What is your stance on loot saturation?
bigdogchris
Member Posts: 1,336
In many roleplaying games, both single player and MMO, you are saturated with loot. What I mean is, rather than upgrades being fewer and further between, thus being more substantial, loot is rewarded much more often but at lower upgrade value.
Some people believe more loot, but smaller upgrades, provides a "carat on a stick" for players to keep playing. I think loot saturation takes away from the feeling of a 'reward well deserved' and that saturation eventually leads to the feeling that loot upgrades are meaningless, just another thing you have to do to play the game. I like the feeling that whether at level 1, or max level, my new piece of armor is a big improvement to my character. What is your opinion?
Some people believe more loot, but smaller upgrades, provides a "carat on a stick" for players to keep playing. I think loot saturation takes away from the feeling of a 'reward well deserved' and that saturation eventually leads to the feeling that loot upgrades are meaningless, just another thing you have to do to play the game. I like the feeling that whether at level 1, or max level, my new piece of armor is a big improvement to my character. What is your opinion?
- What is your stance on loot saturation?57 votes
- I prefer being saturated with loot. I like smaller upgrades more often.14.04%
- I don't like being saturated with loot. I prefer larger upgrades, further apart.61.40%
- I don't believe that the rate at which you earn loot devalues it's feeling of reward.24.56%
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FF4, the rate at which I earned new weapons was few and far between and had noticable difference from gear prior. It fit the game.
Diablo 2, I found new stuff all the time. It was part of the appeal. It fit the game.
Long story short: Does it fit the intended style of the game play?
Well, if that's the case i believe that loot maintenance is part of the challenge, but by other side a small party always suffer of few slot inventory items. So my suggestion is? make one bag of each kind in BG (what is already being done by the devs) but make them hard quest items to be obtained.
i started playing witcher 2 and i really wish someone would come and say; "You can skip this and this shit, because you won't need it for your playstyle!".
right now, poor geralt is reduced to crawling around under all the weight of his herbarium, cloths and timber. you never know what will be handy! -.-
*However*, I also don't like there to be 4 weapons in the game, and that's it.
Part of the reason I like Baldur's Gate is the fact that you have a ton of items you find, but also a ton of inventory slots to fill so get upgrades often.
One of Dragon Age 2's shortcomings (let's not dive into the rest and derail the thread) was that you had 1 character with a small amount of equipment items (sword, shield, boots, armour, gloves) and that was it. As such, 99% of stuff you found was automaticly inferior or useless. Baldur's Gate has more slots per person and more people in your party so when you find a platemail +1, there's a fair chance somebody needs it.
Loot pacing is another thing, I'd rather there be five Platemail +1's in the world than 500. I like my loot to be special and magical, not just extra expensive vendor trash. Fewer loot also allows a bigger difference between the items. Dragon Age: Origins suffered from this problem, having 20ish Plate/Massive armour sets, all with near identical stats (and most being a recolour of three different skins).
The Witcher takes a slightly different angle; while you only have a tiny amount of equipment, it's more interesting to look for crafting/alchemy recipes and components, which takes up a sizable portion of the game (and isn't a cheap tack-on gimmick like in most games that feature crafting, I feel).
This leeds to goblins and wolves running around with magical flaming golden greatswords, while NPCs scuffle around in peasant clothing, complaining about how poor they are...
Variety is a good thing.
Baldur's Gate, The Witcher, Dragon Age, etc are listed under 'serious' (though still fun) and thus get greater scrutiny.
Crafting really ruined the gear-finding aspect of Skyrim IMHO, it was so incredibly overpowered, that it rendered every "loot" item useless.
But even if you decided not to use it, it was incredibly easy to get a humongus amount of gold, and the later dungeons had dozens of magic items, most of them being useless or only marginally better than what you have.
Not to mention that your character very quickly reaches a point where your gear doesn't even matter...
Over the years, I've found that when there's too much loot in general, the game gets tedious, whether it's a flurry of tiny little upgrades, or a bunch of random junk you loot from corpses.
A lot of let's plays on youtube get dry when this is the case too, considering players concern themselves with stuffing their backpacks full of random garbage that drops from every single enemy, whether it be ordinary unenchanted weapons, armor, a few worthless gems, or a broken tooth.
I once played on this NWN server where the enemy loot went straight into your backpack upon killing it, which I thought was convenient, since at least I didn't have to go around looting hundreds of corpses. World of Warcraft also implemented a new loot mechanic, where if you loot one corpse, you loot all corpses nearby at the same time, and autoloot enables it to be all collected with a single click.
I don't mind the armor drops from enemies because I see it as vendor trash plus the roleplayer in me thinks that I should have the option to pick off someones armor, weapon, boots, etc from their corpse.
My poll is in regards to items that are put in the game as intended upgrades to players, i.e. hobgoblin leather armor and short sword abundance really isn't (past level 1 or 2 anyway).
Having said that though, I don't believe in depriving players of powerful loot out of some idea of keeping them low-magic forever. Legendary items shouldn't just be something players dream about, but also, given sufficient trials, something they can acquire for themselves.
I much prefer systems like the one in BG, where there are specific weapons and armor, and you might find one or several copies of those items throughout the game; so if you find an extra one, you know right away that you can sell it or leave it where it is.
I also am generally a fan of the Zelda system--you have a basic, intermediate, and advanced set of equipment based on where you are in the game, and (depending on the game) you can switch levels based on the needs of the moment (fire tunic, for example).
One thing I would like to see in Baldur's Gate loot is for there to be an increase in the number of multi-piece items that I can assemble. I mean I know there are several in BG2, such as the Aslyferund Elven Chain +5 (my favorite armor, btw) but I think it would be nice if for advanced skill levels there were some really advanced items that were extremely time consuming and difficult to put together, but that had a really good reward, like a +7 weapon or something that gave -20 armor class. It would have to be really difficult to assemble though or it would just feel overpowered. I remember in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 where it took like 15 artifacts to build the Power of the Dragon Father. It was rewarding to find each one in loot scattered across the map, but it was so epic to be able to actually put that whole thing together and be able to use it against your enemies. Something like that would be nice to seen in Baldur's Gate.
After all, you get a sea of rubbish but with a few glorious galleons, bobbing on't.
Or do you mean something like the runes you can add to weapons in DA:O or the gems put into items in Diablo II ? I really liked that. 'Hey I have a nice weapon and I can make it even nicer'. But I didn't get far in both games (though I intend to finish DA:O some time), so I wouldn't know how it would feel the n-th time you replace your rune or gem with another.
Borderlands = smaller loot upgrades - each new gun is better but by a very small amount, and there are many upgrades
Doom = larger upgrades - each new gun is significantly better, but there are fewer upgrades.
If it's a straight upgrade, then it should be an upgrade. If it's not an upgrade, then it should be a new weapon that is noticeably different.
No what you wanted was the bandit scalp and possibly the arrows for a top up.
As far as I can see there are two game behaviours followed...
The 'I want to carry all the loot, stagger to the nearest store and sell it.' strategy and the
'I just want to pick up the bits I need, I'll leave the rest to rot.' strategum. Both are fine.
I play mostly the latter, as I believe most players. The rewards for, carrying all the kobold shortswords you find in the Nashkel mines, for example are to low. Why bother for a measly 30gp?
I think an overload of expensive loot (note expensive, items you get a lot of money at the store if you sell it! The really valuable items you will use!) however will make me play the first behaviour. This can be a good problem, trying to get that dragon hoard out the cave... But if it happens after every encounter it will get tedious, possibly game breaking if taken to extreme... Thus explaining my vote.
A variety of situations is what I think should be aimed for. Loot overload and Loot scarcity both have a place in BG.
New pieces of (significant) loot that are significantly better with upgrades few and far between is what I like more. But it's also good to have minor loot to sell to merchants.
What I dislike is there being so much good loot, your character gets overpowered. I dislike as well so much loot-for-cash it doesn't matter anymore: you get so much money you can buy everything you'd want and the limit in the stores gets to be 'mwah, I already have better myself' rather than 'I don't have the money for it for the good items in store'. The thing just happened to me on a 4-party playthrough of IWD: I've got 200.000 gp and nothing interesting anymore that can be bought, as I've already got so many good items in my inventory.