Post by GrandSerpent on 2025-05-05 23:25:59
So a few assorted thoughts on this. I think that breaking down lower-level items into crafting materials for stronger gear is one of the better systems for handling this kind of thing. It means you can give low-level players easy access to weaker gear (they just need to grind normal mobs for a bit), while still giving them an incentive to continue fighting in the same areas after they get it. I really, really dislike games where players are disincentivized from trying to fight monsters stronger than their level range. If skilled players are capable of working out strategies ...
Post by GrandSerpent on 2025-05-09 00:36:55
So, I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think this is the right solution to the current problem. I don't find that having multiple different rarities/grades of e.g. granite does much for my immersion, and it adds a whole layer of complexity to crafting. Optimally, crafting systems should feel like they make sense within the context of the game's world, but having a ton of different tiers of material just ends up feeling artificial and "gamey". Plus, it makes actually understanding the system harder. As a point of comparison, everyone's favorite mining and crafting game, Minecraft, doesn't ...
Post by GrandSerpent on 2025-06-26 16:37:19
So, the core problem with these sort of environments in MMOs is that they're reliant on large, complex assets which need to be hand-crafted for vistas like this. This isn't a major issue for single-player games, because developers can generally control the route a player takes into a location, and therefore both optimize the performance of areas, and only fully build out parts of the environment which the player can directly access. Developers will also generally have longer to spend on polishing any given area, because (aside from a few outliers) they're not trying to create a giant world ...
Post by GrandSerpent on 2025-06-26 21:28:57
Expanding on what @JustVine said, for design reasons, games are often not built at a realistic scale (it's harder to accurately position your character from a third person perspective than it would be in real life, so you need to give the player extra space to move around). How a game's environment feels also varies considerably based on how zoomed out the camera is. Here are a couple of examples, again from DS3: From the default over-the-shoulder perspective, this environment feels about right. However, if we zoom out, the character suddenly appears tiny relative to other objects in the ...
Post by GrandSerpent on 2025-07-21 19:47:32
I imagine it hits the reward centers in their brain differently? I figure they must like hearing the "quest complete!" sound effect and seeing a little particle effect appear around their character.
Post by GrandSerpent on 2025-08-13 20:03:42
Unless there's been some recent change to artisanship categories, I'm not sure of relevance of the article to me personally, since I'm mostly interested in skills like cooking, rather than crafting gear. I don't see exactly how this would apply to cooking. Otherwise, it seems like Ashes' gathering is catching up to Minecraft's.