[crossfire] Things to fix

[Alex Schultz]

On Thu, 29 May 2008 22:37:38 +0200
Nicolas Weeger <nicolas.weeger at laposte.net> wrote:
> The game is missing lore. Some is on the wiki, but not much is
> integrated in the game itself. Also, many many maps are missing hints
> relative to their location or purpose (warrior tower, ...).
Yes, though as far as locations, I'm not sure of how to even give hints
for some locations. The Warriors Tower for instance, can be found by
following the road to the north of scorn to the end of it, then
searching in the northeast direction, however the area to the northeast
is rather barren and I'm not sure what would be a decent hint for how
to find it there.

> So we need people to first incorporate the existing lore, then add
> missing one, into a coherent thing, then add hints to various places
> or things. Ideally, *all* houses and maps could have a whole story
> (ok, not a whole quest maybe, but some background).
I would say that some places might be slightly excessive to have a
'whole story' with, but for sure very many places need more than there
currently is.

> I'd like to expand towns to let's say 5 times their current size.
> This would enable even more things, and make the scale better IMO.
> Ideally, the world itself could be much expanded.an interesting plan
It sounds like would be interesting in some ways, however I'm unsure of
what would really be solving in terms of player experience to just add
more size to towns or bigworld. There's already plenty of cheap
real estate in Bigworld :)


> I'm not sure of the best way to put lore ingame. Currently we have
> books (random things), NPCs. I added some professors in Navar
> university, one can tell you a long story about Lorkas if you ask.
> Things to take into account, IMO, are: one NPC shouldn't know
> everything of the world, or maybe even all the details of one thing.
> On the other hand, it can be weird to have exactly all the people you
> need to learn things...
> 
> Opinions on how to present lore or on those issues?
I'm not entirely sure really in some ways. If it's particularly key
lore, maybe we could do more of things almost like "cutscenes" using
cfanim or something? Besides that, I don't think there's too much that
can be done besides occasional information in

> The combat rebalance needs to be finished. Mark, how can we help you
> on that? Also, do people have comments about the current hand to hand
> combat rebalance? Can be seen on the Ailesse servers (one permadeath,
> the other non permadeath).
> What about general item/monster fixing/balance?
In general my thought about these re-balancing things, is it would be
really nice if we had some "reference points" of what we would call
balanced. Deciding things like "How long should it take a typical level
10 warrior to kill a typical level 10 monster?" or "How powerful a
sword makes sense for a level 10?". Of course, I wouldn't say
quantifying and deciding such things is necessarily easy, but I think
we should make decisions around the "game experience". As far as combat
goes, I think it's mainly about three factors:
* How long does it take to kill?
* How risky is it to kill?
* and how much does it benefit the player to kill? (exp, items, etc.)

One thought about the first and second ones, is it might not be too hard
to make a calculator for those using a reference set of player files,
if we think it might be helpful to be rapidly get a better idea of what
a given monster stat change means for the game experience.

> IMO, the best way to progress is "game experience-driven
> development": develop things because they add stuff to the general
> ingame atmosphere, not for the sake of it "because it's cool". In the
> same way, we should avoid the "not invented here" syndrom and try to
> use existing libraries when they exist.
For sure! I'm personally trying to think of that more these days, such
as instead of thinking "Ew, the protocol is messy, a rewrite would be
nice", thinking of "Well, what in a protocol would improve the game
experience?" (that specific case is another topic that I won't go into
deeper in this thread)

Alex
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