[quote=“Tzan,post:10,topic:25901”]
My point is that if you only want to play the “good” choices, you are setting an almost impossible constraint on designing different paths through the world. Add a hundred different quest paths through WoW, and most of the current player base will simply look up the “best” ones on websites. Why? Because the game design has implicit signs posted all over it that say “Level as fast as possible”, “Seek the optimum path”. Its those signs you need to tear down before you can have significant choices in the world. Unfortunately, I think WoW is mass market because it does very clearly have a path marked “This way to Victory!”. That’s what many people want.
An alternative is easy to program. You could simply take a WoW server and severely soft cap the rate of loot and experience acquisition. Once sub-optimal characters and optimal characters arrive at the same level and wealth at pretty much the same time, there is enough depth in that world for all sorts of character choices to bloom.
The problem with the world changing idea is that each change is good for someone, and bad for someone else. This works poorly if optimizing your character is the game goal. I am playing “A Tale in the Desert” at the moment. In that world, the developers do let players make significant changes to the world. But any change that does not simply benefit everyone is greeted by cries of “I quit” from people who are on the negative end of the change. As someone who plays these games to create a story for my character, these negative events are a good as, if not better than the usual steady stream of victories. But if your game is dominated by min/maxers, you are restricted to world changes that are essentially “presents for everyone”, like the current Gates of AQ event in WoW. And even there, many people are moaning that others got better presents than them, and it wasn’t fair.
[quote=“Timedancer,post:21,topic:25901”]
I guess I was led astray by this:
Let me try and clarify this.
I put the “good choices” in quotes as a jab at people who value that Sorry if that section was a bit misleading.
“What allows someone to create a role for themselves, its not clothing or stats” (quote from my original post).
Perhaps I should have just left it at that, but I went on. Stats clothing and talents exist in the game because people like them, so devs put them in. Variation in clothing, stats and talents is an illusion of RP and complexity since the variations dont amount to much anyway. I was just trying to show that while you could argue that there a millions of talent combinations and therefore RP options, its just an illusion. Unless you distribute talents points evenly (which is only one option) you end up with a primary focus, so 3x9=27. But Talent differences is not RP anyway and does not allow a character to be significantly different from another since there are only 27 major variations. The only reason I discussed this is because many people feel that these systems add to RP which they really dont.
Read the rest of my original post. The devs dont make hundreds of best paths. An automated system makes paths. You cant look up the best path since a quest is dynamic so has a limited life span. Any web info would be out of date in a week. Also it would be usless since the outcome would only be known after the quest was over.
One of the systems I have is a diminishing returns limit on how much exp people can get in a time period and also a boost if not playing over several days. I developed that several years ago, before WOW. But not for the reasons you listed.
Optimizing a character is never a game goal, however it might be a player’s goal.
Making very few “significant” changes in the game is generally bad, but making many small changes is good. The good and bad outcomes will even out when you have more quests that have results. When you then limit a player to contributing to less than all the current quests, some will fail due to lack of support, another choice. Quests do not need to have good and bad results for players, just different. Bad doest really mean you lose something or not get something, it just might reveal a different path that only those “losers” can now take. Winning doesnt need to mean I get a cool item, it might mean we stave off a bad event, like an enemy attack. “We succeeded in destroying the enemy fort, so our village isnt raided next week”, no cool loot.
As a developer you must understand that no matter what you do there will always be people who will be upset about something no matter how trivial.
Understood. On the Net, such jabs can too easily go astray
I think I have a better grasp of what you are proposing. It may well avoid some of the problems I raised. Sounds expensive, but I hope someone can try it someday.
Yup very easy to be misundertood. We all just need tons of patience, which we dont always have
Yeah very expensive. Games just get more and more complex/expensive and I dont see that trend reversing. So I figure one day maybe a company like Blizzard with a huge hit like WOW and now plenty of money will spend some and take things to the next level.
I dunno if this was already - mentioned, but all I heard about choices is, that they get seperated in “good choices” and “bad choices”
I actually think, if a game should be a true RPG, it should have neither. There is no “good choice” and no “bad choice” in real life. Every choice has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Actually I think every choice specializes your character more and more, saying the more choices you make, the less quests (or whatever there is) you’ll be able to solve. You will then only be able to solve quests, that specifically fit to your character and on which you failed before. But because you’re making choices all the time, mostly choices you don’t realize as those, you will automatically advance to those more specialized levels of your character.
And if you think about it, new players won’t have such disadvantages, because “older” players won’t have so much advantages.
A player should feel with his character and not say all the time “look what a crap character I’ve got here”
I never said that and I already explained that “good choices” quote.
Me- quote from above
“Quests do not need to have good and bad results for players, just different. Bad doest really mean you lose something or not get something, it just might reveal a different path that only those “losers” can now take.”
Sorry if that section was a bit misleading.