Randomness, Replayability

[ghadis]

Hi.

This game is sounding great, even though there's only been a little tiny bit released about it thus far.

The most interesting aspect, to me, is the random aspect of it. Random maps are SO easy to do, and they add SO much to the replayability of the game.

This is the difference between Age of Kings, a game that still sees huge amounts of netplay 8 years after release, and Tiberian Sun, which came out at roughly the same time and which nobody has played since.

Further, it's the difference between Red Alert 2 and AOK. RA2 had random maps, but the script looked like something a junior high kid would throw together in an afternoon. An island, with few terrain features and nothing realistic or interesting about it.

Conversely, AOK had a pile of random map scripts, each of which produced radically different but internally consistent and plausible results. There were big wide open deserts, maps with random lakes, maps with hills, rivers and jungle.

Rise of Nations is another great example from the same school of thought.

A random map scripting engine for a commercial title should take one developer a few weeks to do. That being the case, there is no excuse at all for not including random map scripts in games, and, the way AOK2 did, making them flat text files easily accessible to the user or third-party developers.

Random maps and excellent netplay are what make Diablo2 still playable and scarily addicting fun, 8 years later. Contrast that with Dungeonsiege 1 and 2, which have ZERO replayability and are mindless, boring linear slugfests with no strategy.

Randomness is THE SINGLE THING that makes the Nethack and Angband and Moria games still playable 30 years after the debut of the codebase.

Here's what I want to see in a game like the one you're talking about.

I want to be able to set up a small base, with many different combinatoric complexities available from different choices. A great model for this is the player base construction rules out of the excellent Ars Magica roleplaying game.

I want to be able to create my party and set up a base for them, using resources from the environment which again occur randomly, so that my choices for base construction are different from game to game.

I want the wilderness to be different every time so that I never know what's over the next hill, as Will Wright put it.

I want to be able to be evil if I want, and carve out dungeon fortresses, towers, etc. These bases could possibly be propagated over the net and thrown into other peoples' games in a similar way to what Spore does, either in relatively pristine condition or "ruined," as if centuries have passed, and populated with random monsters.

Randomness is good. For small development houses it should be the Holy Grail, because it'll give their games replayability traction and a vast content base that they would ordinarily not otherwise have.

Player content propagation is also good. This leverages the vast amount of work-- hundreds of thousands or millions of hours over the lifespan of a game-- that players put in developing cities, bases, characters et cetera.

I'm enough of a developer to know that these things are both available to small-to-midsized dev houses. Because of the vast price of canned content, and the transitory nature of it, there is no reason at all why developers shouldn't be grabbing onto these two comparatively simple tools and using them to the hilt.

[Azeem]

Speaking of replayability, at least some ability for customization would enhance the game's replayability as well. Some random events (as well as triggerable events like in "Stronghold") could add some spice.

At the very least, I'd like to mess around with the textures (and perhaps be able to specifically select textures while in-game); maybe I want one of my peons' homes to have an easter egg Led Zeppelin poster.

[Corion]

I have to agree. I wish more games implemented randomized locations/arenas/what-have-you.

Other examples:

The Diablo games are way more replayable than Titan Quest because of the randomized areas.

I still play ADOM because of it's randomized areas, but I cringe at the thought of playing all the way through Neverwinter Nights one more time since it's the same static thing OVER AND OVER again.

People easily tire of MMO instances like in World of Warcraft because the only thing randomized is loot and occasionally a boss spawn or fight behavior.

I would love to see all types of games work on randomizable locations (regardless of genre), though I know it can be tough nowadays where games aren't based on simple tilesets anymore to have randomized levels that also look as detailed as the hand-created static ones. Glad to hear this game is going for it, despite the additional work required. :0)

[fleshtonegolem]

I like the idea that you can make this a short game as in 6 hrs.

Can you pick, continue playing, like in some city building sims to sandbox it all out.

A nice feature would be a world size option when starting the game.

A very small world might be beaten in an hour.

A humongous world might take a 20hrs of game play.


That would be an easy solution to a critique I've been hearing about the lack of game length.


I'm not sure how much more coding you'd need to do besides increase the size of the random features and maybe some new goals and game balancing.