Thursday, 24th December 2015, 18:30 by Kaelii
The perfect sideline opportunity for my "Totally Original Idea, Do Not Steal" unique proposal!
Solidus, a human assassin found in the Snake Pits sometimes.
He is equipped with three items:
A blowgun with needles of sleeping.
An elec dagger.
A fixedart +1 'hat', "The Box". The Box locks out all of the players auxillary armour slots and their primary body armour slot, and reduces their vision radius to a 5x5 square centered around the player. Nightstalker Demonspawn or the casting of darkness can reduce that further to a 3x3 square. If you use both, the player will not be able to check any changes outside of their own square, while the 3x3 area is still used for monster AI checks with a 50% chance of being skipped. Moving into completely unknown tiles causes noise as you stumble around. Bumping into a completely unknown wall will cause additional noise and reveal the wall tile to the player. Bumping into an enemy in a completely unknown tile will make them aware of you, and they will get an action as they wake up (if applicable). Special case: Felids who pick up the box, equip it to an 'non existant' slot automatically. They fits, so they sits.
Solidus also gets an aux attack that causes minor asphyxiation in melee combat.
Digressing back to the actual material in the thread:
Crawl is a fairly open path in terms of how you develop your character as a player.
However, from a designer standpoint, a Metal Gear stealth style game is a fairly different genre of game from dungeon-kill-adventure; integrating the fun aspects of Metal Gear Stealth doesn't necessarily work with dungeon-kill-adventure games.
Part of the issue is how to determine when/where these aspects come in.
Do we write vaults to have specific patrol paths on enemies?
Is it random floors of Ziggurats we make umbra covered or 'stealth execution' challenges?
Does player choice impact which type of Ziggurats they encounter?
Should stealth still be a random check based on XP invested if we want the player to sit and observe patrol paths or patterns for the player to observe and utilize to their advantage?
I could see a major fork creating a metal-gear stealth style dungeon crawler, but it would require radically different implementation and design direction from the currently existing game. As it currently exists, almost all 'skills' of the character advance primarily by numerics, and the number of opportunities for player to demonstrate intricate understanding of the mechanics related to a particular skill (stealth, long blades, etc) are at a fairly coarse level.
The player does not need to grasp how to manuver the character's body quietly and out of the vision of an enemy to be good at stealth, instead the player decides that they want the character to know that sort of information and utilize it when the player has the character train the stealth skill.
