Arcanum: Day 2 --&-- Minecraft Suggestions
Arcanum: Day 2 I pursued some leads on some mysteries that had come up in the big city, and decided to keep most of the decisions I made. I did use an explore-load tactic to find out what was in one place (it wasn't what I was expecting), but otherwise I've tried to keep whatever consequences resulted from my actions unless my reputation was permanently busted. For the most part, my main proble...
Arcanum: Day 2
I pursued some leads on some mysteries that had come up in the big city, and decided to keep most of the decisions I made. I did use an explore-load tactic to find out what was in one place (it wasn't what I was expecting), but otherwise I've tried to keep whatever consequences resulted from my actions unless my reputation was permanently busted.
For the most part, my main problem with loading has been that map glitch I mentioned. After about 30-45 minutes, I'll get this glitch that makes it impossible to see where I'm going (because the tiles don't update, I guess), forcing a save-reload. Thankfully this hasn't happened in combat.
Speaking of combat, I was forced to turn the difficulty down to easy because I found myself not enjoying it enough. There was a bug where I fought and killed a robber who mentioned his buddies (but the buddies never showed up). I saved it, and the buddies spawned when I happened to reload later, putting me near some very tough enemies who consistently chopped me into little bits. But lowering the difficulty and running away to save elsewhere, I was able to kill them. Since the difficulty has been lowered I've managed to enjoy combat a lot more. My pistoleer can kill most enemies in a reasonable amount of shots, and she gets four per turn. Combat, then, is a bit low in choices. I run, I shoot, I position myself so there's nothing blocking my shot, I shoot some more. If it's distracted by my companions, I shoot the target a lot. There are called shots that I've still not tried to use, which may be nice. I just wish these extras were visually represented in menus.
As far as ammunition, something that made me realize just how random Arcanum can be showed up in a store: a schematic for bullets. I can now make bullets using charcoal and saltpeter. Since charcoal is so ubiquitous that you find it in trashcans all the time (I'm not so dignified as to ignore free trashcan loot), the process is that I go to stores, buy saltpeter for about 31-37 gold, combine it with charcoal, and I get 20 bullets, which could have easily cost me 80 gold. With ammunition no longer a drain on my money I've managed to do quite a few interesting things, and solve a few problems along the way. I've also used, from the skill necessary to make bullets, all the rags I'd been toting in my overfull inventory to make firebombs (or Molotov cocktails, as they're sometimes called). Apparently, friendlies don't get hit by radius weapons, which is OK by me given how difficult combat can be.
Navigation on the map is now pretty clearly inspired by Fallout, including the ability to see secret areas as you travel. Very nice, although in Fallout you could actually see some general landscape clearly, making it easier to guess where cities and such were. Here it's just a bunch of hand-drawn bumps, suggesting nothing. The newspapers you find need to be cataloged in the journal rather than either being kept or discarded. The thing keeps track of everything else, I mean it actually keeps track of what keys you have and where they go!!! This key feature is brilliant, as is all the other little features in that journal, but it needs to be even MORE useful (like displaying current schematics and people you know under another index filing. One-stop information center.). Some of the ideas in this game are really quite good, and I wish more people would emulate them.
I'd been warned in a review a long time ago that being a woman was sometimes more of a hindrance in this game than helpful. I ran into one of those reasons in Tarant, and true to my gunslinger nature let's just say he and his buddy won't be doing much of anything anymore. But the game didn't break, it almost expected me to do it, I think, since I was still allowed further access into a place formerly forbidden to me. Thankfully this game allows you to react naturally to situations without heavy penalty, although at times there have been some ambiguities that have bitten me in the ass later.
An Aside about Design
I want to discuss a problem in GENERAL with RPGs if you'll forgive the aside. Too often solving dilemmas and figuring out who is telling the truth often comes down to The Stutter. RPGers will know what I'm talking about: you're trying to figure out who is telling the truth in a situation, and one of the parties stutters "I was going to tell her, really I was but I-uh-was distracted." Liar! Thing is, in real life this doesn't work nearly as often as you'd think it does, yet urban myth suggests that this is a foolproof way of figuring out if someone is lying, like human beings are really squishy machines. We may be, but we're more complex than that. Still, in RPGs, which try to simplify human reactions for gameplay purposes, they will often use such commonly held beliefs as a way to allow a player so solve a puzzle. Two times in Arcanum the game suggested that one party was worse than the other through this stuttering. I try to give games the benefit of the doubt when this comes up and try to use whatever evidence I might have that points in a direction I think will be favorable. It's just that often, we're asked by the designers to be fooled in different ways.
Arcanum as Mirror?
The reason why opinions vary so widely on Arcanum is starting to become clear to me. Often in computer RPGs there will be a pen and paper equivalent that is along for the ride, a game-master like presence of the designers, which will govern certain aspects of play and make it so, no matter what a player does, they will not go so far astray as to ruin the game unless they are absolutely asking for it. If you go into Arcanum thinking that such an entity exists, it doesn't. Arcanum is an immense, complex system, left to run by itself, similar the clockwork machines that inhabit its world. You are handed the entire engine, and then left to fend for yourself. What Arcanum really is is old school from the sink-or-swim era.
Being one of the proponents of this old-school gameplay niche, I'd be remiss if I criticized it too much. All the enjoyment I've had from this game so far, and continue to have, is because I've managed to get past the obstacles in front of me, like the ammunition problem (solved through a lucky schematic purchase early on), the tentatively solved combat problem (although many melee fighters are too damned challenging for their own good. Anyone who tries to compare this to Fallout and thinks that Fallout is somehow inferior overall needs to check their reasoning against the very weird emphasis on melee. Aesthetically I can see where people are coming from: Arcanum is a wonderful place to visit compared to the junk piles of Fallout, but as far as game design there are some elements that make this more painful than it should be), character advancement (I do what I want now, even if that will mean failure), and unclear motivations of characters (damn the consequences, full steam ahead).
I continue to come back to this point as I think about this game: Arcanum is a complex machine that isn't completely governed. And as such, I foresee the possibility of some serious problems the further out I go. The mistakes at lower levels may wind up being magnified at higher levels. I guess I'll see.
Minecraft Suggestions
Here's an idea-dump for some ways to up the detail in Minecraft a bit.Expanded Weather : I was originally going to say seasons, but I don't think that would sit well with too many people, since this might last a while. So, weather incidents. Not just snow, but rain, thunderstorms that strike high points and convert dirt to glass. You could have a lightning rod to help prevent things you own from being blasted (maybe not catching things on fire, but converting some squares into other materials, and singeing tougher materials). Personally, I'd love to have a set of wool or fur clothes and a roaring fire to prevent slow damage from the cold, to run for cover during a beautiful thunderstorm, to collect rainwater in traps, to have lowered visibility during a dust-storm that deposits different colored sands (see below), that sort of thing.
Iceboxes, Vermin, and Rotting Food: Permanent torches are already on their way out, to be replaced by lanterns as the new permanent light device. This will make things feel a bit more unstable, but if people work at replacing their torches with lanterns I guess it won't be too catastrophic. At the same time, there will be stockpiles of meat left in dark dungeons forever. It might feel more consistent if bread, say, was the weaker but more permanent food, and meat, especially cooked meat, was the best way to regain health, but meat would also rot over time (meaning it would disappear after a random time had expired). A way to offset this would be iceboxes, which, like furnaces, would require a source of cold that would be needed in order to keep their contents from being subject to rot. Rotting food might also bring vermin in, who will dig through certain materials (creating new blocks, maybe). Then you could have traps to catch them, since they don't tend to show up if you're in the neighborhood.
Furthermore, the iceboxes might actually store ice, from snowstorms, so you could have an automatic response of the ice box that has ice IN it to draw ice from storage to help keep things cool. The duration could be nice and slow so as not to be a practical problem, but a place too long neglected would eventually run out of cold, forcing you to hunt for new food. It would be neat to see the ruin of a place you had long abandoned, full of holes, wrecked furniture, rotted food. I think it'd be neat, anyway.
Ugly Glass Made Pretty: I think having the frame color around each block is fine, but those diagonal streaks are kind of gross looking. Since the game already has transparent effects from water, maybe there could be a transparent effect for glass, so that you can look clearly out on the world beyond, but that it's not quite the same as looking at the world unfiltered. There could even be ways to tint glass using different materials, like the colored sands I mention above. That would be really neat. Stained glass, even, that you'd design through a miniature paint program. Or paintings, using the sands as different color bases that you can use to make paints! Oh... Or (etc etc)
Discoveries and Contact: One thing a lot of Minecraft vets complain about is that you eventually run out of things to find. Once you've invented pretty much everything you're left with a cool lego set. Often there's not much of an incentive for exploration because the rest of the world seems to be pretty much the same. If you get bored with your tamed surroundings, you might head out and hope to find something new. So why not help that person justify their willingness to explore (and put whatever materials they're carrying with them at risk should they die)? Have the engine create certain animals, plants, and materials that are more common the farther away you travel? Exotic creatures and sights are what keep people exploring in the real world, why not inject a little bit of that discoverer's spirit into this game?
I'd also personally like to see ruins, or maybe even other civilizations, WAY far away. One of the designer's desired goals is to eventually have an ultimate end to things. Why not re-establishing contact with other intelligent creatures? (my personal vote is to fly to the moon in a rocket you made, but whatever). The game could even progress from there, where you trade with them, giving them all the weird things from your exotic home, and receiving the weird stuff that they make. Adding a bit of mystery with the ruins, or learning the language and customs of different cultures would transcend things as they currently are. But they'd be hard to find, and way out there.
That would probably be controversial with some people, especially the civilizations, since it would violate a bit of the loneliness that the game is trying to set up. I still think it would be cool as a module or whatever, to have a village of people who actually behave in a certain way, who create a whole city and even expand, and you eventually come across what is basically an AI-created place that has evolved over game-years that you didn't even know existed, all calculated by random rolls running in the background of the game that you weren't even aware of, procedurally generated when you stumble across them.
Slow Damage from Hunger, Thirst, and Sleeplessness: I'm talking half a heart a day or something, but it would drive food creation forward a bit, and make it feel a bit more like survival. I've noticed that once people get their palaces together, the survival element basically stems from risky behavior, not from any genuine need to survive. If you added drinking water to that, also easy to do and maybe causing half a heart more of damage, it might feel a bit more like survival. It would also be fine if this never actually causes death if you neglect it, it's just that you're more likely to die if you have low health. I'm willing to suggest that sleep could revitalize you too-- maybe not injuring you, but making your dude perform better as long as it's not working straight for a long time. That last part might be a bit too much, though.
Bow Durability: Reason to have more than one bow, since all the other tools require replacements.
Zombie drops: Since Zombies still drop feathers like duckchickens, maybe Zombie drops should change to some new element, or a check block of rock or other building material.
Anyway, that concludes this two-part entry. I wanted to do separate entries but I didn't want one to bury the other. I sorta wish there could be a blog/journal thing where one would keep track of some stuff, and the other could be used only for followers or some other justification for it being there.
THE END