>> If by "fully encumbered" you mean terribly slowed down when you reach an arbitrary tipping point?

yep, that's bethesda design. once carried wt == max wt, you can only walk, not run, and you can't fast travel (without a perk).

>> "Wouldn't exist in my game. Either you'd have a hard limit, or you'd linearly slow down the more you exceed the limit."

in Caveman i do both - linear slowdown and max limit. in bethesda games there's no max limit, you can walk around over encumbered with the gear from 1000 slain enemies in your backpack.

"Verily! Woulds't thou bee so kind aff to hold mine 50 sets of iron armor for the moment? for i wish to stuffeth yon castle unto mee backpack! Yeah, tho we be walking back a' town then. Tis no matter - for i'll wager yon Castle shall fetch a good asking at the shops!" <g>. (eh - not that impressive - i don't seem to be in an old english state of mind this morning. i tend to do much better when waxing priatical <g>)

>> Or Indiana Jones can roll under the door right before it shuts. (Exhilarating) <-- This is the kind of experience I want to cultivate. I want the player to barely make it. Not be able to magically fly to safety whenever the going gets tough. Part of my design thinking is trying to come up with ways that makes it so the player does succeed, but with the rapturous delight of almost not succeeding. I think Director AI can help with this. Beating a boss is fine. Beating a tough boss is better. Beating a tough boss with your final strike, knowing that the boss is about to kill you? That is euphoria.

the big problem is that it then becomes a dexterity minigame - slide under the door before it closes. "dang! got squished again, ok, relaod saved game for 7th time and try again!".

or you code it so comes down to the wire, but then the player discovers that combat is rigged. you can't kill them until you're almost dead, and likewise for them - or they may not be able to actually kill you at all.

you can setup "close calls", and let them play out - for better or for worse. but it seems that "rigging" close calls doesn't really work if you look too closely. "you may fool some of the people all of the time, but..."

one way to do it might be to setup multiple close calls, say 3. if the player fails the first, they can try the second, if that fails, the third. if that fails, it resets the first so thy can try it again, and so on. eventually they get out with a close call. but that may play out as being "contrived".

>> I think one form of play-related pleasure is the same: euphoric release of tension, the tension being focused intensity at trying to overcome a challenge when you appear to be on the verge of failure.

you're talking about "Phew! I made it!". you only get that when the game is "almost too hard". pick whatever fpsrpg you're best at, and take a few hours (3 hours) playing it at the highest difficulty you can at all times (you'll have to tweak difficulty often - especially between mooks and bosses). i find that right around two hits and your dead is about right. maybe three hits to be killed you'll fin that every moment is "phew! i made it!". the sad fact is the average gamer isn't up to the challenge. hard core dungeon adventurers like me (i delved into my first dungeon in 1977) - sure. that's the kind of challenge i want. most players are just looking for the skinner box payoff.

you know what they say:

"Hallelujah Noel, be it Heaven or Hell, the Christmas you get, you deserve." - Emmerson, Lake, and Palmer.

same goes for games. we get the games we deserve, cause we demand no better.

i really need to make a hard core D&D game. i keep saying that. something tells me there's going to be one in my future - after i swore i'd never do another "really too big for just one developer" game again.

well, the next two titles are military flight sims. i can kick them out in short order. then i can worry about it.

>> Original four vs current eight:

can anyone find the Bartle test? the link i found was dead. while i was reading about it, there was empirical evidence that the player type you'd think would make a good DM wasn't the player type that usually did. can't recall the type that did, but it sounded like me. i'd like to take the test. back in the D&D days they always wanted to play in my world - i never got to play! <g>. computers were an opportunity for me to write a program that would let me play.

>> That's not my experience. Dungeons that aren't entirely linear, or which have traps, or areas that can't be easily traversed in both directions, all make for interesting navigation, even with a map.

i wish Bethesda understood that.

>> Well, no. You're assigning your motivations onto me and other players, which doesn't apply in the general case. If I reach max encumbrance I often continue into the dungeon and drop things as necessary. I don't want to view dungeon exploration as 'mining for loot', I want to view it as 'dungeon exploration', and the choice between minimizing time and distance travelled vs maximizing loot sold at the shop is an interesting choice I enjoy making.

no, you're assigning your gameplay style to all players. some want to mine dungeons for loot. in such cases, no fast travel out of the dungeon is an inconvenience at best, and disrespectful at worst. different players like to play different ways. as designers we have to cater to them all - or exclude them from our target audience. i've often times noticed that the answers i get about rpg design questions are often tinted by the responder's personal gameplay style. most folks don't think in terms of "all players", just "me as player". no problem with that as long as your sample is big enough. but i suspect that "folks who happen to respond to rpg questions on gamedev" is a skewed sample though. we seem to have a lot of bartle's "explorer" types here.

>> The problem with allowing the player to choose is that it's very easy to turn your game into a Skinner box where you're just clicking away and watching numbers go up. I find that if I'm able to streamline a game then I usually do so, and it's less fun than times when I can't do that. I need the game to provide some discipline for me.

one thing i've noticed is that a lot of games, like SIMwhatever and city builders and rts's and such - if you speed up the game really fast, you realize the game really isn't that much fun or does not do a whole lot. which you wouldn't normally notice for a long time, simply because the game runs so slow. so it would seem that a "slow game" is a good way to hide "not much of a game". note that this does not mean that all slow games are not much of a game. it also leads me to suspect that games should be able to pass the accelerated time test. its a good way to get far along in the game quickly for playtesting - to see if you really have enough game there or not.

the biggest problem i find with accelerated time is the players running the game so fast they die of starvation and such.

>> Offering extra fast travel to suit achievers in that situation can make explorers feel like they're being punished for playing the game their way. It's a tradeoff.

ah. i see your point. in that particular case, the feature that caters to one game play style detracts from or conflicts with another game play style - at least in your opinion. me personally, i'd just ignore the feature if i was exploring, but that's neither here nor there.

hmm... interesting concept. it would seem that explorer types have particular desires in an rpg. perhaps a somewhat more demanding type of player, or one with higher expectations? especially with respect to immersion. even extending as far as optional gameplay features such as fast travel even being available? often times i'll forego certain game play features in Skyrim for purposes of role playing (i always try to play in character with every character and play a wide variety of character types), immersion (no fast travel), challenge (switch to light armor), or to avoid a game breaking dominant strategy (such as smithing plus enchanting). ii'm really bummed i can't do an unarmed monk type character. there are no real skills or items for it. just one item, i think.

in my current rpg project i've decided to give the player choice. x-country travel, adjustable difficulty levels for different aspects of the game, plus all built in cheats and testing tools, like teleport, instant healing of all stats, game editor, you name it. use it if you want, if you don't, just ignore it. none of it is obtrusive. some settings accessed from the in-game menu, right click on the maps for teleport instead of left click for cross-country travel, built-in tools on the main menu, and ALT-F12 for in-game playtest menus that let you do almost anything, spawn critters, edit stats, used to be able to edit the current map square - watch the terrain change right before you eyes. might have to make it do that gain. that was kind of cool! <g>. cross country travel is more immersive than fast travel. its continuous move with auto-steer to destination, collisions ignored, and movement rate based on terrain type. you can then accelerate time until you reach your destination or something of interest happens. a 3rd person view camera tracks the player as they move along, almost like a canned animation camera angle. you can also do 3rd person view, continuous move, steer manually, and accelerate time to manually walk across the world more quickly.

I really love exploring and poking around in places in games, but that sure doesn't mean I love having to walk for hours to get somewhere. I find that Baluder's Gate feels far larger and more epic in scale than pretty much any of the modern Elder Scroll games do.

I want to explore, and I want to have things to explore, but please for the love of god don't make levels and designs which are big for no other reason than to make them big. If there is a central city that I will be visiting frequently, then by all means give me a large space that is spread out and has things to explore and interesting stuff to discover, but don't make me wander over the whole bloody thing to buy more arrows, then back to the other side to top up on healing potions, and then a half hour of climbing stairs to buy bottles for my Mana potions which is followed by a twenty minute jumping puzzle to fill them. Let me walk up to the fletcher in the main market square, hit a few buttons to top things off, move for five seconds, and then buy what I need from the armourer, move another five seconds and shop for potions.

By all means let me go on an adventure deeper into the less traveled parts of a huge city, but please don't expect me to keep making those trips over the same parts over and over and over again throughout the course of your game. Let me go on a quest which takes me on a long winding path throughout the city to get to the "Super Secret and advanced Apothecary of Fun and Adventure", but if it is a place that I'm going to be coming back to again and again and again, then hide a "Back door" to it in the basement of the blacksmith in the main market that I can use once I've put the work into finding it.

If I consistently go diving deep into your dungeons, and then consistently spend twenty minutes walking back out of each one and nothing ever happens, then you have a design bug.

If I have finished your game and can't tell my friends about more than one or two interesting or cool specific points of the dungeons because they all looked and felt alike, then you have a design bug.

Having a huge grand stairs or mountain to climb that leaves the player in awe is something they should be climbing once. If there aren't more details for me to see, things for me to find or explore, something New, then why are you (as a designer) bringing me (as the player) back to it? Things like that are awesome the first time. Kind of impressive the second time, and frankly just bloody annoying the third time, and the rest of your game had better be amazing for me to put up with going over it a fourth time or more.

>> If I consistently go diving deep into your dungeons, and then consistently spend twenty minutes walking back out of each one and nothing ever happens, then you have a design bug.

this happens to me every time, unless i make it all the way to the door at the far end without being over-encumbered. which usually doesn't happen until the second or third trip back to finish cleaning out the dungeon. that is exactly what made me think of this topic in the first place.