[MUD-Dev] Elder Games

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 12:31 AM 3/13/99 -0800, I personally witnessed Matthew Mihaly jumping up
to say:
>On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Martin C Sweitzer wrote:
>
>> Specifically you have 0 to N-1 levels and once you get to the maxLevel
>> you have this uber character that needs something to do.
>
>Well, and I don't intend for this to come off flippantly, but what you are
>describing is only a problem if a game is so one-dimensional that the only
>goals to achieve are levels. 

Or the most *obvious* goal to achieve is level, or the other goals are
level-independent enough that you can do both in the same timeframe. 

>I thik the things people have used
>successfully are too numerous to detail, but they boil down to making the
>game multi-dimensional.

I think one of the things you can do, in very general terms, is to make
some ongoing inexhaustible aspect of the game a lot of fun but completely
level-independent. For example, one thing I find annoying about a lot of
games is the static environment. You always know that if you go three steps
north of town, there will be some specific area. That shouldn't always be
true... once someone maps out the whole game, the exploration aspect is
gone. If the game remaps itself somehow, then it remains explorable
forever. Keep some small core area static, and let everything else be
amorphous. 

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
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