Jump to content

Thoughts on game mechanics


snikrep
 Share

Recommended Posts

So I'm a newcomer to the Avernum games with #5 and must say I enjoyed playing through it immensely. I finished the game on Normal with a fairly un-optimized, organically levelled group (my archer ended up with twice as much Tool Use as Bows, for instance) and still found the difficulty curve spot on for enjoyment: Quest directions which seemed to be clearly leading down the "main storyline" road could be defeated with good tactics even if I got caught flatfooted by ambushes, and tended to kill off my party when I used bad tactics.

 

And the existence of areas off the beaten path, preceded by glaring messages saying "do not pass, fools, for herein lies certain doom," did in fact require heroic efforts to avoid said certain doom. Killing the chief of Khora-Vhyss, for instance, required expending every consumable combat item I had on hand to that point, and left a single party member alive to tell the tale (the mage, who finished the damn slith lord off with his last charge of his last wand)... then, when the interaction dialogue for the glowing Slith-god in the next room came up, I knew it was time to run! Congrats on a well balanced game!

 

That said, there is one thing that I continually found myself wishing for as I played through the game: the ability to restore "unconscious" players back to at least marginally useful status while the party was still out in the bush someplace. I'm the sort of dungeon crawler type who enjoys seeing how far the party can get before being absolutely forced to return to town at the last possible moment, yet was often frustrated in this attempt by having one party member go unconscious in minor fights.

 

It seemed that due to poor tactics or random chance one member of the party would have a high chance of being gang-rushed and slain in even relatively minor fights, leaving me with one of the following options: Return to town just for one guy when three were still at (mostly) full faculties; reload from frequent saves, which would get tedious and felt a bit like cheating as all of the ambushes and whatnot would no longer be surprising a second time through; or press onward with diminished numbers. Usually I chose the third option, so that by the end of the game, my priest character (who had cleverly snatched the Bonding Knife early on and was significantly more durable than his comrades) had accumulated 2 extra levels over the next-most-advanced party member, just from remaining alive through more of the game. The aforementioned clueless archer spent about a quarter of the game unconscious and only got revived when some cunning trap was puzzling the others. And my token Slith spearman had only a slightly more distinguished record at remaining conscious, at least until he learned how to Parry efficiently (somewhere around the Howling Depths).

 

In the entire run of the game my party managed to acquire only two scrolls enabling recovery from unconsciousness (and accordingly guarded them like the Dead Sea Scrolls), and, not being an Anama, my priest only learned to cast that spell after the Vahnatai section. This meant that until the very endgame the above dilemma was constantly the case. The addition of an item or ability (excessive levels of First Aid, or a potion one might craft by burning all that mandrake root, for instance) that allowed a single character loss to not feel like a total party loss / restart situation would have, in my humble opinion, made the game far more enjoyable.

 

Even if it healed the character to 1 health, say, necessitating burning multiple potions or spells to bring the guy to full working order... or healed the character to a state with lessened combat abilities or action points ("still debilitated from your recent coma" or something).

 

Or else, if such an item would be deemed game-breaking or exploitative, at least make it possible to access an unconscious character's inventory while they are unconscious. Pressing onward with three folks often brought me into situations where I really wished I had access to that member's pack. In the early game I had to burn mutltiple inventory slots splitting up all my piercing crystals evenly among my party members, for instance, to avoid the all-too-frequent forced return to town because I had discovered too late that Mr. Unconscious had had the bag of crystals in his pocket before he went down.

 

This sort of feature to keep the ball rolling in exploration mode and lessen the number of "grind-y" returns to town would make an eventual Avernum 6 a better game, in my humble opinion.

 

my 0.02 coins, and thanks again for an enjoyable game!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hear what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's really possible to solve this problem without causing a worse problem, namely that 'dying' (er, falling unconscious) meant nothing.

 

How often do these tedious deaths of one character happen, while the rest are fine? If they don't happen much, then maybe it just isn't a big enough problem to change anything for.

 

If they happen a lot, then adding just a few scrolls of Restore Life wouldn't solve the problem, because I would be hoarding them against some really serious problem later, and would trek back down all the time anyway.

 

Adding a lot of such scrolls or other equivalent items would seriously distort the feel of the game. In effect I could go anywhere and attack anything, as long as one party member hung back to be able to run away and revive the others. This would remove most of the feeling that Avernum is dangerous.

 

So it seems to me that the best solution is just to build characters with a bit more durability. Put a few more points into Hardiness or Endurance, buff a bit more of the time, or drop the difficulty to Easy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Part of your problem was a game design decision to make endurance and therefore health more important in this game. Previously you could use spells to artificially boost health so even a weak spellcasting mage could have the health of a mighty warrior. If you have characters that are under heavy attack, then you need to increase their health and armor them up.

 

In the earlier games which you haven't played, there was no going unconcious. Characters died and you had to go back to town and find a healer to raise them. This encouraged reloading or conservative playing tactics to prevent these deaths. Most of the game testers grew up with this and therefore prepared for ambushes at the slightest whiff of possible trouble.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

but trinity, thats how the game is. I can always just have one guy run away at the beginning of the fight and let the other 3 die. Then, I get back to town and they are all magically there, even though I left their bodies to rot in the ground while I ran away like Sir Robin. Personally, I think unconcious allies should become items that you have to pick up (and are ridiculously heavy) and carry around until you can revive them, but I also agree that if they are, in fact, just "unconcious" it should be relatively easy to bring them back. IMO, there should be 3 states of below zero hp. Incapacitated: a dazed-type effect that lasts until you are in positive hp again. This effect happens when a player drops below zero hp but is still above -max_hp/2. When incapacitated, the character has "effectively" no "active abilities" dex=0, defense=0, parry=0, riposte=0, etc., but also becomes a lower priority target for most mobs. (Some particularly ravenous mobs might continue to attack incapacitated characters just because they are so bloodthirsty they dont' realize there are other opponents to fight.). If a character goes below -max_hp/2 but is still above -max_hp, he or she is "dying" and will lose some small percentage of their max_hp every round until they are healed back above -max_hp/2. Otherwise, the dying state is the same as the incapacitated state.

 

Below -max_hp, the character is dead and can only be revived via the return life spell.

 

Some sort of system like that would make sense to me and retain the idea that avernum is dangerous. Currently, there are few encounters that I can't just run away from with a group of 4...singleton is freaking dangerous though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That system is more complicated, and it goes against Jeff's design philosophy: death is meant to be an inconvenience that you either work around or fix by abandoning what you're doing and healing. An in-between state would be okay, but it's not necessary and it adds complexity.

 

—Alorael, who still generally reloads if any party members kick the bucket. It's an ingrained reflex from years of just about every RPG-like game that isn't also Rogue-like. Not actually having to panic over deaths in the party is a good thing, but not being able to press on like nothing happened is necessary to atmosphere.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

snikrep,

 

Jeff likes his Avernum games to be fairly challenging, and he certainly delivered on this one. IMHO, half the fun is turning the corner, getting your party decimated due to poor planning, reloading, and getting it right the second time...or the third time...or fleeing the dungeon and getting more levels and skills and spells and stuff. I'm not sure Jeff's style of game design is well-suited to getting through dungeons in one shot, especially given the relative lack of potions (_especially_ the all-important energy potions) in this version of Avernum.

 

Like Student of Trinity and Randomizer said, decent Endurance levels are a priority in the early going until you can get the Augmentation and Steel Skin buffs. My mage and priest have 7 Endurance at the Dark River and they're doing just fine. Cross-training your mage and priest types (if you have 'em) so both can minor heal, cast fireballs, bless and very importantly haste also helps a ton, though balancing that against keeping your magic users up to date on the best available spells is a little tricky until you start finding wisdom crystals and knowledge brews.

 

Even though I like well-balanced, prepared-as-possible parties (stacked with all sorts of XP-penalty advantages, to boot), it's really tough to charge through Avernum without being in a constant consumable supply crisis. Adjust the challenge to seeing how far you can hack through a dungeon before your spell energy runs out and that might counteract the problem of losing party members to ambushes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Student of Trinity: While I might count my total party kill situations on the fingers of one hand, single member kills were very common. I had some squishy folks, I guess... my strategy lay in sending one bruiser tank character running into the thick of things while his three compatriots escaped to maximum range and lobbed area of effect weapons centered on the tank. When rushed, the squishies would form a wall-o-summons™ for defense, but often the summoned creature AI would defeat this tactic!

 

I hear what you're all saying about quick fixes for death making the game easier. Then again, it seems the game already has a quick fix for death - if you see an unstoppable monster of doom approaching, send a few party members to their deaths while others back off with a full move and go out of combat.. the monster AI is usually too clueless to pursue, and once you are back at the town, poof! your heroes are alive. It's the walking back to town thing that got me annoyed all the time... death didn't seem catastrophic, just annoying. There was never a point where I felt I had to mourn my losses!

 

Part of the trouble, perhaps, lay in that returning to town back down the route one had come was too "safe"... there was hardly ever the risk that the reduced party might be caught by a monster behind them and fully destroyed, for instance. The only bad outcome from unconsciousness, then, lay in time spent walking about when one could be exploring or fighting. Perhaps the addition of occasional randomly spawning wandering monsters might solve this? Like the returning rockhounds' behavior, but for all the creatures, perhaps. Of course that would leave a window open for powergamers to beat up wanderers over and over to gain extra levels... hm.

 

I guess for me, the fun of the game came in the thrill of exploring new caverns and discovering the encounters therein. Yet often I found myself considering whether loading from a save and redoing a section (stripped of the majority of its explorative fun thereby) was less time-intensive than trekking safely back to town and returning.

 

To put it another way, I had several intense fights in which the party won, but I restored from save anyways, because some member had died and re-fighting the battle was preferable time-wise to the hike to town and back to continue the dungeon (the rat-elevator sequence in Drake Pillars comes to mind). When victories feel like losses in this manner it was a letdown, at least for me.

 

I just hate restoring from saves, I guess. And the mechanics of the game presented a compelling argument why one should do this even when the entire party had not been wiped.

 

I'd even love to see some feature one can activate, say, that removes the ability to restore from save while the party has living members, for instance.

 

Or perhaps something similar to what xerex proposed above -- that party members abandoned to their fate might end up permanently dead, while party members who fell in a battle that the party ended up *winning* might be restored onsite by the quick application of first aid / cpr / potions / etc.

 

EDIT: In a corollary to this , the portions of the game I found most fun were those in which return to town became impossible and one had to press onward to find the next safe haven. Riding the rapids above Harkin's Landing; the sequence in the Howling Depths; and the Vahnatai area all were great for instilling the necessary fear of losing party members, for there was no easy, safe, boring trek back to town to restore them. Write more point-of-no-return sections such as these into Avernum 6 !

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've been playing the game through for the second time with a full party on torment, and everything was going fine until I got the Drake Pillars, where I am completely stymied.

 

Is there a sudden increase in difficulty there, or is there something else happening? I didn't notice a change when I played in normal the first time around.

 

For example, I can't get rid of the rats on the elevator even with an area charm spell and the unstable masses overwhelm me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Swarming is always a bigger problem on torment. And there is a mid-game hole in the area attack spell arsenal, plus the long gap between Daze and Strong Daze. So cheap tactics that worked in the early game die out in the middle.

 

Summons can help fill the gap on lower difficulty settings, as can a couple of spare Control Foe scrolls, or a Jewelled Wand. I'm not sure how much help those are on Torment.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Swarms that don't fall to daze are a problem, but even the rat elevator one has a good chance of reducing the numbers of attacking ones to a manageable level. It's harder, but repeated daze will eventually get most of them.

 

The unstable mass requires you to use a trick of concentrating damage on one creature. Using slow and daze can keep it from splitting since splitter don't split when they can't act.

 

This works even on torment, although it took many tries for my singleton to do the rat elevator. It's a matter of keeping from getting overwhelmed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm not sure I really understand the complaint. It takes hardly more than a minute or two to run back to a town to heal. The whole game has to change to accommodate your playing style?

 

The game already has a way to revive your players in the field: take 30 seconds and run back to a town. Perhaps computer speed matters here, because the people run much faster on my Macbook in A5 than they did on my iBook on A4.

 

However, I agree with the "point of no return" situations. The Howling Depths were truly exciting - no lifelines there, just potions and buffs!

 

Here comes Xerex with another realism argument. Don't you know gameplay trumps realism? If the realistic way is tedious and unfun, making a less realistic but game-enhancing change is definitely better. SO, it's not realistic to not be able to revive unconscious characters in the field, but it's enough of a hinderance to make you careful, but reviving dead characters is also made less tedious at the same time. Same thing goes (I suspect) for the changes to the weight of inventory items. Realistic? no. Fun? yes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So, having started in on Avernum 4, I now recognise the issue... #5's engine allows monsters to break melee combat with my tank, run all the way to my wizard, and swallow him whole with the AP they get for a single round - since they can attack for a mere 1AP. In #4, where the wizard gets a round of warning if a monster is coming for him - since the beast needs 5AP to take a swing at him - the "one guy dies in most combats versus ordinary mooks" problem never happens. I've found even on Hard mode that I'm never doing the back-to-town-early thing. I guess #5 just wasn't designed for the squishy glass cannon ranged attacker character type smile

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jeff told me during testing that A5 wasn't going to have anymore glass cannons. He was upset at seeing spellcasters with 230+ health in the Azure Gallery with only 4 endurance and high experience penalties. This game needs some modification of tactics from the earlier games.

 

A4 changes in game engine eliminated the wait command that allowed you to go at the end of the round so you could slow monsters and haste yourself for the next round.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote:
Originally written by snikrep:
#5's engine allows monsters to break melee combat with my tank, run all the way to my wizard, and swallow him whole with the AP they get for a single round
That's because your wizard is too close. Get him a bit further away, and it won't happen so much.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The combat in A5 is preferable to the combat in previous offerings. Jeff seems to have taken certain high-powered combat antics from scenarios and has done a fairly decent job at capturing his engine's capability for combat. It's simply everything else that I found lacking, especially those stupid, blocky Geneforge graphics.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...