Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Creature Habits and Daganabits or Likes and Yikes
HJ-Uska
Hero's Journey GMMember Posts: 13
One of the things I have found currently in existing graphical MMORPG games is the sameness or blaseness (is this a word) of creatures in or out of combat.
I'm curious to hear what things other people have to say about the creatures in ohter MMORPG and what they do when they are not gainfully employed killing players.
One of the things I would like to implement in HJ is much more intelligent and fun creatures. Have them doing fun and entertaining stuff before, during and after combat. Nothing more fun than having a large elemental stepping on your body and squishing it into the ground as it wanders around. Unlike our text-based siblings GS, DR, AoH and MO where we're not art dependent and we can make you see anything we want with words, HJ requires art and animation which take time to do things like that. But I'm just curious though, without those sort of limitations what are some of the things you see our noble creatures doing when they aren't ridding the game of the horrible player plague.
GameMonster Uska
Critters Rule
Comments
Hm...in the case if "intelligent" monsters (orcs or whatever) maybe dueling eachother, staring at shiny things, or picking their nose? Definitely patrolling...
Just for some clarification I suppose you mean what the creatures will be doing at their camps if a rouge or groups looks upon them, but before the players are activitely noticed by the creatures?
Some obvious ideas are patrolling, fighting each other in brawls (no damage), drinking
Some of the better ones that require more effort: Story telling (would be neat if you knew their language to see/hear stories told. Maybe even have outside racial languages be consistantly derived from English a la WoW for the Horde vs. Alliance). Gambling (one might get more loot from a monster than another). Courts, archery contests, jousts would all be very cool things to have going on.
If they're out in the middle of the forest..maybe building barricades, log traps (sorta like the rock traps but against players) or just happily burning down forests if they hate tree-huggers like elves. Cutting/hauling lumber for their city? Mining?
Yep, just those sort of actions running the gamut from actions they do while they "think" they are unobserved to those where they celebrate their victories. Perhaps take a souveneir or two from their kill. Those are all good examples and along the lines of what I want to explore as critters are brought to fruition. The whole idea is to make the game immersive such that a targe.. err player sees a critter such that they can get the feeling that the critter might not have been plunked down in front of them just so they can gain a bit of experience.
GameMonster Uska
Critters Rule
Some other ideas:
Have the parties perform in raids of increasing strength. As each group outside a city wall gets wiped out the next group from the city will be larger and stronger until they overwelm the party or the raids don't find anything in the area. Maybe have the mobs stay at a "red alert" status for a period of time.
I personally am fond of the story idea in my last post, but the monsters can always loot the players or baring that take their heads/scalps, etc and possibly have increased money (a small amount) as a bounty on the players. If a boss or critter is specially dilligent in killing players maybe have them upgraded with better weapons or better stats.
Creatures should talk to themselves in coherent manners, maybe brag about killing other players or discuss raids/leads that may be good for new instancing quests for a brave/invisiable and clever adventurer that can convert the language over to English. I would recommend that these quests have dynamic openings since obviously within a week it'l be up on stratics or alakazam in detail.
One thing I would like to see, which I havent seen or noticed to an extent in or other MMORPGs (or even single player games for that matter) is 'scout' creatures. Youre walking through a dense forest and suddenly an Orc leaps out from some bushes a dozen yards away, but instead of fighting he runs off into the brush and out of sight. If youre party decided to chase after him he may be leading them into an ambush, suddenly the party is surrounded by Orcs. Or if they decided to ignore the Orc and continue on, the scout could point out their position and direction to a group of Orcs who run off to hunt down the party.
As for animations, I think UXO had some cool animations for their creatures, for example the Zombie slaps a musqitoe that landed on him and proceeds to eat it. Or a metal Golem doing The Robot.
It would definatly be cool to see a Giant lift up his leg an proceed to stamp your corpse, if it was a spider monster maybe it could rap up your character in a cocoon (maybe this ones a little too difficult), a fire elemental/demon could cremate you, etc... things assoctaied with that type of creature would be cool.
Some idle animations... how about some orcs playing rock, paper, scissors? Or the Elanthia equivalent. Or if theyre in a camp they could be cooking a pig over a fire, or chopping wood, or just sitting around talking.
Just some quick ideas.
Get out of our heads!
Skippy
On the first topic, ::shrieks:: The Robot? You must not play GS. As I like to say, "That is so out of genre." ::scoff::
As far as rock, paper, scissors goes....In GS, the Elanthian version is called Roshambo.
Haha, no I know I wouldnt except something like that to be in HJ, it was just a really cool animation