Wish List for Book II {Compiled}

[Mongolian]

Some ideas for mini-games/puzzles:

- Challenge the drunken bar-keep. (not sure how works)
- Duel the knight (no spells allowed).
- Gambling, Tree maze in 50 moves or less.
- Archery contest with monsters
- Logic related riddles

[Evnissyen]

Right: Like Mongolian said, logic-related puzzles are the ones I was trying to refer to. Not random experimentation puzzles or easy common-sense puzzles, but ones that really force you to think.

Of course, this is not as important to me as expansion of characters and story, and the system of interaction and consequences and reputation.

Oh, and... you should all ignore the suggestion I made in my previous post about scrollbars... stupid me, I found them after I posted that, I didn't even notice the buttons. Perhaps because scroll buttons are usually on the right side rather than the left.

[Omensinger]

How about a bank that you can access from each town ?

[Evnissyen]

What's the point, unless there's a limit to the amount of gold you can carry?

(Is there?) :If there is then I think I'd second it, although it'd be easier if we could store gold in chests.

On that note: Chests really should be larger, preferably bottomless. It's a pain to have to spread your hoard among several chests, and then, if you run out of chests in one place, having to expand to other towns. ...But then, I suppose I've mentioned that already.

That and expanding the tiny circle on the map that's so hard to see. :This is the other thing that really drives me crazy. A bold X or diamond might be easier to sight when you're moving around.

Oh, and also I don't think I've mentioned this one:
+ An additional set of quickkeys for spells. You can do this by pressing shift or option/ctrl along with the number.

[Omensinger]

What's the point, unless there's a limit to the amount of gold you can carry?

I was thinking a bank you could store items in. then you wouldn't have to leave a load of bags laying around different towns etc.

[Evnissyen]

Right... the problem of having to spread your stash among crates and areas... I suppose what you're talking about is a more accessible version of the Underground vault? If so, it does sound interesting; I like that place very much. Nice and dark.

It would be much easier, of course, to do what Spiderweb does, for example, and just have bottomless crates / boxes / barrels that you can stuff all the stuff you want into. (Jeff just puts in a scrollbar: problem solved.)

However, at the very least to be different from other games and at the most to 1. further validate the importance of Underground vault and 2. to establish a nice, dark and mysterious area for keeping your stash in... I think I like that idea... provided it's easily accessible (either located in a major town near the quicktravel point, or, preferably, located in a separate place with its own quicktravel).

Oh, and 3. It would add lots to the game. Compound on the atmosphere. The vault already exists, so it shouldn't be a problem to find more ways to implement it. The exposure needn't take away from the "top secret" aspect, since this can be built into the vault itself. The special keyholders get access to the special vaults.

[devinv]

Walking up to a giant black area is pretty weird though too. The image of the adjacent area could be greyed out, or hazy, so it's clear you are moving from one map to the next, while still providing a sense of continuity.

I've thought about two things:


I thought about your second idea but it wouldn't work too well. Because the only way the player could tell if he was on the border of the map would be to find the little dot on the minimap.

And just imagine walking straight forward on a path with trees all around you and suddenly, without warning, it just says "Loading". See what I mean?

[Necromis]

Ok, a thought hit me when reading the new combat options and seeing the difference between the charm spell and the charm cloud potion. I think that maybe it could be worked out that spells give different levels of effect the higher your skill or readied level is. So that as your knowledge increases in casting the spell so do the types of effects you get. Say like Fire Dart, at lower levels just hits one target, but at higher levels can be split to hit more than one. Or can be used to set an area on fire, rather than a single target. I know I am not doing this thought justice, but you get the idea. What do you think Thom?

[Getharn]

I think this has been mentioned before, but recoverable arrows would be a really handy feature. I don't believe arrows are expensive enough that recovering them damages game balance, and I've always found that carrying round a hundred arrows breaks the illusion slightly.

I'm guessing creatures have some (often random) inventory, which results in them dropping the "loot sack" when they die. The way I'd look at it is to spawn an arrow into their inventory whenever they are hit by one - for balance and realism reasons you could have some chance that the arrow breaks, so each arrow hit only results in, say, a 75% chance of adding an arrow to the inventory. I'm hoping this system wouldn't be too hard to crowbar into the existing engine. For added realism, if the arrow fails the breakage check you could add a singleton "broken arrow pieces" object instead, but personally I don't think that would be worth the hassle of implementing.

This also raises the interesting question of whether to spawn arrows in a player's inventory when they are hit by them, but I can see that has both pros and cons, so maybe that's a step too far.

Aside from the requisite engine changes, the only drawback of recoverable arrows of which I can think is that it will result in archery-heavy characters causing lots of monsters to drop loot sacks, which might build up and make the engine run slightly slowly over time. Hopefully this won't be a significant problem.

The one risk to balance with this approach I can see would be for powerful magic arrows, but it's easy to imagine that an arrow loses its power after being fired once, and hence you could still get away with just adding a standard non-magical arrow to the loot. With a slightly bigger stretch, you could apply the same thing to arrows which derive extra damage from non-magical means - so, a barbed arrow loses a bit of its edge after hitting a target once, and only does the same damage as a normal arrow. This keeps the implementation consistent with the KISS principle, as a generic bit of code can spawn in a basic arrow object (with optional percentage chance) every time a creature is hit by any kind of arrow.

If there are other types of projectile (crossbow bolts, sling stones, etc.) you could imagine extending it such that each object has a "recovery chance" attribute, but there's probably no point on me specualting about this sort of thing given that I don't know the engine details in the slightest! Although, having said that, speculation in an information vacuum is practically part of the web's bedrock...

[CrazyBernie]

I think this has been mentioned before, but recoverable arrows would be a really handy feature. I don't believe arrows are expensive enough that recovering them damages game balance, and I've always found that carrying round a hundred arrows breaks the illusion slightly.

So you're saying that carrying around hundreds of arrows breaks the illusion for you, but say... carrying 4 suits of platemail armor in your backpack doesn't??

[Getharn]

So you're saying that carrying around hundreds of arrows breaks the illusion for you, but say... carrying 4 suits of platemail armor in your backpack doesn't?

It would break the illusion, but that's why I don't cart everything I find back to town and sell it - that doesn't usually fit with my character concept. However, that's something I have an easy choice about - if I'm playing an archery-centric character, I don't have a lot of choice but to carry a large number of arrows to "simulate" arrow recovery. Sure, I can continue to do that, I just wanted to mention that arrow recovery would be "nice to have", and doesn't seem too hard to implement.

Of course, I realise there are a hundred "nice to have"s which aren't too hard to implement, but that's no reason not to at least suggest it.

[The Noid]

Aside from the requisite engine changes, the only drawback of recoverable arrows of which I can think is that it will result in archery-heavy characters causing lots of monsters to drop loot sacks, which might build up and make the engine run slightly slowly over time. Hopefully this won't be a significant problem.

That reminds me, it IS a problem in the V1. It doesn't slow things down, but there can be only 1 loot-sack per gamesquare, and newly dropped sacks don't stack their items with already present sacks.
At a moment I was farming the spectre's in the ossuary for ectoplasm, so I'd trigger a load of them by repeatedly stepping on the pressure plate. Since I was a rogue with a very high hide-in-shadows, the spectres wouldn't attack me untill I attacked them, so they'd stay near their spawn spot. Apparently I triggered too many, since one of 'em spawned outside of the map, and while killing them, I got the error that the game couldn't find a free spot to drop the loot-sack...

[wavecutter]

I'd really like to see the spear as a melee weapon.

[BasiliskWrangler]

I'd really like to see the spear as a melee weapon.

Spears are melee weapons in Book II. Javelins are thrown.

[wavecutter]

Awesome, thanks!