DaveTroyer's right Hideo Kojima is the king of blurring the lines between an in game experience and a player's experience.

*Spoilers below* The battle with Pscho Manits in Metal Gear Solid actually read the memory card on the Play Station this boss battle involved Mantis making comments about the games the player had made saves for, required the player use another controller and pretended to change the video input on the tv by momentarily going to a blue screen and displaying a familiar green "Hideo" in the top right corner. These mechanics made for a great boss battle.

A reflection of the player's choices represents that the game designer(you) are interested in the players, this conversation is important in any art, but like so many game design ideas it doesn't mean it will be fun. Build and test! Its the only way to be sure.

Hi again.

Sevant of the Lord - Thanks for that extensive list of ideas!
About the blindlness, I was actually reffering to the World of Warcraft rouge blind spell that would cause a character to randomly walk around for a few seconds rather then the kind of blindness a flash in Counter Strike would cause the player to only see a fading white screen. That kind of blindness fits perfectly to what im looking for.

As a mather of fact, I can see from a lot of answers that I'm not exposed to enough video games. I don't have time between uni, work and dev to actually play and i don't own any console. Maybe I need to re-prioritize

NaturalNines - Yeah, I guess I agree with you. The original "ideas" was just a bit of brainstorming. Maybe locking out some abilitys could be done, but that wouldn't really affect the player directly.. Need to think some more on it maybe.
Tight controls and expected results from hitting a certain key are extremely important to the gameplay and the feel of the game.
I do want a challange that is hard because of the game elements and aspects and not one that is hard becaus of the shitty controls (even though QWOP managed to get successfull with it (how people can play that game for more then 2 seconds is beyond me btw))

lithos - So the affect would allow you to stack actions that would then be released after .5 seconds? That sounds more like a buff then a hindrance, but would make for some interesting possibilities.

Telcontar - Right I've actually watched some let's play of that game.
As far as visual affects go that is awesome. What I have in mind though are effects that the player need to react too in some way or another. All though visual affects are one way of doing that. Again back to the Counterstrike flash - if you're flashed you need to hide or you'll prob die.

Mratthew - lol so you actually had to buy a second controller? ;)
I'm just kidding, that sounds really interesting. might be hard to create the same affects in a PvP enviroment since it could unbalance battles depending on what content each of the players involved have played through (and will eb affected by in the battle)


Thanks for all the ideas. I guess some of what I'm thinking of have already been done successfully in some games. I think it would be really interesting to incorporate affects like these in a PvP enviroment to further increase the involvement of the player, diversity of battle and skillrequirements. I get the fealing that battle in arena-like play (MMO's, MOBA's, arena games etc) have become rather stagnant so fresh ideas are needed to keep the genre going. Something like this might be a nice injection.

I'm thinking of maybe doing some prototyping.
If anyone has the time I'd be greatful if you could tell me waht you think would work best as far as affects go.
What im looking for are affects that the player has to react too in a physcial or mental way.
Keywords would be: Reaction, Strategy, Foresight, Confusion, Fun, Challanging.

Thanks again guys! =)

To explain how Aeon was used you need to realize that iron realms combat is based on status effect afliction. Essentially your goal is to lock down the abilities of a player, and eventually their ability to heal afflictions. Essentially disabling a left arm would mean you couldn't apply poultices or use your shield, leaving openings in your defense for harder to hit abilities and similar. In most cases you're fighting for the ability to continue action/healing rather than keeping your health up and theirs down.

When you are under the effect of Aeon it meant that any action you took happened .5 seconds later(IE instant abilities took .5 seconds, slow abilities took +.5 seconds but a little different because you didn't actually "cast" until the delay was done). So you could choose to do actions now, that you wouldn't be able to do in the future due to say your left arm being hurt. Essentially the enemy gets his normal intuition along with a pace advantage.

The worst design decision a company can make is frustrating players. I say do not make mechanics that are intended to be frustrating, especially if they are able to be exploited by other players. It's one thing to be challenging, it's something else entirely to be frustrating. In the online world, this gets amped up because griefing is such a series issue in games, and you would be amazed at how far people will go to make other player's lives miserable. Don't give them the tools to make it easy.

If you want a high skill cap, include combinatorial and timing based effects, not control interference. Give players situational tools and lots of high reward/consequence choices, but don't interfere with control. In general, a game should do what I tell it to do when I tell it to do it and nothing else. I personally play pvp games almost exclusively and really enjoy games with very high skill caps. One major influence over how I and my friends judge a pvp game's quality is the standard of control (responsive? intuitive? comfortable?). I abhor games that use control interference, however, and have a near zero tolerance policy for them. Removing control from a player isn't encouraging skill, it's just making the game feel like you aren't in control and therefore should be looking for a better game.

There are a lot of lazer beams to avoid here. We want to create a unique and memorable effect with set in-game reprecussions, by affecting the player out of game.

The obvious example is the much used Blind effect from a alot of FPSes, this was also used in the MMO Darkfall, basically painting the screen white for a few seconds.
Another suggestion I like is inverting the keyboard directional keys, I dont know where this is from but I seem to remember another game doing this, forcing me to learn how to move with inverted keys.

In both these examples the effect will apply more to someone not used to the game, as a veteran will find ways around his issues quicker, unlike strict In-game CC effects.

But thats ok, in fact its a positive as it adds more fun to the player in learning how to deal with these unusual effects.

And thats the line, going over it will bother the player and u dont want that. Like rearranging the buttons on his hotbar, that sounds like a terrible idea.

-Exo

Hi guys.

Thanks for your input guyes and sorry for the late reply, been a busy week.

Defenatley some good advice in here, I will try to keep as much as possible of it in mind when doing this!

/ AS

While I was reading your post I was thinking of Metal Gear Solid and was happy that someone already mentioned it.
The idea, as interesting as it is, is a real nuisance to play through. As much as I would like to state all the fun things about this idea, I will focus on the bad. That's all that matters when giving feedback anyways hahaha!

The first problem that I find with this concept is the all-mighty 4th wall. When I play a game, I want to be submerged into it; especially in MMOs, I want to become my character. However, when hazards affect the player, it's like a slap back to reality.
Second, punishing the player might not be very "fun" for them.

So if you plan on doing this, you really have to make sure that you aren't punishing the players too much.