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Whats up with the Mazes?
JacobKnoll
Member Posts: 31
Heh, this topic is for Farrawway!
Is it just me or were the mazes in underlight really bad?
Anybody have any ideas about this?
I was thinking that mazes should be a little bit more difficult and entertaining in reclamation.
Maby mazes could be replaced by somthing else?
I always thought a cool maze would be similar to The Mines of Moria from Lord of The Rings.
I think It would be better if they were not so repetitive and plain, the difficulty should be based on the complexity.
Mazes could be a good way of limiting inexperienced players from really cool/benificial places without havings stinky sphere requirements.
These labyrinths could be dynamic as well, in other words, always rearanging themselves. How cool would it be if players had to take a risk when they entered a maze of shifting mine tunnels. A risk may be that the choice of tunnels the player picks could lead to a nasty nightmare den capable of overwhelming any solo player. The difficulty now is not only the complexity, its the chance that there may be no coherant return/escape.
Thinking about Mirkwood forest form Lord of The Rings, nobody ever thought, "Hey Ive been through that place 100 times, no problem." nah.. thats no fun.. There should be a nasty risk every time for every player. Especially if the maze leads to a really powerfull/cool/exclusive place in the game.
Comments
Dynamic mazes seems the best way to go, forever changing. But I think also make them kinda house specific. for example... For Order I thought having a center chamber with six doors one door for each point of the moon. and have it everytime you enter the room the doors rearrange. kinda like the department of mystery in "Harry potter Order of the Pheonix".
I already ranted about that one on Stratics, though, we didn't delve too deeply into just the maze part...
http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/reclamation/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=reclhall&Number=16290&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1&what2=&selv=&vwhich=
Randomizing portals, or even changing them to a set pattern of "shifting portals" would make things a lot more interesting... Randomness would cause confusion, but a set shift pattern, on a low time interval, would be rather interesting. I did some-what like the maze that came with the Threshold Caves, putting a left and right portal in, and putting in 14 portals per room, was cool. Though there was only 3 rooms. Remember all the codexes laying everywhere so people could see where they were going?
I say we get mazes with the fake walls/floors, shifting portals, and ~20 portals per room, 5 or 6 rooms... And make it confusing, throw mirrors on the walls in bad places... Ie: A fake wall that's mirrored that has portals behind it. Things like that.
One idea I had for a maze was stairwells, ones like in a castle tower. Really high, hollowed center, with stair treads around the outside, small alcoves every 10-15 steps. Put a few outcrops for looking down the center of the tower... a few being fake. Now, if the portals shifted every 10 minutes, going upward on the tower. Wrong portals taking you +5 portals upward (if within four of top, send to remainder from bottom) (the top of the tower would be like a lookout where all you see is Chaos?
)
Now, can you imagine there being, say, 3 or 4 of those towers at various "rifts" in the city, if you hit th right portal, you get taken to another of the rifts... Put atleast... 40 portals in the tower (possible to have that many?) You could spend hours trying to do it with pure chance, spend a month figuring out the timing and rotation, or spend 2 seconds if your a lucky lil' prick, just to endup in another tower that looks exactly the same... would you realize your on another plane?
That's just an example of something I think would be a lot more interesting for a maze.
I thought about what Farrawway said and I think It would be a good idea to have the mazes change on certain time intervals. Maybe the maze/tunnels/whatever rearrange themselves when day turns to night/morning or when a heartstone is returned to neutral or when a house is overthrown.. whatever, the change should be regular enough so that people don't post directions on their web page. I don't think any maze should change in less than an hour because players may want to have enough time to show other players what they have found if they ever do solve the maze.
I think it would be nice if mazes had a natural feel to them, not just a string of portals everywhere. I like what Farrawway said about having stairs and other avenues that might lead to a portal instead of having 10 shiny portals right in your face as soon as you step out of the last one.
RikkuUL mentioned the mazes in the houses, I was thinking about this and thought it would be cool to have multiple entrance ways to a house through underground catacombs/mazes.
For example the caves at the base of Mt Illapse could be a wicked maze that leads to the chamber rooms of the dreamers of light. I think It would be an interesting option for an attacking army to take a risk by sending a small group through these tunnels before an attack in the hope of infiltrating the house from a second front.
The risk might be that the tunnels had shifted recently and there was a chance the group might end up in a nasty nightmare den. A cool way of giving players a decent chance of navigating a maze would be to have color coded item gens in each room that signaled the correct branch of tunnels to take to one of the many possible destinations; having multiple destinations could add a little bit of complexity/ trial and error. A defending or fleeing player could snatch up all these items or plant decoy items to confuse other players trying to make their way through.
So say there are three destinations when you enter a maze, there should be an item corresponding to a certain path which point in a certain direction in the first room, if you do not want to take this path because you already know where it leads then you try one of the other two paths. Either the path leads to another room with an item gen corresponding to the path you want to take or a trap room containing a one way exit or a nightmare den or whatever. If the room you start in has an item gen other than the path you want to follow you have to take a risky chance and pick one of the other tunnels/paths. If you are the first player through the tunnels you can trick players into taking the wrong path by temporarily removing the item, switching items wont work because if you follow the right item path then it will always lead to another room with an item of the same orientation that points you in the correct path. Swapping items to lead players into a trap does not make sense because you would have to follow trap path yourself to know if it was a trap. Picking up sweet items as you move through the maze could be dangerous especially if you are tricked into taking a wrong direction and need to backtrack.
Overall I like the idea of having a slight bit of direction in a maze, that makes them fun to play in especially when your fighting against other players. If mazes are too confusing then players will never want to go in them. I also think mazes should not be repetitive or plain looking, they should be as fun to walk through as any other room in the game.
I liked Farrawway's castle tower idea so much I felt like I had to add to it.
First of all I think Its really sweet to give the city rift layers. The game would be sooo much cooler if you could travel up and down as well as abroad.
There could be several towers located about the circumferance of threshold extending many leagues above the dream city into the upper bounds of the chaos. There could also be a deep chasm at the center of the threshold that descended many leagues into the depths of the chaos.
I was wondering if reclamation would have moving objects or game physics. If it does there could be pillars inside these Towers you could step on that would raise you hundreds of feet into the air from which you would have to step onto broken stairways or moving platforms, timing would be everything when you had to step or jump off at just the right time to land on another pillar extending upwards next to you twice as fast as the one you where on. Add a challenging a few tricks, mazes, and a few mirrors or transparent walkways and bridges and this would be mad fun and difficult. Of course if you fell you might just turn into a tiny soulsphere
hey who said climbing a dangerous tower would be risk free!
I say when you get to the top of one of these towers there will be a vast ocean of chaos with sky mountains, temples, Houses, and anything else you would like to see dangling/hovering in the sky... It would be cool to put a chapter of Order of the sable moon up here?! All of these places could be seen from really far away and would be connected by a vast 3D complex of sky bridges, ramps, stairs, moving platforms.. just like in the tower you just climbed but now extending in all directions. The sky buildings, mountains and islands would have to be in a pretty big room to get the right effect. It would be mad cool if you could see all the Towers in the distance beyond the moving platforms and walkways and look down to see threshold and the deep chasm in the center of the dream city... now that would be cool. Oh how about giant nightmares drifting through the chaos... haha at least a nice visual effect.
Farrawway Your a Genius! haha, even if it does not fly with Lyra I'm glad you mentioned it! I think a vast vertical atmosphere would give an amazing sense of dimension to the game. Think about standing at the top of one of the towers and seeing Mt Illapse breaking through the clouds donning Dreamers of Light at its jagged precipice.. very cool.
Well, take the sewers in Underlight, for an example. They only touch 2 planes, but they're completely on one plane. What if every plane had sewers? Maybe the sewers don't go into other rooms on that plane, but just merely travel beneath the rooms of the plane, into other planes. Water-levels change, nightmares build nests... etc... That would be a great way to make a large scale maze, make it complex, and make it dangerous... But then... You're getting more into the DnD type dungeon, but hey, isn't that what this is? Just give it some cool background story
I can't remember who it was that said it, but I know it was an accepted general consensus thing on the Stratics board. The world, planes, rooms, etc. They're kept small so that finding other people to play with is easier, and so that there is more room for the interaction of groups, houses, mares, etc. They don't want a large scale world, like EQ, where it takes you hours to walk from one corner to the other.
So chances of getting "cool" things like these maze idea's... is slim. Even though it would be quite entertaining during the off-peak hours to mess around with for those of us who are antisocial.
Since flying is built in, why not make a maze that can go up or down as well? Now that would be a confusing one... especially if there were chairs on the cieling... Which way is up?... haha.
[I can't remember who it was that said it, but I know it was an accepted general consensus thing on the Stratics board. The world, planes, rooms, etc. They're kept small so that finding other people to play with is easier, and so that there is more room for the interaction of groups, houses, mares, etc. They don't want a large scale world, like EQ, where it takes you hours to walk from one corner to the other.
So chances of getting "cool" things like these maze idea's... is slim. Even though it would be quite entertaining during the off-peak hours to mess around with for those of us who are antisocial.]
Yeah I definately agree that traveling really far around the game to find other players should not be an issue I also agree that rooms should be smaller. I always enjoyed traveling on a select path, that way I had a good chance of running into sombody.
What if there were no wide open spaces but players could see other players in another room, or just another part of the same room? I think this was done in some parts of underlight.. in one of the newer mazes players would be traveling in opposite directions on parallel paths but coulden't reach each other from their current position.
I think cutting down some visual boundaries definately enhances a players ability to find other players and also removes the lonely mute feeling one usually gets when walking around in a maze or especially the planes.
Keeping fixed tiny rooms/paths but giving some visual range would help protect the cozy feeling of the game and enhance the feel of travel at the same time; to remove that nasty clostophobia feeling you get sometimes lol.
Every room could contain multiple avenues/areas that are linked to different paths, if you were chasing a player you might be able to see them running through the same room but way far ahead of you on another path.
I think this would be a really good way to make the game even more compact, less empty, and make it feel even bigger at the same time.
By using layered paths/areas in rooms to make Reclamation more compact it would indirectly increase player thoroughfare and add needed visual interaction in remote areas.
Don't know if I posted it, but I discussed it with a couple people in IRC/ICQ... If you wanted to keep finding people easy, but still allow for the bigger spaces, or atleast more rooms... Since we're in a dream, and portals just go from one "room" to another and these are like Cloudsbreak, just little "islands" in the dreamstate... Why not make all connected rooms visible from the room your in, but a distance away, you can only see other people in those rooms, possible hear a shout, but no emotes or chat will cross the distance... And you can't attack/defend from the distances (people in other rooms not on who list and name tags don't show)... Might have to make it only show player characters so that people don't get a heads up on nightmares in the next room.
That would be cool... to see another room floating in the distance, and it would still allow for the big wide open spaces that 'some' of us love... :-
This is all assuming Reclamation dev is still a go but I think that if you can see people then you should see emotes. Also, I doubt they'd do this- its a cool idea but the whole idea of separated rooms is to cut down on bandwidth because Reclamation is real time combat. This would probably slow the game down a lot for anyone with a less than spectacular computer/connection, not sure but it might be really rough on the servers too.
Speaking of spectacular computers:
AMD64 w/ 4 gigs of ram, an nVidia 6800 GT OC w/256 megs of ram, and 5.1 sound.
All I need is a case now. Way to be on time UPS!
-night
Actually, no. It could be done pretty easily, since you don't have to handle any broadcasts for those rooms, you could have a simple 1/2 rate movement update, so you would see people over there, but have 1/2 the packets for that "realtime" feel... Would make the distance a bit more realistic anyhow. Unless they put in some ability that changes the camera's focus so that you can see like a cat, and really really far.
But, anyways, back to the topic. Really, it wouldn't be that much harder on the server, or the connections... How often have you seen a room storm, in the current UL, and mind you, the server (I would hope to god) gets upgrades and new code just as much as the client does. So there'd hopefully be less "storm" and lag problems. But, if you got all those rooms pretty full, yeah, I could see it being an issue... But how full would it have to be?
But then, it's not a "requirement" for the system, just fluff. So who cares? If you add too much fluff, you just lose out on your productivity. *cough* Even though, it is just a game.
Back in the day I've seen rooms storm really really hard, I've seen the servers crash from too heavy a load a few times too during the really big war. Bear in mind that these days there are very rarely any more than 30 people on at one time. It used to be that sometimes there were hundreds on, and if Reclamation blows up it could be as big as Planet Side (The only other real time combat mmo that I know of) and that seems to have all sorts of problems with lag (never actually played it though). You might be right through, the internet and computers have come a long way since Underlight began so it could be a different story these days. This all might be a moot point though, there are rumors that Reclamation went under. I mean, when was the last time you saw a weekly discussion or heard from a staff member? I really hope the rumor is wrong and they haven't posted because they've been so busy trying to get the game up and running for beta testing.
-night
If anyone else has ever seen the Haunting (not the old version), when they're exploring the house...walk through a room of mirrors, I think, and a room with books on the floor that are stacked in water, etc...That kind of thing was cool.
It would be neat to see portals that moved around, if that were possible. Or if mazes had more of a theme to the area they're in, instead of basic walls.