Re: Should Swamp stop allowing sighted players?
Hi Aprone,
This is a really interesting question.
First I'll say that I don't play HC so my comments are more general.
I can not read with my eyes but do have a very small amount of vision that is helpful when navigating in swamp.
One of my sighted brothers used to play with me and he definitely had an advantage because of his sight.
It made doing missions tremendously easier and less scary, though I stille died from time to time.
I'd say that if you took graphics out of the game completely my brother would never play it with me again. He's actually told me that in the past.
It's just too much of a shift for sighted players to play a first person shooter in sound only.
I also think it would make the learning curve far higher and game appeal far lower for players who are low vision and rely on a screen reader but still have some small amount of vision.
I'm actually working on an online FPS of my ow n and so I've thought a lot about these problems as I want my brothers to play with me, but that brings a large balancing problem.
For my game the goal is to make the game accessible to sighted players as well which means to leave in visuals, but use other aspects of the game to balance it out.
I'm fixing this by:
1 Improving the navigational radar for blind players.
Obviously the more efficiently a blind player can perceive their environment reduces the gap between their experience and what a sighted player gets from the visuals.
Which makes the problem smaller and improves the experience for blind players at the same time.
Your see monkey is another example of this sort of improvement.
2 For the PVP or PVE aspects that do not involve experience or items retained by players I plan on further balancing the problems via a perks system.
Essentially when a player logs on they can adjust their perks.
Everyone gets the same number
of perks so the system is completely fair and I just need to balance one perk in relation to another.
I make seeing your environment a perk, and seeing units and items another perk.
The rest of the perks grant more health, armor, damage, etc.
For example let's say that every player gets 20 perks:
If seeing your environment costs 10 perks and seeing items and units costs 5 perks and a sighted player will likely choose these, then a sighted player is left with 5 perks to spend elsewhere.
While a totally blind player will ignore the very expensive visual perks and get to spend all 20 perks on health, armor, damage etc.
For a more RPG like experience such as Swamp this is more complicated as you wouldn't want players to be able to switch these perks as often and much of their perks should be decided by their level, not a system specifically introduce to balance sighted and blind players.
I still believe that is easily solvable but I haven
't put brain cells into it yet since I'm starting with a less complicated FPS without as many RPG mechanics as swamp has.
Well, I think that essentially sums up my solutions.
In the case of hard core in Swamp I think it is a much easier choice as even if you remove visuals sighted players can still enjoy the core game experience.
And in another sense removing visuals is sort of a hard core mode anyway.
You could also go the half way point where you leave visuals for navigating the environment but remove visuals for items like food.
That way sighted players can still navigate, but have no advantage when it comes to zeroing in on food.
Hope that helps.
Ian Reed
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=155198#p155198
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