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

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 10:33 PM 7/26/98 -0500, I personally witnessed Damion Schubert jumping
up to say:
>
>Having worked with Jon van Canegham, I can tell you that this is
>part of his design philosophy.  Sure, he could improve the AI, but to
>be honest, it's a lot more satisfying to kill a horde than finally slay a
>solitary troll. 

I like having a dumb AI that I can outwit by knowing how it works, instead
of a smart AI that I have to outwit by knowing where the bugs are. Ever
notice that, in Quake 2, when you fire the stupid little plasma pistol at a
monster so it can see the bolt coming from a mile away... its immediate
response is to *duck*, both immobilising itself and preventing itself from
attacking? I can't tell you how many of those machine gun toting cyborgs I
nailed by switching to the plasma pistol at long range and SHOOTING THEIR
FEET.

As opposed to the ogre in the original Quake, who could be best defeated by
running up to him and convincing him (through being close) that he should
put down the grenade launcher and get out the chain saw... then backing up
and unloading a few shots while he switched back to the grenade launcher,
and repeating the process several times. 

The ogre was at least trying to do something. You can confuse people like
that. It works. The guy in Quake 2 had a *bug*. Nobody just ducks and sits
there while you send shot after shot into his legs. But the alternative is
to try and shoot him while he's rattling off automatic weapon fire in your
face. Neither way is fair. But I'll choose the unfair that *I* get to win
any day.

>He's a big believer of 'Nothing (including realism)
>should get in the way of the fun.'  Sound familiar?  I think he believes
>that everyone, deep down, wants to be a powergamer- and that's
>really the most rewarding part of the CRPG experience.

The best part of CRPGs is exploiting player knowledge. Like in MM3, did you
notice that your characters continue to earn experience points even when
they're dead? Start the game, go to the mirror portal, use 'doemeister' to
get into the room with the million gold, grab the gold, call for divine
intervention (you're first level, so you don't lose anything), and then use
'redhot' at the mirror portal to get onto Fire Island. Go into the inn,
hire the level 50 wizard, and take him around wasting everything in and
under the towns. Just the places you could get to from the mirror portal
provided you enough experience -- with one guy, all on his lonesome, doing
all the work -- to raise your whole party over level thirty. And if you
knew where everything was and how to get to it, you could do it all in two
game days... so for 100,000 gold, you bought thirty levels of experience.
Not a bad deal. Now you just drop off the wizard, give him a wedgie, and
proceed with the game. Sucker.

I had a long argument with someone over whether this was cheating. I still
say it's no more cheating than saving your game before you enter the
chamber your last party painted with their entrails.

>By comparison, I've played Unreal lately, and I can't stress how
>unsatisfying it is to never fight more than 2 monsters at a time.
>And sure, they all exhibit good AI, but in some cases, it's so good

>that the only way I could beat the level was to abuse holes in the AI.
>I felt like a cheat when I did that.  When I killed 60 skeletons in
>M&M6 with one spell, I felt like a god.

I like the first-person one-on-one crossfire games. I prefer something I
actually have to think about, but I like them. Quake and its ilk boil down
to knowing where the monsters, the specials, and the powerups are. Given
that, you generally win the level handily... but I like that. Once you know
the level, it's a cakewalk. You practice, and you get better, over and over
again. Eventually you can do "impossible" things on the level, like leaping
from a ledge onto a walkway and keeping your weapon trained on your
opponent the whole time. 

Then you deathmatch some people, and they accuse you of using a bot, and
some dork with a T-3 comes over to beat your head in with sheer brute force
of expensive equipment. Somehow he still considers this a "victory" and his
friends still think he's a "player", so since the definitions of terms are
so different in this world of deathmatch players... you quit DMing. Single
player is a lot more fun; when you whip the computer's ass, it comes back
to try again instead of whining that you cheated and you're a hacker and
you must have some super game controller.

I haven't bothered with Unreal, since it's so obviously a case of someone
trying to be Id Software Junior. I've tried enough imitations; no one
manages to comes close. Ion Storm might, but who cares? Trinity will
revolutionise the playing field. Again. 

>While other companies work to reinvent the RPG experience, M&MVI stays
>true to it's form and provides an extension of the old CRPGs - Bards Tale 2,
>Might and Magic I, Ultima III, Wizardry.  

"Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord", "Knight of Diamonds", and "Legacy of
Llewellyn" would ROCK on a modern PC. :)
>They did a bloody good job, and
>the game took ~120 hours of my life away.

You know what I really miss about games? I miss the bad jokes. In one of
the Zork games, there was a pair of granite walls. When you 'touch'ed one,
it took you to the other. In the next game, there was another granite wall,
but when you touched this one it gave you a message about the wall being
"made of very hard stone, but evidently the initial identification was
wrong. Take nothing for granite." You don't see that sort of thing much
anymore. 

>I'd never accuse it of being a ROLE-
>playing game, or a fantastic story, but gosh, it was fun.

You know... man, this is going to sound so weird... I had a lot of fun when
Quake 2 came out by turning off all the lights, turning up the sound really
high, and playing through the game on god mode while continually reporting
"storyline" developments to the in-game persona's theoretical commanding
officer. I mean, the guy's got a radio, and he's obviously reporting back
now and again. I had so much fun with that, and all I was really doing was
cheating at a game while talking to myself. It actually made the game into
a quasi-RPG sort of thing. Especially in the meat packing plant, where I
had to act suitably repulsed while I reported what exactly was going on in
it. 


What I'm getting at here is, an RPG is in your head. We all had some sort
of action figures when we were kids, whether they were little green army
men or flat yellow Roman soldiers or Star Wars figures or Micronauts or
what have you, and they didn't come with instructions. We *knew* what to do
with them. When we didn't have Greedo to go and argue with Han Solo, we
grabbed someone else that was green. (In my case, GI Joe was often pressed
into Greedo duty.) When we didn't feel the movie was good enough, we wrote
our own scenes and our own dialogue, and almost always ended up in
situations where Darth Vader and Boba Fett did unspeakable things we were
supposed to be too young to understand to Princess Leia. 

Anything can be an RPG. Make up the rules as you go. It worked when we were
kids. ;)

You can go whisper about what a weirdo I am now.

>Does this have relevance for MUDs?  I think it has a lot.  On the other
>hand, about a third of the posts on this forum is dedicated to controlling
>powergamers, instead of indulging them. =)

Well, something that seems worth keeping in mind is... while MM6 is not
what most people on this list would call a "good" game, not in terms of any
of the major scales on which we measure games as developers or game
critics, it is still one HELL of a good game by the simple measure of "how
much fun was it". I think asking ourselves "why" and figuring out how we
can relate it to our own games is valuable.

Personally, I think it's valuable to draw lines between the powergamer who
is completely self-absorbed and rarely interacts with his fellow players
(like me, most days... go away, I don't know you, no thanks, I don't trust
you, leave me alone, I don't owe you diddly-squat); the powergamer who
wants to have power and use it for the good of the other players (I will
occasionally go hang out in newbie areas and hand out money, because
sometime after about level 10 you end up with more than you'll ever use and
at level 1 you may as well be a bum); and the powergamer who wants to have
power and use it ON the other players (I don't do this, ever, under any
circumstances, on MUDs). I don't have a problem with the first kind of
powergamer, I actively encourage the second, and it's the third that I have
a problem with.