Disclaimer: Haven't played the latest demo or paid close attention to most recent AoD threads because at this point I'd rather wait until I can experience the game as a whole.
- Stop doing all skill and item use in dialogue. Adopted the Fallout approach of using skills and items on objects and characters in the environment to create that sense the player is actually doing something, even if ultimately that something is "unnecessary". Basic example from one quest: player finds stone, has to combine with a rope to create a lodestone, then has to use that on a well itself to pull up the hidden item - currently this is all done in dialogue.
It's all because AoD lacks non-combat mechanics (except for the skill checks, but bare skill checks barely count as mechanics nowadays - it's like saying that you can still call Pong a "game"). No mechanics at all. And that explains everything. Honestly, I myself get pretty annoyed when people compare this game with fallout (because, in reality, it should be compared to Darklands), but let's look at F2's mechanics (hardly brilliant, mind you - the game was developed quickly and by immature designers) and their implementation. So we have this Metzger-Vic-Slavers situation and we want to solve that early and violently. Since you can't beat them honestly at early levels, what can you do mechanically wise?
-snip-
See? Game has some mechanics and allows the free usage of them, suddenly, tons of different approaches is present.
Quoting these because they line up with my main criticism of what I've played of AoD. If I had to pick one area out of the ones mentioned in this thread that I'd most love to see improved upon in a sequel, it would be structuring non-combat mechanics such that the focus is more on players coming up with and executing solutions on their own and there's a greater potential for emergent solutions. Relegating the bulk of non-combat interactions in the game to dialogue selections limits the player in any given situation to the solutions that the designer has provided;* perhaps more importantly, it makes this limitation very salient to the player, who is literally presented with a list of possible solutions. Even if you simply took the exact same solutions and implemented mechanics such that they were accomplished through player-initiated actions along the lines of how skills/items are used in Fallout, that alone would constitute a great improvement IMO.
* On its own, reworking the use of non-combat skills to a more Fallout-like system doesn't necessarily remove this limitation, but it does at least raise the possibility. Besides, to make an analogy: a game may only recognize one answer to a riddle regardless of whether the player selects that answer from a list of dialogue options or is expected to type it in himself, but I'd still argue that the latter is generally more interesting than the former (unless it's a poorly written riddle to begin with).
Take the lockpicking scenario VD brought up earlier. You
could add more dialogue options to any situation involving lockpicking so that the player can choose to pour acid on the lock, pick up the chest as a whole and try to sneak with it at a penalty, and whatever other solutions one might think of. And that would be a nice way of adding some additional options for dealing with a locked chest, as long as you give them some downsides to avoid rendering the lockpick skill a pointless investment. But IMO a better option that achieves the same results would be to set up some basic mechanics along the lines of...
- Sneaking skill - the higher the skill, the closer the player can get to NPCs while sneaking without being spotted.
- Lockpick skill - every (locked) chest/door has some value that you must meet or exceed in order to pick its lock.
- Damage - by doing enough damage to a locked chest/door, you can bust them open. But chests/doors also have damage resistance so that your STR 3 character can't just whittle away at them with a dagger, and there may also be the potential to damage goods.
- Noise - attacking a solid object with a weapon will generate a lot of noise, attracting nearby NPCs who come to investigate (or raise the alarm if it doesn't make sense for them to investigate personally). Lockpicking is quieter, of course. Using something like acid doesn't make much noise, but acid is hard to come by/expensive/doesn't work on some locks.
- Encumbrance - encumbrance provides a penalty to stealth checks and causes your character move slower (so that grabbing some big-ass chest and just running past all the guards isn't viable), and most chests are quite bulky and heavy.
- Disguise skill - chests and other items that the character has no business carrying around and which are too large to hide on one's person are flagged to cause disguise checks to fail automatically.
And then set default values for chests/doors and modify them as needed (thick metal doors have higher damage resistance than flimsy wooden ones, etc.), and let the player go wild. This not only gives the player a greater sense of agency when dealing with a locked chest/door by enabling him to discover solutions on his own, but may also increase the player's
actual agency by enabling creative use of these mechanics - such as making a lot of noise near a heavily guarded room so that the player can slip in from another direction when the guards come to investigate.
Think I may be going in circles at this point, so let me just conclude by adding that I also agree completely with
Kem0sabe's and
Grunker's posts earlier on this page. The Iron Tower team has made something truly unique and special in AoD, and you should be proud of your creation.
