[MUD-Dev] Re: Fun vs Realism [ Was: OT: Sid Meier ]

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> [some stuff I should reply to, maybe later]
> 
> I've been looking at AI recently, and thinking "If I do a really BAD AI,
> and admit up front through my backstory that 'the enemy is not too smart'
> or something like that, and work under the assumption that every player
> will be able to outwit and outsmart the AI... wouldn't that still be fun?"
> I mean, old games had really crappy AI. Think of the Might and Magic series
> through MM3. The enemy sees you, closes to melee range, and attacks.
> Period. It doesn't know how to go around anything. It doesn't know how to
> look in any direction except straight ahead. And if you put a low obstacle
> between you, you can merrily fire missile weapons into the enemy until it
> dies. Probably two or three enemies think to fire missiles back at you. And
> you know what? That was still pretty fun.

Some quick Might & Magic 6 bashing: the "AI" has barely progressed from
that of the third installment.  Not only _can_ you mow down hordes of
tri-colored skeletons from across three feet of water, you _have_ to, in
an endless, mindless slaughter-fest.  To make this slightly less
entertaining, most powerful creatures will fire missiles and spells at you
from a distance and many are resistant to physical attacks.  Since there
are so many monsters to kill (I would estimate there are at least 50
monsters to kill for every friendly villager wandering around town.  So
much for preventing the world from being taken over by an evil plot -
things are bad all over, and it is up to you to kill everybody.) the
rewards are very small.  And actually the best source of experience is to
complete various quests, most of which require the termination of some 40
to 300 monsters, frequently human.

Thinking about how uninteresting I found M&M I started to make some
little diagrams to illustrate how simple the play structure is and
how narrow the appeal.  But I'm unsatisfied with it and will postpone
posting it for the moment, lest it be taken as a simple bash on a game
that isn't even a mud.  The basic idea is that a game can be more
satisfying when the activity of the game changes over time, moving from a
struggle to survive to ambitions of glory, or vice versa.  If the
amount of character management increases as the game difficulty increases
I find that the fun is diminished.

> challenge was a lot higher... but MM3 had STUFF! Things like the "Flaming
> Sapphire Dagger of Moon Portal" and crap like that! It rocked!
> 
> You know what? I miss Might & Magic, so I'm going to go buy MM6 right now
> over at Chumbo. I seem to recall they had a "Deluxe" MM6 which included the
> whole series.

I was about ready to cheat my characters up a couple dozen levels, I'm
that bored with the endless and frustrating combat.  But my CD drive seems
to have stopped working.  Time to catch up on this list anyway.

- B