It's your favourite, fantasy MMO land. Strolling through the near photo-realistic forest you come across a skeletal knight in full plate armour wielding a spiteful broadsword, his tattered tabard bearing the emblem of a cruel and long-dead Order.
Fortunately you are a sorcerer of terrific power, and you casually unleash All Hell's Fury with the merest twitch of an eye and turn its bones to dust.
You run over, loot the corpse and find: 16 gold pieces and an enchanted hat shaped like a chicken's head.
What should you have got? Well the 16 gold is incongruous as I find it hard to believe that a skeletal knight requires any loose change. The chicken-head-hat is just plain silly, not because its a chicken-head-hat, but because the skeletal knight wasn't wearing it, nor does it have any bags to keep such an item. And again, why would the skeletal knight be carrying it?
What should have dropped is: an ancient suit of plate armour, a tattered tabard bearing the emblem of a long-dead Order and a spiteful broadsword, also likely very old. You can see where I'm going with this. What they have is what they drop.
One thing that really frustrates me about MMOs in there insistence of creating incongruous loot tables for virtually all of the mobs. Its high time this was rectified. I want to see mobs dropping what they are visibly carrying, plus a chance to drop a few other things congruous to their background, condition, blah, whatever.
It really is that simple.
What they have is what they drop.
Thursday, 6 January 2011
You kill the poison turtle and it drops a magic battleaxe...
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what you see is what they drop is ideal with all the trimmings you suggest - what about factoring in whatever damage said items took in the termination of their (now previous) owner...
ReplyDeletei always liked the idea of terrible weapon damage causing terrible damage/destruction of any potential loot. in fallout 3 you do indeed get what you can see on the aggressor. however, there are various weapon types such as laser and plasma weapons and criticals achieved with said weapons result in little piles of ash or goo respectively. now clicking on that tiny forlorn pile of once-creature still yields all their items and carried equipment, plus whatever they had in there pocketses... but there are no pocketses, or indeed any limbs left that could be defrocked... good for the pack-rat, bad for the realism.
and now would be a good time to consider that there is a handheld mini-nuke launcher too... radiation tainted gear anyone...? XD
i forgot to add the point that i was leading up to (the thought of equipment that glowed in the dark and made your hair fall out distracted me...
ReplyDeleteso, with the previous point about damage in mind, the player might decide to use less destructive offensive mediums so as to maximize the chance that loot is still viable... hmmm...? :)
thinking about it some more, lotro opponents do seem to drop relatively congruous items, wolves drop skins and matted hair, skellies drop finger bones and relics. there is still a tendency for the odd bit of armour and random weap to become available - but not often and being so means a certain amount of (perhaps it wasnt his to use/had something else equipped/etc) ad hoc rationalization less annoying. sentient creatures tend to drop things sentient creatures might have (recipes/crafting ingredients/etc). though you do still get random-dependent-upon-level coin loot, i dont think it is necessarily unlikely that undead might have some legacy money about their tabards. ofcourse, a skelly that is just bones should drop nothing but bones - and maybe the last rotting eyeball... :) speaking of which, arent skellies just zommers that have been around long enough to have no flesh left...? in which case if you follow the older-the-undead-the-harder policy, they should be more powerful than zommers (extra magical enhancement aside). like they are seasoned with age - conversely, you could argue that they become bore brittle with age and are therefore weaker... this is certainly a topic that begs further geeky discussion!
ReplyDeleteI too like the idea of loot being potentially damaged by an attack. Anything that makes the players more thoughtful about how and when they attack is good by me. I hate games when they just become button mashers.
ReplyDelete