Hi,

We're not most games, and we're not after the easiest, but the most realistic approach. This is a work in progress so unfortunately there are a lot of difficulties to overcome, but the end result will be very much worth all the effort. We want people to treat NPCs as if they were real (i.e., real citizens of Yliakum just like your characters) and not just "tools" to get what you want.

Researchers have been working in the artificial intelligence area for quite some time, with much more funding than any of us are likely to see, trying to figure out problems like parsing natural language, machine learning, etc. The researchers haven't really got very far, but the developers of this game expect to solve these incredibly difficult problems with a few weeks of fiddling.

USER: Is there anything I can do for you?
NPC: Yes, I need 3 carrots for a stew I'm making - could you go to the grocer and get them for me?
USER: Probably not - I think carrots are out of season at the moment. Why don't you just use turnips?
NPC: Hmm, turnips would make it taste strange
USER: What if you only used one turnip, and added some pumpkin to make up the difference?
NPC: Yeah, I guess that'd work. Could you get me a turnip and some pumpkin instead?
USER: Maybe, but are you going to need anything else from the grocer in the next week?
NPC: In the next week? I'll probably need a few sacks of potatoes, more tomatos and some celery.
USER: Hmm, how  about you do a list of things you need from the grocer each week and arrange a regular delivery?
NPC: Hey, that sounds like a good idea...
USER: You could probably even talk the grocer into giving you cheaper prices if it's a regular order..
NPC: Nice idea - then I could make more profit from my stews.  I wish I had time to go talk to the grocer..
USER: Would you give me cheaper stews if I negotiate a regular order with the grocer?
NPC: Ok, as long as the grocer gives me better prices - it's been costing me heaps buying a few vegetables at a time.

In the dialog above, what if the user tried to talk the NPC into dealing directly with a farmer, or growing their own carrots? What if the user had some carrots but tried to barter, or told the NPC that the grocer increased their prices so they could keep the difference? How about if the user was hungry and decided it'd be better to bash the NPC and steal the partially made stew, or perhaps decided to go and get all of the things needed to make stews and start selling stew themselves (and maybe buy every carrot in town to make things hard for the original stew maker)?

There is no way one earth that the developers of this game will ever be able to allow people to treat NPCs as if they are real - the massive number of things a person can say, the incredible difficulty in parsing what users say correctly, and the work required to get the NPC to say sane responses makes it totally impossible. Add to this that most people use tone and gestures - is the sentence "I really like the color pink" a serious statement or was I being sarcastic? You can tell because of the way I said the word "really", and because I poked my tongue out at the end of the sentence...

In practice, there's usually a very small number of responses that an NPC is capable of (except for variations of "huh?" and "I didn't understand that"), and there's also a very small number of things a user can say to trigger the very small number of responses. Keywords will not work - consider something like this:

USER: Is there anything I can do for you?
NPC: Yes, I need 3 carrots for a stew I'm making - could you go to the grocer and get them for me?
USER: I used all of my carrots with your wife last night!
NPC: Yes, carrots - do you have them?
USER: No - I said I've used them all. I killed the grocer last week too...
NPC: Yes, the grocer - did you go see him?

Rather than trying to perform miracles, why not implement something that is practical and can be used? This is what most games do, and I expect it's what this game will do after spending years trying (and mostly failing) to make the NPCs seem "real".


Cheers,

Brendan

Hi,

Quote from: Brendan on June 21, 2006, 08:05:50 am

I guess what I'm saying is that making software annoying is rarely wise under any circumstances, and that the death realm is needlessly annoying (even with "-fullbright"), especially for new players.

Do you think the experience would improve if we could brighten the area without the player needing to use -fullbright from the start? The DR lighting is fine on my monitor, and it seems that some people just have to adjust their gamma settings. Do you have any suggestions you can make to take away the current irritation of the Death Realm without changing its concept and intentions?

Improving lighting (for e.g. filling in pits with glowing lava) would help new users to avoid "re-death". When I first arrived at DR I checked out the Golem(?) briefly, wandered across the bridge and blindly fell to my re-death at the first turn. On the second attempt I got to the same place and tried jumping straight across. On the third attempt I fell off the bridge on the way, and on the fourth attempt I tried jumping out to the right. Then I gave up, checked the forums and found "-fullbright", logged back in and saw another player turning where I'd previously been falling and followed the path to a large libarary where I asked and a kind player helped me out...

So yes, this would help with one aspect of it, but this doesn't really alleviate my main concerns...

My main concerns are that death immediately takes you to a "hard to navigate" place (with no chance of "in-situ" resurrection), new users are treated as harshly as players who've had a chance to figure out how to play, the death penalty is time and frustration rather money/equipment/experience/statistics, and parts of it don't seem logical.

I'm not too sure how much magic, religion, healers (spells, prayers, first-aid, etc) have been developed (or are intended), but I would assume that (sooner or later) it would be desirable for high level characters to be able to learn how to resurrect a player. An immediate relocation to a different zone rules this possibility out. It also takes the fun out of rescuing a guild members corpse from a horde of nasty foes, makes it impossible for evil characters to loot a corpse, prevents people from buying "life insurance", etc. There's a lot of options here that just don't work or don't work well due to the immediate relocation.

Every MMORPG I've ever played has had "less harsh" death penalties for new users - almost all of them have no penalty at all for players that are "level N" or lower. It just gives time for new players to become familiar with the game itself. If you populate DR with dark characters and lifeforms, then death will actually be harder for new players than it is for high level players (i.e. trying to avoid being killed by these dark characters when you've got no skills or equipment).

For the penalty itself, for most games it's lost XP, reduced skills, lost equipment, some sort of debt (or some combination). This means players can choose how they recover from their death, and don't have to repeat the same actions every time they die. The important point here isn't the form of penalty, but reducing the repetition.

Lastly, it doesn't make sense for dead people to die again, doesn't make sense for a dead person to still have their equipment/money, doesn't make sense to have a shopkeeper in the death realm, and there isn't any transition from "dead" to "alive" (no ancient ritual, no sudden jolt as the soul is rejoined with the body, no waking up in the graveyard, etc). It's like death doesn't involve any physical or spiritual change (other than your location) - I'd have thought death would be a little more profound.

Quote

I'd rather see the death realm renamed, populated with vampires or something and used as a high level zone instead.

Well, I'd like a pony too, myself :} The Death Realm is going to be a much bigger world in the future, and its own world - it will be populated by dark characters and lifeforms, filled with quests, and our goal is to make it a lot more fun - while making it harder to die by mistake.

So if a Priest, Monk or Nun dies, they're sent to a place of dark characters and lifeforms? I'm sure there'd be quite a few religous characters that would be surprised at the effectiveness of their faith.

If the Death Realm was much bigger and much more fun (quests, etc), will there be a way to get into DR without dying? For e.g. could a religous leader arrange a crusade against these dark characters, and would it begin with a large group of followers killing each other (with the last one standing doing some suicide)? Will these dark characters be evil and only attack players with good alignment?


Cheers,

Brendan

Hi,

This game looks promising, so I want to describe my first impressions constructively in the hope that my comments might help to improve the game....

To start, downloading the game, installing it, etc is all very simple - no problems there.

The character creater looks very professional, but to be honest it's a pain. It takes me around 10 minutes to think of a unique name (and I never really like whatever I think of). The hardest part is trying to find a name that sounds "medieval" - in reality last names are passed down from father to child, and don't change much through time (i.e. any modern last name is technically a perfectly suitable "medieval" name, at least for human races). The other problem is that I have no idea what sort of name is suitable for each race (and yes, "Qwerty" was taken). The next problem is all the strange questions - spending ages reading options trying to predict what effect they'd have rather than just allowing people to change attributes directly (you would've heard this before). Something that should take 5 minutes ends up taking half an hour, which is OK for the first character but would become tiresome quickly.

I got in the game, walked around clueless for a while, tried to jump over a fence and got stuck in the middle of it, found the help did an "/unstickme". I set my camera angle (so I could see where I was going rather than where I'd been), changed the keys to be more like other games (Q & E for strafe, A and D for turning) and tried to find the "always run" option (still wondering about that). Then I fell off a small ledge and died. Welcome to hell (literally).

To be honest here (after dying several times while stumbling around in the dark with my character that is meant to be able to see in the dark but can't), if it wasn't for finding a post on the forums mentioning the "-fullbright" option I would've given up then and there. Every game I've played has some leniency for new players, and even for very experienced players death usually only takes five minutes to recover from, but not here. I won't continue describing this - the forums are full of peoples comments about the "anti-user" death realm. After being led out by a kind player, watching every step I made knowing that any minor slip means starting again, I continued.

Eventually I found a sewer with some rats - finally something I could kill. Now according to the manual you're supposed to be able to click on a rat and select "attack". This in itself is rather disappointing - it makes it impossible to sneak up on a target and attack them before they know, or to hide around a corner and cast some spells to weaken it before the fight begins properly, or to shoot arrows from a safe distance - things I'd do in real life (in real life, would you walk up to your victim and say "Can I attack you please?" - not exactly a tactic that the US would teach it's marines).

I did everything I could imagine, left click, right click, jumped up and down on their heads, re-read the manual, check the forums, swear at some NPCs, the "/attack" command, etc. Regardless of what I did I couldn't actually attack a rat. Then another player came along (also confused) wondering why he couldn't attack anymore - it was lucky (it was the only way I knew it was the game rather than me). I gave up trying to kill things.

Then I decided the only thing left was quests, so I started trying to talk to various NPCs. I guess people here will know what I mean if I mention Gandalf sitting at the entrance to Mordor - say "friend" to enter, heh. Most games like this have a list of valid options so that the user can just click on one rather than trying to guess the magic words - trying to get the exact phrase and actually type it in correctly is very annoying and constantly getting a "Huh?" response isn't realistic at all (especially when you can't slit their throats). I hope the discussions with NPCs aren't logged - there'd be quite a few obcene suggestions in those logs now (I wasn't in my best mood by this stage).

Anyway, get some stuff? Ok, no money to buy them, no way to get money and no other way to get them (the NPC/seller wasn't interested in my other offers ). Get something fixed? That I could do, or at least I thought so...

On the way back I made the mistake of running down the stairs, and guess what? Yes, I died. No, I didn't fall. I didn't have a shoelace untied, didn't accidentally slip onto my sword and my character wasn't prone to heart attacks or strokes - the stairs where nice and straight, it seemed so easy.

Back in hell. Completely frustrated I tried a nice shortcut key - "Alt+F4". This almost had the desired effect, except the game crashed during exit, invoking both the game's "Oops" dialog box and Microsoft's "Oops" dialog box. I didn't try to send a bug report using either of these dialog boxes (clicking on the "go away" button is a habit learned from years of using other software).

I guess I decided that it was easier to delete the character and create a new one than it was to try to get my no-experience, no-money, no-items character out of the death realm again. Then I had second thoughts - if I start a new character (with the painful character creator) every time I die then there's no point trying to improve any character as they'd die sooner or later anyway. It occured to me that getting out of the death realm was going to be a regular occurance, and that I had no intention of doing it ever again. The only logical conclusion is the uninstaller.

I haven't uninstalled yet - I just don't like quitting, and the game is promising. I guess I can't really understand how the graphics became so good while the gameplay, um, didn't...


Thanks,

Brendan