On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Perhaps a Princess... wrote:
> From: "Perhaps a Princess..." <sarah@...>
>
> >It's too bad sit ins are a bit overdone now. Does anyone else think
> >random death touches are probably one of the cheeziest cop out design
> >decisions ever made? It reminds me of something a 12 year old playing DM
>
> No.
>
> There are THINGS that are going to have Instant Death type of spells. Guess
> what? Gods are the ones.
>
> Even in my tabletop type game, there are situations where we KNOW, if we
> go in and mess with trying to fight something, they are so far above us, we
> will be creamed on the bottom of his shoe.
The company I work for made a tank game. Most of the work we
do involves simulators for the U.S. military, so we made it as
faithful to the real thing as we could. The communications
and map use the same klunky monochrome interface on the real
M1 (as near as we could model it), and the big one - generally
you get hit once and you're dead.
The play testers hated it. We had to add an "arcade mode"
where you could take 2 or 3 hits before being knocked out of
action. (We also had to change the map so it was omniscient
so you could always see all friendly units - something I
guarantee you real tank commanders wish they had but don't -
but I digress.)
The testers felt those were minimum requirements for making
the game playable and fun. Sometimes, what makes logical
sense has to be sacrificed for playability.
> You go up against Cain, you expect to be dead. You try to
The fact that Cazic Thule is killable (without casualties even
- happened on my server) contradicts this notion. If a
well-coordinated group can take out Cazic while suffering
minimal casualties, then giving him a death touch is a
cop-out. You couldn't make him buff or smart enough to kill
players, so you made him do it automatically.
Think for a moment. If CT *really* had a death touch, what
would he do the moment he discovered mortals were messing
around in his realm? DT all of them. Isn't that what *you'd*
do if you were playing CT? If you want a balanced (i.e. fun)
game, you can't go willy nilly giving mobs all sorts of
super-powers.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...