| Good point by Rhett
Nice post Rhett
Its the constant pantering to the uninspired gamer that kills off the heart.
In particular the difficulty,risk and reward ratios. If the casual gamer wants to breeze straight through the game, collect some average gear, use a common build thats relatively efficient then I say by all means let them.
But!!
Within the realms of general game play allow the brave and skilful to make the choices and take gambles that will challange them and provide the benifits.
Now I don't mean let you play all the way through and then start again but harder IE Diablo 2 (although this was a great step up in difficulty and gave incentive it was till the same story same maps same bosses).
I mean I want to be able to enter a randomly generated map that will obviously have the key story features (entrances to next main story area) and run along to find a really nasty random creature or an entrance to a difficult dungeon that has a percentage chance of appearing. The chance could be very minimally effected by level, skill choice and maybe an item or two like a map that could drop for it or a series of items that are required(like magic find)
One thing to avoid is final fantasy sydrome, in that to get access to the best areas and items in the game you have to beat everthing that you could possibly need good gear or levels for.
There has to be access to diversity of path all the way through. I want to be able to start two characters at the same time and have two very different outcomes. The random drop system of the previous diablos did this but it still didn't greatly change your path.
This could really make a difference as if you could only get certain items in certain random dungeons then not everyone would look or act the same.
Some areas could only be open to certain classes as a way to get prestige skills or class specific story development and choices.
The beast thing would be that these areas be varying difficulties scaled by reward. Also once you enter them you can't TP out and if you died in them you are returned with you gear but the the entrance disapears and you would have to wait till it spawns again to try again.
Risk, reward and luck all randomised
I would love to be asked by a higher level character where the hell I got that skill or item or even nasty acid belching pet.  |