Right, well, I was going to start on ways to better serve Exploration and Challenge, but I think what's discussed at the end of BW's last post deserves more immediate attention, because it's a bit of a game-changer.
BasiliskWrangler wrote:there is no such thing as over-analysis, there is only insufficient data to reach a fully supported conclusion.
Over-analysis is quite real. It is clear that you have reach this point, and I will show you:
The entire point of the exercise is not to have JUST personal feelings about things, but to strip away what are just emotional biases in gaming to understand how to rationally and objectively to build a better game.
The key point of this whole exercise is understanding WHY someone enjoys something they enjoy, and WHY they don't like the parts they don't like so that the information gained can actually be turned into the knowledge that lets a better game be built.
Are you a Vulcan? Human preferences isn't about "stripping away emotion" to rationally look at something in order to understand
why you like it. It's okay to like something "just because". Why do I like Coke over Pepsi? Why do you prefer red over blue? Why do you like Centipede over Space Invaders? Sometimes, it really is just a personal preference that doesn't require technical or psychological analysis.
Except it's not.
You may not know why you prefer Coke or Pepsi or why New Coke failed, but I can assure you,
COCA COLA KNOWS.
Food scientists (yes, that's a real thing) have been mapping the brain to know the exact reactions of the brain to sugar or salt or fat, and search not just for things that hit the "bliss point" - a perfect balance of calories and sodium to make people crave - but also for the tricks that make the brain think it is constantly starving, and therefore constantly needs more and more.
(Incidentally, New Coke was launched after the "Pepsi Challenge" and declining Coke sales scared Coca Cola into believing that its classic formula was going out of style, and so they reacted by giving more of the difference between Coke and Pepsi - which was mostly in Pepsi's sweetness. In taste tests, the ultra-sweet formula that would be New Coke performed spectacularly (just like Pepsi outperformed Coke in sip-tests of the Pepsi Challenge)... but those tests were flawed because the tests were conducted with tiny sips of drinks, not a whole can. When you're only taking a tiny sip, sweetness is never overwhelming, but if you're downing a whole can, it can choke out most other flavors. People drinking a larger amount will prefer the more mellow Coke Classic.)
(And that's just the flavor - that's not even starting on the branding, and how that works on subconscious associations. Coke, like most industry leaders, wraps itself in classic Americana for the purpose of making itself seem like some trusted older relative, while Pepsi - and Dr Pepper - always portrays itself as the icon of the rebellion against tradition to heighten the distinction. Santa Claus, in fact, wears a red and white coat specifically because Coke branded him that way - before the 1950's, Santa wore green and brown. Coke rebranded a holiday to be its own billboard, with Santa an infamous Coke-drinker.)
The thing is, you are powerless in that conversation because you aren't armed with the language to understand how the game is being played, and you don't even recognize that such things are even knowable in the first place to even start questioning.
When I took my course on the History of Philosophy, one of the things they talked about was how the very first scientists of Greek tradition were the people who looked up at the coming rain storms and just watched how they formed. The other people thought them crazy, and that the clouds were formed by the gods, and were therefore unknowable, but these earliest scientists still just wanted to see and understand how they worked, because they disagreed - they believed there were things in the universe that were knowable.
What I am concerned with is
why I feel what I feel. If I am bored because it seems like I'm constantly doing the same thing, how do I know how to express that, or remedy that? If you assume that nothing is ever knowable, that it's all just subjective opinions, and one man's coming rain storm will be another man's sunny day, then you can't even begin to understand the world, much less seek to exert any influence upon it.
The people who deny their emotions - who pretend to be vulcans - are the people who are most ruled by their emotions, and in fact, the reason that they ever even try to deny their emotions in the first place often has to do with their fear of facing them.
The first step to control is acknowledging that, yes, your emotions are understandable and predictable, and therefore, controllable.
BasiliskWrangler wrote:You talk about wanting to create a system where you aren't constrained by class, but your mechanics actually are built around concepts like a "cleric spell list" that makes no sense for someone trying to accomplish that goal. ... Why do you use a D&D-style spell list for the magic skills, when those were spell lists built to give class-restrained characters greater flexibility with their spells than a strict class straight-jacket would allow?
Wrong. Class doesn't determine your spells, only your Skills do. Your class in simply a moniker to model your character after. Be a Rogue, but spend some skill points on learning Divination magic. Nothing wrong with that.
Except that's not true, whether you want to admit it or not.
Again, you have
enforced min-maxing, (and say that it's entirely purposeful, at that,) and that undermines any attempt to claim that you aren't trying to force players into classes.
While, hypothetically, yes, you could punch all your points into Speed as a stat and "Divination" (you know that doesn't mean the same thing as "Divine" magic, right?) magic, the game strictly punishes any such strategy.
Instead, you made attributes align themselves with certain skills, while at the same time made certain skills possess so much power that they could be used to overcome all the obstacles in the game.
If you want to be a cleric, you need Perception maxed out fast, and you need very high Wisdom to get spells.
In fact, you
exacerbated this need to min/max by making it so that it was impossible to cast any magic at all without putting points into attributes above their "natural" range, and even worse, forcing players to put in nearly 50 points to their Intelligence or Wisdom for all the spells, while encouraging them to go for massive quantities of Perception for the MP regen.
Meanwhile, Dexterity is for the archers, the different melee weapons have different stats, but generally Strength is a good place to go for it.
If you don't believe that the skill people chose to focus upon IS their class, just look at your own forums, and people will say, "I'm playing a cleric" or "I'm playing a ranger". Whatever your weapon skill or primary magic skill (read: the primary way you solve the primary threat in this game, the enemies,)
is your class. If you put points into Weapons:Blades, and take up a sword, you're now a fighter. Your system has made skill and class synonymous.
When I play in that oh-so-hated Skyrim, I'm a stealth-bow-conjurer-alterer-alchemist-except-on-tuesdays-when-I-chug-a-Destruction-potion-and-throw-empowered-lightning-bolts... there's no name for that. I can't put that into a single "class name" besides maybe to say I'm a sneaky mage, but that doesn't start to describe
how I'm a specific mage.
Again, I have to ask, if you didn't want everyone just calling themselves a "wizard" all the time, why did you make it so that they could clear the game pumping all their skill points into just one "wizard class-skill" with mechanics that reinforce that Intelligence and Perception are the "wizard class stats", and encourage, both in the game's mechanics, and in your own statements in this thread, that they do so?
You built a class system, you just don't really realize it.
If you really want to have a more free-form and classless system, you can do so, but it requires breaking apart those skills that are classes-to-themselves. If you had that skill for spells that only let you do sneaky things like unlock doors and turn invisible, and then set it side-by-side as an Intelligence-and-Perception heavy character's alternative to doing the same thing that a Dexterity-heavy character's non-magical stealth and lock-picking skills do, while still making it separate from a "spells that deal damage" magic skill that is the Intelligence-heavy alternative to the Dexterity-heavy bow skills, then you start setting up a series of real alternatives where players might still be defined by the skills they pick and attributes they have, but it isn't so straight-jacketed into all "wizards" having the exact same spell list.
Because right now, there's no reason for anyone putting any heavy investment into "elemental" not to pick the same spells as everyone else, being the same "wizard" as everyone else. If you separate it out into either being a fire-elemental or wind-elemental elementalist, or the sneaky spells wizard, or the conjurer wizard, or the emomancer from Dungeons of Dreadmore, you start to create chances for characters with the same attributes to actually have different skills, and start creating a much larger number of iterations of real "classes" for this game.
However, if you want to truly go into the realm of making a system that is fully classless, (which I think you actually have some animus against, considering the way you react to Skyrim,) then you have to start working at a much deeper level upon the mechanics, and start using the likes of either a training-through-use system, or heavily recalibrate your skill-buying methods to include sub-geometric cost growth on skills. (That is, if skill level 2 costs 5 points, skill level 3 costs 6, skill level 4 costs 7, etc.)
BasiliskWrangler wrote:Wouldn't it make more sense, if your goal was to create a sense that the characters you created were not defined by "classes" to instead have a far greater set of magic-related skills where you specifically invested skill points into "buffs", or "direct damage spells", or even "fire spells" versus "ice spells", along with a "this is a trap-busting spell" skill?
Yeah, this is pretty much what Eschalon is all about. This is my first clue that you don't really know as much about the game as you appear to. You can be anything you want in Eschalon- dabble in Divination and Elemental Magicks, try out some Alchemy, and dedicate as much or as little to it as you want. Is there a lock in your way?
Bash the chest open. Pick the lock. Find the key. Melt the lock. That is 4 possible ways to open nearly any locked chest in the game. How many other RPGs allow this level of freedom? We made the game SPECIFICALLY this way so that any kind of character build could discover a way to play the game to the best of their ability.
You seem a little eager to want to prove me wrong somehow.
Good. If you want to prove me wrong, you have to critically analyze what I say, and what I am trying to do is bring critical analysis to how this game is viewed.
The thing is, though, that may be what you
wanted the game to be, but it failed to deliver upon that goal for the very problems I keep trying to highlight.
Again, this is the problem that Enforced Min-Maxing creates, and which you, yourself, already declared you were trying to encourage. This is, again, a point of schizophrenic game design - you want to say that any kind of class can succeed, but then at the same time say that how you build your character, and min-maxing them to be as specialized as possible is the way you're supposed to win.
Sure, I dabble in all sorts of skills - the mechanics of the game made it so that there's absolutely no reason
not to do so, because trainers are free in the only resource that matters. However, I'm not spending my actual resources on anything but maximizing my one actually important class-skill to its limit before
maybe spreading other points around, because
doing anything else is punished by the game's mechanics.
If you wanted people to actually spread points around to dabble in skills of their choice, you shouldn't have built the trainers the way you built them, and you shouldn't have set up your skill point costs to specifically punish players for trying to add on more skills with triple costs for the first point, and you should have punished excessive min-maxing by making the skills more expensive the more points you put into them.
But you didn't, because you wanted people to min-max, as you, yourself, said in this thread and elsewhere, but now that I'm saying that there's no reason to do anything
but min-max, you claim that it's not actually what you wanted.
This is, again, schizophrenic game design brought about, most likely, by a lack of critical analysis of what it was you were actually trying to accomplish. You have to realize those two goals are in
direct conflict with one another, and the game suffers for it.
On the other note, I can't really take You see, the reason why I dismiss those "choices" for how to deal with a door is that they really don't add anything to the game as it stands.
I mean, yes, I've played several games that let you do exactly the same thing, even Oblivion was like that with mods to allow bashing, and Arcanum is probably best remembered for it, but that's beside the point.
If I'm a wizard that isn't going to want to invest the points to learn lock picking with actual lock picks, I could, hypothetically, choose between using lock melt or fire bolt to "bash" a door down, but... is that really an exciting choice?
I mean, do you really, honestly, tingle with excitement every time you come across a locked door?
There's a reason most RPGs nowadays involve minigames for their lock picking sessions - if all you do is click on the door, see you failed, click again, see you failed, click again, success, then it's not exactly engaging the player any.
Again, part of what you have to ask is, "Am I doing this for extrinsic enjoyment, or intrinsic enjoyment?" Do you actually enjoy the mechanic of opening a chest for its own sake, or just so you can get to what's inside it? (Again, this is like asking if someone is killing orcs in an RPG because they love the combat system, and play it for that act of combat, itself, or are they doing it because they just are trying to level-grind to get to something else? If you're playing a game that focuses heavily upon drip-fed rewards and huge grind sessions, like WoW, then you're talking about extrinsic rewards and often boring combat.) If all the chest serves as is a toll-booth that interrupts the player on the path to getting to what they actually want, then, well, that's not a terrible thing in a game, but it's not something that you can hold up and say, "SEE! We have a mechanic where you have to hit an inanimate door repeatedly until it breaks! Our game is much better for having that there just for its own sake!" Clicking on a door in some way repeatedly until the numbers say the door gives up - whether it is by axe-bashing, fire-bolting, lock-melting-spell, or lock pick, it doesn't matter, they are all engaging the player in the same way, they just require one or more clicks - doesn't actually deliver on any aesthetic, any form of enjoyment for the player on its own terms. (That isn't to say that you couldn't somehow
incorporate it into something enjoyable, like needing to get through a door quickly in a tense moment, so that the actual time spent might matter, but it's still just clicking, in general.)
Worse still, and I will cover this more in depth in the Exploration post I want to make later, there's no particular reason for me to even want to get into most chests in particular, anyway, and I can always just leave a chest there for later, when I'll actually possibly get rubber-banded higher-level loot from opening them later, anyway. Since nearly every chest is randomly filled with loot, and I basically only sell 99% of what I get, anyway, and there are other ways to get money, there's no particular incentive for me to care about getting into a chest, and that ultimately winds up damping the joy I can get out of Exploration, as well.
BasiliskWrangler wrote:Do you want a game where stats are God, and everything is determined by character build?
I favor this.
or...Do you want a game where tactics are everything, and a level 30 character can be beaten by a level 1 monster if mishandled badly enough?
I feel like this is the type of game
you want.
Strategy is everything. So, if we apply this to real life we could say: if you are a fully outfitted and trained Marine (level 30) and you faced a giant sewer rat (level 1), but you "mishandled" the encounter, the rat is going to kill you. Yes, perhaps if you laid on the ground and did nothing while the rodent chewed on you for two days, you might die. Eschalon works the same way: take your level 30 character, strip off his armor, and stand in front of a rat. Now press the space bar over and over until your horrible tactics kill your character. Being able to mismanage and kill your experienced character is not a mark of a good game, only that you suck as a gamer.
So, what I have to ask is do you consider the way that the game turned out, where people are coming up with ways to evade enemy encounters and defeat more powerful enemies through tricks a
mistake you regret? Was it an unfortunate accident that people found out ways to make these "Challenge Playthroughs" work that you want to reformulate the game so that they can no longer accomplish them?
Because what we do have in this game is a level 1 character beating a level 30 enemy, so it shouldn't be all that much
In fact, I'd point to your own fans, here in this thread, and how they are, in protest to how I say the game offers such limited strategy, trying to offer up all the unpredicted, emergent gameplay behaviors they found - are you genuinely calling all those just mistakes on your part, that you wished weren't actually in the game, and that the players had to accomplish everything through just what they put into character skills alone, with no chance for player skill to matter?
Because yes, I do prefer a focus more upon making each battle involve more tactical choices - my problem with those emergent solutions that players found wasn't that they were somehow inadequate, or that I'm
trying to find one perfect solution to every problem, but rather that the situational solutions were far too rare in a game that could deliver far more of them, and that there
was such an obvious perfect solution to every problem, when the game could be built so that there wasn't one.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure you really fully get what I was asking you about, or if you wanted to put the answer you gave so forcefully against tactical choice, and have the nagging doubt that this might be another case of something you are of a conflicted mind over, but for the case of this post, I'll take this statement at its face value, and carry it to its conclusions.
If what you
really want is a game where stats are everything, and there aren't player tricks and strategies that let you shortcut challenges, then the best way to do that would be to take a page from games like Etrian Odyssey, the old Bard's Tale games, Wizardry, most of the Final Fantasys, and Dragon Quest, and include separate combat screens that focus purely upon just using "attack" and "magic" commands once per turn and focus purely upon stats.
In fact, I'd genuinely encourage you to look at the Etrian Odyssey series and it's
skill system since Etrian Odyssey 3 onward, especially, since they, while they used a class system, used a very non-standard one that shuffled up the typical way classes and skills are distributed. (Rather than having just one healer class, they have "Prince(ss)" and "Monk" classes, where Princes/Princesses don't heal directly, but can cast buff spells with a passive skill that lets them heal allies when they buff them, and also heal the whole party passively if they are at full health at the end of a turn, as well as every step out of combat. Their heals are passive and free and constant, but lack the ability to immediately heal an ally who's badly hurt but by items. Meanwhile, monks have traditional healing spells and barefisted melee attack skills, but have to pay their MP (which basically only recovers with item use or leaving the whole dungeon to go to town,) to actually do the healing. They also have a half-dozen different variants on fighter-type characters, focusing on different aspects of either being tanks, fast fighters, powerful fighters, support skill fighters, or debilitation fighters, with some hybrids between them. They way they set up their skills, and then encourage players to just build their characters around using one skill and making it excessively powerful, are worth at least analyzing for ideas when you set about on thinking about how to make your next game.)
Focusing combat down into just hitting the "attack" or "magic" command without having movement may be limiting in terms of what game strategies you can employ (although if that's what you want, then that's fine,) but it also makes combat go faster and smoother, which allows a greater degree of time to be spent on other things in the game, such as Exploration. The Etrian Odyssey series, in fact, makes Exploration its cornerstone by actually using the DS stylus to make you draw your own map as you go, and sprinkling in tons of hidden passageways and the like to find. The movement system in combat essentially just creates the sort of tactical combat solutions that let people avoid having to use their skills by simply walking around the problems or using tricks to circumvent threats.
The reason why this shift from a Roguelike-style "exploration and combat in the same interface" type of interface to a Wizardry-style of combat interrupting exploration and movement would be a good idea for focusing on the character's stats is that, as I was saying earlier, I can play an Abnegation-focused grindy game, but the problem with Eschalon is that its combat is too simple for me to enjoy as a strategic challenge, but not so simple that it, like those Etrian Odyssey/Wizardry styles of games, I can ram through the combat with minimal brainpower and just do it while listening to the news or an audio book so I don't feel like I'm just sitting there doing nothing. Going for either extreme is fine, but sitting in a nebulous middle dissatisfies both reasons to want to play such a game.
If what you really want to do is pull the focus away from having to make difficult strategic choices in combat, (and putting all those choices back into the Character Creation screen,) then, while, yes, it's not exactly my first preference of game, although I've certainly played a ton of games with similar systems, and you can certainly build up an audience by trying to focus more upon your "Core Competencies" of exploration, and leave the tactical combat behind.
I don't think game development is an industry. There is no formulae for a perfect game, no list of elements to choose, for me at least, games are art, their value is more than the sum of the elements. I'm not saying the mechanics aren't important, I'm saying the creator should not be obsessed with them. For example - Baldur's Gate - the mechanics, especially when it comes to combat are far from balanced and still the game can be replayed hundreds of times. And we played it even when it had more bugs than a prison mattress. Why? Because it had something that cannnot be analysed and more over it shouldn't be.