I'm in favor of taking out randomness. I'm not overly concerned with scoring. My biggest point in this email, though: "In the Tomb Raider games puzzles range from using a specific lever/switch to unlock a door to more advanced puzzles like jumping on certain pressure switches,hidden in the floor, in a certain order, to unlock a hidden passage, etc. All pretty cool, but I fear might be too advanced for most Vi gamers." As it stands now, you may be right, but I don't think that's a good reason not to include such puzzles. If we keep the bar intentionally low, we'll never teach people to jump higher. One of my biggest gripes with audio games to this point has been their overwhelming simplicity. I beat Grizzly Gulch a day after purchasing it. Monkey Business took a day and a half. Super Liam took another day. All of these games were fun in their own right, but nothing has compared--especially in action/adventure titles--to mainstream difficulty. It's disheartening to pay 30 to 50 dollars for a title only to have completed it and exhausted much of the replay value within 48 hours. You have the power to change that.
-----Original Message----- From: gamers-boun...@audyssey.org [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 2:13 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: [Audyssey] MOTA Last Minute Comments Hi everyone, Okay, here is the deal. Beta 17 is almost ready for public release and it may appear as early as Friday/Saturday barring any unforseen issues/problems. Which brings me to the point of this e-mail. Basically, if there is any last minute comments, suggestions, or input you would like to give before the release goes public. In particular a few issues I didn't quite get too in my last e-mail on Mysteries of the Ancients last week. A few days ago I sent a post regarding new Mysteries of the Ancients levels. Most of you understood this as a question of keeping old levels or creating new ones. Unfortunately, I didn't make myself clear in that e-mail but I was looking more for suggestions and input on various aspects besides that question. So I'll address each of them hear directly. Random Items/Monsters --- I know back in the early days of MOTA this was one of the number one requests for the game. Ever since I added it some time back it remains one of the top selling points of the game, but what you may not know or have considered is that like anything else it has pros and cons. As I sit hear thinking about the future of the project as a whole I can't help feel like the cons outway the advantages of a more triditional mainstream side-scroller without random monsters, items, etc. For one thing I've been playing mainstream games all of my life, and the majority of games do not have randomly placed monsters and items. Instead monsters and items are usually placed in the same general location each and every game with the same general stats. There are a number of advantages of doing it this way. For starts balancing game play. When you have a fully random game like we have now you don't really know what monster you will be facing, or B, what its stats will be when you do face it. While I don't doubt this adds replay value for some gamers I also know it makes it impossible to test and balance correctly because I never know from one moment to the next what to expect from the game. Games that have fixed monsters and challenges don't generally have this problem. For example, in the original Tomb Raider game there is a Greek temple Lara Croft has to explore in order to find one of the lost pieces of the scion. There is a chamber inside the Greek temple with two centaurs that were transformed into stone centuries ago. When Lara accidently lifts the spell on the centaurs they come to life, and she has to fight them to get the missing piece of the scion. Besides being a major element of the plot/story they just wouldn't fit anywhere else in the game as an enemy. In this case those enemies generally wouldn't be good to randomly place in the game. When it comes to mysteries of the Ancients I often find myself in a similar situation. There are certain rooms or areas were one monster or enemy is better than another. Rooms were it might be practical not to randomize anything and just place items there by default. For example, imagine swimming underwater. Putting treasures like gold coins and gems in the water is perfectly fine since the water couldn't damage them. If we were randomly placing items, as we do now, it would put things like ammo, swords, scrolls, etc in the water were we wouldn' want those items randomly placed. by all rights the water should ruin a scroll rendering it unreadable and worthless so randomizing in this case is not cool. Diddo for the monsters. it is perfectly fine for a skeleton or maybe a zombie to be swimming around in the water trying to kill you but it wouldn't work for a centaur, harpy, or several other enemy monsters I could name. Plus a lot of games I know have a lot of one kind of enemy on one level, and a lot of a different kind on another level. For example, level 1 might have an army of skeletons because they are fairly easy to kill/fight and while there might be a lot of them around they still aren't a serious threat. Later levels might feature harpies, and another one centaurs, and another one zombies. The reason I point this out is that mainstream games often use miner enemies in lower levels and progress to more difficult enemies as you progress.In Tomb Raider Prophecy, for example, it starts you out with fighting gray wolves and ax wielding skeletons. Later levels introduce you to more hostile/difficult enemies such as black fire breathing wolves, undead priests that cast fireballs, and even the skeletons will throw fireballs and stuff at you. Point being there has to be some sort of natural progression rather than just randomly mixing it all up the way we are doing. Bottom line, it is hard to write a plot, balance game play, with too much random stuff going on. So I really need to know how many really think random items and monsters is worth it. Is it a deal braker for you personally, or shall we create a more triditional side-scroller my way. Before anyone asks doing both is not an option. It is one way or the other here. Scoring and Arcade Mode ---- Ever since I have converted MOTA to C++ a number of you have asked about a standard and arcade mode. While this is possible and fairly easy to add I'm wondering how many people actually are interested in this. It isn't that hard to add, but if there aren't many really interested in this feature I'm not going to take time away from other things to add this feature. So I'd like to know how high this ranks on your wish list. Puzzles and Traps ----- There has been a lot of talk about this issue both on and off list. So I think we need to open this up and hash it out once and for all. A few versions back I remember there were a number of complaints about no warning step sounds in front of fire pits, spike traps, and other things to let you know when and where to jump. Unfortunately, I have always maintained this is sort of like a classic case of x marks the spot, and in my opinion jumping fire pits, spike traps, chasms, etc is far too easy. Therefore what I think needs to be done is add some ability to jump higher and further depending on how long the keys are held down. Perhaps some jump system like Q9. The reason i say this is you have the mud indicating the edge of the pits, but i've often screwdd up and fell to my doom too. So that system is more than fair for jumping traps. What worries me more is puzzles. I've seen cases where some people have complained that they couldn't unlock a certain door/statue because they couldn't find the proper lever to pullin the current MOTA releases. Strictly speaking that's pretty simple compared to some of the puzzles I could use to open certain doors. For example, in a lot of the interactive fiction games I've played they use passwords, riddles, and other puzzles of that kind to open certain doors. In the Tomb Raider games puzzles range from using a specific lever/switch to unlock a door to more advanced puzzles like jumping on certain pressure switches,hidden in the floor, in a certain order, to unlock a hidden passage, etc. All pretty cool, but I fear might be too advanced for most Vi gamers. What do you think? 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