Random Encounters ........ Enough Already

@Burzmali,

Darklands was a great game, but I don't see how those complaining about Shroud wouldn't be complaining about Darklands too. Travel time was even slower than Shroud, and you would have to wait out things like snowstorms or sandstorms or risk your health. Auto-heal was negligible, and you had to camp to convalesce and regain strength. All spells required reagents. Typical encounters were things like thugs (in cities), wolves, boars. More uncommonly you got a more interesting encounter.

A lot of people would be calling that tedious. Heck, I get the feeling that a lot of people would be calling the single player Ultima games tedious.

 

Dear Morkul, I've addressed that gibberish in my posts above; simply repeating your flawed thesis won't make it true.

 

@redfish
RPG design has advanced significantly in the last 24 years, and SOTA has taken many of those lessons to heart in its design. However, for now at least, we have a random encounter system that is, IMHO, massively inferior to the system provided in Darklands, at least on the overworld map. Darklands has at least 20 distinct encounter types and only a handful have guaranteed combat. Were I in charge of SOTA's development, I would have someone go through that list, rip all of them off and file down the serial numbers as content in the alpha phase and start figuring out how to make them multiplayer friendly.

I suppose a key point is that in all but maybe one or two of those gave the player the option to avoid the encounter somehow.

 

@Burzmali,

Personally, I kind of feel the opposite -- RPG design has devolved significantly.

You're right that there were more complicated encounters in Darklands. Though the dev team has already talked about how the system that's in the game now isn't everything that's planned. There'll be roving gypsy wagons, for instance, which will not be a combat encounter. That was discussed way back in Kickstarter. Many encounters in the game will be roving, rather than hidden ambushes. There'll be cases where you find monsters attacking merchants, and where the merchants will give you a reward for helping you out. What's in the game now is just rudimentary and about setting up and testing some of the systems.

I would agree that going back and playing Darklands could help design some of these things though But some of it is in the works already.

 

Lets take another approach to see if you understand better:
When is this opt-in(out going to end?

Random encounters are truly a core part of the game so if you would be able to opt-out of that what else would you be able to opt-out from? One thing that is a much bigger problem and impact in the game play is loading times and huge part of entering a village or a town are ornaments (some will say ridiculous ones) on their lots. Fresh after server wipe it loading time in Owls head for me was 40 sec now it's over 2 minutes sometimes, I would love an opt-out for stuff on player lots to get my loading times down, and some even ruining the immersion. I would also like to opt-out the ridiculous wind power decoration and the radio thing (can't remember the name now)

But there was a lot of players argued abut not make an opt-out for that king of things, even tough it do not affect the game play. And the list with thing players want to opt-out from that isn't affection game is long if so if devs start making a making a out-out on a huge list of things we will end up in more or less a single player game since to few players have the same options enabled.

 

Hi I guess I will jump in lol. So at this point random encounters mostly I don't always enjoy especially when I'm on my way someplace and just want to get there, but if I have time I do grab the resources from the random enconter. I'm not sure when random encounters will be
enjoyable, hopefully soon or let us opt out. Richard says that they will be something that we would want to have with perhaps special resources in them and perhaps a mystery to solve, but they are definitely not there yet. We can hope for soon

 

I DON'T

 

If you were in a deep forest, you couldn't see around you because of the forest cover, and if it was dark, you couldn't see around you because of the darkness. So sometimes, if you were at the wrong times and wrong places, encounters were impossible to avoid. Plus, if you went over a bridge, you could be ambushed by trolls. If you did a hole-up-and-camp, you could ambushed by a random encounter during sleep. You needed to set a guard to watch against this, or else your sleeping party members could be murdered. So you would have to choose to travel when you could more easily avoid encounters, and choose to sleep in cities if you couldn't risk an ambush in the wilderness.

So its not accurate to say there were no ambushes; just that you had options to avoid them. Although, to do certain things in the game -- for example, getting through a deep forest -- you would have to choose not to avoid them.

 

Riddle me this, Batman ...... how do you play the game if you opt out of everything? How do you earn gold? How can you earn gold without taking risk? How do you have fun? Why does my suggestion of opting of REs have anything to do with other game mechanics? Must there be a slippery slope where the game experiences Armageddon, or can we simply agree that sucky game mechanics suck and should be improved? Oh, and you already can opt out of going into a city, can't you? And you can opt out of going to a dungeon? And a PvP area? And this? And that? Why is opting out of an RE any different than saying, I don't feel like going to Verdantis Shardfall, because I don't like PvP? Why is it any different than saying, "I don't like the lag in Ardoris, so I opt not to visit that city"? We can opt ENTIRELY out of PVE. We can opt ENTIRELY out of PVP. We can opt ENTIRELY out of crafting. We can opt ENTIRELY out of playing with others, via SPO. We can opt ENTIRELY out of visiting ANY geography on the map. REs are, geographically, the ONLY "place" we must enter in order to travel to and fro. The game has been designed to give players all sorts of choices, but NO, REs must be a sacred cow, even though a large part of the playing population hates them in their current state (and maybe their future state)?

I mean, are you serious? Or are you just out trolling today.

 

You can opt out of going to cities with a large cost, because there are things you need to do in cities. You can opt out of crafting if you're willing to pay for things with gold. All of these opt-outs involve a cost. If there are random encounters, avoiding random encounters should also involve a cost.

But that's a different conversation than improving the mechanics.

 

You totally miss my point. If A want something done so do B,C,D.... and so on. If devs start to listen to A the rest of the players that request things will be upset, specially if their request is not interfering with game concept and wont in any way influence other players (opt-out of random encounters will).

And with your reasoning you can already opt-out of random encounters, do not leave town

 

Agreed completely. And the cost, if and when REs are properly designed, should be lost opportunity, same as any other place if you choose to avoid it.

 

Yes, the slippery slope, the snowball. Don't suggest improvement because then people may seek even MORE improvement. Egads!

 

Yes, though the lost opportunity might be a lost opportunity to go to a certain place that's known to be dangerous, or a lost opportunity to travel somewhere at a certain time of night. If they're designing lost opportunity by simply the lost XP and gold from the encounter, I don't think that would work out or make sense.

Adding to that, they could always add stealth on the overland map, or other ways to ward encounters, that will also have costs.

 

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It's 2015. Why are random encounters even in modern game design vernacular in the classic definition?

 

It still exists in games made today, games that are pretty popular.

 

I would argue that REs in Pokemon are more in line with gambling, hoping to find a rare creature to catch, as opposed to RPGs as a whole, in which case they have become decidedly unpopular over the years as they are just grinds to make the game feel longer. The 90s was the realm of the JRPG; the Western RPG has come back with more sandbox RPGs that involve a lot more immersion.

 

It can get pretty annoying in Pokemon; that's why there's a Repel item. The only reason these style of random encounters are out of Western RPGs more generally is because we have single scale maps in full 3D.. they only made sense on dual-scale maps, or non 3D representations.

But as I've said, my hope is that most of the map encounters we'll have in the game will be roving encounters, and hidden encounters will be saved for ambushes, ones that could not possible be visible to us because of our surroundings, or other situations that the devs might think can't be made visible on the map.

 

Wasteland had JRPG-style random encounters, but both Fallout and Fallout 2 had many fewer encounters and many unique (certain less than 20 in a normal play through unless you are hunting for them). Wasteland 2 seems to have moved back towards the generic random encounter a bit. Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 had negligible random encounters. Arcanum had them, but they were pegged to your level. Banner Saga has non combat encounters only. Overall it is a mixed bag, but the majority of users seem to dislike pure combat REs in their western RPGs with their only redeeming grace being that they make grinding easier.

 

I think the main thing is every game uses what fits the purposes of the game.

Whether they're JRPG style random encounters or not seems to me to miss the point. Obviously many games don't have them, simply because they wouldn't fit the style of the game -- many do have random encounters, but they do them in another way. Beyond that, in a JRPG, its possible to be interrupted with an encounter every step you take, and that's what makes them especially annoying. If you're playing Pokemon, you can move from one encounter to another by just moving one tile over. Its also what made them annoying in some older Western RPGs.

I haven't found that to be the case in the builds we have of SotA at all. Encounters happen, but aren't that frequent -- they're not step-by-step encounters. And there will be be non-combat encounters in the future, and roving encounters. I don't think we know at this point what the ratio of roving vs. ambush encounters will be... or what the ratio of combat vs. non-combat encounters will be.

Right now, they're not that satisfying, mainly because they're really easy. The monsters are easy, and its easy to evade them and run right by them leave the scene. That wouldn't be a good final design for the game. At the same time, I don't feel the angst, because they don't happen that often.