Discussion: A Suggestion For Judging Enemy Strength

So now I have myself a spiffy Princess hat, and I just look fabulous! But one thing that became obvious as I tried to get through the various mobs without dying is that, until I actually died, I had no idea how strong what I faced was. This was especially frustrating with Skeletons, as some were fantastically easy, others stupendously hard, yet they all have very similar physical models, and unless you had name tags visible, and knew from prior experience what something was, it was impossible to know if you should risk a fight or not.

However, I realise the Dev Team want to avoid the cliché of visible mob levels; and most players here prefer a more old fashioned RPG experience too. After a little thought though, I remembered another classic computer game I used to play on the Amiga, alongside Ultima V all those years ago, which had a mechanism which we could be applied here. And I'd like to see what people's thoughts on it being used are...

Suggestion: Danger Reckoning Skill.

Does anyone remember Wings? It's just been re-released as Wings Remastered in fact. But due to coming early in the Amiga's life, and the limitations of gaming hardware then, although part of the game worked in pseudo-3d, it had to lock the players perspective into a forward position. And the concept of arrows on the border of the screen, or target locking, now a staple of flight sims, wasn't yet well known or utilized. And radar would have been immersion breaking. So how did it handle letting the player know where his enemies where?

By the simple, but wonderful expedient of having the pilots head turn to look at where the closest one was;



What I'd like to see in Shroud then is a particular skill for looking towards danger too. When you press a key, your avatar turns his/her head towards an enemy that, behind the scenes, the game knows is much stronger than you. Perhaps he/she can also gesture once towards it. When there are no mobs nearby that out level you, your avatar could chuckle, or rub their hands, to indicate confidence.

If you wanted to make it more roleplay, perhaps also have the game remember which mobs have killed you recently, so if you've died to a rabbit earlier, even though they will never out level you, your avatar is reasonably afraid of rabbits and using the skill will also make your avatar watch rabbits carefully; I mean, they can leap this far, they've got teeth about this ... I mean, look at the bones! Die to rabbits more than anything else and your avatar will prioritise pointing rabbits out over, say, Liches... especially if you've never seen a lich before. Over time however the memory will fade and you'll point to more pressing dangers than rabbits. Basically, weight the awareness of danger with rising skill and in game experience and tailor it towards the player's own personal history.

For PvP players, I thought about allowing it to look towards someone PvP flagged, but this could possibly prove an unfair advantage. But would they like it to work like a flight sim Combat Lock I wonder? That is you can choose a player to keep your head turning towards, but as long as they were in line of sight only (ie, no seeing through walls, distance, invisibility spells etc)...?

Either way, I think this might be a nice way to keep immersion here and avoid going down the visible levels route. Thoughts, folks?

 

They could also add a skill to Tactics for sizing up your enemy, perhaps. You can't be very tactical without knowing what the heck your fighting, after all.

Though it shouldn't work on players. Not knowing if the person across from you can murder you in three seconds or not may keep a lot of buffoonery in check.. If it could, people would just run around using the skill on everyone and then only harass people that showed as "weak" or whatnot, since they would then know they could mechanically take them in a fight.

 

Aye, if it were active for players, I'd not have it based on strength; I was thinking just looking towards someone who was PvP enabled, so people could turn off name/status flags too, but not lose some spatial awareness. But buffoonery isn't to be encouraged, I agree

 

Great idea. The skill for detecting NPC strength should only work for NPCs.

Perhaps the skill should be located in the Tactics skill tree and be usable out of combat so it doesn't take up any room on my combat deck.

 

I too would like a skill to determine whether or not I should run away like a screaming little girl or show the ladies how badass I am by taking it on.

 

No.

 

You have to learn the enemy. The skeletons do have different names at different levels from what I can tell. "Skeleton" is weaker than "Large Skeleton", which is different than the next level up. "Skeleton mage" is different than these, since it casts, etc..

I like not knowing, it puts risk and realism in the game and makes it more realistic. The zone you're in tells you a lot as well.

Giving a skill that tells the strength is really not much different than putting a level over its head or a color.

 

How about this you learn by approaching them carefully, attack one at a time and Not just run head long into a fight without any thought?

A skeleton is just that and a Liche is guess what - a Skeleton. You don't know what it is until you encounter it and start to engage it. In this game there is a huge graphic difference between the two. An enemy has to be sized up there is NO magic tool t tell you what they have or their abilities until first contact :-(

But if you are an Archer and run headlong into the middle of a bunch of guys standing around with swords guess what - bad planning, or a swords man running thru the open to attack a bunch of archers.

Play = Experience. It is only a spider LMAO.

 

On the other hand once the game has been released everyone will know what everything is anyway.

 

I'd like to point out that finding out something is more powerful than you isn't equal to knowing how powerful something actually is. It could be "1 level", "15 levels" or "10 levels" or even "100 levels" ahead of you-you won't know. You might just want to risk it anyways especially if you're trying to reach a chest and there's only one of them.
Likewise, you won't know how powerful something is if the avatar thinks he can take them on: it might equal level or really weaker than you. It's not a "for-sure" indicator.

 

Yup. And I'd add to that, that artificially limiting a player's ability to gather information, either out of a misguided sense of nostalgia ("we didn't have that ability in the old days!") or a masochistic sense of unrealistic challenge (If we cut your legs off you'll find it much harder to fight, but it's the hardness of the fight that matters, right?) is far, far more unrealistic and off-putting to the vast majority of players than showing a numerical level; the reason such a practice has become standard is because we expect naturally to be able to make some judgement about what we see, even if it's based on irrational ideas. No man is an island, or as Isaac Newton, one of history's greatest geniuses famously said; "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Everyone draws on something.

When it comes to gaming, consider Skyrim, one of the most successful RPGs ever made; it auto-levels everything to be near your standard of power permanently, and does away with the set level standard completely. However it also plays absolutely rigidly and fairly with fantasy tropes. You know that, seeing a bear, that it won't be casting magic and isn't going to be too much of a challenge. You can clearly see what weapons humanoids have, or in the case of mages, that they're in magic associated garbs, so you know how they'll fight... and fighter harder than the bear. And Giants and Dragons in turn are even more powerful; a mechanic Skyrim reinforces with the concept of Petty to Greater to Grand Souls each mob gives. Even if you don't see any "level" then, there is a way to work out the hierarchy of creatures you fight by judging how much Soul they have.

Shroud instead actually uses Levels, which means even a bear can absolutely destroy you until you grind let's say wolves for a few levels to overpower it. But it completely hides the information as to what those levels are. Which might be fine, except... consider crafting. How many of you really spend hours randomly placing materials into the craft tables to learn what comes out? After 30 minutes of trying to guess what makes basic leather, you went and googled it, or asked those around you, didn't you? And so it is with combat too. A very few of you will masochistically grind wolves, then go back and hit a bear, and if it kills you, go back and grind more wolves until you think you can take a bear... the vast majority of players will simply Wiki the information and get a level number indirectly.

So what I am saying is, why not include some basic mechanic, in role play form, which will allow players to actually feel part of the game world, and have their avatar look at the mobs and make a judgement call? If we want to keep players in game, imagining themselves in the game world, give them an ability which let's them look at relative strength in game. I don't want it to be a visible level number either, but there's a reason games like WoW use one; because it's the simplest way to respond to the very human quality of wanting to know before they act. As Heradite says, you don't need total information. I'd be happy if your avatar just went "Oh oh" when he saw something strong. But right now the only deaths you'll have are running into something much, much higher level than you, or getting mobbed because we're all running around to get a princess hat and there's no way to tell where we can go yet. That's not fun gameplay at all... except to the curious masochists amongst you it seems.

 

Or you could buy a copy of Wumple's Bestiary...once it's written.

 

I agree to see target level would be helpful. Especially once we have to put out for armor repair. How hard would it be to mouse over a baddie and see what they've got? Not sure at this point if the various areas are already defined at a progressive level. I haven't figured it out yet.

 

I'm not opposed to the idea, but if people really want it, they need to sacrifice something for it: namely, skill points. Those that like this style of play will need to spend skill points on perhaps a Lore skill line or something, as others suggested something in the Tactics tree. Those that don't care will spend their skill points elsewhere. And, it would not be a global skill for every creature. Depending on how extensive they'd want it, they can have multiple skills for the four different types of creatures in SotA: humans (excluding PCs), animals, fomorians, and monsters. From there, they can extend it further underneath each of those.

 

I would call it neither masochistic nor unrealistic, but a challenge and without having a challenge I wouldn't play a game. Trial and error has been the number one way of learning for millenniums, just that unlike in games, in reality animals and humans often enough consider a strategic retreat, instead of digging their toes into the ground and defending a lost cause till the end. If I face a Lich Mage, I can run away. I notice that I don't stand a chance, long before I perish even as nude Level 5 (that's still the starting level, right?). I don't have to come back at a bear every other 'level' (read time I progress, since gear is as important as skill points) for trying either, but if I'm only half smart, I can recall roughly how much of an issue a bear was the last time and then get a good enough guess when to tackle one.
On that matter, I absolutely hope that we are getting away from 'level prediction'. If SotA develops on the design ideas Chris has mentioned, then there's no way to tell if Level 5 Logain can tackle Level 5 bear or not, but it is a combination of gear, skill distribution, tactics and player skill. A 'normal' RPG example of this might be the firelemental, where it is simply a matter of your fire resist gear, your fire counter skills and your 'fire hurting' damage (water, or whatever is seen as opposite of fire) if you can tackle it or not. In SotA that should apply to a Lich Mage, a bear, a wolf... (when the game's ready and launching, NOT now). In other words, I hope the game wouldn't even be capable of guessing if I have a chance or not (since neither tactics nor player skill can be factored in the algorithm).

I am all in favour of 'predictable' skills, but we already have bears knocking you to the ground, whereas a fireelemental is going to throw fire at you. And Portalarium is still reworking that.

Btw. I think that the real reason WoW and most other modern RPGs have some sort of easy means to figure enemy strength is simply comfort. The average player is more than happy to approach and grind monster X without having to put much thought into the process. Hit your hotbar of skill triggers, click next monster, progress and be happy.

 

They could count how many times you has killed that enemy compared to how many times it has killed you and give some impression based on it