For the longest time, Joasia had a recharging point in front of her house for electric cars and scooters. I hardly ever saw anyone using it, until last night, when I saw someone had connected their Tesla Roadster. I think the world is going to be just fine. :)
One of the most difficult challenges with an online game – any online game, browser or otherwise – and to an extent normal games as well, is how to keep the economy under control. When you play monopoly, the amount of money in play is always the same, it just changes hands. When you play a computer game like World of Warcraft or Shadowrun: Corrosion, where you can create money out of nothing by doing missions or quests, it becomes important that the amount of money earned (created) is balanced out by the amount of costs incurred (destroyed.) In Shadowrun: Corrosion, we’re looking at ammunition to help solve that problem.
Ammunition comes in different forms; actual ammunition for weapons like pistols, rifles and bows are the most common types of ammunition. You can buy this ammunition and it depletes whenever you fire your weapon. Not every character will have use of that type of ammunition as shamans and mages can use spells instead, and there’s always the option to duke it out with your fists or with a katana! In essence, these will have an edge over those using ranged weapons, but they’ll most likely suffer more damage as a result of drain and as a result of closing the distance to their opponents, essentially making hospital trips and slap patches more their kind of ammunition. In the end, nuyen is destroyed and the economy remains more balanced.
Balancing the costs and earnings of a character is probably something that’s going to take a lot of effort. Interestingly enough, a game I used to play, The Dead Awaken, a really simple but very addictive and popular browser game where you try to survive in the midst of a zombie plague, had terrible balancing. Inflation was insane, prices sky rocketed, but luckily it didn’t diminish the popularity of the game. Unfortunately, in the case of Shadowrun: Corrosion, I think it’s going to be a lot more important to keep things balanced. Essentially, training is probably going to be the biggest nuyen sink, followed by ammunition in the long run, and then perhaps gear.
Because there’s not that much gear out there that scales with a character’s progression, with the possible exception of Cyberware (regular, alpha-, beta- and deltaware) and spells (force 1, 2, 3, etc.), we were thinking of keeping certain gear bound by reputation constraints. That way it takes a while before you can get your hands on an AK-98 with all the trimmings, putting the emphasis more on weapon modifications. Another thought was to incorporate special weapons. Like Ah Mae Sing’s Colt L36, a special issue L36 with some bonuses, much like they do in Fallout 3.
Getting back to ammunition; the idea is now to make certain ammunition purchasable (regular rounds, gel rounds, etc.) and make certain ammunition purchasable from special vendors or perhaps only something as a reward for performing particular missions. EX Explosive Rounds, adding an extra 2 points of power to a weapon must be something worth putting a little effort in. Running out of ammo in the middle of a mission is going to cost dearly when ghouls tear you apart as your weapon repeatedly goes “click click”. It’s going to be even better when you get ambushed in a PvP fight and they didn’t realise you were packing EX rounds in your Ares Predator and had the Woo Clip modification doubling your ammunition capacity. I see potential. :)
“The Japanese say it’s because America has become a land without substance. We let our manufacturing go. We don’t make things anymore. When you manufacture products, you add value to raw materials, and you literally create wealth. But America has stopped doing that. Americans make money now by paper manipulation, which the Japanese say is bound to catch up to us because paper profits don’t reflect real wealth. They think our fascination with Wall Street and junk bonds is crazy.”
What strikes me is that this was written in 1992-1993, and even then it was evident to all those with rudimentary knowledge of macro economics that it was an unworkable situation that would one day come crashing down on us. Fifteen years later, in 2008, several large banks and investment firms are in trouble and are all saying ich habe es nicht gewusst.
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again; Deus Ex: Human Revolution looks absolutely fantastic and it may very well trump Deus Ex. The potential immersion is phenomenal and I really can’t wait to play it. I’ve been clinging to the Eidos twitter feed like a crack addict waiting for more footage and yesterday they released this. :)
One of the nicest things about having a project of the magnitude that Shadowrun: Corrosion has is that, if done right, ideas spawn and ignite new ideas. We always held the idea that Player vs Player (PvP) combat should be a large part of the game, not only in order to keep the game competitive, but also because we needed a reason to play Corrosion in a browser and being exposed to other players. If there was no PvP element, the game would be a single-player game with chat options, and that wasn’t good enough. The idea of PvP spawned the idea of organised PvP, which is what our end-game is going to be about. (That and resource management.) So we started on PvP, single combat first in order to set the stage for the multi-player combat and in order to give players something more to do to make money, to earn karma and to tweak their character.
We’ve got a rough outline for ranged PvP combat finished and it’s looking good and fast, which is good since the path-finding algorithms we’re using in missions leave a lot to be desired, unfortunately. Having use for pathfinding, it’s fast. Immediately, we came up with another idea; ambushing. Ambushing (or surprise) is already a part of the SR3 game system, where, before the combat starts, the ambusher and ambushee both roll a reaction roll, ambusher against target number (TN) 2 and the ambushee against TN 4, to determine if the ambushee could respond. If not, then the ambusher got a free combat pass to do his worst, which, when you’ve got enhanced reflexes, can be lethal.
Of course, this lethality of ambushing lead us to another idea; how about we drop the TN for the surprise rolls by one for a middle lifestyle, and two for a high lifestyles, and drop the ambush all together for a luxury lifestyle? That way, there are more reasons to aim for a higher lifestyle, which in turn demands a higher daily upkeep price, which in turn keeps the economy stable and flowing.
Right now, if you’re victorious, you get 1 karma if your opponent had a higher reputation than you, another karma if your opponent had a higher rank than you, your rank increases, and you get between 5-10% of the opponent’s nuyen. If you weren’t victorious, you get one karma if either the opponent’s reputation or rank was higher, but you lose 5-10% of your nuyen to your opponent. Also, your rank will most likely go down. This concept of earning karma and making nuyen through PvP introduces some new ideas; you could self sustain on PvP, never having to do one mission if you don’t want to. This means mission rewards need to be competitive in order to keep a steady influx of nuyen into the economy, otherwise players would constantly fight each other and the same nuyen would exchange hands over and over. Nuyen still needs to be spent on increasing skills, attributes and gear, so the need for missions will remain, but to keep the economy healthy we’ll need to keep an eye on things.
What if you want to safeguard your money? Couldn’t you put it in an offshore bank account instead of walking around with it in certified credsticks waiting for some other player to come along and rob you? Wouldn’t that be a great addition to customisable lifestyles? You start out with a small bank account where you can keep money stored for a lower level lifestyle and increase the size as the quality of your lifestyle increases? Perhaps you can buy expansions to a lifestyle, increasing your bank account, increasing your security or something to that effect.
Ideas aplenty, and more and more popping up as we go along. It’s a great feeling, creating something and being infused with ideas. It sure beats sitting around being lead along by someone else’s idea and never having any of your own. I like it!