Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ultimuh]

With Todd "needs more dumbing down" Howard, that isn't going to happen ever again though.
(It's actually a suprise, given he was the one leading Morrowind too, Unless he wasn't really the one leading it.)

Some say that Morrrowind was dumbed down compared to the previous games.

[Araph]

I get having some elements of Morrowind eliminated (I hadn't thought of stuff like Recalling out of danger making the game easy being a problem, and having cities being in separate cells makes levitation unworkable), but getting rid of the spellmaking system is pretty dumb. That and having enchanting stations instead of letting you enchant stuff in the field irritates me to no end. Smithing should be cool, though.

[FunctionZero]

With Todd "needs more dumbing down" Howard, that isn't going to happen ever again though.
(It's actually a suprise, given he was the one leading Morrowind too, Unless he wasn't really the one leading it.)

Some say that Morrrowind was dumbed down compared to the previous games.

Well, in Morrowind, they mostly removed the elements that weren't really used in Daggerfall, like climbing and the language skills. Reputation system would be cool, though, if left in.
And the almost infinite landscape was scrapped for a more fleshed out world. Each town had a nice backstory, with its own architecture. Not that they invested the same amount of effort in Oblivion with fleshed-out worlds.

The amount of stuff they threw out of the window in Oblivion was completely unnecessary and mostly done to dumb it down for consoles.

I get having some elements of Morrowind eliminated (I hadn't thought of stuff like Recalling out of danger making the game easy being a problem, and having cities being in separate cells makes levitation unworkable), but getting rid of the spellmaking system is pretty dumb. That and having enchanting stations instead of letting you enchant stuff in the field irritates me to no end. Smithing should be cool, though.

Separate cells were only made because they were dumbing it down for consoles. Consoles couldn't hold that much memory at once, so they had to cut it apart as much as they could.
Recall being removed is because they were lazy and couldn't make quests more dynamic. Instead they resorted to railroading the player.

As for smithing, who knows how they'll do it. Probably not very well, but we'll see.

[Shadowlord]

With Todd "needs more dumbing down" Howard, that isn't going to happen ever again though.
(It's actually a suprise, given he was the one leading Morrowind too, Unless he wasn't really the one leading it.)

Where'd they say that spellcrafting was removed? I can't find any statement on the matter. Enchanting was confirmed to still exist, and they also confirmed you can combine spells on the fly by casting two simultaneously, but as far as I remember they never mentioned spellcrafting (and searching didn't find anything about it either). Maybe it'll be in the game when Skyrim comes out, or maybe not. If they haven't said anything about it, that doesn't mean it's confirmation that it doesn't or won't exist. They may just not want to say everything about the game all at once and then have nothing to say later on (Of course you would tend to think most of what they say would be new things rather than "Yeah, we still have enchantment, but we got rid of spellcrafting because we have a limited budget to spend and the music needed more cowbell").

They could slap in a UO-style "Go mining for ore, smelt my ore at a forge, and hammer the iron (or whatever) into weapons/armor/tools at an anvil!" without having to think overly hard about how to do it, considering that the UO model works fairly well if the players wouldn't mind wasting hours on mining, smelting, and forging items. As long as you don't have to make hundreds of junk items to raise your blacksmithing (or whatever they call it) skill (assuming they didn't make a separate skill for all the different types of smithing stuff, and one for mining).

Gothic II on the other hand just had you buy iron billets and make swords out of them, cutting out the mining step. Then of course you sold the swords to the guy you bought the billets from, and did this for several minutes for massive profit. You had to spend XP to learn new sword-smithing recipes (XP that would normally be used on something more useful than just generating massive profit for yourself).

[FunctionZero]

It was mentioned in the original Skyrim thread with the link to source.

[kinglog]

You might be interested in Die by the Sword - player skill sword fighting. It's available on GOG cheap. The best melee combat ever.

I can second Dark Messiah - I don't know why this game didn't get more attention. This and Alpha Protocol kept the Deus Ex spirit alive in me

[Kay12]

I liked the magic system (or rather, the rough idea) in Steamband, which is a bit obscure Angband variant which has been out of development for a few years, I think. As the name implies, it's a steampunk game. It does feature magic though, and in many forms. Some classes have their special powers: naturalists are able to use the forces of nature such as lightning and blizzards, mediums can use the force and try to seize enemy minds, aesthetes can enchant items and if you happen to be a hulking mecha or a more modest automaton, you can use a variety of your inbuilt tools that function as weapons, scanners, mining equipment and such.

Then, there's the traditional Angband spell book system, although it's been spiced up by making the "books" fit in three different categories. There's "black magic" which is pretty much what it says on the tin - you'll suffer nasty long-term damage from casting spells, especially miscasting them. The spells are powerful, though. Prayer books are safer to use, but miscasting spells will cause extremely nasty side effects. The spells are too specialized to be the sole means of survival in the early game, as the first direct damage spells one gets only works on automata and undead. Finally, engineering allows one to manipulate powerful machines that range from utility belts to powerful weapons. Miscasting is relatively safe here, but the best effects are unlocked only at a quite high level.

However, the system could've been much more. I really liked the idea of black magic actually causing the loss of something else than easy-to-regenerate mana.


Another Angband variant with a nice system is Hengband which, I think, is even more obscure. I don't know about their magic expect that they have a lot of specialized magic classes (mirror mages, blue mages, red mages, high mages, priests etc...) but the do pack perhaps the most interesting class in all Angband variants - the Ninja. You can deal powerful backstabs, vanish in darkness, hide in a fireball and perform the kawarimi no jutsu. Stealth action FTW!

[Rabek Jeris]

I second Hengband. I used to play that sucker as my exclusive roguelike for, I'm going to go with, years. Ninja are totally awesome and nothing like how they're usually handled in games. Most of the mages are really interesting, but a bit tricky to use. I also like the beastman/chaos warrior combo, but that's in a number of roguelikes and not so unique.

[zestorum]

A pretty interesting, albeit simple, magic system was the magic system of Arx Fatalis.

Basically, the spells were written with symbols, and each symbol had a meaning. So to create a fireball, you would have to write "create" "fire" "missile" using the symbols. The symbols are written in a book, and so are the spells, but there are hidden spells which aren't written and you'll have to experiment with the magic system to find out what they are.

[Kay12]

I second Hengband. I used to play that sucker as my exclusive roguelike for, I'm going to go with, years. Ninja are totally awesome and nothing like how they're usually handled in games. Most of the mages are really interesting, but a bit tricky to use. I also like the beastman/chaos warrior combo, but that's in a number of roguelikes and not so unique.

I thought I was the only one who ever saw the game!

I wonder how's Hengband's licencing... if I had all the time in the world and it was GPL, I'd pick up Heng's source, "steal" the Ninja class and recreate it in Steamband. (EDIT: Hengband's open source, I guess it's only about all the time in the world now!)

[GlyphGryph]

Vagrant Story

I was going to mention this but got beat to the punch. Very interesting combat system with weaknesses and targeting and combos. Worth a go at least.

[Supercharazad]

On the topic of skyrim and dumbing down:

Modders WILL add EVERYTHING in eventually.

Oblivion currently has bees, chopping trees, bow making, mining, smithing, smelting, shearing, skinning ect.
In one mod.
In fact, the skinning and smithing usues a different system, specifically coded for that one mod.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Would "The  Void" count. The combat in that has you drawing symbols on the screen with your own blood.

[lordcooper]

Would "The  Void" count. The combat in that has you drawing symbols on the screen with your own bloodthe very life essence of the Void..

[FunctionZero]

On the topic of skyrim and dumbing down:

Modders WILL add EVERYTHING in eventually.

Oblivion currently has bees, chopping trees, bow making, mining, smithing, smelting, shearing, skinning ect.
In one mod.
In fact, the skinning and smithing usues a different system, specifically coded for that one mod.

Mods are never perfect. When they need to do something not in the original game, it often turns out broken somewhat.

Now, crafting is easy to make. Most of the time, all they need is to make a new "conversation" and dump the options there.

The example you posted? With bees and stuff? It's all very doable, with simple code. All you need to do is put some scripts on the activators, mostly done either by activating them or swinging a certain weapon at them.

But with spellmaking? They'd have to recode the UI and probably even more.
You can't do everything with mods. For some things you just need the source.