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Player Controlled Monsters
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A Collection of Ideas
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[ Goals | Common Ideas |
Unique Ideas | Contributors and Links ]
Goals
The contributors to this page believe that having player-controlled monsters
in Ultima Online would be a very beneficial addition, for a variety of
reasons.
First, it would allow players who are mostly interested in the
fighting aspects of the game to play a character that is limited almost entirely to a combat role.
Second, it would allow those who wish to do so to role-play a new and different character, opening up an entirely new game within the game and potentially making game play more interesting for
everyone.
Third, the existing monsters in the game will never have sufficent complexity to present a real challenge to players. Monsters can be made tougher and tougher, but as long as there are enough humans with enough effective tactics, the humans will always win. Adding monsters that might actually win over the longer term would add a lot to the game.
Common Ideas
Although we have a wide variety of ideas, there are some common themes in almost all of the PC monster proposals. Please read the proposals themselves to get a feeling for the details of these suggestions; the contributors have put a lot of thought into them and they each have their own flavor (go to Contributors and Links).
Some of the most basic:
- Although PC monsters will be designed to encourage combat, it is important to dissuade people from using them to easily and rapidly kill excessive numbers of normal players without some time and effort put in by the person playing the monster.
- It is important the PC monsters not be abusable by players working with each other to have both the player and the monster benefit in terms of advancement, loot, etc. They should encourage combat with all humans, not cooperation. This implies a few other things:
- Monsters should have very limited control over what they loot.
- Monsters should not be able to trade, or drop items as a means of trading.
- Monsters should not have control over where they operate (i.e., where they "spawn" or where they can wander).
- Many features of normal (human) UO characters need not apply. For example, the skills/stats advancement concepts should be replaced by a simple "experience points"-based system. Some of the common features of such a system:
- Experience is gained for killing challenging human opponents.
- Some experience is gained for engaging in combat with human opponents.
- There should be massive loss of experience for dying, in order to make it difficult to maintain a powerful monster character and to discourage suicidal gameplay.
- At some level, monsters should be able to communicate; at the very least, certain types of monsters should be able to talk to other monsters of the same type.
- Although in a carefully-designed system this should not be necessary (because it would occur naturally), it will probably be necessary to enforce some kind of cap on the number of high-level monsters alive at any given time.
- One potential advantage of PC monsters would be that it might allow a player to play UO with less of a time commitment than for a normal, complex, human PC. This simplicity should be a feature of any PC monster system.
Unique Ideas
Contributors and Links
Many of the ideas presented here have been collected over the months from sites such as the CoB Dev Board, and all of the contributors wish to thank everyone who has discussed these
ideas there. That said, the main contributors so far are:
We are looking for more ideas; please send them to us and get your name on this list too!
This site is still in the early stages. Last modified 2 April 1998.
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