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Idea for player races. (I want to see monsters.), Scratch the humans, cut the elves, burry the dwarfs!!! |
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Alexander |
May 6 2007, 04:04 PM
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I’ve noticed something disturbing in this Idea’s section.
Races! There has bin some meagre talk about it and I get the point that the project hasn’t come to the point where there shut be active discussion about it but still I have to write what I have to write about it.
Aren’t you sick if seeing humans in fantasy games? I sure am. How about elves? Or dwarfs even? Aren’t these three creatures not the most common and over used playable races in fantasy games? I want to see a game where fantasy is really done way over the top.
First of all I don’t want to see a single human in game, this is fantasy and those creatures don’t belong here, if I see one I’ll make it my personal quest to exterminate them all from the face of the game world. The same goes for Elves and Dwarfs and Orcs, throw them away.
What I want to see in a game is more along the lines of this selection and lest start of big:
True blood Dragons You know what I’m talking about, not those little things people tame to have a cool mount no, I mean the real big suckers where an Ogre could walk upright inside its open maw without ever bumping its head, I’m talking Colossal sides doom machines that destroy a kingdom overnight. And I want to see them in every variety, every colour and every sub-type you can think up. And lets not forget their magical talent, they shut reek and ooze with sorcerer power.
Mind Flayers / Illithids Anyone who’s ever played D&D knows what a mind flayer is and I say I want it as a playable race. Hailing from the far future these brain sucking horror once dominated the entire universe after having enslaved all forms of life until disaster struck and all they could do was escape to the past. They now seek to rebuild that once vast empire one race at a time, one world at a time. Who doesn’t want to play a race that is feared by all others? Living completely in the darkness of the underground with the purpose of enslaving all other creatures and ruling the world.
Gibbering Mouther An intelligent blob of semi-human flesh randomly spawning myriad eyes and mouths. Cool no? Look up its abilities in your Monster Manual and see its possibilities for a playable race. You don’t always need hands to build buildings and some buildings don’t even have to resemble buildings that we could recognise. With some inspiration I’m sure we can come up with a way to make them able to build their own settlements making them an interesting choice.
Marilith Better known as a powerful species of Demon but in a world of your own creation you can make them a natural race if you want. Consider playing a creature easily slithering 9 feet tall and 20 feet long, lower body of a large snake, upper body of something half human/half demon and having 6 arms, three on each side. Think of what you could do with something like that, a powerful and smart race with some innate magical talents as well.
Cyclops Because giants are dull. The concept art of the Wish Cyclops got me hooked to them. Strong and resilient survivors capable with heavy arms. They have the size and a single weird feature that sets them apart from humans while still having the same basic shape. Perfect material for a character race. Keep them about two times as big as humans and I’ll like them.
Sahuagin Weird creatures but a nice race that lives underwater yet can raid the shorelines and surrounding land to make things interesting, to pose a thread. Having two arms and legs which is the same build as a human these things shut be capable of constructing underwater cities and are therefore capable of forming and expanding a settlement. They are the fish people and still the best sized and strengthened of all the above named races.
Aboleths Strange beings that occupy the deepest ocean floors. While the mind flayers came from the future these hail from the past though not thro time travel. They where the first race ever to be created on this planet and they once ruled over all its surface. Today though they only haunt our nightmares and our waters. Aboleths are huge fish-shaped beings that have 4 long tentacles 2 on each side. Alto seemingly incapable of building anything their tentacles work as good as any human hand and their great talent for magic allows them many wonders. Though they look like fish on dry land they move about their bellies and push with there tentacles.
But we also need brain food for our Illithid friends so some land or deep dwelling human sized creatures have to be added. There for!
Gnomes Lunch! Er, I mean I love these little inventors. Smart and technically gifted. Though they make their homes under the dirt they are a surface race unlike dwarfs who mine deep underground. Gnomes live under hills in well hidden homes where they do their tinkering. Seriously I like gnomes no sarcasm there.
Kobolds Small scaly humanoids who despite their appearance are actually true dragons. Much like the dwarfs they are a race of hard workers and mostly miners only far more industrious and in higher numbers.
Ethereal Doppelganger Worse yet then the ordinary doppelganger we all know. These have not only the ability to disguise themselves perfectly as another race but can also wink to the ethereal plane where it is safe from most other creatures. It is on this plane that their main settlement truly lies just out of reach from the other races and still so far away.
That’s just some of the cool things you can really go for as playable races and there are many more to be found in other games if you look hard enough. Naturaly it is evident that I’ve bin talking a close look in my D&D monster manual and why shouldn’t I? It holds the greatest repertoire of unused races I know of so why not steal the really cool ones to make a really interesting game?
For those that think some creatures are either overpowered (and I wouldn’t tell you otherwise) you can still use them by having them age long periods of game-time before they truly become what they can become at maturity. There are those races that carry with them so vast a bank of spell power or special abilities that short tutorials are needed to comfort starting players, this can also be done by having those creatures go thro a maturing process only in the form of short quests. With each quest you learn to use one or more of its abilities slowly before being thrown in the deep.
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echorev |
May 6 2007, 04:22 PM
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PW Sound Team
Group: PW Developer
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Dwilf |
May 7 2007, 03:37 AM
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PW Programmer
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I think more then a few of the races you listed are IP of Wizards of the Coast If a game were to go this route I think they'd have to create all their own races from scratch. Dragons are hardly a new concept. Gnomes are a coomon sight in WoW and many other MMOs. Anyone who has played DnD will be familiar with the rest of your list. I'm not dissing the concept here though. I think a fantasy game with completely unique races created by the Developers of the game would be very cool if they have some decent creative folk. A pitfall I've seen with games that go this route is that they end up with a slight variation on elves, dwarves, goblins, etc. with a new name slapped on 'em. Ghedi started creating his own race in another thread. http://www.projectwish.com/index.php?s=&am...post&p=7057
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Dwilf - Project Wish Tool Coder "A Knife in the Dark is worth a thousand Swords at Dawn" RP or die trying
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Alexander |
May 7 2007, 09:01 AM
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QUOTE(zicyo @ May 7 2007, 02:31 PM) I really like the concept of huge dragons flying by in the distance sometimes and some more of Alex monsters as bosses or other bad ass enemies. And I really like the idea that most races are playable.
Though there are going to be balancing difficulties, yet I would to love to design a quest line for Dragons.
A personal limitation I have is that I want to identify myself with the character I play in a game. And thus I probably will be hunted by Alexander the Human Slayer for all eternity.
Damn right you will! All in good fun though, nothing personal. And Dwilf is thinking right up my ally, I think you have one of two ways you can go and both are fine. The first would be to come up with races and monsters all of your own design making sure not to even slightly copy other people work or existing mythic creatures. It would be unique but also very difficult to do as it requires a lot of imagination. The other way to go is to copy everything from everybody and try to give a place in the world for every known creature of fantasy that we have today. A lot easier to do (thought still an insane about of work) but you'll also get problems with copy-write or whatever its properly called so you'd have to give them slight twists or make sure that they aren’t perfect copies of what other games have done. Nobody can sue you for having a Gnome race in your game or giving them traits that they are known for generally. And please people, don't consider yourself with balance to much, just add perma-death to everything and give each powerful race an aging process so they would have to stay alive while they are weak and hunted for which dragons serve as the perfect example. Yes you will be the most powerful critter once you get to that golden adult age but in the meantime you have to survive as a Wyrmling for half a real-life year. And since nobody likes the aspect of 100 adult dragons flying around you can be sure that every settlement has its dragon hunting guild making active patrols in the wilderness. I say that players will make their own balance most of the time and if they don't then they deserve every hardship they get. As a safety measure you can even give a max-age to every race so that even if undefeated you'll still die when your time is up, there, solves everything.
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Jerky |
May 7 2007, 02:40 PM
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Former PW Project Manager
Group: PW Admin
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QUOTE(Alexander @ May 7 2007, 09:01 AM) And please people, don't consider yourself with balance to much, just add perma-death to everything and give each powerful race an aging process so they would have to stay alive while they are weak and hunted for which dragons serve as the perfect example. Yes you will be the most powerful critter once you get to that golden adult age but in the meantime you have to survive as a Wyrmling for half a real-life year. And since nobody likes the aspect of 100 adult dragons flying around you can be sure that every settlement has its dragon hunting guild making active patrols in the wilderness.
I say that players will make their own balance most of the time and if they don't then they deserve every hardship they get. As a safety measure you can even give a max-age to every race so that even if undefeated you'll still die when your time is up, there, solves everything.
I am going to have to say that that is a terrible idea. As a game designer, you can NEVER make such a statement and expect to make a game that people will play for more than a week. You could get away with that on a UO shard, or any sort of sharded world, but not on a seemless, single-server world. There absolutely has to be balance. Saying otherwise is ignorance. I will give you some reading if you don't agree. Game design is not glamorous. You don't just get to pick every feature you ever wanted and put them all into a broth and mix them up and hope to make something great. It just doesn't work that way. You have to make concessions and compromises. It can be done another way, but those games are never heard of, because they just plain suck. Expecting players to govern and balance themselves does not work. It has been proven countless times. that is what makes MMO design so much different than other game design. You are designing a world and a society. Things have to work together. I know you mentioned making things like Real Life and having freedom in another thread. Real Life has laws. For freedom to work, there HAS to be an opposition in all things. In order for there to be freedom, there has to be choice. For there to be choice, there has to be opposites. Its simple philosophy, but it is truth. There is no justification that can work here, these are absolutes. Now, don't get me wrong. I am all for having original races, especially things other than the typical fantasy ones, but balance is an absolute key. No if's and's or but's.
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Erik Briggs (Jerky) Project Manager My Blog
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Jerky |
May 7 2007, 07:40 PM
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Former PW Project Manager
Group: PW Admin
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Joined: 11-January 05
From: Dallas, GA
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QUOTE(greendots @ May 7 2007, 06:30 PM) Natural selection works because the weakest forms dont come back. This would mean, for a game with perma death, that the weaker species will not last long and then no one will play them.
Thats exactly my point. I'm still directing this toward Alexander, btw, as he posed the question. As a game designer, as an artist, as a dev, whatever angle, that is the absolute LAST thing you want to happen with assets you spent time making. Why even bother when you know what the outcome is going to be. Its outrageously silly to think like that. We are going to have a hard enough time making enough assets for an MMO as it is, why even bother making some that won't be used? As the designer, you can predict what will happen to a race, or mob. Its your world, noone knows it better than you. Say you decide to not give a care about it, as Alexander suggests. What happens then? The system breaks down. The gimped race gets ignored. The gimped mob gets camped. The world and the whole system fall apart. It becomes a worthless game. People start leaving and it is left desolate. Thats survival of the fittest for you. The game goes extinct. Great idea. As the designer, it is your job to see the consequences before they happen. That is why there is a job for a game designer... and its not just some kid from the community who thinks he knows all the answers. The designer sees the flaws and fixes them before they even have a chance to ruin the game. It is the designers job to do more than just come up with ideas he/she thinks are cool. The designer is the architect of an entire world. Anyways, I hope that explains a little better my opposition to the idea.
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Erik Briggs (Jerky) Project Manager My Blog
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Exudos |
May 7 2007, 08:57 PM
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Familiar Face
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Bravo Jerky. I do agree whole heartedly that I am sick of seeing HUMANS in MMORPGS, it's supposed to be on a different world...! O_o My suggestions are as follows: *Animals should not be familiar at all *Spectral beings should be fairly common, and exist without being spirits *Playable races should be diverse and different, maybe some with the ability to fly with the consequence of low stats or the ability to only wear light armor and weapons *Mounts should be extreme. HOW FRICKIN AWESOME WOULD IT BE TO RIDE SOME KINDA DRAGON AROUND?! *You should be able to still connect with your character by giving them human characteristics, just not physically. *A diverse culture for each and every race would be likeable *Giant bugs? *Maybe the main inhabitants of the world are some sort of planar beings that exist only to suck the life force from others. (AKA EXP) Their equips could be genetic modifications to their arms or skin? *The world itself should be warped and twisted in some places, beyond anything you have seen in any other game, and yet beautiful and tear jerking in others. Just a few thoughts, talk to me on IRC if you want my thoughts on this to the fullest, haha.
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Alexander |
May 8 2007, 12:06 PM
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Jerky your an ok guy, I like you and respect your opinion which is probably more professional then I'll ever be but please step out of your little toy box.
Forget for a moment that you are in a game that works on hit points and blindly hitting your opponent with a to-hit rating and a sword that deals X damage.
Now step into a world where you actually hit your opponent if you manage to swing your sword against his model, no to hit rolls, just player skill. Now imagine that damage or wound you inflict depends on your characters strength, where on the body you hit your opponent and what kind of weapon you’re using. No hit point, just wounds, broken bones, bleeding, muscles that can be hit again and again until they go numb and more stuff like that.
Suddenly you strength score of 60 where others only have 4 doesn’t matter, suddenly being small is not a disadvantage anymore, suddenly it maters more that people plan out their ambushes and raid more then what expensive armour they are wearing.
Being big or small doesn’t matter anymore, it no longer an advantage all the time, now what matters is how you use your qualities. Sure a large giant will make short work of a medium sizes human but a small sized kobold will give him the run for is money when its dodging attacks by running under his legs and jumping on his back with two sharp daggers. If your smaller you are usually more manoeuvrable and harder to hit. Size matters but ANY size matters in different situations!
You think wings give an advantage? Think again. On a grassy plain a winged creature with the same wing speed as the walk speed of the running creature will find little benefit for its wings, in fact its even at a disadvantage. In the air with your wing spread out you’re the bigger target over some running critter, if both of you have a bow the walker only has to shoot you in the wing and you fall dead on the ground. In caves and underground you are even a hazard to yourself if you try to fly is so small a space. The only time wings are good is there is enough obstructions in the terrain to make walking and running in a strait line impossible. Wings an advantage? Only if you know how to use them!
What’s better a high strength score or a high dexterity score? Either is, it all depends on your battlefield, in an open plain I’d go for the dexterity because before the melee brute even sets one foot in my direction it will have 3 arrows piercing its lungs. In a hilly forest and overgrown terrain I’d put my coin on the brute who will use the cover to advance and pound the elf into pulp with a few blows. Where your balance now? THERE IS NO BALANCE!! It’s an illusion, a figment of your imagination that’s still locked in that corporate box of standard MMO’s!
Survival of the fittest doesn’t eliminate the weaker race, it eliminates the weaker players! Every race is strong in its own right no matter how weak it looks, people shut use their head in a game and actually device strategies instead of money scams and build trees.
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MNZ |
May 9 2007, 07:19 AM
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Familiar Face
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Your last sentences Alexander, sum it all up... QUOTE(Alexander @ May 8 2007, 08:06 PM) Survival of the fittest doesn’t eliminate the weaker race, it eliminates the weaker players! Every race is strong in its own right no matter how weak it looks, people shut use their head in a game and actually device strategies instead of money scams and build trees.
Some are slow and strong, some are fast and weak, some are mighty intelligent and cannot kill a rabbit, some are mighty dumb and can kill the fiercest of beasts. If you learn to use your strengths and avoid your weaknesses, you become great. I'm just elaborating on your point: Every race is strong in its own right indeed........ what most call BALANCE. This post has been edited by MNZ: May 9 2007, 07:21 AM
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