GhanBuriGhan said:
Yeah, but you have no idea if your system eally works in a game.
Sure - it'd need testing. However, Morrowind was totally unbalanced, so if we're comparing it to that, at worst it's:
Unbalanced and reasonably sensible.
rather than
Unbalanced and nonsense.
I think my system (with possibly edited constants) would provide pretty much the same balance as Oblivion's (which is hardly likely to be fine-tuned). Similar balance and more sense is good.
Well, go ahead, mod your idea in, if the CS lets you.
Perhaps I will. I never said it was ths most important thing though. Neither did I say it'd be easy to mod in.
It (or something similar) is just a significant improvement that could have been made in a day - or two if I'm generous.
It would be fixing something that doesn't need fixing, imho, but I am certainly not against added realism in principle.
Like adding physics?
I'm not saying you're pro physics, but the developers are willing to spend large amounts of time and money on that - which is a detail in RPG terms -, and unwilling to spend a day or two on a reasonable trade system.
I am just wondering if its necessary or fair to accuse developers of lazyness, idiocy, or whatnot
I'm not saying the developers are idiots / lazy. I'd say it's probably thoughtlessness. It probably didn't occur to them to come up with anything better. If they did think for a long time about the options, and came up with this, I think that's idiotic.
That doesn't make all the devs idiots, of course - perhaps some of them were passionately campaigning for a realistic economy, but someone somewhere in authority was holding a grudge over a disagreement involving pizza toppings, so chose to ignore them.
There might be many reasons why we're stuck with the painfully nonsensical system we have. I don't know what they are. I do know that at least one of our friends Thoughtlessness and Idiocy were involved at some point though.
because they chose to treat this as what it is: a pretty unimportant subfunction of the game.
Treating it as "pretty unimportant" would have meant spending a few days to get it right. There's no "pretty" in the "unimportance" this feature has been treated with. The coherence of the system has been treated as completely irrelevant.
Will it be an improvement over Morrowind? Probably, and I welcome that. I just hope that they totally ignored the feature. To think that they thought hard about it and came up with this just makes my brain hurt.
- the desire to have a realistic range of values in items, including the wow factor of finding something really valuable
How is there a "wow" factor in finding anything really valuable? Perhaps the first time, a player will be naive enough to think "Great, I'm rich". After that he'll just be really annoyed that the theoretical value is 20000, but he can sell it for 1000.
If there is any wow factor after the first time, it'll come from the properties of the item. The cost is just going to be annoying - as it was in Morrowind: find a 12000 gold sword you can't use, at level 2? Carry it around for five levels, getting more and more annoyed at the impossibility of selling it, then sell it for a tenth of the value in disgust just to be rid of the thing.
Several words spring to mind here, but "Wow" is not one of them.
- the need to avoid letting a low level character becoming too rich too quick (upsetting game balance, and eliminating interesting long term goals)
So don't give the player a load of expensive loot he has no possibility to sell. If you have to give him the loot, and it has to be highly priced, give him the option to sell it at a loss. Having a 1000 item sell for the same as a 10000 item is both ludicrous and totally unnecessary.
- having a wide open sandbox game with random loot.
And credibility? How is it that every tenth low level bandit is walking around with / guarding equipment worth thousands? Randomise loot all you like, but if there are really valuable items, don't have them just lying around / on very low level opposition. It really isn't hard to restrict the player to finding low / medium valued items to start with, and having to work hard to get anything really expensive.
Perhaps Oblivion will handle this better than Morrowind. We'll see. I'm actually confident it might, since the infinite gold of merchants could imbalance things very quickly. Therefore it seems they'll have had to address things from the item acquisition side. I'd be very happy to see that.
Morrowind's method of giving the player highly valuable items, then not allowing them to be sold was stupid and frustrating. I really did find the "Sword of white woe" on my first playthrough of Morrowind at about level 3, not having looked at any tutorials / walkthroughs etc. This sword was worth 12000, guarded by no-one, and placed on top of a bookcase in the middle of a safe town.
Hopefully such absurdity doesn't exist in Oblivion.
Their system may not be elegant or realistic, but if it achieves that balance, than I have no problem with it.
Would an elegant and realistic system not at least be a bit better then?
