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[moogmg]

I was reading this  article (http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2012/05/windshields-and-warriors.html) by Andrew Doull and was immediately struck by this qoute: 

I've been thinking about the role of monsters in games, particularly with the recent Diablo discussion on Roguelike Radio's comments thread, and a recent attempt to play Torchlight (which for some reason had lost a whole lot of my character's progress). I'm also coincidentally at a point where I'm not finding gaming terribly satisfying: I suspect because I'm wading through sub par games like Deus Ex: Revolution, while waiting for the next brogue, Binding of Isaac, Terraria or Dark Messiah of Might and Magic to catch my imagination (to name some gaming highlights of the last few years).*

My favourite games have something in common: monsters, and enemies in general, exist in those games as an obstacle, not a resource - whereas Diablo, Angband and many others have you exploiting monsters for loot and experience. I realise Terraria requires you farm drops to find certain items, but boss monsters and Skeletons aside, you're almost always (until after the Wall of Flesh) better off searching for chests to get the same drop.
 

I find his he raises an interesting point. Enemies in many recent games seem to serve more as a resource for loot and experience than as a credible threat.Yet, this is not always bad. Some games (Like Diablo) are fun because they let you build and customize an all powerful character. How do you all feel? 

[fenrif]

I'd imagine this is probobly to do with enemy AI and behaviour generally not being a huge focus of game development nowadays. It's hard to make enemies obstacles when pretty much every player can figure out an enemies behaviour instantly just from past experiences with other games in the genre. "This guy has a shield, so i need to stun him/get behind him" "this guy is invulnerable, so I need to find the different coloured part to shoot at!" etc.

Though I don't think enemies being a resource is really a bad thing. Pokemon is probobly a perfect example where your enemies are your resource, and the game is hugely fun because of it. The problem is when the enemies are only a resource, and not an obstacle as well.

[AlStar]

Personally, I like the idea of enemies as a resource... however, I don't like the way that it's handled in games like Diablo or World of Warcraft, where every critter, big and small, is a loot Piņata which must be killed, since that giant roach over there might be holding the +9000 Vorpal Sword of Righteous Flaming Trees.

What I like is games like Darklands, where if you kill a knight, you'll find:
A sword, a suit of platemail and some cash.
and if you kill a peasant, you'll find:
A club, some ratty clothing and/or some leather and maybe a couple coins.
Basically, if you see someone with stuff that you want, you can take them on. None of this "ooh, there's a knight - I'll kill it for a 1% chance at a sword!"

[freeformschooler]

Pretty much why boss fights are usually my favorite part of a game. Look at earlier final fantasies for an example: the regular foes were (usually) mowed through to farm for items, Gil and experience, with bosses acting as a legitimate challenge that required real strategy (something uncommon with the normal enemies).

[Girlinhat]

This raises an interesting point that I've not considered before.  If a monster is just an ore for you to mine (which hits back occasionally) there's probably something wrong with the game.  Thinking about it though, I did love the Terraria monsters.  Minecraft as well.  Loot from them is marginal at best, and killing a zombie won't give you any iron, it's mining that will do that.  Monsters exist to make your efforts more difficult, because your main goal is to exploit the environment and the monsters impede this.  In many other games, the main goal is to kill monsters, and in that regard there is no effort to impede this, just to make execution more difficult.

[moogmg]

His view made me appreciate games where enemies could serve as a resource , but are still a very real danger where what might be gained is not equal to the risk.

examples:
1.Binding of Isaac where you have items that make you gain hearts for enemies killed or rooms visited, it could really save you in the end, but any new room can hold your downfall
2.Big Battles in Mount and blade, you can gain a lot but a huge lose can leave you extremely crippled.

[RedKing]

MMO's have flirted with this idea for a long time, of making monsters a finite quantity. For example, silverscales are useful for their scale drops which can be crafted into armor. But they have a set breeding rate based on their total population. Once all the silverscales are killed, there's none left...but then you're left with a handful of power gamers who would literally go around wiping out species after species for the bragging rights and phat lewt. And tons of regular players who would throw a fit that content is being denied them. Asheron's Call used to have some world events and items that were quite literally unique, as in, there was ONE of them. In the whole game. Which got to be rather amusing on the PvP server, as getting the One Foozle Sword immediately marked you as a target for every living thing on the planet to come after.

It would be rather fascinating for a game to make monsters into a finite resource. Or even better, simulated a complete biosphere so that if you decimate the rat population in an area, maybe the wolf population drops, which hurts the wolf-eating Morgok population, forcing them to move or maybe start eating other things....the problem being that such a system would be crazy easy to throw out of whack through a little organized player action, and you have plenty of people who would wreck the world just for the lulz.

I could see DF eventually incorporating some of this though. It already tracks total world populations for most critters (and, as if to prove my point, some people have gone into Adventurer mode and quite deliberately depopulated the entire world of sentient life just to see if it can be done). An ideal MMORPG system would find a way to turn people like that into the object of a "Kill Big Bad Foozle" quest. Or somehow encourage conservation-minded players to organize in defense of nature.

I'm thinking of the infamous "Vorpal Bunny" in Asheron's Call. For those unfamiliar:
Asheron's Call had the unique trait of allowing monsters to gain XP from killing players. This would continue to accrue until the monster was slain and respawned. This meant that a particularly successful monster could lvl up beyond the "stock" version and gained appropriately in power. So somebody took a random lvl 1 brown rabbit a little ways outside one of the towns, and deliberately "fed" it kills by debuffing themself to a near-helpless state, then triggering aggro without damaging the rabbit (which had about 2hp). Over time, more people signed on to offer themselves as sacrifices, and another group formed to take turns guarding the rabbit and attempting to dissuade any other players from killing it. Eventually, they got it up over lvl 100, and it could quite easily kill an unprepared player in one shot. Eventually, another player group sought to kill it, and did so after an epic battle. (Turbine recognized the effort by adding an actual lvl-666 Vorpal Bunny NPC in a later patch).

So the idea of a self-organized player group trying to "Save the Mobs" isn't too far-fetched.

[freeformschooler]

So the idea of a self-organized player group trying to "Save the Mobs" isn't too far-fetched.

Already been done in possibly the most hilarious fashion ever: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-elaborate-dick-moves-in-online-gaming-history_p2/

[fenrif]

This raises an interesting point that I've not considered before.  If a monster is just an ore for you to mine (which hits back occasionally) there's probably something wrong with the game.  Thinking about it though, I did love the Terraria monsters.  Minecraft as well.  Loot from them is marginal at best, and killing a zombie won't give you any iron, it's mining that will do that.  Monsters exist to make your efforts more difficult, because your main goal is to exploit the environment and the monsters impede this.  In many other games, the main goal is to kill monsters, and in that regard there is no effort to impede this, just to make execution more difficult.

I think it depends a lot on the genre of the game. In the Monster Tunter series the monsters are both your primary resource and your primary challenge, which works really well at giving you a cohesive progression and goal structure. You goto kill weak monsters so you can make better armour and weapons from their bodyparts so you can goto fight stronger monsters... Obviously this wouldn't work in every game but it has it's place.

Asherons Call stuff

I really honestly think Asherons Call was the best MMO ever made. Wasn't there a monthly plot event where people on the server had to kill some sort of endboss to progress the games story (a crystal I think?), and a group of players were defending it and feeding it to level it up, making it impossible to kill, and thus progress the story. Eventually some of the devs logged on and tried to take it out with the help of some very high leveled players, and lost! I think eventutually it was taken down, but the next update added a statue to one of the main towns commemorating the defenders of the crystal.

I really miss that game.

Edit: ninja'd by freeformschooler!

[Orb]

Loot from them is marginal at best, and killing a zombie won't give you any iron, it's mining that will do that.

Ironically...zombies do drop iron ingots. 

To actually contribute: I've always preferred mobs as obstacles. This usually means they're tougher than usual, and become 'challenges', instead of just grind fests.

[Girlinhat]

Ironically...zombies do drop iron ingots. 

Ah-ha, to be honest I hadn't actually played that version

[GlyphGryph]

I particularly like games where monsters-as-obstacles means that figuring out a way to circumvent the monsters is just as good a plan, if not better, than taking them head on.

Which is clearly never the case in monsters-as-a-resource game.

[RedKing]

I really honestly think Asherons Call was the best MMO ever made. Wasn't there a monthly plot event where people on the server had to kill some sort of endboss to progress the games story (a crystal I think?), and a group of players were defending it and feeding it to level it up, making it impossible to kill, and thus progress the story. Eventually some of the devs logged on and tried to take it out with the help of some very high leveled players, and lost! I think eventutually it was taken down, but the next update added a statue to one of the main towns commemorating the defenders of the crystal.

Yup. And I and my friends were actually *on* Thistledown (but nowhere near high enough to participate in that). AC had some great ideas, because it was so early in the MMORPG timeline that they weren't as restricted by player expectations. For instance, death actually HURT. You took an immediate percentage penalty to all your stats *and* you left one item at random on your corpse, which you had to get back to in order to recover. If you were travelling solo off in the ass-end of nowhere and got raped by a shreth, and lost your best item because of it....it was enough to make you ragequit your character. Or run around town begging for some high-lvl character to help you out.

The guild system was interesting too, because it worked like a Ponzi scheme. When people joined an "allegiance tree", they joined as the vassal of another player. You got points for your vassals, and once you had enough you went up in rank. Some items had a minimum rank requirement to use. Additionally, when you were offline, you got a small percentage of the XP earned by your vassals. And your vassals' vassals counted for you as well. The nice thing was that you could vassal each others' alts and mules and pretty qiuckly build up a decent little tree with just four or five people.

And spellcasting took all these different components...which actually took up inventory space. Got to be kind of maddening, but it definitely kept magic from being OP. It also had an "experimentation system", where you could randomly try spells with different combinations of components, and if you got it right (and made the skill check), you'd cast the spell and permanently learn it. Brilliant idea (and the idea was to encourage master spellcasters to jealously guard their 'secret' spells) but alas the idea of the Wiki came out about the same time, and pretty soon everyone was openly sharing their spell info outside the game.

[Matz05]

I think that it's OK if at least some monsters can be used as a resource, but that should NEVER be the only reason for their existence. In fact, you should be careful if a mob's primary purpose is to be a resource. A mob should be an element of the game that fits in multiple places. You could be jumped by a pack of well-organized ambush squad of kobolds that stab you in the back while their buddies rain arrows on you. That is a chalenge, and possibly a useful environmental hazard to lure enemies into. You could hunt the elusive Magma Crab for it's incendiary... uh... venom glands; but it shouldn't be a glorified ore that hits back. There should be multiple REASONS for their existence.

Random drops are only the prototype of what should really have been replaced long ago. The Bandit dropped a +3 scimitar of Pain and Death? Why was he ineffectually beating on you with a stick then?

[Frumple]

Random drops are only the prototype of what should really have been replaced long ago. The Bandit dropped a +3 scimitar of Pain and Death? Why was he ineffectually beating on you with a stick then?

If Incursion and dungeon crawl have taught me anything, it's that when that trope gets subverted, it's brutally hilarious.

I still remember that time I had a gnome illusionist in Inc facerolling everything with demi-shadow monsters of doom, only to get one-shot instakilled by a vorpal hunga-munga critically thrown from outside my light radius. I laughed, so hard. It was beautiful. Decapitated at fifty paces, probably by a kobold or somethin'.