Quote:Original post by Wavinator
If so, then most of the ideas so far simply will not scale well on a budget. When you hear the character oomph or aaargh! for the 76th time, you'll know what I mean. Visual and audio cues are long retained in the brain, making repetition annoying, whereas numbers flee rather quickly. Anyone who has had to sit through repetitive cut-scenes they can't space through knows how old it can get. Visually representing stats means that you're giving the player lots of bite-sized cutscenes, none of which they can skip.

I agree whole heartedly. After playing BG2 for about an hour and hearing "I could use some healing..." I just want to say "SHUT UP, I heard you the first time you stupid gnome!!!"

Unless your visual cue is going to cover the whole screen or part of the screen, I wouldn't do it. Using BG2 for an example (again), half the time my mages/archers die because I had no warning that they were stunned (because I was watching my warrior so that he didn't die) other than a little tiny head that was added to the that character's avatar. No text was added to the console, no spell casting effects (since I was fighting illithid and they don't have to 'cast' the spell since it is innate.)

Quote:Original post by Programmer16
But, If I don't know how well I can pick locks, how do I know that I have to improve it. And, if I don't know who has a higher strength rating, how do I know who to use to break the lock (in case I don't have theif.) If I use graphics, then I should assume that because person A is a giant barbarian I shouldn't even try fighting him (I mean seriously, look at how easy he swings that sword!) Or that dragon that I'm fighting, if I don't know that my sword does 5d4 + 5 damage, and my thunderbolt spell does 10d10 damage, and my ranger's magic arrows do 4d4 damage + 2 electric damage each, I might just think to myself:

You have to get a fealing for this anyway. If you have the power to slay a dragon in a single round you should feel it in the game. You would be able to kill most of the other monsters with the glimse of an eye. So where's the problem

Quote:
Ok, I have Carsomyr, a mighty elven empowered, evil-killing sword, a thunderbolt spell that can kill a umber hulk, and arrows that can kill a goblin in one hit and does electric damage. I have no chance against a dragon that spits fireballs and can hit all of my team at once. When in all actuality I can kill him in one turn from each player.

And whats an old master swordsman going to say: Oh, that's Carsomyr. It was forged by elves to cut through the undead? Well that really tells me that it does double or triple damage to undead creatures. It might even have the chance to utterly destroy them if they fail a saving throw of 3d6. But I decide to put on the Mace of Light that the old man also says was made to cut through undead, but it only does 2 extra points of damage and has no chance of utterly destroying them.

Come on be a bit more creative. If it does triple damage to undead and has a chance of desintegrating them, the weapon is legendery. So the expert tells you: Wow, this sword must be the mythical Carsomyr crafted by the elven ceturies ago to fight the hords of undead send to them by $evil_necromancer. They wouldn't have won the war with out it. You should be feel honered to hold this long lost relic!
Now that would be a good hint that its you should use that to fight undead.

Quote:
There's also spells. I learned fireball at the very beginning of the game, but I learned ball of lightning halfway through the game, so it must be stronger. What if I have 2 sets of lock picks. One has a nice red, leather case and the other one is carried in a cardboard box. Just because the leather one looks better, doesn't make it better.

no, but what if you character says "hm... my old tools, although looking aglier where much better balanced. Maybe I should stick with them."

Quote:
Are you going to buy a car when the guy says: It goes really, really fast (you can tell because it as spoilers and leather interior, with 2 15's in the trunk), or are you going to buy the car from the guy that says: Oh, its got a 454 in it and comes with an optional spoiler.

Try go bying a sword and ask how much damage it does. You will probably get a reply like "you can cut of a head with it" or "It could penetrate quite hevy armour" but definitely not "2d6 + 1"

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
The other problem is that the more you put into visually and auditorially representing systems that 95% of your audience already accepts in stat form, the less you have to do anything else. So, sure, you can show sweating brows, limping from herniated disks, compound fractures from falling too far, etc., etc. ad infinitum.

Just be prepared to drop alot of the quests, special action scripts, monsters, items and locations you were planning on. And call it something other than an RPG.

Hm... maybe drop half of the boring NPC that don't add to the story would be a way to get some resources.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
I'm not sure you understand the magnitude of what I'm saying. Maybe there are 30 - 50 NPCs in your average RPG? Fifteen to 25 won't save if your intent is to visually / auditorially realize all stats.

Let's take skin: Muscles will be shown, I assume? How many levels of detail? You'll need multiple levels for multiple resolutions. Have different genders? Male & female body details will differ, particularly in tone for appeal (think female body builder--a no-no). Any other races? Need those, too.

So what else can happen to skin? Mummy's curse? Need rot patches. Burns? More patches. Slashes? Now you have particle fx for bleeding.

And let's not even touch custom art, like assassin's tatoos or tiger patterns.

Now let's take meshes. Genders and races now are already standard in several MMOs. But now you'll need morph targets for endomorphic or ectomorphic body types, per race/height/gender. Does height vary? How about weight? More morph targets.

And what about those animations? You're cutting out combat actions in favor of grunting and lifting actions; or too-heavy sword dragging actions. Because the actions are now more complex, it's now harder to control where they happen in the environment-- so rather than collision detection for just the character, you now have collision detection against multiple chained entities, which in theory should be able to intersect.

So it's not just NPCs. Be prepared to nix monsters/enemies, items, spells/tech fx, etc. There's no free ride on this one.

lots of valid arguments. But I think it is still worth to think about it. Eventualy there might be some easyer was to adding feadback to the game instead of expensive eyecandy. Like maybe nice descriptive texts.

Quote:Original post by nefthy
Hm... maybe drop half of the boring NPC that don't add to the story would be a way to get some resources.

You have an answer for everything.

So you're saying I should just go and "drop" the people in California because they don't add to my life. Its supposed to be a 'world', which means there are going to be people who don't contribute (and those that hinder all together.)

Just because I can kill almost any character in the game doesn't mean I can kill a dragon. In BG2 I could take my ranger in and kill almost an entire party of hobgoblins before they even got close to me. But with 6 characters, and the dragon 'near death', I still couldn't beat the damned thing until I leveled up about six more times.

Ok, you got me with the legendary statement, but the fact remains that I don't know how much damage it can do and I don't know that it has the possibility do utterly destroy them. And he might have a similiar story for the Mace of Light (or Ultimate Undead Destroy, whatever you want to call it.)

And you didn't mention my hit points and armor class statement.
"OH MY GOD! He's bleeding, he must be near death. Man, I must be doing something like 50 damage. Oh wait, look it that I'm bleeding too... He must be doing something like 60 damage."

RPGs were built on stats, storylines, and a party/team (go and try to play an AD&D game with only one character and see how far you get) and I won't call the game an RPG without them.

Quote:Original post by nefthy
I haven't played BGII that much, actually I lost interest so fast as with no other game. But you seem like the kind of player that is happy with just with this type of game.

What do you mean by 'this type of game'? Baldur's Gate is built upon the rules of AD&D. Its 2D isometric (in view, not in graphics) and is point and click movement. You learn spells, skills, kill monsters, gain experience, and level up. What other type of RPG is there (aside from different types of graphics)? It has an extensive storyline (with atleast 30 side quests, I can count atleast 30 off the top of my head right now), that can end in one of two ways. You have somewhere around 15 different characters at your disposal through most of the game. There are around 7 races (of characters, not including monsters). A huge list of classes (and subclasses). Theres a plethora of spells, about 15 skills (weapon skills), most of the npcs that don't contribute to the game are in in the taverns and city streets (I've counted no more that 20 of these NPCs in a single place), and the graphics are awesome. What with the game made you lose interest. Did you even make it out of Irenicus' dungeon before you threw it away?

Ok, and just for the sake of argument. Could you tell me a couple reasons why you DON'T like stats? Why is it that you want to 'think outside the box' and remove the second most important part of an RPG?

Oh, and taking away numbers will also remove one of the best parts of the game, experience hunting. I'm not going to run around fighting monsters (and just fighting monsters, so that I level up) when I don't know how much experience I'm getting or how much I need.

In order to RP, you need atleast quantatively know and control your char, that's the how and stat and number helps. Or else you have no way to even know your own char but to trial an error. After leaveing the game for awhile and come back, most likely you'll forget the status and capabilities of your char(S). Moreover, char development and advancement is a slow process (it takes 2 years to max out) where only numbers can represent the slow progress, or else you'll either use up all the words in a dictionary or simply see no progress due to the lack of phrases to distinguish your every steps in the advancement path.

On the other hand, what actually kills a game is the statitics serving the purpose of precisely calculating the results. Such as you need kill 3cows+ 5dogs+ 6wolves to advance 0.1 of your sword skill, or a cow has 1/36 chance droping a broadsword, or str+dex/2+3x1.5 = damage done. It sounds more like a 'Terminator' than a medieval warrior.

There are two overlapping fundamental issues here — differentiation between the player and the character; and abstraction of complexity.



As a preamble for the first issue, I'd say that roleplaying requires a character-oriented point of view (as role-playing means to me the capability to play a role different from my real-life "role"). This in itself requires some form of "stats" (regardless of whether the player ever sees them or whether they are modeled as in fuzzy, in stochastic, or in what ever form you want). As I've already stated, making the problem "disappear" by simply making all in-game skills player skills doesn't really solve the problem, it merely changes the context into such that the problem no longer exists in the new context.

Anyway, the first of the issues is the fact that the player should know exactly what his character does, no less, no more. I'm exaggerating here, as obviously the character will know things the player doesn't (the player sees, whether you wanted it or not, an abstact view of the game world) and the player knows things the character doesn't (as starting the game from scratch doesn't wipe the memory of the player clean).

Usually the game doesn't start from the birth of the character. Much has happened before the moment the player gets to control the character. Whatever has happened in the character's life so far has given the character some sort of idea how strong he is, how easily can he pick a lock (assuming he has tried it; if he hasn't, it would be a plausible assumption to say that he can't pick locks), etc. Thus, if you force the player to learn these things by trial-and-error, you are basically not giving the player at least the same information the character has. Similarily, failing at something (a "skill check") could well give the character the possibility to estimate what kind of changes would he have, should he try again. Hiding information and forcing the player to learn something that the character already knows is at very least as silly as making the game a munchkiny optimatization problem. From one extreme we get to another.

I'm not saying the estimates of the character are in any way accurate or precise. I'm just saying that the character can make such estimates, and these estimates can be shown to the player by appropriate means (other than having to try out the skill in question and making all sort of vague interpretations based on the grunts and snarls uttered by the character). Numbers are — at least to me, and many others, it seems — a natural and easily understandable way to represent this information. If you want to add a random value to the actual true number to produce the inaccuracy of the estimate of the character or round up or down the number in order to create an illusion of lack of precision, then go ahead. If you want to add a large constant to the true number in order to represent the overconfidence of the character, then go ahead. You could use many such tricks to make the estimate of the character more in-game and intuitive (as opposed to having an omnipotent character), but just don't make me waste time to learn from scratch something I should already know from the history of the character.

Another related problem is memory. Why should I have to remember everything the character has learnt of himself? The computer should remember these things for me.



The other of the issues is the fact that there can be different levels of abstraction in the game. For instance, if all weapons are characterized into one number (say, some sort of attack value), then there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to keep combat simplistic, that's fine. But even if you wanted to make combat more complicated, there is no reason to go all the way to the other extreme — there is a whole spectrum of alternatives to choose from. The sword can still be a sword, even if all you given was the exemplary 'A/D 10/5.' data from superpig's post. If all you see is a generic weapon description consisting of a bunch of numbers, I'd say it's a sign of rule-playing instead of role-playing (no offense intended). The game is still giving you enough information to create as vivid image of the sword in your mind as you want. Use your imagination, man! You just have to see the forest from the trees... [wink]

That's not all the abstractions. There are many things in the game world that aren't displayed. After all, in few games you can actually use a toilet. Still, no one complains. Usually you don't have to eat (strangely enough, if you do eat, your health goes up — what the heck?). Still, these things should happen, and they do — but the game itself is already abstract and thus the player is not bored with such mundane issues (this is what I meant with the player not being able to know everything the character does). With that being said, when you start to barter with the local blacksmith, who is to say that such comparison as suggested by superpig doesn't happen? It still could happen, but you just don't see it, just as you don't see your character taking a leak every now and then. And if the absolute scale is worrying, then why not transforming the whole display of items to be relative to some item (e.g. the currently wielded item)? Not that it really changed much, but the main point is that either you get very complex gameplay (spending hours just comparing equipment when selling loot etc. as Wavinator suggested) or you get very vague abstractions (sword is 6, axe is 9 — you figure it out). You can't have your cake and eat it too. [wink]