Regeneration of Monsters

[realmzmaster]

Regeneration of monsters is why action rpgs put in teleporters, rebirth fountains etc of some type. No one wants to redo going through hordes of monsters again because a quest sends you back through the area where you killed all the monsters. Regeneration is an annoying part of action rpgs. If you save and exit from an action rpg and reload every monster regenerates!!! You of course are back at the last city you visited. The teleporters enable you to avoid the regenerated monsters and continue the story.

The point of regeneration in action rpg is in case you need more experience points or you lost a quest item and need to go back and get one.

Slow regeneration would be acceptable, but if I am have a level 20 character it starts to get old to have to keep killing level 1 monsters. There has to be a balance. My suggestion would be for the program to check your level and regenerate monsters that would be somewhat of a challenge to the character. Rather than respawn 15 1 level monters, maybe spawn three 5 level or 1 15th level monster in a region.

Of course this also requires more work, especially if the monster level is geared to a particular map.

[Necromis]

really it isn't that hard to have each map *Region* have it's own set of monsters types. At least from a coding stand point. It becomes difficult on the artwork, sounds, and such. Book I kept the number of different monsters relatively low. Even all the salamanders were simply larger different colored versions of each other. All you have to do from a coding stand point is assign a value for each map section, and then assign that value to each monster set associated with that map. Then when respawing in a swamp, for example, it would be all swamp related monsters who's power level relates to the character level.

[Mongolian]

Not sure if this is sidetracking this conversation but:

One of my all-time fav aspect of book is NO RESPAWNING. I wouldn't mind seeing respawning in some kind of aspect, but I extremely enjoy the fact of not having to keep reclearing the same area killed area.

[IJBall]

I personally think that at least some above-ground maps should slowly repopulate with beast/monsters/goblins over time (days).

Or, rather, I think Book II should be more like something like Ultima IV, where there's some non-zero chance that you will suddenly encounter random monster(s) at any given time (i.e. not just when camping).

That said, something that I think definitely should repopulate with monsters over time is DUNGEONS.
Maybe not something like the two "cellar" dungeons in Book I. But places like the Ossuary, the windy caves, Grimmhold's maintenance level, etc. from Book I - dungeons and such should repopulate monsters over time in Book II.

Anyway, that's my $0.02 worth.

[The Noid]

I would like some respawning monsters, makes the place feel less empty.
Once you're level 15 you can just ignore those salamanders. They won't be able to harm you anyway, so if you don't feel like killing 'em just walk past.
I think monsters should not respawn on maps with npc's that can be killed by those monsters. Because it sucks if that npc gets killed by those monsters.

[CrazyBernie]

There's always the option of having creatures of a lower level to run away when there's say, a 5-10 level difference. I'd say a max 20% respawn amount would be reasonable (20% of the original population in a given area). But lets not opt for anything that would increase the development time by a large amount....

[Gesion]

Just to throw in my thoughts on the subject. I would rather have the above ground areas never respawn unless there is a specific dangerous region that is just crawling with monsters. In place of respawning I would rather see a small chance of a random encounter. I also think that random encounters should pull you out of fast travel as well. Having said that, I don't mind creatures repopulating a dungeon after some time.

[Getharn]

Respawning monsters seems to be one of those issues that often split opinions right down the middle, and everything in between - along with other contentious issues like realistic handling of food, multiple denominations of coinage, limits on resting and natural healing, etc.

I can see arguments both ways, and like a lot of these issues, there seems to be a bit of a fun / realism balance. On the one hand, I can see why people don't want to trawl maps as a 15th level character, having to slowly wade through swarms of 1st level monsters just to get to the other side of a forest. On the other hand, I can see the fun and excitement of a surprise encounter, perhaps when the player's least expecting it and in poor shape for a fight - even a low-level monster could make an interesting challenge under those circumstances.

My personal feeling is that some form of random encounter would give the best balance. So, once you've cleared out an area it's a lot safer, so your chance of encountering anything is very low... However, there remains a small chance of bumping into something which could cause you hassles. If you've been careful to keep an emergency stock of potions and the like, this shouldn't cause players much hassle, but incautious players could end up in trouble.

This sort of ties into one of my (few) gripes about Book I, actually - monsters stay frozen in the same locations when you leave a map. Also, they don't seem to follow you between maps, which gives you an "easy out", but that's not quite so bad. Personally, I'd like to see monsters return to their approximate spawn area once a map's been left for a certain amount of time (including time spent resting), and preferably also heal at approximately the same rate as the player. This delay could be tied into some form of respawning, so after the same amount of time, an area has one or two random monsters re-added to it (up to some per-area limit).

Anyway, it's just an idea. I don't think it's a huge issue either way, to be honest, and there may well be other design constraints that aren't immediately obvious which make respawning much trickier - I could see that having to specify detailed per-area respawn criteria could increase area build time to debatable advantage, for example. (Primarily due to increased play-testing and QA requirements, not actually specifying the criteria in the first place).

[waltshooter]

My suggestion would be for the program to check your level and regenerate monsters that would be somewhat of a challenge to the character. Rather than respawn 15 1 level monters, maybe spawn three 5 level or 1 15th level monster in a region.

Gods, no! "Scaled" monsters was THE MOST complained about issue with Oblivion. What's the point of gaining levels, when your adversaries scale with you? Thankfully, there are mods out that solved the issue.

I think of it this way ... Instead of my 15th level warrior striking fear into the hearts of puny goblins, I now have to worry about whether I can take on that group of taurax (where the goblins used to be).

Nor should the experience you get for slaying (say) a lowly fanged salamander change, just because you're a higher level. After all, isn't that why it takes more experience each level to go up to the next? IE; You have to kill more salamanders to go from (say) level 5 to 6, than you did to go from level 1 to 2.

[Getharn]

Gods, no! "Scaled" monsters was THE MOST complained about issue with Oblivion. What's the point of gaining levels, when your adversaries scale with you? Thankfully, there are mods out that solved the issue.

I agree that the situation in Oblivion was fairly irritating at times. I can see how it happens, though - developers think "hmm, we want to put random encounters all over, to keep the game interesting, but as it stands most of them will just be an annoyance to higher-level players... I know, let's make sure the encounters are meaningful by scaling them!". Taking a more cynical view, one could say that it's a cheap way to prolong the play-through time of a game, and hence claim it's bigger. Luckily, I'm not quite that cynical.

All of that notwithstanding, I believe that the fundamental idea of making sure that areas of wilderness are never quite entirely safe is reasonable, however. My personal belief is that low-probability random encounters are the best way to resolve this, though. I don't think it matters if the monsters are too low level for the player (or too high for that matter), as long as the player has the option to flee, or otherwise avoid the encounter.

I think it is OK to have some degree of scaling, but kept within carefully specified limits. When designing Neverwinter Nights areas for persistent worlds, I used to assign a level range to the encounter - so, there were certainly easy and hard areas, but within those limits there was a little bit of flexibility to balance overwhelming players and giving them a challenge. The way NWN actually handled this was that one gave it a list of monsters to choose from, and a minimum and maximum number to spawn, and it would attempt to create an encounter level which matched the player's level, but within the specified constraints.

This approach seemed to work quite well.

I tended to define many encounter zones on a map, but give many of them only a small chance of triggering when the player entered them. They were also set up to only "re-arm" after a moderately long delay, and these two factors combined to keep them feeling pretty random - most of the players didn't even realise there were pre-defined encounter zones. So, it didn't matter so much if there were a lot of high-ish level encounters on a map, because only a truly unlucky player would trigger several on a single trip across it. These random strikes of misfortune were infrequent enough that they didn't cause players too much frustration, but just frequent enough to keep players on their toes.

I'm quite keen on keeping players on their toes. If there's no element of the unexpected in a game, I think it risks becoming rather banal.

[waltshooter]

That's pretty similar to how the Oblivion mod I used worked.

IE; a certain dungeon was the "province" of vampires. With a low-level character, you definitely didn't want to go there! But at some higher level, you began to ponder the possibility of attempting it. And when your level got high enough, you could go there without a second thought.

IMO, it makes more sense to have different levels of creatures in different areas than to have "scaling" monsters. That way, if you're not tough enough to handle (say) vampires ... you avoid where they tend to hang out. Kinda like how yuppies on mopeds tend to avoid "biker bars".

[Slushduck]

I feel that monster re-spawning is a great idea, but only when it is logical and not random.

They should come from somewhere, and I should be able to go there and stop them.
i.e.: I should be able to see a potential encounter beforehand and decide if/how I want to engage it or not.

IMO, constantly randomly regenerating monsters from nowhere and throwing me into a fight really destroys the feeling of progression and overall believability of the environment.

[Necromis]

but Slushduck, remember you are just one adventurer in a large world. There is no way you could destroy all of animals/monsters alone, so there would always be repopulation. Thus there should always be some type of respawning of animals/monsters.

[Slushduck]

Here's some examples of what I meant by "more logical" vs "random"

"Random"
Walking around, beautiful trees, landscape, rivers etc.. Then suddenly I'm engaged in combat with 5 salamanders.
-much like the "rest for too long" event -I hope EB2 doest go this route wrt respawning monsters.

"Logical"
-bees generating from a cave which is home to the queen bee.
-much better IMO, as I can see the bees before engaging them, make a decision, sneak around and discover the source, kill the queen etc.

With a "logical" setup you can randomly generate appropriate encounter sources, then let those generate wandering monsters.
NPCs can talk about these in town. "A bunch of thieves just set up camp inside the scary forest" etc.

Take it another step and you have the thief leader generating these encounter sources every x days or whatever.

Now I have a potential sub mission within the well designed missions of the game -expanding my experience.
I can overhear the thieves at the encounter source talking about their source (the thief leader) and now I can go hunt that person down and stop the chain.

Then maybe x days/months later the big bad leader generates another thief leader etc...

At the end of the day I would hope to eventually rid the world of all the nasties, making it safe for my children to frolic in the forest once again. =]

[Necromis]

well the random works with a slight modification. Especially the way book one was designed, if it is the same way in book two. Each time you load a map it would generate the monsters/animals based on behind the scenes logic. So it wouldn't just *pop* right up in front of you like camping. And again I will say towards your later part of the post. It don't happen in the real world, so why should that happen in Eschalon? LOL