Questions will be taken in the chat room for this one. Richard Garriot, Tracy Hickman, Chris Spears, and Mojito Spears will be on camera!
Questions will be taken in the chat room for this one. Richard Garriot, Tracy Hickman, Chris Spears, and Mojito Spears will be on camera!
I absolutely love the idea of “no health bars” and having to rely on visual hints (maybe audio hints too if monsters could start howling or coughing in ever more unearthly ways the more the are hurt) to estimate how serious an enemies’ wounds are and how close it is to falling unconscious or to dying.
In a hunting scenario, the blood stains on the ground could even allow me to follow fleeing pray if I lost sight of it.
When Richard is talking about weaving Dukes into the story, is he talking about $5K Dukes, or $10K Dukes?
Lord British! B! Get that map over to us at the MINECRAFT project soon! We’re very excited to terraform it into existence.
Sir frank. both
@Duke Ironman, If this is true, I see a castle in my future.
Hopefully welcome to the Duke club then. There are not many of us
An answer from the team indicates that $5K Duke details are still a little fuzzy, so I think I’ll just wait for things to firm up a bit more.
I really like the idea of clearing off the hit point bar and use the immersiveness of actually watching your foe get weaker. It will give us the feel of actually being in the game and playing, and not just monitoring different bars and numbers
Great hangout guys! I want to say that I love the idea of using visual clues for damage instead of numbers and health bars. Yes please!
Also, can we please get advance notice of these hangouts like we used to? I didn’t realize there was one on until 30 minutes into it already – same with last week’s chat… An official notice in the Dev Hangout thread, on the front page here, and/or on Facebook at least a few hours ahead of time would be appreciated by all! Thanks!
No numbers and no healt bars is a great idea!
Maybe even go a step further and remove Hitpoints altogether? Just tracking for example the number of light/medium/severe wounds that increase the chance that the next hit will be critical enough to incapacitate the character/monster.
The monster fight that was described at the end (arrows sticking, no hit points with visual cues to determine damage, etc) is what I’ve always hoped for in a fantasy role playing game.
At least I would love that to be an option.
I loved the little tidbits of lore from TH, and very much like RG’s notion of eliminating the hit point bar.
The elimination of health bars and the integration of visual cues for the state of health of combatants would be very welcome.
Love the visual cue ideas for the combat system. I agree games have too many bars and numbers flying over the screen. Make it real. Be a trend setter and do not follow the tired systems currently out there. Great chat… Looking forward to next week and the upcoming developer level chats
yes to no health bars the game will be mush more immursive
great idea LB .
Visual cues, no health bars, no numbers flying around are extremely welcome. I hate having to concentrate on health bars and not on the actual fight.
IMHO:
– Having the visual cues is a good idea whether or not health bars will be present. The more the player can determine by looking at the scene itself, without having to rely on the UI, the better.
– The first few fights against a “new” kind of mob are the time when not seeing the health bar – and, thus, not knowing it’s HP – can bring the most immersion, and even mystery, to the game.
– Removing the bars altogether might not be a good idea. Too much of a shock for players coming from other games. Also, it opens the doors for players with information providing hacks – which are often undetectable, and thus really hard to punish their usage – to be more effective in combat.
My proposal, then, would be to have both visual damage clues and optional health bars, but to only allow showing health bars for mobs the player has already defeated a certain number of.
With this the mystery of facing a new kind of mob and not knowing his HP is preserved; players that want the extra immersion of not having health bars can play that way without much of a handicap, and they might actually be better at fighting unknown mobs due to not relying on health bars; players that require health bars get them after a while, after experiencing the visual clues first; and the benefit of using a hack to show hit points is reduced, making the development and usage of this kind of hack less likely.