theWulfen 2 – Blog

Update June 09

June 22, 2009 on 10:23 am | In Game Environment, Messages | 1 Comment

Well the last month was particularly crap, a number of things have kept me away from W2 which hopefully after a funeral this afternoon should ease up. I have however begun to rewrite the back end of the framework that I have created, so this is now becoming more efficient.

More online games are appearing in the market, a few very good (Warrior Epic comes to mind) and some total rubbish.  However the marketplace has become more crowded as a result.  Now one thing that seems to be becoming more apparent is player’s requirements.  Players like casual groups/parties, where they can conquer some objective and culmulativly gain a reward/xp.  Players generally dislike repeating the same activity over and over again, even if it has a tangible outcome.  Players like being able to group with friends (be they in or out of the game).  Players like the freedom of being able to solo parts of the game.  15 ~ 20 minutes is an ideal length for a section after which point most people seem to be happy to have a break, those who want to carry on will just head straight into a new section.  Players do want a way of investing money into their game experience.  Buying novelty items is largely pointless, but equally players don’t want to see somebody who is flush spending vast amounts of cash on the game and gaining an unfair advantage.

I’ve had a bit of a rethink about maps and similar as well and am going to tweak W2 into more of a dungeon based game.  Travel will still be dangerous, but not require the player to navigate miles before they reach their destination.  During travel time events may occur.  An inn will be available in every village, town and city where you can recruit other group members or be yourself recruited.  Each group will exist within its own ‘instance’ so there is no chance of other parties stealing kills.  Dungeons will be randomly generated in the same way as the old Warhammer Quest game and will have a mixture of forested, jungle and interior ‘board tiles’.

I need to spend some time considering how characters will level up as well.  Warhammer Quest (WQ) and in fact Warrior Epic (WE) both have a gold = xp type system.  Everytime you kill something in WE you get gold and at the end of a dungeon that gets turned into XP.  In WQ you get gold as a reward for killing things and then spend it on training – plus other provisions.  I’m currently verging more towards a WQ-esq concept.  Monsters will reward gold coins, and you will be able to purchase silver coins.  Gold coins must be used training.  Silver and gold coins can be used to purchase provisions, such as healing potions, rope, bandages etc.  All monster drops will be split equally amongst the party, unless the player is ‘idle’.  I’m toying with the idea of having the skill system linked to a more traditional XP method, but specific to what you do.  So if a character hits something with a slashing weapon, they will gain XP in slashing weapons and can purchase a skill from that pool – providing they have enough skill slots (1 per trained character level).

The biggest benefit from going this route is that there is suddenly a definate path to follow.  Basic city/town > Simple Travel > Dungeon Creation > Combat.  Suddenly W2 looks less horrific!