AD4DClickX
"Stockades, gnomer, SM
Won't you join me, on an instance farming run
Let me hit the vendor, free up some bag space
Once I repair, I'll be good to go"
-Pure Pwnage, World of Warcraft is a Feeling
This is going to be long.
So I have this idea for my roguelike. It's been in my head, approximately ever since I lent the laptop out and watched Zero Punctuation's review of Tabula Rasa. I'm not sure if the idea is somehow skewed by the games I've mostly been playing this year, but I think it's a good idea anyway.
I play first-person shooters. And roguelikes. And some RTS. And 4x games. And turn-based strategy. And RPGs. And driving games. And sports games (they are fun, but I've never bought one). And beat-em-ups. And the very occasional platformer. Remember this list, there'll be a quiz on it later.
Lets take a popular game completely not at random: Pokémon. I was going to say WoW, but I thought my argument would hold a little more water if I used a game example I actually play. I realise some of you may not be reading this sentence right now because you saw the opening para or Pokémon and decided to skip this. Your loss.
So everyone should be vaguely familiar with the game, right? In addition to the storyline, the game is all about catching 'em all. That's fine. However, catching 'em all doesn't require any skill. You need time, patience, a decent strategy and/or dumb luck, but at the end of the day anyone can do it.
Compare that to a first-person shooter, deathmatch-style. There's some strategy involved, though not a lot. Dumb luck can help too. But at the end of the day if it takes Twitchy 50ms to aim and fire but Slowpoke needs 150ms to do the same, then Twitchy is going to win out most of the time. Oh look, skill.
Okay, I'm going to get to the idea already.
I don't think all gaming should be twitch-based. As stated before, I enjoy a number of turn-based formats. However, if a few more things involved skill then a lot of grind can be taken out of games.
For example: my idea. Making items seems to be a common-ish element of a number of (MMO)RPGs, or at least the one that harkon got me to play for a while. It seems the common thing is to grind away at infinite mobs to get the items, the click a few buttons to actually make the item. What if it were easier to find the components/ingredients were more common, but it took more effort to make?
Let's say you wanted to make a sword. In some games you might have to kill a lot of monsters to get some 5% drop items, then all you have to do is stick them together. In my system, the drop would be pretty high - 50%, say. However, to make the sword, you're presented with a nice screen that looks like a forge or something. You need to control the temperature of the forge, and hammer the metal into shape, maybe with the mouse. The metal would be various shades of red all the way up to white to represent temp, which should be rather nice in the age of 16 bit and better colour. Obviously you need a certain temperature to make the sword properly, but insert relevant details here as I know little to nothing about making swords. There would be optimal timeframes and methods, maybe things that need to be done ASAP, and therefore, speed, skill and practice to get better at making the sword.
Now Pokémon actually has a minigame for making "poffins", which you feed your Pokémans [sic] as stat alterers. How well you perform on the minigame affects how powerful your poffin is, but the system is flawed a little since you can just make more poffins to feed if you can't do them well and it's fairly easy to farm up the ingredients. If you're making swords, well, you can't just wield five of them of you're crap at making them. Of course, someone else who makes swords can make you one. Maybe there needs to be some sort of penalty for using a sword that someone else made, even if it's something like everybody being able to tell that you had to get someone else to forge your beatstick. I don't know, but you get the picture.
This is just the idea I've had. I doubt I've expressed it adequately but you should get the gist. In games like these, roguelikes, MMOs and such where you're levelling up, killing people and taking their stuff and etc. it gets boring to have to spend hours doing the same thing. I guess if this sort of thing was implemented, it'd force game development types to focus on more content in the game, rather than relying on the grind to keep users interested. That sounds like a good thing.
Thought for the day:
Sherbert slurpees are a good idea in theory, but the execution is a little lacking.
Won't you join me, on an instance farming run
Let me hit the vendor, free up some bag space
Once I repair, I'll be good to go"
-Pure Pwnage, World of Warcraft is a Feeling
This is going to be long.
So I have this idea for my roguelike. It's been in my head, approximately ever since I lent the laptop out and watched Zero Punctuation's review of Tabula Rasa. I'm not sure if the idea is somehow skewed by the games I've mostly been playing this year, but I think it's a good idea anyway.
I play first-person shooters. And roguelikes. And some RTS. And 4x games. And turn-based strategy. And RPGs. And driving games. And sports games (they are fun, but I've never bought one). And beat-em-ups. And the very occasional platformer. Remember this list, there'll be a quiz on it later.
Lets take a popular game completely not at random: Pokémon. I was going to say WoW, but I thought my argument would hold a little more water if I used a game example I actually play. I realise some of you may not be reading this sentence right now because you saw the opening para or Pokémon and decided to skip this. Your loss.
So everyone should be vaguely familiar with the game, right? In addition to the storyline, the game is all about catching 'em all. That's fine. However, catching 'em all doesn't require any skill. You need time, patience, a decent strategy and/or dumb luck, but at the end of the day anyone can do it.
Compare that to a first-person shooter, deathmatch-style. There's some strategy involved, though not a lot. Dumb luck can help too. But at the end of the day if it takes Twitchy 50ms to aim and fire but Slowpoke needs 150ms to do the same, then Twitchy is going to win out most of the time. Oh look, skill.
Okay, I'm going to get to the idea already.
I don't think all gaming should be twitch-based. As stated before, I enjoy a number of turn-based formats. However, if a few more things involved skill then a lot of grind can be taken out of games.
For example: my idea. Making items seems to be a common-ish element of a number of (MMO)RPGs, or at least the one that harkon got me to play for a while. It seems the common thing is to grind away at infinite mobs to get the items, the click a few buttons to actually make the item. What if it were easier to find the components/ingredients were more common, but it took more effort to make?
Let's say you wanted to make a sword. In some games you might have to kill a lot of monsters to get some 5% drop items, then all you have to do is stick them together. In my system, the drop would be pretty high - 50%, say. However, to make the sword, you're presented with a nice screen that looks like a forge or something. You need to control the temperature of the forge, and hammer the metal into shape, maybe with the mouse. The metal would be various shades of red all the way up to white to represent temp, which should be rather nice in the age of 16 bit and better colour. Obviously you need a certain temperature to make the sword properly, but insert relevant details here as I know little to nothing about making swords. There would be optimal timeframes and methods, maybe things that need to be done ASAP, and therefore, speed, skill and practice to get better at making the sword.
Now Pokémon actually has a minigame for making "poffins", which you feed your Pokémans [sic] as stat alterers. How well you perform on the minigame affects how powerful your poffin is, but the system is flawed a little since you can just make more poffins to feed if you can't do them well and it's fairly easy to farm up the ingredients. If you're making swords, well, you can't just wield five of them of you're crap at making them. Of course, someone else who makes swords can make you one. Maybe there needs to be some sort of penalty for using a sword that someone else made, even if it's something like everybody being able to tell that you had to get someone else to forge your beatstick. I don't know, but you get the picture.
This is just the idea I've had. I doubt I've expressed it adequately but you should get the gist. In games like these, roguelikes, MMOs and such where you're levelling up, killing people and taking their stuff and etc. it gets boring to have to spend hours doing the same thing. I guess if this sort of thing was implemented, it'd force game development types to focus on more content in the game, rather than relying on the grind to keep users interested. That sounds like a good thing.
Thought for the day:
Sherbert slurpees are a good idea in theory, but the execution is a little lacking.