http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/tags/review Discussing games, one brightly glowing comment at a time en-US Sun, 01 Aug 2010 04:15:01 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/search.php http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/im-back-from-beating-the-game#post-219 Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:54:37 +0000 Anonymous 219@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <p>So one monster is linked to one spawn point? It sounds like a sort of mobile hologram. Cool. </p> http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/im-back-from-beating-the-game#post-218 Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:07:03 +0000 trevor 218@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <p>Right now in the 1.1 development, monsters work like they do in WoW; There are designated spawn points, and when a monster is killed, after a short delay (currently about 20 seconds), it respawns back at it's origional position.</p> <p>Theoretically, I could very easily switch this to a CoH system, where there are more spawn points than are generally in use, and monsters can respawn from any of them, instead of being constrained to just one position. Though that'd cause problems for any developer who was trying to go to the monster to change it's level or type..</p> <p>Alternately, yeah, monsters could even be a little like adventurers, wandering around within their home region. But I'm a little nervous about doing that; there are an awful lot of monsters in an MMORPG, and having them go to sleep when not actively chasing a player will be much nicer to CPU cycles.. ;) </p> http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/im-back-from-beating-the-game#post-215 Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:06:49 +0000 Anonymous 215@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <p>Or an idea I had earlier with monster zones. You could define an area in which certain monsters are and at certain levels. They could probably go a bit out, but would mainly stay in those hunting zones. That way you'd avoid being ambushed the second you leave a city.</p> <p>The weak AI of the players seems to have been taken care of, but maybe in a later version they could have different personalities? I.e. an explorer spends more time walking around in different areas(mainly lower-leveled regions, I suppose), only battling on certain occations. A hunter would, of course, kill stuff and reap the rewards. A socialiser would spend more time joining and playing with parties. </p> http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/im-back-from-beating-the-game#post-214 Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:23:27 +0000 Aeon 214@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <p>What about having monster spawn points, and you can specify which monster(s) spawn from them? Then whenever a monster in that region is defeated, it'll be revived back at the spawn point. </p> http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/im-back-from-beating-the-game#post-209 Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:16:21 +0000 Fedora Freak 209@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <p>Well, cool then. I did have a load of towns, so that's quite possibly the problem. I'll play with it. Thanks for your response. </p> http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/im-back-from-beating-the-game#post-206 Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:28:34 +0000 trevor 206@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <p>Glad you enjoyed, Fedora, and thanks for the comments and suggestions! </p> <p>In regards to your experience of everyone hanging around in just a few regions.. in version 1.0.x, players look for a "home town" that's in a region which has been zoned to include their own level, and will perform randomly generated quests near that home town until they outlevel the zone. </p> <p>So if there's a town in a region that's zoned 1-10, and another in a region that's zoned just for level 3, then a user who's level 3 would happily use either of those towns as his home (and will generally pick between them based upon which is closer to where he is at the moment when he needs to pick a home). Once a player has a home, he generally will not change his home until he outlevels the zone where the town is.</p> <p>However, once a region reaches about 70-80 people in it at once, users start to feel like that region is "congested", and if their home is inside that region, they'll start looking for a different home. If there's an alternate home of an appropriate level for them, the users will begin to switch over to that alternate home; again, preferring homes that are near their current location (so they don't end up trudging huge distances across the map).</p> <p>As I'm typing this, it occurs to me that there's likely to be a little bug, where if you have two towns near each other (say, in adjacent regions or even both within the same region), then users are likely to end up feeling congested and travelling back and forth between those two regions, instead of seeking less-congested homes which are further away. If your map has been constructed in this way, that'd probably explain why your users aren't migrating away from the congested zones.</p> <p>I definitely do want a way to specify where different monster types can be found on the map; I'd been thinking about making a separate monster list for each region.. but I like your suggestion better!</p> <p>"dungeon placement, boat routes, cities, and customizing the names of classes and monsters."</p> <p>I'm planning to have all of these except for boat routes in 1.1. (I do plan to have other rapid-transport systems in place for 1.1, though; things like WoW's boats and dirigibles are a neat idea, and are possibly something I'd consider for 1.2) </p> http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/topic/im-back-from-beating-the-game#post-205 Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:33:45 +0000 Fedora Freak 205@http://www.vectorstorm.org/forum/ <p>By "beating", I say because I reached the max limit of subscribers (10,000) and had at least $5,000,000 w/o a loan.</p> <p>The game was great fun, although slightly easy, slightly confusing, and, of course, incomplete. I can't wait until 1.1, seeing some of the other discussions in the forum.</p> <p>Without further ado, my FIVE COMPLAINTS/SUGGESTIONS:<br /> 1 - The game was kind of easy, although it did take me a few hours to win. Once you get the difficulty levels balanced and spend the time to get all the zones down, you can ignore the huge multitude of overpopulated server complaints.<br /> 2 - Speak of the devil! Overpopulated servers were horrible on account of the players' AI. I had the entire map well-zoned, but I still had pretty much every player, from levels 1 to 10 (my highest level was 10), hanging out in the same five zones.<br /> 3 - It being incomplete was an annoyance, and made the game far more simple than it needed to be. I dearly hope that 1.1 adds things like dungeon placement, boat routes, cities, and customizing the names of classes and monsters.<br /> 4 - While we're on the track of monsters, is it possible you could allow us to put down where certain monsters are and where other ones aren't? Let's see how to explain this... like you click on the monster type, and then you click on every zone that monster should appear in. Clicking again would take monster appearance out of that zone. This way, you can balance the difficulty of the monsters to zone difficulty, otherwise you basically just make all the monsters the same.<br /> 5 - It's already been said, but yes, the players need some pathfinding to get around water.<br /> 6 - The instructions weren't very clear. Some things that need clearing-up: explaining the build tools thoroughly and how to lower and raise the difficulty of your game.</p> <p>Am I being harsh? I don't mean to be, so sorry if it sounds that way. Also, sorry if most of this has already been said. I'd like to elaborate later, if you like. Moving on.</p> <p>And... my FIVE PRAISES!<br /> 1 - The concept was absolutely delicious, and you've pulled it off well. With 1.1, it'll be an accomplishment, great for a resume. I'm serious, show v1.1 or possibly v1.2 to a game company that likes RTSes, and I guarantee that they'll be absolutely impressed.<br /> 2 - The whole game presentation was wonderful. I liked the randomly generated maps, although mine had some rather annoying islands. It looked like a whole behind-the-scenes, stripped-down, control-center type overlook of an MMO, which was the whole point, but my point is it worked well.<br /> 3 - Being able to inspect your players was a nice touch. I liked simply following a player around to see what he's doing.<br /> 4 - Wow, I can't really think of anything else. Great game, though.<br /> 5 - So on so forth.</p> <p>Even if it doesn't seem like it, I really loved this game, and maybe tomorrow I'll rant a bit on what I'd like to see included. Thanks for giving me some gaming pleasure. </p>