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Message ID: 11084
Date: Thu Dec 2 22:09:58 GMT 1999
Author: Kimes, Dean W.
Subject: A way to fix tedium and predictability was RE: RE: Cler ic/Bard armor quests


I can think of a couple ways to fix that fairly easily. Whenever a Mob
spawns, just offset its location by a random number in the X and Y
directions and pop him to the nearest surface. This would make the game a
heck of a lot more difficult at higher levels where a spawn that pops up on
the other side of a wall is suddenly part of a melee in another room that
wasn't expecting more trouble because everything was 'predictable' Camping
a spawn in a dungeon would become really tough if anyone was camping nearby
spawns as well.

Just the amusement of have the PGT Mucktail suddenly spawn between the two
medd'ing wizards instead of in front of the tanks would be worth the coding
difficulty. This cannot be that hard to code, obviously monsters spawn at
fixed locs, just insert a function call to the random number generator to
offset the database coords passed to the spawner and you'd be done. If
their design is any good, this should be easy to implement.

Kitasi


In all seriousness, Verant has painted themselves into a
corner with the basic game design where nearly everything is
predictable. The same mobs spawn in the same places carrying
the same items and can be killed using the same tactics. The
only things that really require strategy are multi-mob fights,
and exploring. Given the high degree of predictability, it's
virtually impossible to make things challenging - once you
figure out how it works, it's predictable, and no longer
challenging; so they're stuck with making things tedious.
--
John H. Kim