Codex Interview RPG Codex Interview: Malevolence - the endless RPG

[Bulba]

Sounds like definite if you're a sandbox gamer. Devil, of course, will be in the gameplay, but I'm already liking the philosophy of not letting you powermax and randomizing things like the spells. I'm interested to see if they can avoid the curse of so many open-ended games, though, in the form of lack of closure. Many seem to just end up meaningless if you play for too long (something narrative games prevent by cutting you off). Maybe there'll be some sort of in-game attainment or challenge that will cap the whole experience.

As they said there will be a large spread of difficulty, so you could say that it will be challanging and easy all the time depending on what you do. The game will be very reepetative as you will be always fighting the same monsters with different hp and damage, so unless you think that fighting 2001st skeleton will cap the whole experience than no.

Personaly I don't believe it's possible to make such a game fun, unless you have massive amounts of tiles, monsters, dialogue options etc. If they had a budget of COD mayby than they could pull it off.

 

[mondblut]

Sounds like Demise at best and Dungeon Hack at worst.

I'll give it a go, but no party = tons of wasted potential. Making such a game single-character is akin to taking a hammer and smashing it against your own balls.

 

[Wavinator]

The game will be very reepetative as you will be always fighting the same monsters with different hp and damage, so unless you think that fighting 2001st skeleton will cap the whole experience than no.

Personaly I don't believe it's possible to make such a game fun, unless you have massive amounts of tiles, monsters, dialogue options etc. If they had a budget of COD mayby than they could pull it off.

This is probably where they're going with the expansion packs now that they've gotten so much more than they've asked for from Kickstarter. I think it'll be okay in iron man mode if every battle could potentially be your last, but I think you're right that the nth iteration of the same monster with more HP will only go so far. One thing that *might* work, if you set aside the need for graphical variation, would be different attacks/defenses from higher level versions of the same monster that force you to play differently. If they put a lot into spells and damage / effect types and whatnot there could be a lot of variety-- though a party would make it all the better.

 

[Tolknaz]

b) getting better in one sphere causes decline in other (why?!)

Ah, this takes me back (to being 10 years old and thinking that'd be a good idea) . . . and the bullshit answer is

"We only have a limited amount of time to exist. If we spend all that time strength training, we will getter dumber, as we're not practicing our smarts."

Any kind of training, that doesn't involve concussion doesn't cause you to get dumber in real life. However, there certainly are some physical disciplines and training programs, that that effectiverly cancel each other. Sure, you can be both much stronger and a better runner than an average sedantary person if you put some effort in both of them, but you can't be a bodybuilder and a long distance runner at the same time no matter how hard you train. The diets and training programs needed work against each other.

 

[Metro]

As they said there will be a large spread of difficulty, so you could say that it will be challanging and easy all the time depending on what you do. The game will be very reepetative as you will be always fighting the same monsters with different hp and damage, so unless you think that fighting 2001st skeleton will cap the whole experience than no.

Personaly I don't believe it's possible to make such a game fun, unless you have massive amounts of tiles, monsters, dialogue options etc. If they had a budget of COD mayby than they could pull it off.

To me they're only fun when you play with perma-death on (which I will) to make it more like a rogue-like. Otherwise, I agree, to keep going and going would get fairly boring.

 

[Mastermind]

Roguelikes are what led to Diablo, which in turn led to the death of turnbased + partybased and that transitioned into the shit churned out today.

Dragon Age 2 is fairly recent and party based.

 

[Stelcio]

Any kind of training, that doesn't involve concussion doesn't cause you to get dumber in real life. However, there certainly are some physical disciplines and training programs, that that effectiverly cancel each other. Sure, you can be both much stronger and a better runner than an average sedantary person if you put some effort in both of them, but you can't be a bodybuilder and a long distance runner at the same time no matter how hard you train. The diets and training programs needed work against each other.

Well, it can make you dumber indirectly if focusing on training causes you to avoid any intellectual efforts. As I have an opportunity to meet many sportsmen, I see much of them have great lacks in common knowledge and intellectual skills (not being dumb per se), as they disregarded their school in favor of their sports, which granted them automatic promotion. It's not always the case, as I've seen few exceptions, but it's pretty common. Still, intellectual skills depending on using or not using physical skills (and vice versa) is retarded.

 

[Mother Russia]

Dungeon Hack was good for what it was. Yes it was RT, and yes it didn't have a party, but it was ahead of it's time in some ways.

Keep in mind that hack and slash real time games like Dungeon Hack and Ultima Underworld and TES:Arena are good in small doses, serving as a bit of a change while you wait for the next real crpg (aka turnbased, good story, party based, lots of stats, great magick system, taktikal kombat, etc etc). unfortunately, we are living in bizarro world and it has become the other way around.

 

[Mother Russia]

So, the demo has been released. (it's the full game in beta version, but you can't save unless yo pay up)

How is it?

 

[Metro]

Installed it. Something messed up with the reinstall of DirectX or one of those programs and the visuals were fucked up for me so... uninstalled.

 

[Mother Russia]

Installed it. Something messed up with the reinstall of DirectX or one of those programs and the visuals were fucked up for me so... uninstalled.

Just goes to show how entitled and spoilt we have become: I remember trying for hours to get a single game installed using multiple floppies. If a 7 floppy game flunked out of installation after the sixth floppy due to a bad disk, I did everything from diskdoctor to chkdsk whatever the fuck we used to have up our sleeves back in the day to make the final disk error free.

 

[Metro]

Not sure what it has to do with being entitled/spoiled. The game wasn't insanely compelling for me and if I can't get the demo to work after about half an hour of tinkering I'm not going to waste anymore time when there's half a dozen other things I could be doing. We've had a bit of a technology leap since the days of 5.25" discs, you know?