🚀 go-pugleaf

I've got a lot of "me too!"s and a few of my own suggestions here:

dst...@minerva.cis.yale.edu (Daniel Starr) writes:
>I.  Interface suggestions
>II.  Plot suggestions
> 
>I.  Interface suggestions
> 
>1.  No arcade sections.  No arcade sections.  No arcade sections.
>     "Arcade section" = any obstacle that a typical player has to
>try more than three times to get past.  Maybe even two times. 
>Absolutely the most annoying part of U8.

What he said.

Primary rule: The interface is there to help the player do what he wants.
If he has to battle the interface, he won't be interested in battling the
bad guys.  Puzzles should use brain power, not ultra-finicky reflexes.

>3.  Lots of hotkeys.
>     I want to be able to hit (C) to get a list of spells to Cast
>and (R) to Rest and so on.  I do not like mouse-only interfaces. 
>And I'm tired of mucking about through my inventory all the time. 

Speaking of the keyboard, bring back typing speech options!  Replay value 
is greatly enhanced if you can (if you remember) cut to the chase of a 
conversation, not wade through 15 menus.  Also, since one just ends up
traversing the whole menu tree to see what's under all the leaves, this
leads to a feeling that you're doing "busywork" to get the game to cough 
up info.

>5.  Idiocy-free combat.  
>     I do not ever again want to see my character sheath his
>sword in the middle of combat in order to move.  If I click on an
>enemy, I want to move up to him and swing.  If I click on a
>location, I want to dash over there.  I want my relevant objects
>and a list of spells available by hotkeys, no inventory-mucking
>required.  If it makes the player look stupid or feel clumsy, get
>rid of it.

I have yet to see an Ultima where "Flaming Oil" didn't kill more party 
members than monsters, because the NPCs were too stupid to walk around
the damn stuff.  This is true both in combat and normal walking around.
I was very annoyed at U7 when I found that, although if I was careful, 
I could notice and avoid caltrops, my party members never would.  Ditto
for lava that had safe paths in it.  Similar problems in U7 with the
Firedoom Staff always seeming to get used in close combat.  Give these 
guys half a brain!  No character should do something obviously life-
threatening without very good reason.

>6.  View rotation.
>     I'm tired of not being able to see what's going on.  And
>it's very aggravating to knock a chest where you can't see it.
>Alternatively a hotkey to turn all walls to transparent glass
>would work quite well.

Yes!  No more silly myths about not having doors on half your walls...

>8.  Text optionally visible during speech.
>     It was impossible to make out what Hydros was saying...

Yah.

Further comments:
The game should be playable lots of different ways.  If I want to go 
solo, I should be able to go without a party.  The old ways of customizing
your characters gender/race/morals all helped a *lot* with character 
identification.

Speaking of characters, bring back the portraits.  If you want an 
improvement, try giving each character a few different expressions.

Combat should be more tactically oriented, less arcade-ish.  I liked the
U5/6 combat routines.  On the other hand, I liked the feature of the U7
system that, once you had reached sufficiently high levels, you could
essentially ignore combat with low-level monsters.  I spent too much time
in U5 fighting screens full of bats and the like.

>II.  Content suggestions
> 
>1.  Game flags must make sense.  Game flags must make sense. 
>          Game flags must makes sense.
>     Whenever the game won't let one do X until one has done Y a
>reason must be explicitly given.  Nothing does more to destroy
>the suspension of disbelief than a senseless requirement.  "What,
>if the dog sniffs the medallion the barrier around the castle
>disappears?  What the heck?"  [In U8:  Why wouldn't Hydros speak
>to me until after I completed the Shrine of the Ancient Ones? 
>Why did I have to free Pyros before I could get the Ethereal
>Travel spell?  Stupid, stupid, stupid.]

Yes!  For that matter, I think that *restrictive* game flags should be
kept to a minimum.  Yes, the world should react to what I do, but flags
are often transparently arbitrary.  If you want to keep someone away
from somewhere until late in the game, put a really-hard-to-kill
monster or somesuch in front of it; not a wall that vanishes when he 
does 'X'.

Also, keep restrictions on travel to a minimum.  I was *very* annoyed
at Serpent Isle and U8 for the limited ability to be a 'tourist'.
Why do you include a map at all, if you won't let a player roam the 
world.

>2.  Satisfying resolutions.
>     If I kill a local dragon I want every single villager to
>thank me for it when they see me and most of them to have changed
>habits as a result.  If I save the world I want a big, flashing
>YOU HAVE SAVED THE WORLD sign and I want every single citizen to
>come up and shake my hand and tell me a personal anecdote about
>how I have made their lives better.  The closing animation should
>be blindingly explicit and triumphant, and resolutions during the
>game should be similarly direct.  Don't assume I know I've done a
>good deed, don't just tell me "You have done a good deed", SHOW
>ME.  There should be no doubt about the consequences of my
>actions.

Yes!  Good example here would be Martian Dreams, which had a lot of
'end-game' speeches people could give to you.

Also, people should react not only to the end-game, but to *all* 
significant (to them, at least) changes in the game-world.  If I go
back to a town after a lot of local adventures, I want the NPCs to 
have heard about some of them, and react.

No Generic People! (Except maybe guards).  One of the best things about
U7 was all the little life-stories in Brittania, and the fact that most of
them *weren't* directly tied to the main plot.

>4.  Evil people should be evil during the game, too.
>     I want to make good friends and useful allies only to have
>them kidnapped with taunting notes left behind.  I want to see
>innocents taken away screaming.  I want Blackthorn and the
>Shadowlords (U5) -- enemies who make my quest difficult on a
>personal, direct and regular basis.  I want personal reasons to
>be upset with the enemy.  

Yes, and see also Time Pressure, below.

>7.  Lots of small figure-it-out-yourself puzzles.
>     Using brain = fun.  Give me lots of opportunities to piece
>information together.  I'm investigating the Widgets, say:  an
>apprentice says the Mage of Veils was interested in Widgets but
>has now "vanished, I know not where"; but the innkeeper says that
>a bard told him there was a carnival with caged Widgets in North
>Vespers.... so where might the Mage of Veils be, hmm?

Inferring connections is *much* more satisfying than being handed an
itinerary of tasks to do and places to go.

>8.  Lots of common knowledge.
>     Everyone in town should be able to give me directions to
>buildings in town; and if there's a plague, everyone should have
>something to say about it.  "No man is an island."

Yes, and this is another argument for ditching the menu interactions and
going back to the keyboard.  We all *have* keyboards, why ignore them?!
Good Example: in U5, most NPCs had interesting things to say when prompted
with "Shadowlord", "British" and "Blackthorn".

>10.  Lots of dynamism in the world.
>     Gypsies and bards who move from town to town.  Roving
>brigands.  Armies on the march.  Lots of things to keep the
>Avatar on his toes.  Just don't make any obvious links to
>unrelated game events -- if the army marches into York right
>after I free the Princess, every single time, it looks stupid. 
>Instead, try "The army will march into York as soon as the player
>has completed one of plot objectives A, B, and C and has visited
>1-6 (random) more cities."  (Time-based flags don't work too well
>if the player works quickly.  Instead, increment the counter each
>time the player goes into a city different from the last city
>visited.  Or count the number of conversations.  Or both.)
> 
>11.  Genuine time pressure.
>     Repeatedly emphasize the urgency of the situation - "The
>BigNastyFolks take more of us away each day."  Count the number
>of visits I've made to cities so far.  Trigger something
>upsetting every N+(1-4) visits.  An army blockade?  A fire?  Lots
>of ways to make players' lives unpleasant without making the game
>unwinnable.  Just make sure we know the time pressure exists.

YESYESYES!  Plot Events which are *obviously* triggered by player
actions, but in the context of Brittania are independent or time-
based really tend to ruin the suspension of disbelief.  Might be a
good idea to have customizability of this, a la System Shock, although
I think Daniel's ideas here are *much* more intruiging than a simple 
time limit.

As a bad example, in U7, The members of the Fellowship that you try to 
trace have *always* just left wherever you are until the end game.  This
feels way artificial.  Time should pass, both for players and NPCs.

>12.  Rewards for the clever and alternatives for the rest.
>     Let there be a wandering Oracle who requires onerous tasks
>in return for hints.  If you can't figure out where the Mage of
>Veils is, you go hunt down the Oracle.  This lets there be
>serious brain-working puzzles without making the game impossible. 
>Just heavily advertise the Oracle, and make the tasks harder each
>time.  "Back again so soon?  Good -- I need the skulls of three
>dragons from the northern mountains..."

Repeat after us: Non-linear.  Customizable.  Multiple Paths.

One of the major plusses of Myst (and to a lesser extent, U7) was
multiple possible endings, including bad ones.  If no matter what I do,
the Guardian *doesn't* win, then I feel less involved in stopping him.
A spectrum of Bad-Soso-Good endings would be interesting, and add replay 
value.

One final comment:
One of the things I missed in U8 was the element of moral choice.  The
Avatar should have to make hard decisions, and they should *matter*.  When
I was faced with the choice of betraying one of two necromancers, I thought
I had such a choice, but a little save-and-restore exploring showed that the
two paths were virtually identical.  Choices should make a difference.
Blackthorn's death-threat in U5 came close to this, but did not go far 
enough, IMHO.

Alexx

Al...@netcom.com
"The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really
 are is that you very often succeed."
      -- from The Magician's Nephew