So, in the spirit of that old grandaddy of all good RPGs - D&D - I thought I’d start this thread to get some discussion going on what folks feel about the probability of beastie encounters in the unterzee…is it too low? too high? or safely in the goldilocks zone…?
Right now, I think it’s rather too low. Hopefully though that’s going to get fixed with the next major patching
Ideally, you shouldn’t have more than two types of enemies at the same time on the screen unless they’re somehow related to each other. Also, periods of emptiness should be as frequent as periods of sightings.
Currently, the spawns are broken, so I can’t really say anything.
-GM with thousands hours of D&D behind him. And game designer and stuff. Uh, I’m boring.
It all depends, sometimes, a large number of encounter, then nothing.
[quote=Xaphedo]Ideally, you shouldn’t have more than two types of enemies at the same time on the screen unless they’re somehow related to each other. Also, periods of emptiness should be as frequent as periods of sightings.
Currently, the spawns are broken, so I can’t really say anything.
-GM with thousands hours of D&D behind him. And game designer and stuff. Uh, I’m boring.[/quote]
[li]
Can you say a bit more about the mechanics of the spawns? At present, I can go a complete circuit of ‘the known world’ with about 6/7 calls to port without seeing anything but my own grizzled reflection… While the loneliness and solitude that this engenders ties in well with the game’s overall aesthetic, I’d really like a bit more bang-bang-boom, please!
I played through a few games without seeing a single monster. Then in one game I saw four of them right next to london, and then a ship (which murdered my face) right by venderbight. Since then I’ve seen a very few monsters in following games.[li]
Pathfinding on some of the mobs seems to be a bit wonky too. I was docked at Mutton Island last night and watched one of the crab things (forgot what they’re called) continually bumping into the island while apparently trying to get to me. (Should I screenshot and bug that? Seems a bit vague.)
At the moment spawns are just straight up broken. Based on some experiments I’ve done, I suspect that there’s some sort of spawn flags that only get reset on program launch, not on New Game like they should. This is why you often see crabs and things right away and then never again. It even seems that if you have a saved game with no monsters and load it up after restarting the program, all the monsters will spawn in then. Regardless, it’s probably too soon to tell much about the encounter frequency.