Officialish Thread of Nifty Requests

[getter77]

In order to liven things up a tad around here since things have been quiet as you chug along with rounding the game out, I figured I'd throw some requests for "nifty" things out there to hopefully get added into the game.

-Ironman Mode. For the non-scum Roguelike fan out there, a hardcore mode where the death of all is the end of all unless you've resurrection magic handy would be fantastic and, perhaps, not incredibly hard to implement if it isn't already a feature?

-VIDEO REPLAY! This would be, in my opinion, an invaluable resource for the future of this game. The abiliity to "record" your adventure in the game as a full featured video replay that could load itself through the game proper would open up a tremendous world of sharing among the playerbase as an "in the system" playback style would keep filesizes low and allow for ease of sharing. This would remove any sticking issues with people having trouble recording a PC game properly to boot and would surely allow for interesting things. I would pay money for disc containing, for example, a selection of the best voted full playthroughs, challenge vids, and so on. Some freeware games and most console emulators allow for this feature and considering the speed of enemy combat decisions not being bogged down and this being a turn basesd RPG I should think it possible to "keep up" with it all versus some manic platformer or some such. If this is possible and every other thing I mention winds up not followed through on, give serious thought to and DO THIS! Imagine how many good "Let's Play" threads could manifest!

-No complicated method needed to incorporate some of the game's soundtrack into general music listening pleasures---as the trailer already alludes to some fine tunes.

-Weekly or biweekly live chats or youtube's via AIM or whatever in order to reiterate current events in the game's post gold days as the future is wrangled amid hopefully counting money as well as casual conversation and discussions on the game itself and times people have had in it thus far.

-Frequentish updates in the announcements on the mainsite, even if smaller in scope, so as to keep up lively momentum and entice newcomers to visit and interact.

I'll try and think of more and hopefully other folk can think of other "nifty" ideas as opposed to just hoping a Monk gets added in as a character class or some such down the line.

[BlueSalamander]

Hi getter77, thanks for the new ideas.

-> Ironman mode: Am I right that the only difference is that when you save the game, you also have to quit, and when the party is defeated, the save game is destroyed? That sounds doable but is it not just going to make the game outrageously difficult and frustrating? For example at level 1 an orc could kill one of your party members with a critical hit by pure chance and not because of a tactical mistake.

-> video replay: sounds complicated to implement and I don't know of any game that has it? any example please? As far as I can see the game would have to record the player clicks to move, dialogue choices, the results of attack and damage rolls and saving throws, hit points, the position of monsters and their actions and a lot of other things. Additionally the campaign is rather long, can you imagine watching an entire film of someone playing through Baldur's Gate?

-> the music: it uses the midi format and can be played outside the game without problem.

-> live chat: I'm not much into that but you can always use the private messaging function in this forum. Live chat means little time to think about your answers and also is not viewable by everyone (unless I copy and paste into a forum post of course).

-> more frequent updates: sure, good idea but I would rather post only when some work has been completed.

[getter77]

-As far as Ironman mode, what I generally had in mind was how Wizardry 8 did it. While things can fall apart on you due to some bad luck and/or bad decisions, it also "encourages" one to not try and game the...game...with stuff like constant save reload scumming before opening chests until you get what you want, and so on. As it is an optional mode, it'd be moot to normal players save perhaps some kinda extra accolade on the party's clear file not unlike how you earn different titles for beating each difficulty of Diablo II on Hardcore mode compared to normal to signify the accomplishment.

-I watch lots of speedruns and such of RPG's and quite enjoy both the long and short campaigns. There's nothing to say, for example, that it would all have to be done in one sitting....perhaps one could deliberately make a playthrough video in half hour-1 hour parts using saves as the start and stop points of each segment of the adventure. Likewise, there's no rule that the audience up for watching somebody's adventure need marathon the whole thing in one sitting----could watch one part a day, couple a week, one a week, etc at their leisure. I would RECKON, as a total shot in the dark, since the game already has to keep detailed logs of everything that happens in between each save of the game anyways...that this might well be an extension use of it a bit more forward thinking and modern than just making a printout of hundreds-thousands of lines of text and posting it up somewhere so people can see the exciting time that was had. I'm trying to dig up some specific examples of some games on the PC that implement this already...though I want to think at least some of them were realtime ones.

-The main thing for the live chats was for there to just be a general encouragement for players of thegame to chat it up somewhere in a live fashion as opposed to random forum postings. Like an IRC chat...but not using IRC. If somebody then wanted to post the contents of a week's "chat" or whatnot then I suppose they could or otherwise curious folk could just join in for the next chat. All we'd have to do really, I suppose, is for somebody to crete a private room and folk around here could get in and have a good time of it. LIveliness is the biggest concern I have with any new, niche game like this that comes along---as without it things won't develop to their full potential. For example, in my conversations with the dev team behind Kamyran's Eye 2 they confirmed what I unfortunately discovered---that even they knew of no manner of venue anywhere on the internet where there was ongoing discussion of their game or had ever been such; even though the game clearly has an audience scattered and isolated through the world as evidenced by the high score listings they have.

So yeah, anything that keeps people freshly engaged and "finding" the game are things that I'm keenly interested in for the ultimate success of this project.

-Awesome on the music.

-Good deal on the updates. I agree on posting when things have happened, but don't be shy about posting them even if only small things like fixing a couple bugs as opposed to a major overhaul or something. People feel reassured about purchasing a product and taking the time to discuss it when as many signs as possible point to it not being a dead or dying project/lost cause to get into---and many people just don't think to check a forum to see about new posts and such if they see the mainpage has remained static for awhile based on the frequency of past listed updates.

Thanks for responding to my notions. Hopefully some others will be able to chime in with other stuff.

[BlueSalamander]

- Regarding ironman mode: can you please refresh my memory on how it was done in Wiz 8? is it just the save game thing like I mentioned? Regarding random goodies, the only way you can get random items is by defeating random encounters, everything else is set. Regarding reloading to get a better HP roll at level up, this is taken care of already because the rolls are pre-generated during character creation (although there is an option to force maximum HP rolls).

Speaking of random encounters - they can happen in the world map too, and currently you have the option to run away. I think this is best because if you force an encounter on the player he could just reload the previous save to avoid the encounter. Or if it's an ironman mode, and the encounter is too high level, again there would be a total player kill not because of a tactical mistake. What's your view on running away from random encounters?

- the replays: There's a big difference between the whole detail of what happens during a fight, and the results of a fight. The results of a fight are the HP of player characters, whether they're dead or not and their experience. That is what gets saved when you save the game (as well as other data about the game's state). So you see the game would need to save much more information in order to be able to replay past events. Still, that's an interesting concept. The alternative is to record a video with one of the game recording software out there, and I agree it's a pain.

- keeping people engaged: Sure we can try to encourage people but I think in the end it's more a matter of whether the game is good and whether a lot of people are interested in that particular kind of game. So hold on, wait for the game to be released, and if it's good enough I'm sure you'll be able to talk about it with other interested people.

[getter77]

Doom
Quake
Half-Life
Return to castle Wolfenstein (doesn't work for single-player)
Daikatana (I think)
Serious Sam
Driver
Call of Duty
Counter-Strike
City of Heroes
Starcraft
Warcraft 3
Unreal Tournament
Portal
Descent
- Soldier of Fortune
as I remember it was:
/record x
and
/demomap x
- most of games using id Tech 4 engine have record (but it's bugged Undecided)
- Hexen 2 (record need to be started before starting a game)
- probably all games using Source Engine (Half-Life 2 [+EP1, +EP2, +Lost Coast], Portal, Left 4 Dead)
Marble Blast Gold
Sins of a Solar Empire

Above info provided by the fine folks at SDA,

-Wiz 8 Ironman was merely, IIRC, permawipe of party once they all died and save scumming rendered impossible unless you used backups or some such. Once a party died, there was no reloading from an earlier time before death---they were simply gone and it was time to create a new party.

These "fixed" notions you all have in place would mix things up a bit though...seems like I recall hearing about a similar system in Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir. Running from random encounters makes sense in the framework of this game...though I would worry that it could be imbalancing at times considering combat is the meat of the game and just avioiding all of them no sweat seems likely to lead to a situation where there's no hope in the "fixed" places outside of mass grinding eventually----though I guess with sharp enough balancing and whatnot this common pitfall might be sidestepped. I'm inclined to favor Roguelikes' random battles versus classic random encounters---where one has to consider what the enemies have in store this time different from other times instead of "Oh, randomly ran into this giant pack again that is the same as usual...here we go again killing by the numbers with no surprises".

-IIRC, it is mentioned in the outline of the game thus far that there is a detailed turn/action counter available for viewing in a classic D&D fashion as the fights go along and such...a console...something like how in Crawl: Stone Soup hitting Ctrl+p will show the logs of all messages and actions up until that point in the current game. The game already uses the info at least once while you are playing through it, so I figure why not allow for an optional "recycle" of said info to beget said video replays and help to preserve adventures for posterity.

-I agree that the game's quality is paramount. I just know that the more people involved the more likely somebody will come up with a good idea, notice something other folk haven't, and so on. Mainly, as I said, I just aim to prevent what happened with Kamyran's Eye 2 to happen with this game as much as possible----I'd hate to see this forum turn into a ghosttown.

I'm optimistic though! Who knows, this game might even win over the Rpgcodex folk eventually that balked at the trailer.

[BlueSalamander]

Thanks for the list. Of all these games the only one I've played is Call of Duty, and then not long enough to find out about this feature. Yes there is already a record of combat actions (not simple moves though) which could be saved to a text file but in the current form it couldn't be used to produce a video replay.

Wiz 8 Ironman was merely, IIRC, permawipe of party once they all died and save scumming rendered impossible unless you used backups or some such. Once a party died, there was no reloading from an earlier time before death---they were simply gone and it was time to create a new party.

Another thing about ironman, is what to do with a party member who died early if you still want to go on playing with that party? In Temple of Elemental Evil they allowed you to create a new character to replace the dead one.

I'm inclined to favor Roguelikes' random battles versus classic random encounters

Personally I don't like random encounters very much since they can't be carefully crafted and don't help you progress on the storyline, though they were fun in the old Bard's Tale games because of the sheer variety and quantity of monster groups you encountered and because going through a dungeon was often a matter of preserving spell points. I do like the roguelike battles but with a few exceptions all enemies in roguelikes act independently, I've never seen enemies acting as a group. Which might be for the best since you control only one character. In the case of Knights of the Chalice, in my last play through, I didn't fight any random encounter, and I still reached level 19 or 20 by the end.

[getter77]

-I think in Wiz 8 there might've been a way to add in another party member but I can't say for sure. I want to say it was just a case where if you lost 2 adventurers out of your 3 man party, well, time to find out just how well you can figure out to use that one remaining character to puch onward as far as you can or just suicide on some pack. Depending on how rare revival magic and such winds up being, it encourages one to get a bit more attached to the party members due to making their individual values and contributions to the team that much more important.

-On the replay, I do wonder if it still might be worth implementing in even if the record of events isn't quite as detailed as I was imagining it to be. This would also be a helpful feature to have in terms of distinguishing this game from other RPG's on the PC side of things----might even start a trend. Might inadvertently help with bughunting as well since that'd allow for that much more detailed information to be seen at hand if something goes strange.

-You can run into something akin team tactics in Crawl: Stone Soup which just yesterday got a substantial new update. Orc Priests to Smite you from afar while their Warriors attack in melee, other times the Warriors will use a turn to shout and alert the others of your presence, Queen Bees bring swarms with them, and as a Orc Priest oneself you can somewhat direct Orc's you gain as followers---including getting them to pick up weapons and armors. One of the things in the works for upcoming versions of the game is an increased emphasis on team tactics within the game's foes...so that's nice.

-Good to see you still gained levels at a steady clip despite skipping the random encounters.

[BlueSalamander]

Right, I've added Ironman mode to the list of features I'd like to have. After all, it's the player's choice.
As for replay, I think a highly simplified replay of a battle (not the whole game) would be possible to do, but unless a whole lot of people start clamoring for it on this forum, I can't see that happening because even this would require a lot of work.
I'll have to try the new Crawl.

[getter77]

-Good to hear on Ironman!

-Replays can always come along the line, no rule that said it has to be there from day one. Speaking of at first only being able to do a "battle", what about dovetailing that with the earlier notions of one or more secret/post game dungeons and/or "special challenge" fights/gauntlets and having the replay function awaken at first for that since odds are that'd be pretty "exciting" yet self contained material for it? Let it start with the Grand Epilogue of sorts then eventually contain the entire adventure...perhaps..

[Gribble]

In place of point n' click movement allow me to hold the mouse button down and move my party in the direction of the cursor perpetually, like in the Ultima games.