The LBD theyre introducing isnt what I wanted or had in mind.

What I believe came from MMOs was the culture of power grinding your character up the progression as quickly as possible either out of competition or to sell it off. Before MMOs RPGs were mostly about experiencing the world, the lore, and the story. There was little to no competitive nature to any nonMMO RPG other than flexing. I remember being shocked the first time I heard about the thousands of dollars people were able to make selling their top level characters. It was a reason to play I had never considered before.

You did often have to grind in order to get your level up to the point to beat the next boss but there was never any real incentive to rush the progression until MMOs came along.

So LBD was a mechanic seen in RPGs prior to MMOs but they wouldn’t have been exploited to the degree that they often are today.

There’s no need to rush the progression in nonPVP versions of this game but after years of MMO gamer culture it is just naturally the playstyle many gamers continue to choose as it is what they were essentially trained on.
 
Roland said:
Also, feel free to ask me about any decisions made from A17 to 1.0 and I'll be happy to explain them to you....
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Then perhaps I'll ask about a very strange solution, from my perspective.
In older versions, weapon parts were found more or less evenly, regardless of the skills I had equipped. And if I found a turret blueprint, I could craft it fairly quickly. Now, with the Electrocutioner and Robotics Inventor skills, I collect magazines fairly quickly, but I can't craft a turret because I don't have any shotgun or pistol parts. Meanwhile, I have a lot of stun gun parts; I can't even sell them because the merchant won't buy more than three stacks of them.
 
Suxar said:
Then perhaps I'll ask about a very strange solution, from my perspective.
In older versions, weapon parts were found more or less evenly, regardless of the skills I had equipped. And if I found a turret blueprint, I could craft it fairly quickly. Now, with the Electrocutioner and Robotics Inventor skills, I collect magazines fairly quickly, but I can't craft a turret because I don't have any shotgun or pistol parts. Meanwhile, I have a lot of stun gun parts; I can't even sell them because the merchant won't buy more than three stacks of them.
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The idea behind the magazines is that you are finding snippets of old world knowledge as you scavenge. When you improve your skills by spending skillpoints you also gain the expertise to be able to recognize, amongst all the junk, useful parts that you can utilize to craft items. Some items are immensely useful and complex and so require a greater investment. The turrets are some of the most powerful and useful items in the game and so require a bit more of an investment from the player than simply reading Electrocutioner and Robotics Inventor magazines. They also would require a point or two spent in those skills having to do with shotguns and pistols so that when you are scavenging you have a better chance of finding the pistol parts and shotgun parts you need to go along with the knowledge you gained from the magazines.

Otherwise, you are leaving it up to pure chance and may not be able to find enough of those parts to craft those turrets. Thematically it makes sense and also from a balance and gameplay perspective it makes sense seeing as how useful and powerful the turrets are. Alternatively, if you don't want to invest the right mix of skillpoints to craft those items you can always wait until your gamestage/lootstage advances enough to start seeing them at the trader and you can simply buy them. Also, you could play cooperatively with a friend who might specialize in shotguns or pistols and between the two of you, you would have the knowledge to craft and the skills to find the needed parts.
 
Roland said:
The idea behind the magazines is that you are finding snippets of old world knowledge as you scavenge. When you improve your skills by spending skillpoints you also gain the expertise to be able to recognize, amongst all the junk, useful parts that you can utilize to craft items. Some items are immensely useful and complex and so require a greater investment. The turrets are some of the most powerful and useful items in the game and so require a bit more of an investment from the player than simply reading Electrocutioner and Robotics Inventor magazines. They also would require a point or two spent in those skills having to do with shotguns and pistols so that when you are scavenging you have a better chance of finding the pistol parts and shotgun parts you need to go along with the knowledge you gained from the magazines.

Otherwise, you are leaving it up to pure chance and may not be able to find enough of those parts to craft those turrets. Thematically it makes sense and also from a balance and gameplay perspective it makes sense seeing as how useful and powerful the turrets are. Alternatively, if you don't want to invest the right mix of skillpoints to craft those items you can always wait until your gamestage/lootstage advances enough to start seeing them at the trader and you can simply buy them. Also, you could play cooperatively with a friend who might specialize in shotguns or pistols and between the two of you, you would have the knowledge to craft and the skills to find the needed parts.
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In my opinion, the game developers need to rebalance weapon part drops a bit. First, there's the aforementioned situation with intelligence and turrets. Second, I'm currently playing with an endurance build. I have highly-leveled brass knuckles and machine guns. I get two to three times more brass knuckle parts than machine gun parts. Meanwhile, brass knuckle parts are needed several times less. And brass knuckle parts are only needed for the steel brass knuckle, while machine gun parts are needed for the Kalashnikov, the assault rifle, and the machine gun, and in much greater quantities.
 
Jost Amman said:
You got the names of some of those games? :unsure:
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Wizardry 6 (1990)
Wizardry 7 (1992)
Wizardry 8 (2001, admittedly)

I'm not sure exactly how previous Wizardry games played, as I haven't played them.

There were certainly others, but those are the ones that stick out most in my mind.

Granted, you couldn't really grind by doing non-dangerous tasks in those games.
 
Jost Amman said:
You got the names of some of those games? :unsure:
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Wasteland, from 1988 comes to mind. Probably wouldn't have the Fallouts without that gem.
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Vaeliorin said:
I'm not sure exactly how previous Wizardry games played, as I haven't played them.
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I don't believe any of the Wizardry games employed LBD. I'm a bit foggy on 8, but pretty sure it was all experience leveling.
 
Morloc said:
I don't believe any of the Wizardry games employed LBD. I'm a bit foggy on 8, but pretty sure it was all experience leveling.
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Wizardry 6/7/8 are my favorite trilogy of games of all time. I've spent countless hours playing them since they came out. Yes, there is experience leveling, but there's also learn by doing.

Always had to make sure you got enough levels in swimming before you ever tried to get in the water or you just automatically drown. 🤣
 
zztong said:
Plus many "happy accidents" in the lab revealed breakthroughs, which you could say is learn by doing, though they often don't learn what they set out to learn when that happens. Imagine accidentally learning that you club is an okay ranged weapon, for instance. Whooops...
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LBFU -learn by f'ing up- works too, in general even faster than by just doing :cool:
 
if you are going to implement a big change like this, TFP should being doing so based on community feedback or we are just in the same boat we've been in for years. One driven by ego and not guided by concensus.
 
warmer said:
if you are going to implement a big change like this, TFP should being doing so based on community feedback or we are just in the same boat we've been in for years. One driven by ego and not guided by concensus.
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I disagree.
This is NOT a democracy and I don't know when players started thinking they have the RIGHT to decide the direction of development of ANY game.

The fact that now many developers actively listen to player feedback and suggestions is only good to a point. As I've said in the past, when I pick an Early Access game, I do that because I like the developer's VISION. Some weak-willed developers however, after a while, start developing whatever the so called "majority" asks. That is BAD in my opinion, since many games have become cookie-cutter ideas that are always the same because people vote for what they already know and like.

The key is doing that only in SOME cases, otherwise most games will be ruined by this kind of "hivemind" development model.
 
warmer said:
if you are going to implement a big change like this, TFP should being doing so based on community feedback or we are just in the same boat we've been in for years. One driven by ego and not guided by concensus.
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But how? The community is pretty split on this. Which feedback do you listen to? Look at jars. They were returned to the game with a breakability setting and people were ■■■■■ing that the game was not balanced on non default settings. People like that want the game their way, no compromises. There is no consensus to be had.

…and what I want is a game with a largely coherent vision. If TFP go further down the road of allowing certain or varying portions of the community to dictate what is and isn’t the game I don’t see that happening. It’s just going to be a hodgepodge of random community requests that don’t make a coherent whole.
 
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Kosmic Kerman said:
But how? The community is pretty split on this. Which feedback do you listen to? Look at jars. They were returned to the game with a breakability setting and people were ■■■■■ing that the game was not balanced on non default settings. People like that want the game their way, no compromises. There is no consensus to be had.

…and what I want is a game with a largely coherent vision. If TFP go further down the road of allowing certain or varying portions of the community to dictate what is and isn’t the game I don’t see that happening. It’s just going to be a hodgepodge of random community requests that don’t make a coherent whole.
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The response that always makes me laugh and shake my head is when someone declares, “ Nobody asked for this” as though the only content that should ever be added is wish fulfillment for some portion of the community and the devs are just supposed to wait around for the community to tell them what to do next. Anything other than this is somehow “ego”.
 
Yeah, I don't know when this change first started happening, but it's gotten pretty ridiculous. Players are not the ones in charge of development and shouldn't be. Players can offer feedback and state whether or not they think something is good. They can write reviews. They can choose to either buy or not buy a game. But it is not the players' right to dictate how a game is developed.

I've seen a lot of people posting about how games these days are getting worse overall. I have to wonder if it's because too many developers are letting the players dictate how their games are being developed. I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I wonder if that's related. When players dictate games, you will usually have the same groups of players who are the "loud minority", which can lead to games being cookie cutter because they devs just listen to the same group over and over and we keep getting boring and mashed together garbage because of it.

Now, developers aren't always very creative and you can certainly get bad games from developers who don't listen to the players. And there are times when feedback from players will improve a game for most players. I'm sure that the changes made to storms because of the feedback given has improved storms for most players, even if they still prefer to have storms disabled, for example. But developers who will change direction just because players cry will end up with a worse game in the end 9 out of 10 times. Listen to feedback, make adjustments based on that feedback, but stick to your vision and don't be swayed by players crying about this or that, especially when there is a clearly divisive split between both sides of a topic.
 
Roland said:
One wonders how games managed to get made at all in the 80's, 90's, and 00's without all the player community feedback to guide them. So much ego laying thick on the ground during those decades. So many games that nobody asked for....
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well...they got made all at once...then released in a form you could hold. there was no public discussion about it...it was great.
 
HammerDano said:
well...they got made all at once...then released in a form you could hold. there was no public discussion about it...it was great.
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While you can certainly look fondly upon them as "the good old days", software project failure rates were pretty high then too. I'm not well versed on the game industry trends specifically, but based on my experiences as being a software developer through those years my speculation is that you only saw the projects that survived to reach a major release and you also saw lots of project that were rushed to release and then floundered because they failed to gain an audience. Incremental / Prototypical software development became popular to try and increase quality. A side-effect of that approach has been it has been less-common for software projects to be delivered "on time."

A title I remember "fondly" was a 2nd "Pool of Radiance" game that a great many people wanted to play. It delivered and then the community dubbed it "Puddle of Irrelevance" because it sucked. But hey, it delivered all at once.
 
zztong said:
While you can certainly look fondly upon them as "the good old days", software project failure rates were pretty high then too. I'm not well versed on the game industry trends specifically, but based on my experiences as being a software developer through those years my speculation is that you only saw the projects that survived to reach a major release and you also saw lots of project that were rushed to release and then floundered because they failed to gain an audience. Incremental / Prototypical software development became popular to try and increase quality. A side-effect of that approach has been it has been less-common for software projects to be delivered "on time."

A title I remember "fondly" was a 2nd "Pool of Radiance" game that a great many people wanted to play. It delivered and then the community dubbed it "Puddle of Irrelevance" because it sucked. But hey, it delivered all at once.
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cartridge games are still pretty popular...just saying. lol

I am sure there are a great many people out there who have tried to make a piece of entertainment that failed to reach a greater audience. It is like a lottery ticket in that way...if it hits big the creator is set for life and/or "the doors" are now open for them, more early backers, more options, more top people wanting in on the next thing...which allows them some distance from listening to outside voices.
 
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