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FORUM: Feature Requests
This topic was started by jdw on 02/01/2013, 16:03:04
Hello,
I'm about 30 hours into Silversword and enjoying it a great deal. Like others on the forum I got really stuck around level 13 because I utterly missed the bandit cave and thus found myself broke and stuck between things I could steamroll for no points and things that could steamroll me (not sure if they were getting points for it-- never asked). But wizard's excellent walkthrough put me on the right track. :)
I do have a couple of quality-of-life feature requests. (By this I selfishly mean the quality of my life rather than, say, Mario's.)
First, rerolling on level up to get the stats you want (and not 1 HP) is a time-honored tradition that dates back to swapping floppy disks on the original C64 Bard's Tale. I read elsewhere on here that non-random level-up mechanisms like points buy just wouldn't be BT-alike, and I completely agree with that. However, casters tend to level quite quickly and often on their way to archmage, and in my last three hour play session I spent over an hour doing the save-level-load shuffle outside the review board. Which is not exactly the meat of the game.
What I would propose to address this is to add a "Reroll" option at level up, where currently the only option is "Continue." This would work just like the "Reroll stats" option does when initially creating characters. This would really help shift the balance of leveling back out into the woods for those of us capable of rolling "Health points are increased by 3 points. Spell points are increased by 6 points. Your Strength has increased by 1." on their Sorcerers hundreds of times in a row. :)
Second, I started out playing on an iPad, but my wife is using that now for school so I am playing almost exclusively on my iPhone. The UI feat to get a game like this playable on an iPhone at all is amazing, and I am duly amazed. (See also the virtual-keyboard based implementation of Bard's Tale I/II/III included with the iPhone version of the remake for just how painful it could be.) What I do find is that the arrangement of touch areas in long thin strips looks fairly authentic compared to the BT series on platforms long ago, but is really problematic when the touch areas are next to each other and barely 2mm wide. I've also found that scrolling a long list can be problematic because sometimes the iPhone just gets it wrong (no fault of the app) and the option it decides was touched while trying to scroll has no confirmation and is not reversible. (Oops, you just healed the wrong guy with the last of your spell points.)
If there were an alternate layout for some commonly-used menus with square-ish buttons in a horizontal layout of say four columns and one or two rows, they would be a lot easier to hit. If those buttons were say twice the height of the current strips, this would probably also cut down on the number of mis-touches that happen while trying to scroll by cutting down the need for scrolling entirely. (Four options would fit where two currently do and eight would fit where four currently do.)
The three places I think this would be most worth doing are:
- selecting a character
- selecting a monster group
- selecting a combat action (Attack, Defend, Use an Item, Cast a Spell, etc.)
It would be great to have this for in-town (store, review board, bank) actions as well, but the ROI on development time would probably be less there.
I admit this would probably have to be an off-by-default option, because there could (possibly) be icons for the Attack/Defend/etc, but character and monster group selection would probably be ugly wrapped text like:
[ 30 Mad Ta ][ 10 Tarasz St ][ 2 Tarasz Ig ]
[ arasz 30' ][ osstrupp 20' ][ niters 50' ]
That wouldn't look the greatest, but I think the usability win would be large on small screens.
These are the two big issues I've noticed. Everything else seems great so far. :)
Thanks for making such a great and nostalgic game! I really enjoy the game and the sense of humor behind a lot of the writing. But I think the real success of Silversword is that it mimics the game we remember not necessarily the PITA that the games of our childhood often actually were. :)
I second the touch interface concerns. However, I don't know his plausible it would be for Mario to change the layout without affecting so many of the good UI elements.
On the "reroll" option for leveling up, I'm against this idea. My feeling is that such a feature defeats the purpose of leveling up with random stat improvements. My view is that if a player doesn't want to spend 30 minutes trying to get the optimal/maximum stats, you move on. That's the trade-off of time: you get a sub-optimal stat improvement.
I second the touch interface concerns. However, I don't know his plausible it would be for Mario to change the layout without affecting so many of the good UI elements.
As I was picturing it, it wouldn't change the layout at all, it would just double up the vertical size of the buttons, allow them to flow horizontally to fill the same amount of space, and involve the ugly word wrapping. Any given collection of buttons would take up the same or less space in the text window as the strips currently do.
I wish I could draw a picture. :( I think it would be worth a thousand words here for sure.
<QUOTE>[quote]On the "reroll" option for leveling up, I'm against this idea. My feeling is that such a feature defeats the purpose of leveling up with random stat improvements.
Rerolling on level up is a practice as old as Bard's Tale I when it involved physically swapping disks. It's part of the game, whether it's good or bad is a matter of individual preference. Making a task commonly and repeatedly performed by a large number of people less physically punishing is not making it trivial to get max stats or removing the random element of the game, nor is it affecting the gameplay at all of anyone who chooses not to do it. It's just a UI improvement of an existing feature, use of which is so prevalent it is part of the walkthrough. (I wish I still had my BT manuals, because I'm pretty sure it was given as a tip in at least one of those as well.)
To give you an idea of how unlucky I am, I have a sorcerer who just broke 100 HP on hitting level 8, and that is with all the rerolling I can stand. After changing classes, this character actually spends more time reloading in front of the review board than he does leveling. Even so, in any combat against casters, I have to evaluate whether I can win it without him because he will die in the first round. That is not much fun. My other two casters aren't quite that bad off (130HP and 150HP) but they're still glass cannons.
I don't pretend that everyone who used a reroll option would do it for that reason, but I don't care what they do, their choice doesn't affect my gameplay.
Another alternative would be to tighten up the curves significantly. For example, if a class gets 1d8 hit points when leveling up, change it to 1d4+4 or 1d3+5. Enough that you can end up with real variation of the course of 35 levels but not so much that you wind up with gimps like that sorcerer. But that's much less accurate representation of Bard's Tale and you might as well just go to point-buy at that point.
<QUOTE>[quote]My view is that if a player doesn't want to spend 30 minutes trying to get the optimal/maximum stats, you move on. That's the trade-off of time: you get a sub-optimal stat improvement.
That's a matter of opinion, which is why it would be nice to support both playstyles. I would argue that if the reroll option is inappropriate here, then it should be removed from character creation as well for the same reason. If you don't like the stats, start the character creation over from scratch. I believe that's how the earliest BT games worked; reroll showed up in later versions of the engine. Heck, back in those days, paper RPGs like AD&D dictated that you would roll three dice six times and those would be your stats and you had to choose your class based on which one(s) your stats qualified for, if any. I believe the 1st ed. AD&D manual allowed as how if the DM was feeling generous, a player might be allowed to pick which stat each roll was for, Yahtzee style, to maximize the chance(!) of getting to play the class that you wanted. That's the tradition of random stats, but I don't know anyone who ever played that way... twice. ;-)
At least in D&D they could smear a patina of RP on top of a low stat. (The "sickly mage" archetype, for example.) You can't RP your way out of a low CN score and bad luck on HP rolls in Silversword. You can only spend the money you were saving for spell levels getting rezzed over and over.
Also, it's not 30 minutes to get optimal stats, it's an hour per two hours of play to get the result above, which is far from optimal. The ratio is actually worse after a caster changes classes because the first few go by so quick and every HP counts.
Perhaps there should be three options choosable when the game is started:
- always max rolls for HP/SP on level up (still have to reroll if you don't like what stat you got? or just picks "best" one?)
- allow rerolls at level up via an in-game option
- no rerolls (but save/reload can still bypass it as presently)
People can then choose the option they want, without their choice affecting others. And we can all get together and look down on the losers who pick "always max." :)
I think I saw elsewhere that Mario was considering a hardcore "legendary" mode. I think for this mode, all of a character's initial and level-up stat rolls should be (invisibly) calculated at creation time so rerolling cannot be done at all, even with save/reload. :twisted:
I haven't experienced what you've gone through. I've never had a situation where my casters had more SP than HP early in the game. What are your casters' CN and IQ stats?
I haven't experienced what you've gone through. I've never had a situation where my casters had more SP than HP early in the game.
I suspect that's because you did a lot of rerolling at the beginning of the game to produce casters with unusually high CN. (That's certainly what the Silversword walkthrough says to do. Wish I had known that at the time. In traditional BT, it was DX and LK after IQ so you could shoot first and resist any shots from survivors; second-row characters' HP was irrelevant.)
<QUOTE>[quote] What are your casters' CN and IQ stats?
For purposes of determining whether reloading should be easier, that doesn't matter. I omitted the specifics of that character's situation because I didn't want to get sidetracked by it. I requested the reload feature because I've been playing BT games off and on for 25 years and the whole time I've done so, reload at level up is what I and everyone I've ever known who played did to deal with getting shafted with cruddy rolls. Changing this changes nothing whatsoever about the gameplay, it merely improves the user experience based on the way many people actually use it.
You understand the problem with your feature request -- and it doesn't matter that many games do this -- don't you? A corollary feature thrown around this forum was for an upper range upon character creation (say 14-18, so that at least rolls would yield decent stats if not perfect). Let me ask you, if the "reroll" feature is in place, why not just offer max stats on level up? The reroll (if it's just a random number generator in a range) wouldn't take more than a second. Wouldn't this mean that after 5-10 seconds or reroll, you're likely to get a max score? If I've misunderstood what you're saying, please clarify.
Also, are you playing on a slow machine (phone, tablet)? I'm curious because the experience you describe is not one I've seen described by many -- that is, 1 hour of rerolling for every 2 hours of gameplay. That's just an outrageous ratio. You may not think these situational factors matter to the pure philosophical idea of a reroll button, but I believe they matter. To give you an example, I usually spend 30 seconds or so to get desirable level-up stats for a character. I usually take 5 minutes for my 6-7 character party upon level up. Even when I was level 2-3, I didn't take more than 10 minutes. The question is why you're taking so much time. Is it unique to you? If not, how widespread is it? If it's not widespread (say greater than 1% of players), I don't think Mario should add this feature.
You understand the problem with your feature request -- and it doesn't matter that many games do this -- don't you? A corollary feature thrown around this forum was for an upper range upon character creation (say 14-18, so that at least rolls would yield decent stats if not perfect). Let me ask you, if the "reroll" feature is in place, why not just offer max stats on level up?
What you're not getting is that there is already a reroll feature in place, one that is widely used by most people who play the game. Including, as you point out, yourself. I am not asking to have a feature added. I am asking to have an existing feature in the current game as it currently exists made less cumbersome to reflect the frequency with which it is actually used.
But, yes, sure, I'll play along.
I already proposed an option for people who want it to automatically get max stats. It's not an option I'd use, but some people probably would.
Why not go past automatically having max stats and have an option like "Charge" that automatically selects actions most likely to win a fight instead of everybody attacking? Clearly the code is already there, because monsters can to advance, attack, or cast spells. Wouldn't be that tough.
Why not go past a button to automatically fight and have a button that creates a high-level party on the last fight with combat actions preselected, so you just press it and win the game?
Why not? Because gameplay. Design decisions are made to reflect what makes good gameplay. IWIN buttons are not good gameplay. But you know what? Neither is spending time on the options page hitting "Load" to reroll gimp stats again. It wasn't good gameplay in 1985 when it involved swapping disks, and it's not now. The process has already been made less awful than it was in '85 -- no disks -- but on the other hand, I don't have the free time I did when I was 11. More can be done.
<QUOTE>[quote] The reroll (if it's just a random number generator in a range) wouldn't take more than a second. Wouldn't this mean that after 5-10 seconds or reroll, you're likely to get a max score?
If you're looking for absolute max stats for, say, a caster, you have a range of 1d8 HP and 1d8 SP and you're looking for 1 out of 5 or 1 out of 4 stats. That's a 1 in 256 or 1 in 320 chance. At one second per try, it'll take a whole lot more than 5 seconds. In fact, at one try per second, it will take 3 minutes, 43 seconds just to have a 50% of getting that. If you're unlucky, like me, it'll take potentially a lot longer. E.g. at one try per second, it takes 12 minutes, 21 seconds to get to a 90% chance of an optimal role. Per character, per level.
That's not realistic at any speed. Soften it up to taking the top two values for SP and HP and the stat you want and you can cut it quite a bit: to a 1 in 80 chance. At one try per second you have a 50% of getting that after only 55 seconds, but it still takes 3 minutes, 3 seconds to have a 90% chance of getting one of those. Per character, per level.
Put four melee through 20 levels and three casters through 53 levels and you have spent 3 hours, 39 minutes, 5 seconds just hitting "reroll" at one second per try, and the end result would be rolls that have a 50% chance of being near the maximum.
So, 5-10 seconds to get a max score you say? Not exactly. To be 90% likely to have max rolls, you'd be spending over two days pressing "reroll" once per second.
(Note: the above is a little off because you eventually cap which stat you care about raising. That happens after 20 melee levels, but before 53 caster levels. So towards the end things speed up, eventually by a factor of 4-5 at the very end.)
But, as I said, this feature already exists. It just doesn't take one second. I just timed myself, and it took 90 seconds to do 10 rerolls as fast as I could. That's about 9 seconds per try, and that's optimistic because you really should add a second or two to parse the results. It takes 14 tries to have a 50% of being at least average with a particular stat, which is what I shoot for, so that's about 2 minute, 6 seconds. For a 50/50 chance of being at least average with the stat you want/need. Per character, per level. An hour spent rerolling is 30 character levels. Which is not that hard to go through in a couple hours of play after casters change class.
Oh and just how my luck rolls, I did this test on a monk with 18 CN (+4). The highest health he gained in any of the 10 tries was 6. So I rolled 1d8 ten times and came up 1 or 2 ten times. :(
<QUOTE>[quote]Also, are you playing on a slow machine (phone, tablet)?
I'm sure many Android owners would claim my iPhone 5 is slow.
<QUOTE>[quote]1 hour of rerolling for every 2 hours of gameplay. That's just an outrageous ratio.
I agree. It will become somewhat less as caster leveling slows down, I'm sure. Plus, like all gamblers, I believe irrationally that my unlucky streak must end at some point.
<QUOTE>[quote]You may not think these situational factors matter to the pure philosophical idea of a reroll button, but I believe they matter.
You're right, I don't think it matters one bit. This is a current, frequently used feature that has an objectively bad user experience for reasons that are purely emotional ("I feel people who use this feature should be punished.") and do not withstand mathematical scrutiny. It is a problem that has a solution to the exact same problem already present in another part of the same app.
<QUOTE>[quote]I usually spend 30 seconds or so to get desirable level-up stats for a character. I usually take 5 minutes for my 6-7 character party upon level up. <QUOTE>[quote] I don't think Mario should add this feature.
I am not saying that it should be added. I'm arguing that it is already present in Silversword (fact), that it has a bad UX (fact), that it is widely if not pervasively used (fact), and that the UX of this existing feature should be improved (opinion). You are entitled to your opinion that the feature should not exist -- even though a few sentences earlier you described your extensive use of it -- but it isn't an argument against improving an existing, widely-used feature's UX.
Just so we're on the same page, I'm not arguing that rerolling shouldn't exist. It does. I'm saying making it easier to the point of building a single reroll button shouldn't. When you run the math, the obscene time scenarios are for max stats. But not for good enough stats. I have a max level up of 18 HP and 14 SP for casters. If I want to obtain 18/14, I would be rerolling for a very long time. But I don't. I did at first and decided spending inordinate time trying to achieve 18/14 wasn't worth it. When I get a 17/12 or 16/13 or 18/11 or 15/13, I move on. My objection to your "reroll" button is not that it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist--certainly not as one button, so let's stop saying it already exists when it doesn't in the form you describe. It's because part of the reroll gambit is that it is time consuming. There's a trade off. You can either spend all your time rerolling for high stats or you can get on with it and play the game.
I'm not telling you how to play the game. That's your prerogative. I love the game and I've replayed it multiple times with multiple characters created. I'm responding to your feature request and offering my opinion based on my experiences. I recommend Mario not to enable "a single reroll button" as a feature.
Jdw,
I think one takeaway for me is that there are people who like this game enough to contribute. I may not agree with you on this reroll button but I think both of us appreciate the game to speak out. If Mario thinks it's a good idea, I'm confident he'll consider it.
Another thought on the reroll button at character creation versus at level-up. At character creation, there are 5 attributes. Getting a "high" cumulative score in those 5 is exceedingly difficult. As one who's spent countless hours trying to get 18 across the board, I know players can spend countless hours rerolling at character creation. The obvious difference with level-ups is that there's only 1 attribute for non-casters: HP. A reroll button to maximize 1 attribute is simplistic in my view. A level 9 warrior may (or may not) achieve max 20 HP. If you get 8 HP, with a reroll button you'd just reroll and reroll until you got something around 15-20. Unless you're exceedingly unlucky, you'll hit on a decent HP # very quickly with a reroll button. Of course there's the attribute, if you're seeking to increase DX specifically. Now you've got a bigger reroll task ahead of you. With casters, it's more involved. With 3 factors (HP, SP, attribute), you could be rerolling (even with a reroll button) for a while.
Mario, I think the Legendary mode could maintain the current system. Per earlier posts, perhaps a higher range of stats (say, to exclude severely low cases) for the core game would be a good compromise. That way, you wouldn't have to introduce a reroll button into the level-up events, but players could be satisfied with less frustration.
2 cents
Now that my mages are all level 13+ archmages, this doesn't bother me as much but I used to routinely spend more time rerolling than grinding XP while I was trying to cap my intelligence and constitution.
So your mages roll a d8 for hp and a d4 for sp. you have a 1 in 32 chance of maxxing those rolls adn a 3 in 32 chance of getting max-1 or better, I am going to assume that you would not accept a roll that is worse than max-1. Thats not too burdensome, after all you will hit a max-1 roll about 10% of the time... BUT
(a) your first several level-ups must be spent towards getting your constiotution to 18 (if its not there already and getting your intelligence to 24. This can take a lot longer to achieve with a max-1 because you end up throwing away more than half your max-1 rolls;
(b) you next series of level-ups anre't very difficult, you just try to get max-1 and avoid intelligence increases beyond 25 (and it you hit 25 dex, avoid dex increases beyond 25. Not horribly difficult but you still end up throwing away a lot of max-1 rolls;
(c) now you hit worst part of levelling up. This is the part where you have to get con increases and a max-1 roll. Constitution is not a primary stat and I don't know how frequently they are supposed to come up but I routinely throw away more than 10 max-1 rolls before I get a max-1 roll with a constitution increase. These are the really difficult levels that test your patience and frankly I took a lot of rolls that were less than max-1 because it was just so time consuming.
(d) once you get past this, you don't care about the stat anymore because your mage is going to get close to maxxing all the stats so you are really only looking for max-1 rolls.
I had previously proposed letting people choose their stat increase, I realize this changes the game dynamic so in the interests of game balance, I think it might be fair to make the ability to choose your stat increase a race bonus. Of course it would soon become the only race anyone played.
Revisiting the feature threads ;-)
Well, with the legendary and the modern mode you should be able to find the game type that you want to play.
I can't change the system in the classic mode because rolling for stats is something that many players (including me) loved - it's a somewhat stupid game of rolling a dice and try to get it to the highest result. Stupid, but magic ;-)
As for the UI: I already changed the iPhone UI, made everything a bit larger - and added the textsize option. These two things should help playing the game. Other changes would be too much work right now.
Kind regards
Mario
