yerk already kind of suggested it and I would like to pick up that idea.
A specific chance for looting in areas could be nice.
It could work like this:
Chances a new area you haven’t visited before: (colours taken from TQ)
white: 0,6
yellow: 0,3
blue: 0,09
purple: 0,01
(sums up to 1, chances don’t come in % ;))
Chances in an already visited are:
white: 0,7
yellow: 0,25
blue: 0,045
purple: 0,005
Of course they would have to be finetuned , I just thought them up in like 1 minute, especially in the latest difficulty because at some point you have visited all areas and you wouldn’t find alot of good loot.
ps: yeah I forgot greens but I htink you get the idea…
I don’t think it’s a good idea to make the monsters straying off of the paths stronger. It would force you to stay on the path, and maybe even make you think it is needed to stay on the path and go back later, inducing more grinding in normal difficulty, making the chance even bigger that Average Joe doesn’t spend time in higher difficulties.
Putting Side Quests off of paths makes Average Joe look for them even more, again, making the chance smaller he’ll play Epic or Legendary.
My vision, again, is that we need to find a good reason to play the higher difficulty levels, so the gameplay is measured by Normal+Epic+Legendary, not just Normal.
Special monsters (Talos, MAnticore, etc.) and the secret passage are ways, but i think not apparent enough. Average Joe sees the same world, played the same, and thinks ‘meh, been there, done that’.
I just thought of them to just be, too dam tough, so maybe you could kill 1 or 2 but you would be mobbed and killed quick.
as you went up difficulties the tougher guys further off the path would not so in the second difficulty you could go out further but the last ring of tough mobs would still kill you off too fast for effective levelling long term but it would be ok to grind a little xp if the going got tough?
I dunno it is difficult to think of a way that would not make you feel there was stuff you missed out on. It was just a thought of how to make an open environment small whilst being large. If late game you had to back track through these areas again then this would make sense as you would just have the whole verity of mobs needed and only later could you kill more freely this would also reflect the growth of a guy/girl that was a low level adventurer/ average Joe coming back as a master fighter / whatever and things that brought fear to him before are now just common foe.
Yeh I don’t know.
I like the idea of having relatively open areas in which I can just explore, mill around, and kill things that are minding their own business – it’s great to have options, after all.
I do enjoy the compass/minimap combination that Sacred and Sacred 2 employ, so you always know the general direction in which you need to travel to complete your quest(s), and I like the Fog of War which they employ as well. You could still see the general terrain features (mountain, desert, jungle, rivers, etc.) but the cities, temples, and other notable areas would be obscured by this fog – you did not know they existed until you were in the vicinity.
For me, the minimap actually plays quite a large part of the game, since I often find myself navigating from point-to-point purely by the minimap utilizing my characters positioning arrow/icon rather than focusing on the game world. The translucent minimap of Diablo 2 was great for this, as you could still identify terrain features without having to ever close the map, although its level of detail was slightly lacking for my taste – I’d like to have the option to turn on/off mobs, bosses, shrines, chests, and other items and obstacles.
To focus on the slight tangent we’ve had: Players could be rewarded for playing through higher difficulties not only by increased XP and loot, but possibly through unlocking higher tier abilities, or changing/improving the abilities which are already found in the game at earlier difficulties. XP & items have been done before; there is a chance to create something very innovative with this game.
Just my $.02
You can make the areas as big and open as technically possible, as long as you offer an easy way to navigate through them without getting lost.
So if there is a clearly visible road, that leads from point A to point B, and all quests you get at point A can be solved without straying from that road, noone has to get lost, noone needs to do any exploration - but everyone who want’s to, get’s her/his deal too.
Roads could fork off / split and have way-signs telling the player “this way to cave A, that way to city B” -> where cave A could be the stage for some side-quest.
Quests that have to be solved somewhere out there in the wild, far off the roads, would also be given to the player somewhere else out in the wild, off the road.
To make new players grasp this concept, just have their very first quest text contain a paragraph like: “Just follow the road to get there. Don’t stray from the road, or you might get lost in the wild.”
And about those minimaps:
Important for me is to be able to continue running while having the map open. I like to just constantly open the map, catch a glimpse of where I am and close it again. And I don’t want to stop running for that.
Well,first of all I didn’t read all of the posts(first few pages and last few posts only :p) so I might repeat what someone else said.
I don’t like Hack and slash RPGs,only 2 I ever liked are Titan Quest and Sacred 1, reasons being ability to explore and quests(Titan also got me with talents :D).
If you close the area and do it Titan Quest style you might cut off some people,but if you try to create big world right away I guess quality will suffer( Dungeon design repetition in Sacred).You could go for open world with closed off zones which can be opened later through DLC and with open world you can always add new stuff however you want(desert?no problem,slap new town in it and announce how theres new town on nearby oasis ),and as hooby said you can guide newbz with roads and compass.
Lord, please no auto-leveling of the monsters. Sacred 2 could have nearly been TQ2 in my book had it not been for the stupid auto-leveling of the monsters. It makes being level 50 irrelevant if a level 1 monster can kill me.
The point I’m making is that if you make it open and have auto-leveling of monsters, then you can’t have the invisible barrier of higher level monsters in an area.
Side question : Does Two Worlds 1 have auto-leveling of monsters? I had thought that Oblivion had it, but it doesn’t seem that way in TW1, because I have gotten one-hitted by certain mobs until I got a couple more levels and also I can one-hit stuff now I’m higher level.
(Is that sufficient enough attempts to derail this thread? I tried to stay on subject, kinda.)
EDIT: Now that i think about it,we could keep players away from high lvl zones by coloring zone names,lets say I’m lvl 5 and zone I entered is lvl 10(graveyard or something),zone name(“now entering Graveyard”) could be red,while my lvl zone could be yellow,and towns could be white.There would be warning when player enters red zone for the first time(like hint in titan quest).
They already did so in TQ, but probably more limited than they will in GD.
Colouring names could be a good idea. Or just put a skull next to the name. Just seeing the monsterlevel might not really give enough info on how bad ass the monster is…
I asked about the auto-leveling on the Sacred 2 forums and that’s what they said. They problem was that the ‘set range’ was so big and the ‘set area’ was so big that they might as well had made the whole game auto-level.
I played probably about 50% way through the story mode and felt like I was fighting the same monster over and over because of the auto-level function.
Sacred 2 -could- have been the beat out TQ, but the auto-level killed it. Please do not implement any kind of auto-level in Grim Dawn. I know it sounds like a good idea, but it kills the game.
I don’t mind auto-levelling tbh. I think Sacred was not a letdown because of the auto levelling, but rather to a ton of other features. I already got enough of the game before I was actually affected by auto levelling, even though I love the genre.
Actually the auto-level isn’t bad as long there is a lot of variety in mobs to fight AND level progression also adds abilities to the mobs based on level range.
e.g.
1-10 rat bites
11-20 rat - bites, infected wound
21-…
Also perhaps there is a point beyond which you will never see another higher level rat to face.
I like the idea of large open spaces ALOT. One thing to consider would be an optional “Go This Way” ping to point players towards the exit forward.
Let’s people explore all they want but still gives an option for those who get lost or turned around. From a player standpoint a small non-obtrusive indicator can do wonders to remove any feeling of being lost.
Personally, I found the tighter spaces in TQ better, because I’m the kind of person I absolutely has to leave no area unexplored. I like it better when I can keep moving forward thought the game instead of running back and fourth meticulously making sure not to miss anything every single zone.
Honestly somewhere inbetween TQ and Sacred is the sweet spot on how big to make it. Plus each area should vary. some small others large. Variety is the spice of life.
Imo it would be great to have a wide open map to explore but only if there would be interesting things for you to do there, like some bosses or side quests.
The more open, the better. I see no fun in following a linear path in games, especially not in a RPG.
Games needs to treated as games where the player can decide where to go, and what to do (to an extent), in that way it feels more like an adventure and like actual gaming and that me, the player, are in control of my actions. Far too few game developers understands this and forgets the game part in “gaming”, and instead makes a movie-like experience, which serves neither as a good “movie”, or a good game.
Not every area needs to be filled with super exciting content either. You can’t have every chest filled with interesting loot, areas can be treated like this a bit too (for balance and to surpise the player).
Backtracking is also important, to give the player a connection to places. Give the towns a role, just like you would treat an important NPC. They shouldn’t just serve as backdrops without meaning, something you visit once and can then forget when you’ve finished the quests. The connection to the starting town/s is often strong and it’s often a very nice feeling to get back to them (like coming back to Seyda Neen or Balmora in Morrowind after hours of adventuring, for example). A sense of coming “home”.
I’ve seen lots of RPG’s fail because of how boring and linear they are, but very few fail because they were “too open” or had “too much exploration”. I play RPG’s because i LOVE exploration and not because i want a movie-like experience where everyone is following the same path and experiencing the exact same thing.
I get the feeling this is going to be the biggest design challenges for Crate.
What to do depends on the pace you guys want to give the game. IIRC, TQ was described as a fast-paced game, and the in-game level design did the job just fine helping the pace while allowing some exploration. Now then, it makes no sense to develop a fast-paced game where between your next destination and yourself are 2 kilometres of a few random spawns, rocks and arbitrary obstacles.
Now let me get my bias out of the way: I don’t like big open spaces that are there just for the sake of big open spaces. Sacred’s gargantuan world map, I think, hurt the game more than anything else. It was an absolute pain in the ass to ride your horse all the way across the place and stop to fight stuff properly. It just wasn’t fun.
Wide open worlds are fun when they benefit gameplay. See Burnout Paradise with its massive Paradise City that looks huge and maze-like at first, but after some hours of play fits the game like a glove in terms of size. Or, for a closer case, Oblivion, which has a slower pace than an action-RPG like TQ or Sacred and puts more emphasis on the roleplaying, so it makes sense for its big world map to be in place.
So here the answer is what makes sense. Personally, I think the ideal would be the double funnel format TQ followed in many areas: a narrow, impossible-to-miss entrance and exit, and a wide area in the middle, yours to explore. So, essentially, the gameplay is linear and there’s barely any room to get lost, but there’re places to explore.
),and as hooby said you can guide newbz with roads and compass.