World Exploration...Yay or Nay, Big or Small

[Damned Registrations]

Derail concerning MW flaws;

MW had some massive balance issues, but that was mostly for people who already knew where to look. Theres some unguarded uber loot lying around (A lot really) but it's usually hidden just well enough that you'd probably be level 12 before you find any of it without being told. If you play through a second time though, it's insane. You can go from level 1 weakling to level 30 warlord with infinite cash and enough custom enchanted unbalanced uber gear that nothing in the game can kill you within a day. Most of that was through exploits though;

-1 second duration charm spells/mercantile enhancement spells to make infinite money
-Essentially unlimited training. If you know where the masters are and have the cash, you can have 100 in every skill (And therefore stat as well) without fighting a thing, picking a lock or jumping even once.
-Customized enchantments. They obviously didn't figure out what was possible with constant effects on all your armour. (Or thought it was ok. Personally I like the fact that the PC in MW can become more powerful than the gods.) My first character in MW ended up with gear that gave me permanent 100% chameleon. Nothing could see me except maybe 3 npcs in the whole game (Expansions included), and 2 of them were too afraid to attack me. I could steal anything from anywhere with 100% success and everything would run away when I attacked. My friend made a character with 100% sanctuary; completely immune to physical attacks. Both characters additionally had enough EXTRA room for magic bonuses to be able to jump ~80 feet a hop, run about 20 times faster than your base speed, regenerate more hp/sec than you'd suffer from standing on lava, have infinite fatigue, and probably some other stuff I forgot.
-Overpowered artifacts. There were a very few artifacts that put everything else to shame. In particular, a ring in Mournehold grants something like 100% spell reflection, 5hp/sec health regen (Enough to be basically immortal) and some lesser bonuses. For ONE ring slot.
- Items of power too easily stolen. I'd actually rate this as the most minor 'unbalancing' flaw in the game. Yeah you can steal a grand soul gem in the first town if you're clever about it. But you'd have to sell it to a cleric enchanter to get the money out of it, which you might not know even exists when first playing. Using it yourself requires massive cash and it's not strong enough for a constant effect anyways. Theres artifacts scattered around that you can dash in, steal, and dash out with that make you very strong. In some cases you don't even need to dash. But if you don't know where they are (And you don't really get hints in the game) you might find one such item for every 1-2 hours of honest searching. The ring and helm in my example were both lucky finds, and by no means made me godly. Neither could be traded for the raw cash needed to train to the higest levels, only bartered for gear + money to get their worth out of them. Neither ring nor helm would really increase my power that massively; my armor skill and spell skills were too low to make proper use of either at that point. BUT, they were items good enough that they remained useful for 90% of my characters career, only becoming useless to me when I attained levels of power that simply break the game.

Back to the food...

The food systems weren't great just because they were important to gameplay or proactive, but because they were both. Added food hunting as a requirement to an rpg might be interesting, but it'll also piss you off if theres no upshot to it ever, no matter how fascinating the varied methods of aquiring it are. Finding ammo in FO was important and there were plenty of ways to go about it, but it was still annoying every time. I never look at ammo in FO and go Hurray! I can keep firing my gun! It's something I only think about negatively when it runs out. But guns without ammo would be stupid, and it adds to the gameplay. If it had something else about it to make it interesting, like an ability to craft extra powerful custom ammo or something, then I might have something to cheer about too. On the other hand, if ammo was so common and weightless it might as well not exist, it probably shouldn't, and custom uber ammo wouldn't save it.

 

[galsiah]

MW had some massive balance issues, but that was mostly for people who already knew where to look.

I found the "Sword of white woe" (IIRC) at level 3 first time through (I'm that 1337). It was one of the first of many sources of extreme annoyance. This was after scraping up enough money to get decent early equipment by buying 50 arrows for about 30 gold, then selling them back one at a time for 50. (yes - I'm that cheap)

I agree that to get things totally unbalanced, you needed to know the game pretty well. However, I think most new players would bump into quite a bit of unbalanced nonsense without trying too hard - simply because there's so much to go around.

Added food hunting as a requirement to an rpg might be interesting, but it'll also piss you off if theres no upshot to it ever

Almost all of the time it can be automated. When it isn't automated will be the times that hard decisions / dangerous actions are needed to obtain food. The "upshot" here is not dying. It shouldn't be a chore, and it should require planning / trade-offs etc. - if it doesn't, that's a poor implementation, not a poor idea.

If you want more special magical bonus items, add them. I really don't see how it helps to use food in this way (it simply makes the game less coherent, for the sake of a mechanic you could have introduced without that sacrifice). If it's a silly, light-hearted game, it probably doesn't matter. If it isn't, I don't see the point.

...no matter how fascinating the varied methods of aquiring it are.

This is blatantly untrue - if finding food were the most fascinating activity you'd ever engaged in, it wouldn't "piss you off".

Finding ammo in FO was important and there were plenty of ways to go about it, but it was still annoying every time.

Sure, but that's because it was a chore, made much worse by a horrible interface. Add a simple "gather all ammo in area" button then make trading and sharing smoother, and it's much less of an issue. In fact there wouldn't even need to be a "gather ammo" button - it could simply happen automatically.

I never look at ammo in FO and go Hurray! I can keep firing my gun!

And there's no reason you should - the same goes for food.

It's something I only think about negatively when it runs out.

If there's a problem, it's this: running low should force interesting challenges and difficult situations on the player. If running low only forces you to choose between dull maintenance task X and dull maintenance task Y, that's a problem.

Also, note that something you "only think about negatively" is not necessarily something which makes the game worse as a whole. Presumably, being shot/stabbed is something you "only think about negatively" - that doesn't make it bad design, but rather part of the challenge of the game. The question is whether these challenges help to create interesting / tough choices. Usually getting shot does, so that's ok. All too often, gathering ammo / food does not.

This is the issue - not how to make the player grin like a madman as his character eats a banana and gains +5 uberness, but rather how to use bananas to create interesting gameplay. The "+5 uberness" mechanic is a tool that already exists in almost every game in the form of items/potions/spells/drugs etc. etc.. Using food as this kind of tool is not going to create any gameplay you couldn't without it.
For food to be a useful gameplay construction tool, it needs to do something which other items don't. Simply performing its real world function fulfils this criterion. I don't understand the eagerness to run away from this function (well I do - but I think it's misguided).

 

[Zomg]

So, exploration play without survival mechanics for the game element. Ubiquitous filler combat is also a no-no. Just moving across a topology absorbing the visual art of the game and maybe collecting coins is not sufficient.

Combat is easy because it's so self-contained, and to a small extent automatically integrates the topology into gameplay (ex. you can circle strafe all day on open prairie, but not on a steep hillside).

I guess my stock answer is to make things an element of an overgame. Rocks have fallen into the only known entrance to the box canyon, and if you don't find a way out for your herd in two weeks you'll miss the train to the Chicago stockyards. Or maybe you're surveying for a 4X overgame, mapping out defensive positions and resources, and you're making a lot of forethinking game decisions as you explore. But those are obviously not easy, self-contained seasoning.

The only thing I can think of is making travel itself interesting, to the point that it's inherently play. Maybe you're playing a game set on an atmospherically terraformed low gravity planet, and with glider wings you can literally fly indefinitely, but not take off unaided. Exploration is therefore about the complicated process of flying, finding precipices to jump off of, understanding how thermals are formed, dealing with weather, et cetera. Even just finding hidden coins can be interesting if the travel is. In fact, this belatedly reminds me of the Tony Hawk games, in which you're exploring on a skateboard as a minor element of the gameplay.

 

[franc kaos]

The only thing I can think of is making travel itself interesting, to the point that it's inherently play. Maybe you're playing a game set on an atmospherically terraformed low gravity planet, and with glider wings you can literally fly indefinitely, but not take off unaided. Exploration is therefore about the complicated process of flying, finding precipices to jump off of, understanding how thermals are formed, dealing with weather, et cetera. Even just finding hidden coins can be interesting if the travel is. In fact, this belatedly reminds me of the Tony Hawk games, in which you're exploring on a skateboard as a minor element of the gameplay.

Like Midwinter: 'you must defend an immense playing area of over 160,000 square miles. You can ski downhill, hang-glide using thermals, snow-buggy with limited gas or travel by cable car across glacial landscape, shooting, sniping and sabotaging the intruders as you go.' Released in 1989.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwinter_%28game%29

I'm pretty sure it used a fatigue system too, so travelling around wasn't a simple keep jogging until you've reached the other end of the island scenario, and tho' it didn't have caves or 'easter eggs' as such, travelling across the terrain was brilliant. Game developers appeared to have forgotten how to create a fun time in favour of the pursuit of the easy option.

My fave games: Star Control, Midwinter, Ultima (6 & 7 and the underworlds), Arena and Daggerfall, so large expnsive game worlds are my def. preference.

 

[Zomg]

Ah, always nice to see that my brainstorming is twenty years too late.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Have you ever heard of a game called The Sims? Do you know what your entire purpose is in that game? Apparently it's very successful too. My point is, it can work.

Sims isn't an RPG in the conventional sense, so there's a different expectation; the player 'agreement' of what he's getting into (managing this virtual being).

And what are they agreeing to get into? While it's true people might have certain expectations based on any game they play, those expectations are changed constantly by plenty of successful games. Myst had no inventory yet it was an adventure game. Most adventure games I'd played at the time all had inventories. I didn't decry the lack of one. I accepted what Myst was. It worked and I enjoyed it. Think about Civilization. You expect to run a Civilization. You might not specifically expect culture and religion to play a role though but both elements have been implemented in the latest Civ. Even resources which were never an issue before.

I doubt there's any who looks at a game and expects things as specific as eating or not. People look at the package on a larger scale then that. It's an RPG. Do I get to save the world? Yes. Can I level up? Sure. That's pretty much all I care about. How I do that or the mechanisms involved in how I actually go about that are something I discover later and then determine whether or not I enjoy them.

Either way, as you said, getting food is not the issue, its simply remembering to do it. The gameplay comes from managing ALL the needs and wants, which might as well be food as they are all the same in concept. RPGer's dont expect to have to manage food when they have to worry about saving the world.

Can you quote me the survey this is from please, I'd be interested to see the results.

No to a setting. It's like that issue of TB and RT combat. You get the bad parts of both and the benefits of neither. You either balance your game for food or you don't. That's just a decision you have to make based on what you think the focus of your game should be.

No its not. Those are two different systems of combat. What I'm suggesting is akin to turning combat on or off, or at the very least the difficulty of combat, just like your mention of Thiefs skill levels below.

Did you ask yourself how stupid the concept of turning combat "on or off" was before you posted that? I'll give you a hint: It's right up near the top there on the stupidity scale.

For example, let's say you have a game called Doom and in that game you have a weapon called a BFG. And you decide, in your wisdom, that rather than balance the game for the BFG, you'll instead make it Uber powerful and then give people the option to "turn it on or off" depending on whether they want an easy game or a hader game. For starters, that's being incredibly stupid. Either your game can handle the weapon or it can't. Secondly, those people who turn it off encounter issues where they need it but can't have it because the level design was balanced to use all their rockets and then the BFG for the final boss monster, yet they've turned it off and so are screwed... Or there are those people who keep it on only to find it too easy for those few levels which were designed without the BFG in mind.

Either way, you now have to make a game that can take into account there being a BFG and there not being a BFG. In the end, instead of having a balanced game, you get some kind of hodge podge mess between the two. Again, the bad parts of both solutions and the benefits of neither. That's why "it has to be enjoyable". You don't get to pick and choose. If a gamer doesn't like a certain part of your game, turning off shouldn't really be an option. The gamer has to decide whether the good bits are so good that it's worth putting up with the bad bits. Any gamer is going to find different parts of any game they like or don't like though that doesn't mean there aren't things that the majority will hate.

You're the one making the computer game. You're supposed be the one who decides what features get in and what doesn't. You don't leave it up to the player to decide whether they want to face Demons or Trolls or Magic Elves with X weapons or Y agility or whether they have to eat or whether lockpicking is automatic or not. If you do that, it fucks horribly with your game balance. EG: Hand picking locks becomes easier and more tedious and boring than automatic lockpicking or vice versa. You have to ask yourself the question: If the system I have implemented is so little fun that I have to implement an automatic solution for those who hate it or add in the ability to turn it off, why am I even bothering? You either bite the bullet and make your system more interesting so that people DO have fun using it or you remove it entirely.

Levels of survival could range from needing to eat readily accessibly food once in a while (your Sims example), having to eat regularly and find food, or having to have elaborate means of hunting and trapping, cleaning and cooking, and otherwise simulating food survival.

So when I get half-way through and realise that you completely fucked up the "Extreme Hunger" difficulty setting and made it completely impossible, am I going to look forward to starting again on the "Hunger Strike" difficulty setting? Only to find that that's too easy and after several other attempts eventually settling on the "I like to eat some food but not too much but maybe a meal once a day is good but sometimes I want to go without one" difficulty. As you said yourself, I'm supposed to be saving the world here, not trying to balance your game for you. If you've added in a food system, make it interesting and enjoyable or don't waste your time doing it.

Like combat, if you want to add that mechanic in, it has to be enjoyable otherwise it's just annoying.

Obviously it has to be enjoyable, or else whats the point.

Exactly. So make it enjoyable enough that people DON'T want to turn it off or adjust themselves to minute degress. Make it something people like. Make it something people want to use in the game. Can you imagine if they took the combat out of Doom? What's left? Nothing. Your system should be designed such that every part of it is an enjoyable experience. Letting people pick and choose doesn't solve the problem. It just leaves you trying to account for all the things people might turn off. And what about quests? That quest designed to be really tough which has dialogue that refers to the "long and arduous journey" across the desert and tells players that they "better bring plenty of supplies". How much fun is that when I've got the food setting on "Eating not required"? Are you really going to change all your dialogue or are you simply not going to have those quests in your game, meaning you're leaving out a perfect opportunity which might have actually made your system fun?

Just like anything we've discussed here, the idea is that all things being equal X and Y activity are enjoyable, be it exploration or comabat or puzzle solving or eating food. This goes without saying so it never needs to be said again.

But if it's enjoyable, then why would I want to turn it off?

Oh, and I never ever wanted to added eating or survival, this was brought up by someone else in reference to getting lost.

Hey, you're the one asked the follow up.

 

[Ivy Mike]

Since I fall within the category of players who enjoy exploring large worlds I thought I'd pitch in with an example of a game that I thought did the whole exploration thing right.

On the top of my list when it comes to travelling/exploring lies Realms of Arkania for several reasons. First of all it's the one cRPG I've played that actually made you think once or twice about setting out on a journey. You absolutely HAD to be prepared before setting your feet outside your starting location - i e buy sleeping bags, food/rations, appliances to prepare the food you bought, ingredients/reagents for healing/curing poison/disease etc. While it could become tedious to note down what you needed and hunt around town for places to buy those things, it worked because it tied so well into the wat travelling was implemented. Depending on where you wanted to go, you had to make different preparations, since different areas affected you party differently. If you had to journey through a swamp you'd better make sure you hade some boots on or the risk of catching a disease would be significantly higher. Should you want to explore a potential shortcut through a desert area you had better make sure you had water and food to spare. It could be argued that such a system becomes tedious and hard to manage due to the wealth of information the player needed to sort through - but that's a question of implementation. A similar but slightly simplified system could work better.

Another reason why I think so highly of the travelling system in Realms of Arkania is that
it's one of the few games to actually have a usefull outdoorsman skill. If one of your party members had a high level in the specific skill that related to travelling (the name eludes me at the moment) you would see several benefits:
1. You would travel faster, and more securely (i e less chances of hostile random encounters).
2. You would find better paths to travel.
3. You would have a higher chance of non-hostile random encounters.

I'm constructing from memory here so you'd better take it with a bit of salt, but I think that's the gist of it. The prerequisite for such an implementation is that travelling is done via a world map. It could probably be implemented if travelling is done strictly through first or third person perspective, but I doubt it wold work as well.

 

[GreatGreen]

This question might be best aimed at those that don't abhor 1st/3rd

• Do you like large worlds, where locations are farther apart and there were a lot of natural filler terrain?
  
• Do you like small worlds where its quick to get from location to location, with little to no filler, where every area was unique?
  
• Do you like to get lost?
  
• Do you like to find hidden areas based on distance or based on simply being hidden by occlusion of large objects or general object density?

Normally, the bigger the world, the more believable it is to me. I guess the main thing here is that I don't want to ever feel like I'm playing in a fish bowl. If at any point during play I can see the "edge" of the game world, I feel constrained a little bit. Oddly enough though, making gamespaces on islands where the edge of the world is more or less a coastline, so long as the ocean is accessible and seems infinite, doesn't bother me. I accept that this is the edge of the island I am on, and not where some dev decided to draw the line. I can sort of pretend that this is just on of many islands on the world I'm in... It's more about constantly existing in a state of not knowing what's over that next hill or horizon, but knowing that if i felt like it, I could check it out. I prefer that the game world be larger than my sense of periphery at any given moment.

For example, I don't like exploring much at all in Oblivion, even though it's a fairly large game, because I always feel that no matter where I am, I can see where at least one border of the game world is.

Filler terrain is good as long as it is pretty or interesting. No, it doesn't have to be next-gen photo-realistic, just good looking from an artistic standpoint. I wouldn't want to have to walk straight through a flat desert with tiled textured sand for half an hour, but doing the same through a forest wouldn't bug me so much I don't think.

As far as location finding goes, I'd rather individual places be farther apart. I like to travel in games, and when just getting there is half the challenge, it makes things more fun for me.

Getting lost? I love it. That don't mean that I want to have a tough time finding something specific that I'm looking for, though. It means that I think the game world should be large and complex enough that if I wanted, I could just start wondering in a particular direction and after a while, have no clue where I am or how I got there, or how to get back. Where's the sense of adventure otherwise? In Oblivion, exploring is no fun because you can always always always see the Imperial City from anywhere, so you've always got your bearings. It makes the world seem so much smaller.


The last question is difficult. Would I enjoy a small world where things are really close together with the hidden things being hidden in cool ways, or a large world where distance hides most things? Well, I think a healthy mix is the key here, although I'd personally like more distance thrown in the mix. The idea here is obviously that if something is hidden in both distance and terrain, it would be pretty much impossible to find, so you have to choose what type of game world you want. Ultimately, I'd like the game world to be huge, but to have most hidden things close to more popular places so they'd be more likely to be found (example: a secret cave right outside the city walls), and the *really* hidden things to be hidden by mostly distance, your only hope of finding them being acquiring the directions to those places through maps or advise from key npc's.

 

[suibhne]

I'd like a system like Arcanum's or FO's, with improvements. Overland travel should be handled with a map interface like that; a Survival or Outdoorsman or Wanderer skill should enable you to map farther away and discern signs of other travellers, nearby settlements, significant natural or artificial features (like the likelihood of a settlement or ruin in a river valley); large cities should be easily detectable from far away, small villages from closer; you should be able to follow roads, rivers, etc.; and travel time should matter in some way, whether through food consumption, in-game political events, etc. I'd probably assume that the character has some basic knowledge of survival and is able to fish, snare small game, maybe occasionally kill larger game like deer - but advanced or specialized survival skills should be necessary for more challenging environments like tundra or deserts.

While this is clearly then next best thing, and I'm completely for it, I have to say games like GTA, Oblivion and Just Cause have ruined non-open world gaming for me. I know this ignites the fires of seething hate from many of you, but I now just want to be dropped into the game world, ideally 3rd person as I enjoy seeing the character(but only if animated well), and have a great draw distance and absorb the quiet ambience of the world around. I want to see the skeletal remains of a great city in the far distance and anticpate going there some day...

What about a map interface that's more than a map? We obvious have the tech right now to represent a fully 3D world replete with forests, rivers, ruins, etc.; hell, RTS games like Supreme Commander and CoH handle this with aplomb. Why not adapt this for an RPG travel interface? You could actually plot your route through the gameworld from an overhead "cartographer" perspective rather than first-person, but you could also zoom in and out a la Supreme Commander. A "fog of war" could dynamically show points of interest (campfires, distant ruins or settlements, etc.) based on weather, terrain occlusion, and outdoorsman skill.

The big question to me is whether players would find survival activities interesting - even a high-level abstraction of choosing where to camp at night, for example. I would, but I'm probably not representative of the market. But this approach could do a very good job of representing real-world scale - settlements that are two days apart, for example, not 5 minutes apart as in Oblivion or Gothic 3 - yet also making the player-world interaction much more interesting than simply moving an arrow across an overhead map (as in FO).

I'd dig it. :D

 

[Damned Registrations]

If ammo (Or food) were gathered automatically, there probably wouldn't be any point to having it at all. That amounts to lessening the boring task X syndrome, not eliminating it. Mana regenerated slowly in MW, but realisticlally any time I wanted mana I'd just rest for an hour, which basically means I should just have infinite mana when not in combat. Likewise if food aquirement simply required X amount of food gather skill or killing X monsters/whatever and was automatic, it might as well not exist. The point of aquiring/using food being manual is that it produces choices with consequence; buying an assload of food them wasting all the food you end up finding, or bring nothing then starving. Eating now before you get very hungry or runnning around nearly starved to death trying to avoid eating your last ration that you know won't rot. Risking eating a corpse you've never tried before that might be poisonous because you're desparate. Thats what makes it interesting enough to tolerate the 'chore' factor. That and the fact that eventually a powerful character doesn't need to bother with the chore anymore.

It's not like eating was annoying in Nethack anyways, press 'e', press a letter corresponding to some food in your inventory, done. Going from full to starving takes about 2000 turns normally, half that if you're regenerating, and ten times that if you've got the right ring. Going from starving (A dangerous state to be in that occured after hungy but before fainting) to full would take about 2 rations, or 1 large enough corpse, or a half dozen small corpses. I'd estimate I spent less than 1/300th of my time playing nethack messing around with food as a nutrition worry. But whenever I saw a swarm of fire ants, I'd grin and chase down every last one hoping for precious fire immunity.

As for the bonus stats, in Ergeiz it was a funky little game so the realism factor was moot, and having it tied to food meant, once again, decisions about playing instead of just carry X amount of food always or starve. In Nethack it made perfect sense; why should a potion be any more likely to grant you stats than the organs of some exotic creature? Hell, why would such potions exist really, wouldn't they be consumed as soon as they were made since they're so powerful? I like the idea of hunting mindflayers to increase my intelligence at peril of having my brains sucked out compared to just hacking 1000 random blobs to get a potion of int+1 or equivalent.

Yeah, you could have the same system only with the 'organs' as a separate drop from the meat, and providing no nutrition, but what would be gained by that?

I don't really understand what kind of better food system you're envisioning. Would you buy a pile of food in town and never have to bother with it unless you were stupid and stayed out too long or got screwed by random occurence of some sort? I can't imagine that being a worthwhile mechanic at all. Especially since it would inherently disrupt whatever I was trying to do in the first place when it became an issue; in my examples food can be aquired from hacking anyways, which is the focus of the game to begin with. If I had to stop searching for the lost temple of foo to track some stupid food down I'd be pretty pissed around the tenth time it happened.

What kind of decisions would there be to make if you were unexpectedly low on food? You obviously have to get more and can't ignore it. Would there be different ways to get it? What would be the differences?

 

[suibhne]

Food gathering could be automatically tied to camping, and both would be necessary to reduce fatigue for you, companions, and mounts. A lower level of food gathering (some minimal foraging) could accrue while you're traveling at a normal pace. In other words, foraging would be totally automatic when it doesn't matter, but there would still be enough flexibility to make it a challenge in some circumstances: e.g. traveling through difficult terrain like desert, or traveling as fast as possible while being chased by enemies.

If fatigue/food are tracked at all, they should only be obstacles when they're significant. Traveling on (relatively) safe roads between established settlements, the player should simply never have to deal with such issues - but of course they still have to be tracked in ways that are accessible to the player, or they won't make sense once they are relevant.

 

[EvoG]

What about a map interface that's more than a map? We obvious have the tech right now to represent a fully 3D world replete with forests, rivers, ruins, etc.; hell, RTS games like Supreme Commander and CoH handle this with aplomb. Why not adapt this for an RPG travel interface? You could actually plot your route through the gameworld from an overhead "cartographer" perspective rather than first-person, but you could also zoom in and out a la Supreme Commander. A "fog of war" could dynamically show points of interest (campfires, distant ruins or settlements, etc.) based on weather, terrain occlusion, and outdoorsman skill.

Oh absolutely. Test Drive Unlimited does it to great effect, where the entire island of Oahu, is rendered as your overhead map with the same assets as when driving; it zooms out from the top of your car straight up to high above the island to plot your course. Its all seamless, pretty and very helpful. The thing is, I was referring to the relationship of the player, the character and the world. We 'can' easily have this kind of travel, only that I prefer the total in-world aspect of the games I mentioned; I'd rather not have fast travel so to speak.

 

[Section8]

If ammo (Or food) were gathered automatically, there probably wouldn't be any point to having it at all. That amounts to lessening the boring task X syndrome, not eliminating it.

Well, not necessarily. It depends on how much control over that automation you give the player. A game like Darklands performs a lot of tasks "automatically", ie the player sets a strategic way for characters to spend their time for a day in town. Three characters might work to pay for accomodation and food, and the other might study at a monastery. Likewise, Jagged Alliance 2's passive skill use/training involved strategic use of a limited resource - time.

If an RPG automated eating/gathering of food, but integrated it into setting up camp, then suddenly a whole layer of strategy opens up.

Do I spend the time gathering food, or do I spend it brewing potions, standing guard, honing my swordsmanship, getting a good nights sleep, etc. Or even - How long do I set up camp here for? I have a weeks worth of food, and it will take me four days to heal my grievous wounds, but I'm five days from the nearest town...

The trick to automation is to cut out the tedious bits and preserve the strong gameplay aspects of a particular design facet, otherwise automation just becomes a way of preserving a concept for its fluff value. Or so the developer can brag that their game has a feature which is essentially utterly neutered, with no gameplay value.

 

[galsiah]

If ammo (Or food) were gathered automatically, there probably wouldn't be any point to having it at all.

The point is to have it automatic when it's a trivial non-decision without significant cost - i.e. most of the time. When it's not automatic, that should be because the character is in some situation without simple access to food, and where obtaining access produces a range of challenges.

That amounts to lessening the boring task X syndrome, not eliminating it.

No it doesn't - full automation eliminates it where it's a boring task. Where it's an interesting challenge, it isn't boring - the difficulty is in making sure that it's automatic/trivially simple whenever it's a non-decision.

Mana regenerated slowly in MW

Not true. It only regenerated when you rested.

but realisticlally any time I wanted mana I'd just rest for an hour

That wouldn't have got anything close to full magicka back unless you're using mods.

which basically means I should just have infinite mana when not in combat.

No - it means that you should have full magicka (not infinite - 1000 point spells should still not be castable) only if time is irrelevant, and the ability to rest is unrestricted. Neither of these is entirely true (although time is almost meaningless).
Anyway, I don't believe I indicated that Morrowind wasn't horribly flawed.

Likewise if food aquirement simply required X amount of food gather skill or killing X monsters/whatever and was automatic, it might as well not exist.

Sure - so it's automatic only where it's trivial, or a non-decision.

The point of aquiring/using food being manual is that it produces choices with consequence

It needs to have not just consequence, but enough significant consequence that a choice isn't either trivial or obvious.

buying an assload of food them wasting all the food you end up finding, or bring nothing then starving. Eating now before you get very hungry or runnning around nearly starved to death trying to avoid eating your last ration that you know won't rot.

In most games, these are fairly dull choices. The interesting choice isn't deciding "Do I eat now or later?" but rather "How do I go about getting food?". The first is a short term roll of the dice; the second can involve interesting challenge and strategy.

Thats what makes it interesting enough to tolerate the 'chore' factor.

It shouldn't be a chore in the first place. As to choice over what / when to eat being interesting, perhaps it is for a Rogue-like type game. If the ambition is to create a first-person, open-world RPG with strong narrative elements and long term challenges, I'd hope that there are more interesting choices than when to eat. The challenge should be about acquiring / maintaining a viable food supply. (also, note that dropping down dead after e.g. a day not eating is ludicrous)

That and the fact that eventually a powerful character doesn't need to bother with the chore anymore.

That's horrible design. If the mechanic provided interesting choices, its loss is not a good thing (whether or not it causes the player to grin like an idiot). If the mechanic didn't provide interesting choices, it shouldn't have been included in the first place.

It's not like eating was annoying in Nethack anyways

How exactly is Nethack relevant here?

I'd estimate I spent less than 1/300th of my time playing nethack messing around with food as a nutrition worry. But whenever I saw a swarm of fire ants, I'd grin and chase down every last one hoping for precious fire immunity.

So you're saying that the nutritional aspect added next to nothing, while the funny-little-bonus mechanic was great? I could say the same about chasing mushrooms in Mario, and it'd be about as relevant.
The point still stands: by including such a system, you're turning abstract good sense into in-your-face nonsense (in any conventional setting) simply to get a fun little bonus you could have included without the food system.

As for the bonus stats, in Ergeiz it was a funky little game

Sure - so silly mechanics are fine there.

...In Nethack it made perfect sense...

"More sense than total nonsense" is not "Perfect sense" - but anyway, I'm not saying it's a bad system for that type of game.
Since we're not talking about that type of game, could we stick to talking about either relevant examples, or what's possible?

Would you buy a pile of food in town...

Probably not - it'd probably be automatic.

and never have to bother with it unless you were stupid and stayed out too long or got screwed by random occurence of some sort?

An adventure should be all about getting "screwed by an unpredictable [NOT random] occurrence of some sort". Predictable "adventures" are not adventures.

I can't imagine that being a worthwhile mechanic at all.

A mechanic doesn't have to be relevant all the time to be worthwhile. In any case, this one would be relevant whenever making medium/long term travel plans.

Especially since it would inherently disrupt whatever I was trying to do in the first place when it became an issue

As does combat, any quest which is a means to an end, or basically any in-game challenge. The point is that it should present you with interesting challenges / dilemmas (as should combat, quests etc.). The point of an RPG isn't to provide all the mechanics possible to cheer-lead you towards level 34, without requiring you to think.

If I had to stop searching for the lost temple of foo to track some stupid food down I'd be pretty pissed around the tenth time it happened.

It wouldn't happen unless there was some significant obstacle preventing your character from getting food. In safe areas with easily accessible local food supplies, obtaining food could simply be automated as part of camping etc.. You'd only be called to do anything actively when there was a real threat, and important challenges to face / decisions to be made. Again, no-one starves in a few hours, or even days. The possibility of starvation wouldn't start to be an issue unless you were being continually stupid, or your actions were being forced by enemies or similar.

What kind of decisions would there be to make if you were unexpectedly low on food? You obviously have to get more and can't ignore it.

For a start, this isn't the relevant situation. The point isn't that you look in your pack and think "Oh dear - I'm out of rations". The point is that you see a situation arising that's going to prevent your acquiring food (or make it difficult) over the medium / long term. You are not immediately forced to do anything - apart from to think about how best to handle the situation.
For example, if you're being pursued by enemies; if you need to travel unobserved; if you've been attacked, robbed, and left in a location without available food; if you've been outlawed in a region, and can't get food from merchants or townspeople; if you've been stupid enough to wander out into a desert etc. without any means to obtain food....

The food itself can easily be abstract - there's no necessity for inventory juggling with foodstuffs. It's not about finding food, but about finding reliable access to it. Usually that'll be trivial (and automatic). Where it isn't, it should be interesting.
Note that even automatic food gathering can have some gameplay tradeoffs - e.g. gathering enough food while camping can take different amounts of game time (no real time) depending on character skill / current environment etc. This will in turn influence the speed at which a character can travel long distances; the likelihood of being discovered at camp; the ease with which his trail can be followed etc. etc.

 

[EvoG]

Okay, about this food talk:

I'll try this again but I dont think the lot of you that support the high-survival concept of gaming will care for.

Game Design of Positive Reinforcement

This isn't my 'theory' nor is it a new concept, but its not always understood. The goal of any game is to promote futher play and reward the player for the time spent...he has to enjoy himself. Positve Reinforcement is a way to make the player proactive in his input and encourage to do repeated tasks by rewarding the player. Rewards for a combat game for example include great looking walk cycle when the player moves the character (be it WASD or analog stick or point and click), satisyfing flash of the muzzle and sound of the blast when firing a gun, impact on the environment with realistic results (cause and effect) and impact on your opponents with realistic results. In driving games, proper use of braking, maximum apex velocity or even drifting, resulting in improved speed maintainance and better lap times to encourage better driving skills rather than 'rail riding'. When a interaction from the player results in something that is enjoyable for the player, he will do it again.

Punishment in design refers to an event that the player has limited or no control over, and isnt' passive. When an enemy can shoot you without missing, perfectly every time, no matter how well the player is trying to dodge out of the way, this is punishing gameplay. Granted the inclusion of a cover system like many modern games solves this, since the player learns to respect that cover is going to be superior to run-and-gun.

Poison from a spiders sting could be considered a punishment, as you're taking damage from both the sting, but then recurring damage from the poison. Having the sting do less damage helps alleviate the punishing effects. This works well enough though as you can anticpate an encounter with a poisonous creature and carry more antidotes(as you're not ALWAYS going to be fighting spiders, if at all if you just avoid them), but the design has to allow you to make this a conscious decision, not something that forces you to panic, running around scouring the lair for dead bodies that just may have antidotes. I dont know anyone that enjoys poisoning in games, even though it can be managed. Sure it does add to the stress of the encounter, which can be fun, but it shouldn't spell instant doom for the player that just didn't have enough antidotes in his inventory and managed to use all that he found in the lair...now he's just stuck until the poison wears off (if the design is forgiving). That rarely works as there are usually more poisonous creatures to continue to sting (albeit for less damage) but that sting 'refreshes' the poison in the system, guaranteeing that there will be more poison than HP to flush it out. As tedious as it was to perhaps read all that about poison, thats how tedious of a design it is. The best solution is to include a gameplay convention that allows the player to make conscious combat choices that can minimize or remove the spiders ability to get the poison into the player. Just like a cover system for a shooter, here if the player pays attention to the encounter, tracks the spiders attack behavior, and is able to keep the spider at bay, he's rewarded for good play, not just having tons of mandatory antidotes. This is attrition play, and is not well designed gameplay but rather a crutch to a poorly designed encounter that assumes the player can just bump the Health/Mana/Antidote hotkey for a quick fix.

Food for Thought

I know I'm now an asshole for the title of this section (or an asshole for even having sections to begin with), but I expect no less from a critical audience. :D I'll be brief though, as I explained this earlier in this thread.

Food and other general survival elements in a game, especially one about dangerous environments and vast wastelands, can increase immersion, no doubt. But unless you're making a survival game, which most RPG's are not in context, food can be tedious...you're out to save the world, not maintain your BMR+. What I'm suggesting is a way to have food play a passive role and encourage players to participate in 'survival lite' gameplay in the context of a non-survival based game. This is important to keep in mind. Many of you WANT full survival, and your arguments have been, "do it all or dont do it at all", and thats black and white nonsense.

From a gaming abstract, we can simulate the need for food and other survival methods in a wasteland environment as a texture to the game world, as again, we're not doing a survival game, we're making an RPG narrative, post apocalypse. Yes yes, we can easily argue that by the nature of 'surviving an apocalypse' wouldn't the player have to 'survive'? Well that hits at the nature of any game...you have to survive the nazis MG-42 gunfire...you have to survive the perilous lava flows as you jump from platform to platform...you have to survive being eaten by ghosts. Its not about having the most realistic game ever, its about introducing elements that fit with the type of game it is, and make sure its fun...but you scream:

"Fine, why can't hunting, scavenging, cooking and eating food be fun?!"

"You must suck as a designer if you can't make it fun!"

"Its easy to make it fun...but I dont know how to make it fun myself!"

"Time for a semantic argument now!"

Instead of just introducing an element and assuming it can be "fun", lets think about game conflicts instead. In pretty much every game, a conflict or obstacle is introduced. Its easily defined and ideally is fun to overcome through a variety of means. This conflict is usually assertive, be it through an enemy that wants to kill you, or a puzzle or locked door that wants to bar your progress. Food in and of itself is not a conflict, but a form of maintainance that the player must bear. There's no getting around eating as his state of hunger is never static. You can't avoid hunger like you can an enemy...you can't find another way around eating like you can with an obstacle. There's a reason why food eating in RPG's is not highly regarded...its a chore. Right now, please dont hightlight-quote text-reply to this, as yes, I know you think it can be designed to be fun...I'll never agree though. People understand maintainance, but unless it serves a purpose beyond keeping your character alive (outside ALL the other challenges they must face), its just work.

My suggestion was to make food an optional but beneficial choice. It would highlight and establish the survival aspect of the gameworld without making its participation draconian. We use positive reinforcement to show WHY eating is beneficial rather than show why NOT eating is harmful. If you tell the player that this is a harsh world, and maintaining a healthy diet, regular exercise, meditation and a supply of rad away will help them through PLAY, they will respond. If you're less susceptible to certain types of damage or damage altogether by regular maintainance, players are going to WANT to eat, rather than feel forced because they're are dying from starvation. This is no different than exploration that rewards the player with hidden items that are really useful. As far as extrapolating why the player can choose not to eat but not starve, just like a great many things people are suggesting in this thread, we can 'assume' that the character in the gameworld is automatically nibbling on berries or nuts or whatever he casually finds in the gameworld without explicit input by the player otherwise.

The goal is to understand the design application, not just real-world reasoning. I know the proponents of 'realisitic food survival' here will want to argue with me just to prove they're right, but you dont have to, as I know you're right, but its not all encompassing. Some things are just not fun, great design or not. Food maintainance in an RPG is one of them, and unless you're making a Food Survivor Game, I dont think any amount of great design is going to make it 'interesting' otherwise.


Cheers

 

[EvoG]

But whenever I saw a swarm of fire ants, I'd grin and chase down every last one hoping for precious fire immunity.

As for the bonus stats, in Ergeiz it was a funky little game so the realism factor was moot, and having it tied to food meant, once again, decisions about playing instead of just carry X amount of food always or starve. In Nethack it made perfect sense; why should a potion be any more likely to grant you stats than the organs of some exotic creature? Hell, why would such potions exist really, wouldn't they be consumed as soon as they were made since they're so powerful? I like the idea of hunting mindflayers to increase my intelligence at peril of having my brains sucked out compared to just hacking 1000 random blobs to get a potion of int+1 or equivalent.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. The core design in a game of drinking a potion or eating a fire ant for fire immunity are identical in every way, but how its presented to the player in context is what makes it interesting. And the danger of going after creatures who otherwise will grant bonuses is great risk/reward play.

 

[Zomg]

Skinner box design? Are you fucking kidding me? Hang yourself on a meathook.

 

[EvoG]

If an RPG automated eating/gathering of food, but integrated it into setting up camp, then suddenly a whole layer of strategy opens up.

Do I spend the time gathering food, or do I spend it brewing potions, standing guard, honing my swordsmanship, getting a good nights sleep, etc. Or even - How long do I set up camp here for? I have a weeks worth of food, and it will take me four days to heal my grievous wounds, but I'm five days from the nearest town...

So here's the question...where's the risk. If you have a weeks worth of food, four days to heal or five days from town, but, you can go get more food, where's the risk unless you anticpate a high random factor of being attacked, making standing guard important. But then at what point does the player lose control due to the random encounters, so he's hard pressed to get enough rest or food to eat, on top of being injured that requires more food and rest to recover from. If you can find a 'safer' place to rest, then this conscious choice more or less eliminates the need to stand guard, so you can take your time fully recovering from wounds and getting all the food you need to that and make it to town.

Whats bad about this type of play is that it puts the player in a hole that he has to climb out, as low food and stamina makes him less effective in combat, and combat is going to always damage him, even moreso since his ability to sustain damage or deliver damage is reduced. This is where reality fails to make great gameplay.

I know I picked this apart and in all fairness, this can be made to work, but then it does become a different kind of game.

 

[galsiah]

The goal of any game is to promote further play

Not true. It's to entertain the player. The fact that this often promotes further play is not the objective, but rather a side effect. Promoting further play as an end in itself is EVIL. If you're doing it as a means to make money, fair enough - then acknowledge this.
It's not true that "The goal of any game is to promote further play...", any more than that "The goal of any game is to make money".

I'll read the rest later, but for now I'll stick to pointing out that you're using incorrect premises. Basing design on nonsense premises is not a good start.

EDIT:

I know I picked this apart and in all fairness, this can be made to work, but then it does become a different kind of game.

A game not exclusively based on camping and run-of-the-mill combat? Not exactly a great loss.

 

[EvoG]

I'll read the rest later, but for now I'll stick to pointing out that you're using incorrect premises. Basing design on nonsense premises is not a good start.

Please do, perhaps even the rest of the sentence you misquoted so you could preach to me..

The goal of any game is to promote further play

Not true. It's to entertain the player. The fact that this often promotes further play is not the objective, but rather a side effect. Promoting further play as an end in itself is EVIL. If you're doing it as a means to make money, fair enough - then acknowledge this.
It's not true that "The goal of any game is to promote further play...", any more than that "The goal of any game is to make money".

The goal of any game is to promote futher play and reward the player for the time spent...he has to enjoy himself

See that last part of the exact sentence you quoted? How convenient is context eh?

 

[Damned Registrations]

For the MW thing, I haven't played it in a while. But the point was basically this; just because something is theoretically trivial doesn't mean it is in practice. Technically speaking I could stand in town casting crap spells and resting till I've maxxed every school in the game. In practice, I'm going to go use a trainer like a sane person. If it was just automated then the whole system would be pointless. The same applies with food. If it's automated, the system is pointless. Even if the tedium of manually eating isn't there, the annoyance of having to aquire X amount of find food skill or spend X gold to get the self sustaining magic number is just as annoying.

What you're describing sounds like it would be used in a meaningful way SO infrequently (I don't recall being robbed and dumped off in a desert ever in game.) that it might as well just be a scripted event instead of a whole system. Deciding what % of time to spend gathering food at camp isn't interesting, you'd simply set it so you're gathering all that you need. So thats a non decision there.

Everything about being discovered in camp/travelling time doesn't need to have anything to do with food. Might as well be fallout. The only difference is ineffectual fluff text. If theres no impact for not eating for 4 days straight and you're 4 days from the nearest safe town with no food, it's not a very tricky decision is it? If you're 5 days away instead, then it's not tricky either. Nor is is tricky if you don't know when you'll next be able to get food without hunting; you'll always hunt.

The ONLY potential interesting decisions would be when you unexpectedly lost all known reachable sources of food. In which case you're not making a real decision anyways, you're just guessing at what might keep you alive.

Suppose I am stranded in the barren desert with no food available. What would be my interesting options? Wander into the nearest unexplored region and hope theres food vs. do nothing and starve? Boy thats just got infinite replay value written all over it. And by replay value I mean replaying the same 3 game days over again till you know the right direction to travel.

I still don't see how the stat bonuses in Nethack are 'silly'. They make just as much sense as any other way of increasing your stats in all the games I've played. Short of spending a whole month to train your strength to a very low ceiling that anyone can reach (Non decision again) nothing makes realistic sense. Eating corpses makes more sense than magic potions and allows for interesting gameplay to boot.

I also disagree with you about changing the way the game is played part way through is poor design. If I advance from being a footsoldier to the guy in mecha power armor, does it suck that I don't have to think about all the weaklings I struggled with in the begining? No. If I get an airship and overland travel becomes trivial to me should it have never existed in the first place? Of course not. Aquiring the airship is a major accomplishment and provides a sense of true power being aquired. A game that starts and ends with only statistical changes to your character is rather dull on the character development side.

Come on, just give me ONE fucking example of an interesting choice to make with a realistic food suppy system. Something with options I'd actually have to think about, which would vary depending on both the current character and particular situation, and would occur frequently enough to warrant a system instead of one or two scripted events.

 

[galsiah]

@EvoG
The context is not relevant here: the first part of the sentence is wrong. I'll preach at you when you seem in desperate need of salvation from the forces of idiocy - the case here.

The point is that to "promote further play" is NOT a goal in itself. You can say that you want to: "Promote further play, entertain, create world peace...", and the first part will still be wrong.

If you want to say that the goal of the game is to "entertain, and thereby often promote further play", then that's fine. Your statement implies that "further play" is a goal in and of itself. This is false, regardless of the context.

 

[EvoG]

Great examples Damned...

Come on, just give me ONE fucking example of an interesting choice to make with a realistic food suppy system. Something with options I'd actually have to think about, which would vary depending on both the current character and particular situation, and would occur frequently enough to warrant a system instead of one or two scripted events.

...and yea, I've been asking for this as well, beyond the deriding my design ideas.

 

[EvoG]

@EvoG
The context is not relevant here: the first part of the sentence is wrong. I'll preach at you when you seem in desperate need of salvation from the forces of idiocy - the case here.

The point is that to "promote further play" is NOT a goal in itself. You can say that you want to: "Promote further play, entertain, create world peace...", and the first part will still be wrong.

If you want to say that the goal of the game is to "entertain, and thereby often promote further play", then that's fine. Your statement implies that "further play" is a goal in and of itself. This is false, regardless of the context.

You know what, I have no idea what you're on about and I cannot believe you actually found a way to redfine the word "context". Remarkable, as I know you know exactly what I was saying, but its more convenient to tell ME what I was saying.

You're tone is antagonistic and you do not discuss WITH people but talk through and around people. I've asked you for ideas and wanted to engage you, but you honestly appear to have an agenda, even if just personal satisfaction. *shrugs*

You want to talk about this, I love debating actual ideas...if you just want to quote me each and every time followed by "this is just ignorant and stupid and is just to make money", then enjoy yourself, but I can guarantee it won't be fruitful.


Cheers

 

[Damned Registrations]

@EvoG
The context is not relevant here: the first part of the sentence is wrong. I'll preach at you when you seem in desperate need of salvation from the forces of idiocy - the case here.

The point is that to "promote further play" is NOT a goal in itself. You can say that you want to: "Promote further play, entertain, create world peace...", and the first part will still be wrong.

If you want to say that the goal of the game is to "entertain, and thereby often promote further play", then that's fine. Your statement implies that "further play" is a goal in and of itself. This is false, regardless of the context.

I gota call bullshit on that. Unless you're promoting further play by injecting the player with heroin it's a given that you're doing it by entertaining.