30th November 2004, 9:30 PM
Indeed. Again, a party in an instanced zone would allow these sorts of cooperative puzzle solvings to be very well done, but then what's the point of the Massive part? Thus, the idea of what the majority of people are doing in that area affecting it so that you have to do different things, depending, would be nice.
What I was thinking of with the gates thing was more along the lines of people entering from two different sides of the vast cave, and one person innocently wandering along sees an open gate, but another person suddenly flips a lever, on their side of the gate, and it closes, but another gate opens. They flipped the lever because... I dunno, some 3rd thing happened they needed.
And yes, the cool part of a lot of RPG side quests is the puzzle aspect of them. For example in Final Fantasy 6 it was fun finding a letter with a hidden cryptic comment about the location of a hidden cave of the phoenix, which you only find when solving that riddle, then when you decend into that place you have to go through the whole thing with 3 parties switching back and forth raising and lowering water/lave/spikes or opening/closing doors and such until at the very end you find a boss and some hidden items you need to be clever to find (using classic 2D "you can walk through this suspicious wall" puzzles there). Or you know, you are wandering around the dream world and only by solving some puzzle can you find a way to get out of an endless loop, or various special items used in weird ways, because it's the dream world. That was a fun game... And then there's text ones, like in FFVIII in the best end dungeon I've played in the series (by my opinion) where you have to keep things in mind like the weight of your characters for what turn out to be scales (another multi party thing), and all sorts of paintings in some room, one without a name, and you need to find the best phrase to name that painting by reading all the other paintings in the room, finding out how the names of those relate to the image, and using all the words you picked up, well a couple of them, to name the nameless painting. And then some sort of clock puzzle, gotta have a clock puzzle. Or maybe like in FFX with spacial logic puzzles where you have like a couple different spheres that do different things and you need to find a way to connect all the weird spiritual circuitry by careful placing of the spheres, which are also needed to unlock others, and you can only carry one at a time.
That's just Final Fantasy, I already gave examples of other types of RPG puzzles, like a weird quiz given by an evil sith teacher who will kill whoever looses, but at the same time you want to find just the right balance of right and wrong to keep both you and the other guy alive, that is assuming you can manage to even give him the answers he wants for his questions (not the "right" answers mind you, the ones he WANTS from you :D). Anyway, suffice it to say there are a lot of different kinds of puzzles they should be using in a lot of quests. But, we already said that. I guess I was using this as an excuse to list some of my fave RPG puzzles.
What I was thinking of with the gates thing was more along the lines of people entering from two different sides of the vast cave, and one person innocently wandering along sees an open gate, but another person suddenly flips a lever, on their side of the gate, and it closes, but another gate opens. They flipped the lever because... I dunno, some 3rd thing happened they needed.
And yes, the cool part of a lot of RPG side quests is the puzzle aspect of them. For example in Final Fantasy 6 it was fun finding a letter with a hidden cryptic comment about the location of a hidden cave of the phoenix, which you only find when solving that riddle, then when you decend into that place you have to go through the whole thing with 3 parties switching back and forth raising and lowering water/lave/spikes or opening/closing doors and such until at the very end you find a boss and some hidden items you need to be clever to find (using classic 2D "you can walk through this suspicious wall" puzzles there). Or you know, you are wandering around the dream world and only by solving some puzzle can you find a way to get out of an endless loop, or various special items used in weird ways, because it's the dream world. That was a fun game... And then there's text ones, like in FFVIII in the best end dungeon I've played in the series (by my opinion) where you have to keep things in mind like the weight of your characters for what turn out to be scales (another multi party thing), and all sorts of paintings in some room, one without a name, and you need to find the best phrase to name that painting by reading all the other paintings in the room, finding out how the names of those relate to the image, and using all the words you picked up, well a couple of them, to name the nameless painting. And then some sort of clock puzzle, gotta have a clock puzzle. Or maybe like in FFX with spacial logic puzzles where you have like a couple different spheres that do different things and you need to find a way to connect all the weird spiritual circuitry by careful placing of the spheres, which are also needed to unlock others, and you can only carry one at a time.
That's just Final Fantasy, I already gave examples of other types of RPG puzzles, like a weird quiz given by an evil sith teacher who will kill whoever looses, but at the same time you want to find just the right balance of right and wrong to keep both you and the other guy alive, that is assuming you can manage to even give him the answers he wants for his questions (not the "right" answers mind you, the ones he WANTS from you :D). Anyway, suffice it to say there are a lot of different kinds of puzzles they should be using in a lot of quests. But, we already said that. I guess I was using this as an excuse to list some of my fave RPG puzzles.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)