Scars, anyone?

[tokage]

Hey guys, I just got an idea influenced by the weapon-carrying-over thingy propsed by Jeff in the inventory thread although it is a really thin relation, I admit.
First two prepositions:
In Lugaru I was impressed by how your injuries show. Having been sliced by a knife or slashed by a wolf you can see the aftermath on your body. For me that added greatly to the depth of the game.

I guess there are a few more games where your character changes over time, but what made a big impact on me was the Prince of Persia Sands of Time triology. Depending on the game progress your clothes get ragged, in the second one you gather a scar on your face, etc. That also added greatly to my playing experience.

So now for Overgrowth the combination of both. In Lugaru your injuries were gone with the next level and in PoP the changes were only through cutscenes and therefore predetermined. How about have the injuries you get carrying over as scars to the rest of the game. Not really impact on gameplay, but just looks.
It could get that far as losing half an ear e.g., but I guess changing the model would be too much to implement for too little gain. If the scars were diverse enough, upon finishing the campaign you would have a pretty unique looking player character to showcase (in multiplayer?) and a story to tell.
So what do you think?

[Zhukov]

The first Fable game* had something like this. It worked alright, although by the end of the game the player was invariably covered with them. Can't say it really added a great deal to the game.

On the other hand, limited mutilation would be very interesting. Losing ears, an eye, a finger or two etc. Show that one cannot fight with edged weapons on a regular basis without suffering long-term effects.

Honestly though, cool as it would be, I doubt it's gonna happen.


*Probably the second one as well, but I never played that.

[Count Roland]

in lugaru you could have a scar on your face lol.

[Zhukov]

In Lugaru you could have a scar on your face.

You could have a wound on your face. There is a difference.
Also, those wounds disappeared between levels.

[Count Roland]

nope look in the textures. there's a texture called scar, you can apply it using the command clothes scar in the console.

[Zhukov]

nope look in the textures. there's a texture called scar, you can apply it using the command clothes scar in the console.

Well, that is interesting. Is it automatically applied when the player receives an injury?

[kehaar]

not quite-- the campaign maker can clothe the "hero" character and others in progessively bloodier clothes and scars as the story goes forward. Not quite the same thing as keeping EXACTLY the scars and spatters you've accumulated, but not bad.

I'd love it if some stuff carried forward, or better yet if that was up to the campaign maker-- so if a week was supposed to have passed, you'd have had a chance to bathe, do some laundry etc., and if it was supposed to be minutes, you'd look all messed up according to the hits you'd taken.

[wormguy]

I think this is a pretty cool idea. It adds a little bit of personalization to the game in a bizarre sort of way.

[Tally]

GUY: So why aren't you playing the game?
ME: I have to make my rabbit-man badass first.
GUY: Wouldn't you do that by kicking that wolf who keeps clawing you's ass?
ME: Yeah, but first you have to look badass.
GUY: Kicking ass looks badass. . .
ME: Not as cool as having a hell of a lot of battle scars.

[Makrond]

The key word here is morph targets.

Well that's two words. Anyway, the point is character/texture deformation is possible without too much work (or so I read). So maybe it'll happen. Extremity loss seems... excessive, and would either need to cause loss of dexterity - which would punish people who don't play well by making their character WORSE... not really a good idea - or be unrealistic - which wouldn't be so bad, but I personally don't want to see my one-fingered rabbit swinging a claymore.

[Wilbefast]

My dog bit off part of my other dog's ear because she's much better at "balley" than he is and he gets jealous. That and my cat's phychotic so's got pretty torn up ears too.

Reckon it'd be cool to have scars on characters if they're easy to implement - especially to simply give each enemy a slighty different look and differentiate veterans from wet-behind-the-ears recruits. Course as always it's a question of work/benefit ratio...

[Xerxes713]

It would be cool to have scars, but only from hits that did more than X damage. Otherwise your character would end up a walking blob of scar tissue.

This also brings up the topic of character customization- eye patches, bandage wrappings, etc.

[Wilbefast]

I was reading a few posts up - some good points: it'd be stupid if players started going out of their way to get stab, just so they'd get cool scars. Mabye you could lose points for getting hit or get more points for defeating a foe with minimal personal injury, to reflect the fact that getting stab sucks (in Lugaru you only gets points for kills, and how much damage you take in the mean time is ignored).
Still think that'd be a good idea to have scars on some enemies, give them some more personality: perhaps you could fight some guy once and think you'd killed him, but he'd come back all scarred and really pissed off

[invertin]

Maybe instead of making scarring look badass, make it look ugly.

Or make story characters comment on the scars.

[Tonjevic]

Or not implement the system in the first place.


I'm very much a subscriber to the Peter Molyneux model of "Don't work on the fucking weather."

Basically, when he and his buddies first founded Lionhead studios, and they were working on Black and White, they decided they wanted to make the in game weather mimic that of the weather outside a given user's house. In the end, they had an aggregator for dozens of weather sites and a bunch of bloat that they'd put hours and hours into developing. Eventually they realised they'd derailed the rest of the the game's development and cost themselves not only the actual development time that they wasted on the weather system, but also the momentum of the project.

So, yeah.

Don't work on the weather.