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DrPaper posted:that's second life lmao
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Oct 23, 2014 22:04
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| # ? May 3, 2024 12:51 |
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Tabletop.games always come up in this discussion but they're completely different. Tabletops are multiplayer, and you have a "role" to fill, like a chess price or (God help me) an MMO, since everybody needs to get a chance to be useful. The problem for them is that they get tied up with magic also being a story thing. Video games are a different story. The problem with trying to balance endgame Mage gameplay with Warriors is that in like 90% of games the core gameplay mechanics are in physical combat. By choosing a mage, you're cutting yourself off from that; while you can do physical attacks, your stats are so bad you can't actually do anything, and will probably die. Generally most equipment you get as rewards are swords and armor and things too - which are useless to you. Most gear and item drops are useless to you, in fact. However, magic is also utilitarian, so other classes make up for no magic stats with things like scrolls, which aren't as strong as mages but give them things like elemental coverage and utility spells. Mages aren't barred from scrolls, of course. All this makes mages though is lovely warrior with a lot of scrolls. Magic, as it gets stronger, tends to get balanced as "slower to cast" and "uses lots of MP." Contrast this with warriors, where the only difference between a level 1 and level 50 warrior is the numbers So what really happens is that you get a character who.spends the majority of the game as garbage with the boon of not having to spend a lot of money on scrolls, with the endgame reward being that you get an incredibly situational, hard to use attack that does a lot of damage. Plus there's the fact that most games just don't bother to make.magic any fun. It's there to fill a niche, not be a mechanic. It's just supposed to be a tool. Most spells, especially strong ones, have you clicking your little icon and then waiting and watching a little animation play, then taking control of your character again and running around the room waiting to recharge your MP. Mages by their nature should take more consideration in their actions than simply pressing "attack," but instead most games require you to simply choose one specific spell, adopt one specific tactic, and cheese the game until you scrape through the encounter. So the point of the whole "quadratic wizard" is that it's a magikarp deal; you're deliberately choosing a more difficult early game in the hopes of the reward being greater payoff at the end. Instead you get half a game and the ability to bypass a couple encounters or mechanics (lockpicking, generally) If you really want to go the "separate but equal" route it's essential to make the classes... Actually equal. I can't tell you how many games I've played that make both mage AND warrior completely worthless due to the rouge's melee skills). If melee is a warrior's bag, don't make thieves better melee fighters, but at the same time don't make backstabbing invalidate melee completely. Don't make your mage a better thief than your thief; invisibility is cool but it negates stealth completely. And if you're gonna have a stealth system and a melee system, you need to have a magic system that's just as interesting and engaging.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:15
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A post longer than a sentence from the great and powerful ForeverSmug? You bet your sweet candy rear end I'm reading it.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:16
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Wormskull posted:A post longer than a sentence from the great and powerful ForeverSmug? You bet your sweet candy rear end I'm reading it. Lol
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Oct 23, 2014 22:19
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Wormskull posted:A post longer than a sentence from the great and powerful ForeverSmug? You bet your sweet candy rear end I'm reading it. friend of the family butt rear end booger penis
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Oct 23, 2014 22:19
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that post might even be longer than three sentences...
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Oct 23, 2014 22:19
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ForeverSmug posted:friend of the family butt rear end booger penis peepis
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Oct 23, 2014 22:20
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'Runers' is a pretty fun indie game that has a cool magic crafting system, and it gets the official pretty cool small game stamp seal of approval
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Oct 23, 2014 22:20
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lesbian baphomet posted:peepis I agree
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Oct 23, 2014 22:22
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ToME has some pretty good mages, Archmages are probably the best class in the game and you have Corruptors who are pretty cool. You can be a skeleton wizard that shoots blood. Or just a Wizard who gets healthier and stronger by being on fire. pretty sure quite a few other roguelikes have true wizards
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Oct 23, 2014 22:38
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A Meat posted:skeleton wizard that shoots blood what the gently caress
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Oct 23, 2014 22:43
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maybe it's other people's blood or his own blood but temporally displaced so he's draining it from his past self and that's how he died
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Oct 23, 2014 22:48
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Mr.Unique-Name posted:WoD mages own and are what all wizards and magic users should be. I want to roll up a Void Engineer and go full space opera but that would mean playing with the kind of people who enjoy tabletop WoD. ForeverSmug posted:que the inevitable "if wizards get powers like that at high levels then warriors should too" slapfight Characters in high-fantasy Wuxia are basically kung-fu muscle wizards and the "spells" they learn from scrolls are better ways to hit people or how to heal themselves faster by focusing their energy. There's no reason not to go full Fist of the North Star with high level martial classes. Bolverkur posted:what the gently caress Blood is produced by bone marrow, so it's not that much of a stretch.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:48
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Unguided posted:Blood is produced by bone marrow, so it's not that much of a stretch. .....ok..... but I'd much rather prefer this: ForeverSmug posted:maybe it's other people's blood
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Oct 23, 2014 22:52
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Unguided posted:Characters in high-fantasy Wuxia are basically kung-fu muscle wizards and the "spells" they learn from scrolls are better ways to hit people or how to heal themselves faster by focusing their energy. There's no reason not to go full Fist of the North Star with high level martial classes. D&D Monks should basically be Breath users from the Phantom Blood JoJo that get Stands when they Prestige
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Oct 23, 2014 23:07
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In Dragon Age 2 someone uses magic to blow up a church.
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Oct 23, 2014 23:14
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Buschmaki posted:In Dragon Age 2 someone uses magic to blow up a church. I'm surprised goons hate it so much then
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Oct 23, 2014 23:22
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magicka and magicka wizard wars and in the future magicka 2
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Oct 23, 2014 23:23
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Bolverkur posted:.....ok..... but I'd much rather prefer this: it kind of is other people's blood, corruptors use vim which is stolen life energy to cast spells, but can also jyst make enemy blood boil and stuff corruptors can also teleport people to the fear dimension but not for a long time
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Oct 24, 2014 00:03
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A Meat posted:it kind of is other people's blood, corruptors use vim which is stolen life energy to cast spells, but can also jyst make enemy blood boil and stuff i seem to remember there being a way to make it last forever, late-game. like by having enough uh... mana regen or something? maybe i only remember being able to do it for a pointlessly long time but not quite forever, its been a while since i played
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Oct 24, 2014 00:13
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Wormskull posted:A post longer than a sentence from the great and powerful ForeverSmug? You bet your sweet candy rear end I'm reading it. Lmfao.
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Oct 24, 2014 00:25
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Wormskull posted:A post longer than a sentence from the great and powerful ForeverSmug? You bet your sweet candy rear end I'm reading it. It was a good one too! A Meat posted:ToME has some pretty good mages, Archmages are probably the best class in the game and you have Corruptors who are pretty cool. You can be a skeleton wizard that shoots blood. Or just a Wizard who gets healthier and stronger by being on fire. ToME is awesome. And I really like its low-consumable system. Instead, your "potions" are infinite use with cool downs, which solves the problem I have of never wanting to use my pots and wands because "I might need them later"
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Oct 24, 2014 00:27
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OkieMurse posted:ToME is awesome. And I really like its low-consumable system. Instead, your "potions" are infinite use with cool downs, which solves the problem I have of never wanting to use my pots and wands because "I might need them later" the dungeons really aren't very interesting once you've played it enough, like almost all of them play exactly the same as each other and are almost entirely straightforward killing stuff. but for character-building RPGs its great, there's a ton of build variety and things you can gently caress around with and that owns a lot. i also like that there's a class which can dual-wield greatweapons by wielding one of them with psychic powers, and the time magic wizard and time magic archer are both really well-realized classes. games usually dont know how to make time-altering mages work in an interesting or balanced or fun way
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Oct 24, 2014 00:33
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OkieMurse posted:It was a good one too! That's a good idea for wands. Guess they work like Powers in some game? Like, non-mp spells with a daily/whatever limit? And dawn of magic has a cool potion system where enemies drop shitload of "potion" pickups which add to one pool of mana or health potion, so instead of being one item you have an overall amount of health or magic you can restore. It's rad. Plus it lets the game have arcadey pickups and that rules
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Oct 24, 2014 01:10
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lesbian baphomet posted:the dungeons really aren't very interesting once you've played it enough, like almost all of them play exactly the same as each other and are almost entirely straightforward killing stuff. but for character-building RPGs its great, there's a ton of build variety and things you can gently caress around with and that owns a lot. Explain this time wizardry
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Oct 24, 2014 01:11
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ForeverSmug posted:Explain this time wizardry spell taht savestates and puts you into a parallel timeline so you can scout ahead without risk, spells to make gofast self and goslow enemies, change cooldowns, remove a creature from the game for a bit, turn into the Big Time Monster and hurt things, shoot a million arrows in the time it takes other ppl to move 1 space
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Oct 24, 2014 01:14
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a shield that instead of being an actual shield it stores up damage received and gives it to you more slowly as damage over time, like taking out a loan to make payments instead of paying cash up front
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Oct 24, 2014 01:19
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lesbian baphomet posted:a shield that instead of being an actual shield it stores up damage received and gives it to you more slowly as damage over time, like taking out a loan to make payments instead of paying cash up front This is really cool and needs to be in more things where Time-Altering Magic is a thing
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Oct 24, 2014 02:02
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I wish there were more games that let you turn boulders into gigantic chunks of meat and then choke on them when you try to eat them
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Oct 24, 2014 02:36
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The Dwarf Fort guy made a game before it that let you magically teleport someone's brain out of their skull or turn your face into stone among other things.
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Oct 24, 2014 02:38
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Jon Irenicus was a pretty bad dude, as far as wizards go
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Oct 24, 2014 02:41
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Benny D posted:Jon Irenicus was a pretty bad dude, as far as wizards go im glad i kill that bastard
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Oct 24, 2014 04:35
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A lot of RPGs give magic users all kind of interesting powers, but since you ultimately need to kill increasingly difficult enemies all your wizard ends up doing is shooting people with varying levels of magic bullets. The Elder Scrolls games are a good example of this. Outside of a pen and paper RPG where the DM can theoretically come up with other things for you to do with your magic, video game wizards are just glorified walking guns. I think they even cop to this in Diablo 3. I like the vibe in The Immortal, where you were wandering around trying to figure things out and avoid being owned by traps. That seems more wizard-y to me.
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Oct 24, 2014 04:47
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lesbian baphomet posted:spell taht savestates and puts you into a parallel timeline so you can scout ahead without risk, spells to make gofast self and goslow enemies, change cooldowns, remove a creature from the game for a bit, turn into the Big Time Monster and hurt things, shoot a million arrows in the time it takes other ppl to move 1 space my favorite is Cease To Exist, which you cast on an enemy to give that enemy vulnerability to all damage you do. then, if you can kill that enemy in the next few turns, the game is immediately rewound to the point that you initially cast Cease To Exist, except the enemy drops dead
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Oct 24, 2014 08:24
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lesbian baphomet posted:the dungeons really aren't very interesting once you've played it enough, like almost all of them play exactly the same as each other and are almost entirely straightforward killing stuff. but for character-building RPGs its great, there's a ton of build variety and things you can gently caress around with and that owns a lot. yeah, most of the dungeons in ToME are pretty boring on lower difficulties, there are some interesting optional ones that most characters will avoid because they can gently caress your poo poo up and can be much harder than normal dungeons. nightmare makes normal dungeons more interesting, but some classes have a much harder time (mostly rogues, since they're really squishy even on normal) the time wizard and time archer are being revamped in one of the next patches to be more fun, which at the moment isn't finished, but the stuff i'll describe is stuff from the current master version of the code which i tested like two weeks ago. they lose some of the time fuckery with save-stating, because as it stands huge spergs can waste time endlessly rerolling enemy drops by peering into the future which breaks the game's balance in half. instead, time mages get great damage mitigation and spacial manipulation stuff(warp bombs, anti teleportation fields, a spinning vortex of destruction, etc.), and time archers just become time cops, who can summon time hounds and other timecops from beyond space and time as support fire while also still doing most of the same things. and your spells don't blow up in your face, they just cause anomalies that do a bunch of cool poo poo. at least cease to exist is still there if you want to erase enemies from existence. that won't be out until a patch or two later, since there's DLC coming out first, which admittedly looks cool as well, with two new classes, a demon warrior type class that can turn into a huge demon and cause enemies to burst into flames when they get hit or something, and a weird hybrid warrior/mage/summoner class that can do some demon magic but also summon demons or imbue their weapons and armor with demon souls or whatever. there also a sun/moon mage in ToME, but it's currently really boring to play so i'm not even mentioning it
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Oct 24, 2014 08:52
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A Meat posted:yeah, most of the dungeons in ToME are pretty boring on lower difficulties, there are some interesting optional ones that most characters will avoid because they can gently caress your poo poo up and can be much harder than normal dungeons. nightmare makes normal dungeons more interesting, but some classes have a much harder time (mostly rogues, since they're really squishy even on normal) Goddamn spergs ruined one of the best features of the class. I say keep it in and let them waste huge amounts of time breaking the game, who gives a poo poo?
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Oct 25, 2014 08:46
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OkieMurse posted:Goddamn spergs ruined one of the best features of the class. I say keep it in and let them waste huge amounts of time breaking the game, who gives a poo poo? There might have been an issue with memory leak due to storing huge amounts of save states or something, but I don't really remember, precognition is now a skill that basically grants you x-ray vision for a pretty long time in a really big radius. It's still in in some form, the skill that splits the timeline into 3 is still there, only you die when you die in an alternate timeline, and you can only use it once per stage, which is super lame. Pretty sure the Revisionist History prodigy is the same so you can do timeline fuckery with that, but wouldn't you rather take the prodigy that turns you into a time elemental?
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Oct 25, 2014 09:26
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i like the concept of the time wizard in tome but i wish i had more patience to actually use its poo poo related: also that it was in a better game
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Oct 25, 2014 16:03
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"guys are pumping shitloads of time into manipulating an obscure mechanic in gamebreaking ways in a single player game. Better patch it out or it's not fair  "This is why mages never get to have fun Doing intense crazy research into the underlying mechanics of reality to manipulate them to your benefit... what is more magelike than that?
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Oct 25, 2014 17:36
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| # ? May 3, 2024 12:51 |
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the tome revamp for time magic makes them in my opinion cooler in the end but it takes away basically all of their current skills and replaces them with new ones. the whole paradox mechanic is actually fun now and not a huge loving pain to micromanage and the bad things that happen if it goes too high are more varied than just your character violently exploding. i wish tome had better dungeons and progression, the base mechanics and the classes are really fun, and even the infinite dungeon stuff is kind of boring and i wish it had more variety. the people in the ingame chat are usually weird losers who try to tell you what the 'right' way to play the game is and how you shouldn't do certain dungeons because they're more of a challenge and what's the 1 true best build for each character class. you can still be some great wizards in tome, basically every flavor of archmage in tome except for plain cryomancer are really good and fun, and cryomancers just have a super tough time getting going.
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Oct 25, 2014 18:02
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