The Drunken Lizard Pub

Actually I didn't find the demo part that hard as long as you don't stand there and let monsters come up and pound on you until you die. When you start to lose health or spell energy as a mage you need to retreat to recharge. It's boring, but it beats reloading.

Randomizer wrote:Actually I didn't find the demo part that hard as long as you don't stand there and let monsters come up and pound on you until you die. When you start to lose health or spell energy as a mage you need to retreat to recharge. It's boring, but it beats reloading.

Yeah, I use this tactics too much, it is getting boring sometimes, but I got no other choice.

Bryce, I fully agree with you that the variability of loot drops is way too great. Especially in the early parts of the game, couple of lucky loot drops will make a big difference. For example, I got a skill book and a piece of fairly decent armor from a certain chest the first time, and with another character the very same chest gave me an apple! Not good - makes luck play too big a role in the game, IMO. I would prefer to have hand-placed loot in chests, at least in those that are placed behind hordes of enemies (serving as a reward for beating them). At the very least, the loot drops should be less varied in range.

I also would have preferred the line of sight to be blocked by closed doors and walls. It kills much of the suspence of dungeons (etc.) when you see behind doors and through walls. I would think, that in a turn-based game with a gridded map, the LOS issues could be handled more accurately without excessive computer horsepower devoted to it. Then again, I know nothing of programming. (Related to this, it would be great if the illumination sources would not spill their light behind closed doors and such.)

Items on the ground would be great too. Don't know how big a hurdle this is programming-wise. The memory issues of dropped items (tracking countless items across the world) could be limited by having such items vanish from the ground when you leave the map they're on (some passing by NPC took the axe you left behind - too bad). More than being able to drop items, it would be great though, if there would be items on tables and on the ground that you could pick up - not just in barrels and chests.

As to the difficulty, maybe different difficulty levels could be implemented, so that those über-hardcore players could torture themselves on higher difficulties, while the rest of us mere mortals, play the game on normal difficulty (it's supposed to be fun after all, not result in grinding of teeth and hair-pulling) .

Grue wrote: Items on the ground would be great too. Don't know how big a hurdle this is programming-wise. The memory issues of dropped items (tracking countless items across the world) could be limited by having such items vanish from the ground when you leave the map they're on (some passing by NPC took the axe you left behind - too bad).

It should be almost a non-issue, programming-effort-wise. The issue might be needing art for the lone items, or not wanting to make an "items on ground" container thing for some reason. (Since you have to have some place to drag them from / click on them to bring them into your inventory.)

As to memory, say that each item took 256 bytes (a high estimate, without knowing about the game's internals) and there are ten thousand items in the game near the end. That works out to about 2.4 MB of memory, assuming the most naive possible memory management (keeping it all loaded at once.) I don't think memory is the problem.

Bryce wrote: The issue might be needing art for the lone items, or not wanting to make an "items on ground" container thing for some reason. (Since you have to have some place to drag them from / click on them to bring them into your inventory.)

I would be content in having a generic "loot bag" icon (which we already have in Book I) for all dropped items. Sure, I would prefer to see an item specific icon for the item in question (oh, there's a spiked mace on the ground there), but if the production of all those art assets is too prohibitive - a single loot bag/generic item icon will do just fine.

P.S. I envy you for getting to play Avernum 5 already. Damn you Mac people!