06-04-2009, 12:00 PM
Kakarat Wrote:Since this is a living world. Do the mines get deeper?, Do the mines get depleted of resources? If they are depleted, what sort of 'base' does the mine become? or is it abandoned all together and opposing forces can move in to plan future attacks?I would vote "no", that the mines are basically just a fixed location, perhaps a fairly shallow cave, and NPCs just go in there and bang sticks on the ground for a few minutes and then come out with some ore, UO style.
I don't particularly want depleting resources because:
1) "Realistically" it would take an awfully long time for 10 orcs to mine all of the iron out of an iron mine.
2) I want resource locations to be fixed and infinite so that they become focal points for conflict. By contrast, in SWG you might say, "Oh well, we missed out on the rich resources but let's just wait a week and the resource pile will move." I want people to fight over it.
If NPCs could be allowed to modify the game world fairly easily (Dwarf Fortress / Evil Genius / Dungeon Keeper style) then I'd be all for it but that's a level of detail that probably represents lots of development effort for relatively little gain.
On the other hand, we might NEED that level of detail or all of our dwarves are going to be surface dwellers.
Might be doable... if you did it like those other games and NPCs would basically "dig" causing a big cube of rock to vanish after a few hits, that might work.
But then we need another component of AI to revolve around NPCs making clever use of digging...
Maybe that'll be in Version 2. :P