Gah, I lost everything I typed yet again *bangs head*
Ok, notepad is my friend....
Right, let\'s discuss, as you\'re receptive, Rage, and I\'ve honestly got enough time to waste upon conjecture (*grin*)
The language barriers are there to help accentuate the racial identity. If you\'re and orc for example and want to learn Common speak, it\'s probably a matter of doing a specific quest and poof, you know it. Humans will probably think it\'s cool to have an orc reaching out to them rather than think it\'s just another mediocre race differing only in appearance. Think of the cultural enrichment that languages might have.
I think you\'re also a bit confused as to have it might have been implemented. For example, if you\'re human and orcs speak with you, you\'ll probably just see \".\"
No, in EQ it was done that text came out garbled if you didn\'t understand the language being spoken. You would see \"Charaka speaks in an unknown tongue: JREIU*-n IJ\'tha kenh802\' \" or something similar. The usual response to this was \"Speak common!\" or \"R U Drunk??\"
Sure, it would have been a great idea for immersion; the problem was that no-one bothered with this. Even on the roleplay server, the solution to dealing with different languages was not talking to anyone. They had to include common as a result, and other languages went by the wayside. After a while, speaking in your own language was actually considered rude (the assumption was that you were insulting a character that you didn\'t think would understand you) and then fights would start.
Personally, I think there are enough languages floating around in general chat to confuse me anyway - adding in game language will be even more confusing.
Gambling works.... why are there casinos in the first place? If you\'re not a gambler type like me, perhaps there\'s something else to do.... maybe fishing on the boat.
Again, take into account the setting - just where exactly would there be so much water that it\'s necessary to have a boat? There are two levels underwater, and it\'s not even clear whether being \"above water\" is accesible on those two levels. It\'s quite possible said body of water is merely a lake. There\'s also the matter of coding. Boats in EQ were notoriously buggy - get one bit of code wrong and the boat would disappear out from under you, your character would drown and it would be over eight hours before a GM would show up and get your corpse. As a result, the boats were often \"down\", people started using other transportation and all that coding became useless. I enjoyed the boats myself, but I was often the only person on them, and hence it became a bore.
Gambling would be the same problem; an immense amount of coding for something that people would probably complain about anyway. I can imagine the \"cheat coding\" now as we speak, or conversely the characters having to beg other people on the boat for money because they lost it all in a round of gambling.
What it comes down to is how WELL these ideas are implemented. You can have really good ideas, but end up with poorly designed quests, trade skills, cultural identities, factions, communication interface, and guilds. It\'s the design and polish that is the challenge. Ideas are a dime a dozen... great design and implementation skills are what makes a game great.
This is true...however I\'d like to bring something up that may shed some light on my \"naysaying\" trend.
I work on GuildWare.Net with my husband; he\'s the coder, I\'m the \"think-tank\" and \"human credential\". To a coder, coding is the most important part of any endeavour - anything else is just window-dressing and fluff. Conversely, I know what people want; eye-candy, user-friendly navigation, great graphics, good content. To a coder, this is last minute stuff, but to a gamer or a thinker, these are things that should always be in the back of someone\'s mind whenever doing anything of this sort. As a result, hubby and I butt heads a lot. I say I realise why they put coders in dark rooms with lots of pizza to keep them quiet, and he says I think out loud too much and I\'m asking for the moon.
The perfect balance happens however, when both the thinker and the coder can take into consideration the other point of view.
Often the coder as well as the thinker get too hung up in various things; the coder thinks of every single possible variable and possibility, often to the point of complete redundancy. I\'ve discussed crafting with some developers, and it was rather like talking to my hubby - they each had these very far-out ideas of how impossible things would be because they were taking into account things that the gamer or thinker didn\'t really care about seeing implemented in the first place. I often have to derail Simon when he gets into such long-winded \"what ifs\" by a gentle \"no-one is too worried about seeing that, they really want this, this and this\". Also, what he thinks is perfectly beautiful bit of code may very well be, but to the eye of the person coming along upon a website or game, they want to see something pretty they can relate to (I think he\'s figured this out out even after many of my protests because a common comment to GuildWare is how dull it looks to the eye).
On the other hand, here\'s me wanting to add all these extra fiddly bits that aren\'t possible because I don\'t understand the code, which often earns me a look as if I have just sprouted antlers. I don\'t understand entirely WHY my ideas don\'t work, but I have to take it into account that Simon must know what he\'s talking about and leave it at that.
So, in that light, again look over your ideas. How simple do you really think coding language-barriers would be? Can you imagine how difficult plotting a direct path for a boat, completely with characters and all their gear in their inventory, gambling away, would be for a small group of coders doing this in their spare time? Does any of these ideas actually enrich the game or are they merely there as a \"cool idea\" (this translates into coder-speak into \"fluff\" and remember, to coders \"fluff=useless\")? Merely watching my husband create code for a message board has been an education in how difficult coding is - but at the same time, he knows when to come to me for a dose of \"perspective\" when he\'s getting too wound up with his coding \"what-ifs\" and I can give him a simple solution.
Right, I\'ve gotten a bit longwinded myself, but you catch my drift, aye?
