cool but have worries,

[Anonymous]

this game absolutly rocks, i love it, there are only two problems, they are big though, not game runiers or anything but potentially, for me anyway.

judging by the demo the game (the world mainly) seems very small, i.e. not much to do/see/kill/explore whatever. Along with this is the fact taht you can not explore, you must be told about a place to find it. Not that this will stop me from buying, since i want to support historical rpgs a lot, especially one that is so damn near perfect. But i worry/wonder that teudogar 2 will also be small, as will later games. Will this be the case? is this due to a lack of world designers?

secondly is the fact that it seems to easy to get the best equipment. For one because stealing is pretty easy, but this aint so bad cause its not super easy but also because it stains your 'death' rep, so i see incentive to be good. But still i can go from town a to town b killing all these foolish bandits on the way and sell their axes and end up with the best stuff while having been in no real danger ever. I would like if after ahile your equipment or your reputaion kept bandits from attacking you, and if there were harder enemies taht would attack you (though rarely) etc.

but still great game, i would love to see a roman/celtic/carthaginian/whatever one as well!
(i especially love the dynamic people)

 

[Wolf Mittag]

Hi, and thanks. I'm glad you like this game so far. Concerning the problems you mentioned:

1) The game (the world mainly) seems very small, i.e. not much to do/see/kill/explore whatever: Unfortunately, this is true. It IS comparatively small.

This is partly a conceptual problem: As a historical RPG, I wanted this game to be realistic, and ancient Germania consisted mainly of huge empty forests and swamps, and there are only few (and very few large) caves is this region of Europe. Without any fantasy monsters to kill or treasures to find, there wouldn't have been much fun in exploring these kinds of areas. So I chose a location/settlement-based game world (instead of a continuous, Ultima-like one).
I tried to compensate this lack of exploration opportunities by hiding dozens of smaller caves around every game location (and random caves on the location where the robbers hold you up), some with wild animals, some with booty etc - but it's still very little, compared to the huge monster-filled dungeons a regular fantasy RPG can offer.

The second problem was that there were no real cities in Germania, just small settlements with always the very same old type of houses; nor were there any professional craftsmen with shops (apart from a smith, perhaps); nor any great variations in lifestyle or settlement patterns: At a certain point of game world design I felt adding more settlements wouldn't improve gaming fun, it'd just become repetitive. So all in all there are indeed just a few dozen locations - a few larger villages, many single farmsteads, a sacred grove, a Roman camp, several forests, a few dozen caves, two or three large caves: basically, that's all. (So, yes: Don't buy Teudogar if the size of the game world is very important to you. Perhaps I should have made this more explicitly clear from the very start. My apologies to all who may feel misled.)

With regard to future games, I'm currently working on a fantasy RPG called DARGHUL: There I can place fantasy monsters everywhere I want, without any concern for feasibility (who cares what these monster live off and how large an area they'd need to sustain themselves?), hide countless magical or special pieces of equipment or treasures, place books or written spells, potions, weapons and the like in huge and deep multi-level dungeons, etc - so the game world of this RPG will be quite large. Teudogar 2, if I'll take on that work, should be much larger too, since the Romans' arrival has made that period's Germania a much more diverse and interesting place, with very different ways of living and settlement etc.

2) too easy to get the best equipment: I don't know. Of course you can make a lot of booty and then buy a chain mail shirt, iron helmet and the like - but the best armor and weapons can not be bought, but must be captured from the Romans (segmentes cuirass) or other special people (magical sword etc). (Here's one more problem with the historical realism: Too few people possessed real armor; so it's true that once you've got a chain mail you'll have a considerable advantage over most enemies. But since the number of robbers increases corresponding to your skills, and since more of them will know enough wizardry to curse or frighten you, there should be some challenges left even if you're well-armed.) Nonetheless, I'll keep this in mind while designing the rest of DARGHUL's game world.

Thanks for your feedback!

 

[fastjack]

re

thank you for your reply (i am the original poster).

The size of the game isnt prohibitive, it is still one of the best rpgs i have played (mainly because of the history). That said i do think that i personally would have preferred to have to travel across the land a la fallout, just so that i could pick to go whereever without knowing what was out there. Also if you think that this would get boring (since itd be pretty empty) one thing to keep in mind is the possibility of adding survival as a more important aspect (not that it isnt already with food and no auto healing). The main reason id like such things is because i like the game so much i wish that it was more non-linear so that i could play it much more, instead of just saying 'wow that was great, now wait for the sequel' aftrer a game or 2, thats just me though.

on point two, maybe it was just me but it felt too easy to get all teh good (if not best) stuff, for me anyways (maybe just something to look at in testing a wee more) . I dont think this would have been such a problem if the different quests in he game had had time deadlines, because like i say i just kinda went back and forth to aquire it all. Ans on a side note, not from the first encounter did i ever fight a difficult opponent, maybe i was lucky (i stole in this game so i got better equipment than i would have had otherwise, and i didnt kill innocents which i know can lead to harder fights . Come to think of it, i dont know if any bandits wounded me more tahn maybe 1/4 of my life.


great game looking foward to the full version so i can kill me some romans! thank you again.

 

[Anonymous]

Yeah i think it would RULE if you added survival elements to it. There is another shareware game that i play that has great survival, called The Unreal World, or URW for short. If you made Teudogar like URW it would be the ULTIMATE game, and i bet you would sell millions of copies Here is the link to the official URW website so that you see what i mean. If you'd like some suggestions i'd be happy to help. Just drop me a line at svullo_is_me@hotmail.com

 

[Anonymous]

Oops forgot to add the link to URW, here it is :


http://www.jmp.fi/~smaarane/urw.html