[crossfire] What about a gameplay revolution?

[Juha Jäykkä]

>   That's a bit different game.

I agree: I'd like to see CF stay an RPG with major hack and slash content. The 
amout of H&S might be too high at the moment, but I do not think that's 
because of H&S, but lack of other content - so we come back to content again. 
Personally, mining for diamonds instead of fighting for them in order to use 
them in making a ring might be more interesting. Also, making almost anything 
with alchemy, jewelry etc is quite difficult unless you have a script which 
keeps on trying. That's bad - beginners don't have scripts. Also, those 
skills increase way too slowly to ever really get above level 10 or so 
(again, without a script). And creating some of the fancier rings, for 
example, at level 10 jeweller...

>   The combat rebalancing is slowing down combat, so does give player a bit
> more time to think, which is a good thing.

And let's not waste that effort!

>   Yeah, there are different approaches.  If players craft their own
> weapons, then one could find different components that give different
> bonuses - instead of the existing armor improvment logic, maybe you find
> something that gives it 5% of fire resistance, or +1 str, etc.  And you can
> go and choose how to combine those different pieces together.  Maybe as a
> way to burn up money, you have the empty weapon sold in towns.

This is more or less what I proposed a year ago: to define what ingredients 
are required to get, for example, magic resistance +1 to an item. Suppose 
that is an eye of the beholder (I'd like to see some logic in this so players 
might guess that an eye of the beholder, a monster with 100% magic 
resistance, might come handy in crafting stuff to grant magic resistance). 
Now, you might need 1 eye to get +1%, 100 eyes to get +10%, and 10000 to get 
full immunity (if that's even possible), so it becomes progressively harder 
to get higher resistances. Or exceeding +10% might even need some other 
ingredient as well or what ever. But these ingredients should be the same for 
rings, swords etc. Of course, then we need also the rign or sword itself. 
That, too, might be crafted by the player - perhaps level 1 jeweller can 
craft a ring which can consume 1 ingredient (not ingredient type: just one 
single eye of the beholder), level 2 can craft a sword which can consume 5 
ingredients etc (or whatever progression we wish). And then nice XP from 
crafts, too, so they actally do increase in levels, too.

> is just a stick someone picked up after all).  So now instead of every orc
> dropping a pile of stuff, maybe every 4th orc drops one item type of thing.
>  Drastic reduction in treasure - it also means that when you do get
> something, it is at least a little bit more exciting.

I prefer the realism of orcs dropping whatever they were using in the combat, 
even though it creates lots of loot. For orcs, this probably is not a problem 
either, since 99.9% of orc-loot becomes worthless very quickly. The same is 
true for most, if not all, currently generator-produced creatures: they 
rarely carry anything magical (except pixies and vampires). The fact that 
fire (if used) burns some of this loot helps somewhat with the excess, but 
otherwise I don't think it's a problem.

Excess loot only becomes a problem when you go kill titans, death knights and 
such, but the rebalance probably reduces their numbers so drastically that 
there should be no problem there either. Besides, I *still* have never seen 
many of the higher power stuff, like Rings of Power (not pow +somthing, 
but "the Three Rings for the" ... and the Ruling Ring as well). And I've 
searched and searched...

Also, making extra archetypes like "broken shield" (or the 0-100 "condition" 
scale discussed elsewhere) might be realistic for loot dropped by dead 
creatures: if you just smashed an orc with a morning star, chances are its 
plate mail is not in prime condition any more; likewise for other stuff, too. 
So make them drop smashed items. Shops won't pay for them, the player may fix 
them, but since these would be normal items (magic will of course vanish if 
item is broken), repairing them is probably not what most players want to do.

>   And as a new player, I'd get turned off pretty quickly if I logged in,
> and have a list of a few beginners dungeons I could explore, only to find
> that they have all been cleared out.

I rather liked what was proposed earlier: that monsters would gradually return 
to dungeons, map areas etc. That would give an added feeling of realism, 
would solve problem with cleared out maps and might even give a surprise 
every now and then, like the place which was infested by kobolds for years, 
and to which kobolds returned eventually no matter how many times they were 
cleared out, would suddenly, after latest clear-out, become infested by 
goblins, for example.

A related question: is there something preventing us from profiting from the 
work done at forks of cf? It seems some of them already have some of the 
features we desire. Heck, I don't even know if cf is GPL, BSD or what it 
is...

-Juha

-- 
		 -----------------------------------------------
		| Juha Jäykkä, juolja at utu.fi			|
		| home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/		|
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