Thoughts on character creation

[Orwell 1984]

Orwell, can you give specific examples for how you think these SPECIAL attributes could be implemented? Strength is fairly obvious, but what about perception?

Perception:

The Perception ('detection') sets out the vision, hearing, tasting skills, and facilitates the inclusion how you'll notice things.

If you need examples for that here are some:

- Vision:

Your vision range and field of view may depends on the weather and your environment (light effects), but mainly it is determined by your eyes, and you ability to see, as well as how you process the information you can see with your brain.

According to the above statement it influences how well you are able to see the details of what you see on your screen between the given conditions, including but not limited to:

- How far you see in different weather conditions

(it is easy to adjust in the game currently too, making it depending from a variable should not be a problem)

- How well you sense your environment at night with the help of the natural light (the sun, the moon, the majestic aurora) or how well you see with the help of flares, torches and other similar items.

- How often do you spot hidden aspects of what you see, like a bunker (spawn rate or entrance visibility can be variable how deep is that covered in snow for example)

- How many things you find in containers, how long it take to search them.

- Your repairing skill (and many other skills) also could suffer additional positive, negative effects regarding your ability to see.

- You may have different effects influencing binoculars or glasses (and additional content like anything in connection with your perception)

- From what distance you see the wildlife.

- How easily you spot the usable items around (it may affect the spawn amount as well)

(this would require the involvement of different textures for the items, but you can make it simple

example:

determining 5 different levels for all skills, so you can see 5 different textures for every items depending on the perception level selected on the beginning of the game, and may be variable by different conditions during the game = this would make the textures of different items to have snow cover on them while outside, like barely visible, visible etc... or shadow effect on them inside (I am not familiar with creating textures but you can figure out the rest, or if you want me to learn it give me something to worth my time).

Etc... etc... etc... what Hinterland can think of.

So lets roll further, we discussed only the vision part of the perception, lets see what else we have here.

Smelling, Hearing, Tasting.

- Smelling: sleeping next to a corpse, sensing how far you are from a bear before seeing it (The protagonist can react by telling you something about your audience and you should listen to him actually during gameplay)

And all parts planned like I tried to give you a big picture about it in my last 15 minutes.

Sure I can continue giving you examples for hours, but actually I am still waiting for some kind of positive reply or something from nor only the community to encourage me to continue sharing my ideas with you.

I do this because I see unlimited potential in this particular game on the market, however others are getting payed for things like I shared with you in the last week.

So it took me 15 minutes to gather a few ideas about it yes, but would that effect you experience in a positive way during surviving the world of the long dark?

[toebar]

Very thorough! Thanks. I think I see (hehe ) where you'd like this go. I do see how this could add layer of depth and complexity to the game. I'm not sold on whether this is a good thing or bad thing yet..

There's a lot in your post, but lets narrow down one... For vision, if we influence how the character can perceive things (e.g. wolves) in the environment, then we are changing the amount of information available to the player. Currently, the player is always on the look out for wolves. If there is a vision perception modifier, players with characters that have higher perception will be able to see wolves from further away. This is a little bit artificial, since realistically, every player should be able to see the maximum render distance, and plan their movements accordingly..

Similar with seeing items in the environment.. it's my preference to rely on my own skill to see these items, rather than rely on a buffed perception multiplier to help me.. This may come down to personal preference I suppose...

Still, I guess there are certain things that have potential, even if this one I'm not a fan of..

[Orwell 1984]

If there is a vision perception modifier, players with characters that have higher perception will be able to see wolves from further away. This is a little bit artificial, since realistically, every player should be able to see the maximum render distance, and plan their movements accordingly..

You can start the game with limited attribute points what you decide how you spend, so if you want higher perception you sacrifice something else from the special set.

And about your thoughts of it may be artificial:

I was forced in my childhood to wear glass, since that my eyes are -5, this means I can not see your face if you are 1 meter from me.

Similar with seeing items in the environment.. it's my preference to rely on my own skill to see these items, rather than rely on a buffed perception multiplier to help me.. This may come down to personal preference I suppose...

Actually you can decide you choose the default special settings and go on with it, or if prefer to "rely on your own skill to see these items" you may even consider lowering your perception risking you wont spot something important but gaining the opportunity to use the skillpoints for your luck or whatever you wish.

This is why I told ya, this is just beautiful.

Lets do not be limited to our own experiences about the world we live in, since we are different for a good reason.

[elloco999]

@ChillPlayer:

I think we agree that we don't want TLD to turn into a skill progression game, but I trust Hinterland to add more skills to this game without breaking the great gameplay we have now. Like you said, experienced players don't try to max out the existing skills asap, other skills could be implemented in the same way. If there are more skills choosing the starting levels of the skills would allow for different "characters"/ different playing styles to try. This would require all skills to be equally important or else everyone will choose the same skills.

I certainly don't want skills that will change the way the game plays now. I would rather have no skills than that.

@Scyzara:

I can see what you mean by different characters and how that would work in the game. And I like that idea.

With a character creation system, yes you can of course try to make a character that fits their style best, and people will, but you don't have to. You could use it to create characters that are different, have other strengths and weaknesses and therefore require a different playing style, just like pre-made characters can. However you would not be limited to the pre-made characters. But yeah, I get that most people would not use it that way, but that's up to them.

Although I would like to be able to create my character myself, I could live with just selecting a character if the characters are created the way you describe.

@orwell 1984:

I can see how the SPECIAL system would work in TLD to create a much richer character creation and more depth to the game. But I also think it would change the game too much and it wouldn't be TLD anymore. I also think it would be a nightmare to balance, 7 skills * say 5 levels that all have an impact on one or more (probably more) of each of the 1200+ variables in this game... I think it would be very hard to not make some skills/ attributes much more powerful than others and thereby game-changers.

Strength is a good example. If strength allows you to carry more, it's one of the most important skills in the game. It will allow you to not only carry more but also not get tired as quickly when carrying less. This has a huge impact on traveling/ exploring.

So yeah, although I like the SPECIAL system in many other games, I think it's too much for TLD.

[elloco999]

All: Please ensure that your posts remain on topic (Character Creation)

Thanks!

I have quickly scanned (not read thoroughly) the entire thread, but haven't found any off topic posts. If any of my posts have been off topic in your eyes, could you please specify?

[Scyzara]

With a character creation system, yes you can of course try to make a character that fits their style best, and people will, but you don't have to. You could use it to create characters that are different, have other strengths and weaknesses and therfore require a different playing style, just like pre-made characters can. However you would not be limited to the pre-made characters. But yeah, I get that most people would not use it that way, but that's up to them.

You're right about that, I haven't thought much about this aspect before. I mean, there's nobody stopping me from creating a character with certain pro's and con's that would fit a profession and just devise a personal history for him/her myself.

However, I'm still not sure about balancing issues if you can choose that many features for your character. Don't get me wrong, I personally wouldn't mind if people could give their characters loads of positive features without disadvantages, if it's fun to them to play like this. It's just that this would make discussions about game difficulty/strategies (and probably also the leaderboards and current difficulty modes) completely pointless.^^

On the other hand, if you try to balance character creation by enforcing a disadvantage for each advantage (e.g. increased strength might be chosen at the cost of lower perception), I fear that it might be extremely difficult to balance the pros versus the cons.

Just to give an example: How many meteres of sight distance would you have to sacrifice for a 10% movement speed increase? How many additional calories per day would it cost you if you want to be both 20% more resistent to wolf attacks and maximizing your hearing ability?

The more features you add, the more pros and cons you would have to weight against each other. Even with just 10 parameters, you would have to balance thousands of possible combinations people might want to choose.

It's not at all that I want to call such a character creation system a bad idea. (Thanks to Elloco I've realized that it could be used to create some kind of "do-it-yourself premade character" which would fit my needs very well). I'm just not sure if it's worth the giant amounts of time that it would (presumably) take to develop such a complex system in a balanced way.

But to be honest I have no idea about coding or developing video games. It's possible that I consider balancing this system to be way more complex than it would be in reality. :oops:

[elloco999]

I absolutely agree that it would be difficult to balance and is prone to be abused by people to make it easier for themselves to get a high score on the leaderbords. But I was thinking more about lower level skills (fire starting or clothing repair) instead of higher level attributes (strenght or perception). These will have a more limited impact and would be easier to balance (I think).

But that would mean that characters can't be as different. It might be fun playing a character that has less strength and is only able to carry 20kg. That's easier to do by creating several pre-made characters. So yeah, I can see the benefit of such an approach. (Funny, we seem to have convinced each other of the merits of our approaches )

[Ryan CM]

All: Please ensure that your posts remain on topic (Character Creation)

Thanks!

I have quickly scanned (not read thoroughly) the entire thread, but haven't found any off topic posts. If any of my posts have been off topic in your eyes, could you please specify?

It was just starting to wander a bit in general. all is well great posts all!

[toebar]

On the other hand, if you try to balance character creation by enforcing a disadvantage for each advantage (e.g. increased strength might be chosen at the cost of lower perception), I fear that it might be extremely difficult to balance the pros versus the cons.

One of the benefits of having a selection of defined characters to choose to play (as opposed to creation from scratch based on a selection of traits) could be that they wouldn't have to be perfectly balanced. In a way, it would be another layer of difficulty. For example, Lou the Lumberjack might be easier to survive with than Adam the Accountant, based on the lumberjack's inherent skill set (no offense intended to accountants ).

Though, the issue here is that maybe noone would play the accountant unless there was a benefit--- perhaps the challenge and achievement would be enough..

If balance is desired, then balancing a set of defined characters would probably be easier than balancing a suite of traits. And if they're not perfectly balanced, then its not as big an issue, imo.

[Hitchhiker]

I don't think starting the game with different skill sets adds much to the game, but learning through practice and reading books does. Not only would reading books give us something to do during blizzards, but also it might add to the incentive to explore and find all the books. Books could potentially become as important as a hunting knife or rifle if, say, you could learn to smoke meat or make a fire bow. Edit: In this way, you create your character and skill sets as you go.

I think this is an excellent idea. I mean most regular people don't know how to build a fire with a couple of sticks or make raw hide boots or bear skin sleeping bags. I remember a series of books called Fox Fire my Uncle used to let me read and I learned a bit from them. Learning how to do things from books would indeed be one of the best additions to this game. I would love to see the found books be able to be used for something other than burning.