplished in skill, they would be able to avoid completely or failing that, dodge in a way where an incoming attack will strike a less critical area and cause less harm.
then make bears or other dangerous creatures less dodge-able than easier prey.
with some balancing and tweaking of this and the individual creatures, a character could eventually become proficient enough to battle a bear but also not have the bear become trivial as they progress more but still become stronger against other players or other harder creatures. this way the creatures don't scale, but they don't become completely trivial.

[Jackard]

How about if you heavily restrict development of HP numbers, and instead focus more on damage resistance and avoidance, with caps so that you can never get 90% dmg resistance or something stupid.

maybe

The talk about climbing the ladder of beasties is also something that I find pretty distasteful and gamey. Why do you need a linear progression of animal opponents? Why do you need to divide content into low level content and high level content?

If we have character skills that increase over time spent playing we obviously need to also have challenges to match the entire spectra of possible character levels. We might, perhaps not, need a linear progression of creatures, but we definitely need one for challenges in a more general sense. The fun of "Oooh, now I can take on boars, oooh now I can take on bears", that comes from a serious effort invested in a character is fun. Challenge and Reward, basic Csikszentmihalyi, right? You seem to be of the mind that we shouldn't have character stats, and that I simply don't agree with. Some bromides are bromides because they, fundamentally, represent fairly sound mechanics. Also, character stats are essential to the present quality system.

game should really focus less on accumulating individual character skill... more on resources, equipment, strongholds and teamwork

turning combatskilling into a huge time sink is just going to discourage live pvp

[Chakravanti]

game should really focus less on accumulating individual character skill... more on resources, equipment, strongholds and teamwork

turning combatskilling into a huge time sink is just going to discourage live pvp

Excuse my Logorrhoea. Jackard again manages to say in a couple of sentences what I can't say so clearly in in an mwot. Brilliant.

[Pacho]

Unreal World

Yes, strangely enough. But why is that? Is it just that the skill increments are so very, very small?

EDIT: Because a model like that I could definitely get behind.

The increments are indeed very very small. Small enough that you never notice when your skills actually go up.