View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0005675 | Valley 1 | Suggestion - Balancing Issues | Feb 8, 2012 10:46 am | Feb 8, 2012 11:01 am | |
| Reporter | Bluddy | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Product Version | 0.570/0.571 | ||||
| Summary | 0005675: The Problem with Single Try Missions | ||||
| Description | This is something I just realized: single try missions are a real problem in the game. Let me explain why. You're trying to give the player a sense of attachment to his current body. But, by having single try missions, you encourage the player to keep fighting through a tough mission -- there's no way to leave to heal up when I'm doing badly, without starting all over again. Therefore you're encouraging the player to kill himself, which destroys the connection to the character. This is why in GTA when you fail a mission, you're just resurrected. Of course, in GTA, the player never dies because the game wants to encourage full experimentation and crazy antics. AVWW doesn't have that -- you want the player to be somewhat careful, which is why there's a penalty for dying (losing your character, vengeful ghost). But I do think that you should consider making it so that dying in a mission only knocks you unconscious. Or perhaps each mission is in a time warp, and you end up at the staging area, but there's also a vengeful ghost waiting in the mission. Another thing you should consider is what happens to vitality stones in a mission. In GTA, one of the annoying things in the early games is that when you die, you lose all your weapons. You can do the mission again, but you have to go collect your weapons again, which is a pain. In later GTAs (Vice City Stories on PSP for example) they let you keep your weapons. Vitality stones is the equivalent of weapons. If I lose the mission and die, I've lost my boosted health in the process. I now have to go collect more vitality stones just to try the mission again, which is a pain. I suggest that being resurrected in the staging area should also restore your vitality stone health to maximum, so you don't have to go collect them again. If the player wants to, he can go collect more, but that's the player's problem. Winning a mission, however, will leave your health as it is when you finish the mission, giving you reason to go collect some vitality stones before the next mission if you so desire. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
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"You're trying to give the player a sense of attachment to his current body." Are we? We sort of are, but it's far from my first concern. I mean, it would be nice, but compelling gameplay comes far first. And I'm more concerned with the feeling of "death matters" than I am with actual emotional attachment, when you get down to the thematic parts, even. "But, by having single try missions, you encourage the player to keep fighting through a tough mission -- there's no way to leave to heal up when I'm doing badly, without starting all over again. Therefore you're encouraging the player to kill himself, which destroys the connection to the character." I disagree -- it gives players an incentive to potentially push themselves further than they should, but that's a choice the player makes and the smart move is actually to retreat if you know you're going to die. If missions weren't single-try, then the smart move would to be to part of the mission, exit to town, heal fully, return, do the next part, repeat. That gets into annoying backtracking, as well as making every mission just about a battle of attrition. That's 100% the opposite of what I want to do, in both cases. Giving the player a concentrated challenge that is all-or-nothing is what the missions are all about. Some are larger than others, and you can argue that the existing ones aren't balanced right in many aspects, but the general premise is sound I believe. Part of it comes from the fact that these are more bite-size missions, compared to some dungeon in Zelda or whatever. "Another thing you should consider is what happens to vitality stones in a mission. In GTA, one of the annoying things in the early games is that when you die, you lose all your weapons. You can do the mission again, but you have to go collect your weapons again, which is a pain. In later GTAs (Vice City Stories on PSP for example) they let you keep your weapons. Vitality stones is the equivalent of weapons. If I lose the mission and die, I've lost my boosted health in the process. I now have to go collect more vitality stones just to try the mission again, which is a pain. I suggest that being resurrected in the staging area should also restore your vitality stone health to maximum, so you don't have to go collect them again. If the player wants to, he can go collect more, but that's the player's problem. Winning a mission, however, will leave your health as it is when you finish the mission, giving you reason to go collect some vitality stones before the next mission if you so desire." This is something that I feel like is more of a separate topic -- and more for the forums -- but I do agree that vitality stones need some thought put at them. There are some aspects of them that are annoying, but I'm not sure to what degree those are even avoidable. It may be that we need a 1:1 relationship with vitality stones and max health increases, while at the same time making it so that you don't lose your vitality stones until your character dies (again encouraging retreats from missions rather than actually pushing on until you die). And also making it so that there is a definite cap of how many vitality stones you can use, not just making it a crazy numbers game. With that sort of change, of course vitality stones then become something that is not suitable for just finding in stashes all over the place. They could become a reward for secret missions, in that all players in the mission at the time the secret mission is won get a vitality stone as a reward. Secret missions are even smaller than regular missions, and are meant to be something that you divide your time with, so that would make a lot of sense. I think the vitality stone question is something that is worth a forum thread to discuss, like I said, and I think (hope) that would go a long way to addressing many of your concerns with missions being single-shot if we did that properly. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 8, 2012 10:46 am | Bluddy | New Issue | |
| Feb 8, 2012 10:52 am | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Feb 8, 2012 10:52 am | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Feb 8, 2012 11:01 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion => New |
| Feb 8, 2012 11:01 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0018713 | |
| Feb 8, 2012 11:01 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | considering => closed |
| Feb 8, 2012 11:01 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Feb 8, 2012 11:01 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
