Archmage Rises - the play-how-you-want mage simulator - now available on Early Access

[Scroo]

Looks very interesting. The no combat XP thing is usually a gigantic turn off for me but in this case maybe it works due to the focus of the game lying elsewhere.

 

[Ashenai]

Finally, and this may elate you, there is no experience points for combat. None. Nor loot.

What do you mean by this? If a dude has a magic amulet and I kill him, can I not take his amulet (and cash)? I don't even really understand the concept of "no loot" in an open-world game.

 

[LordYabo]

To be honest I don't know what's with hate for combat XP. It's just taking fun from players and any incentive to fight whatsoever.

In that case, when exactly do you earn XP in your game ? After successful usage of a skill, event completion, learn-by-use ? If the game was quest-based and it would give XP only for completed quests, that would make some sense. Otherwise it's illogical.

Fights aren't something you go out looking for in Archmage, it is something you choose (wow, i hate that guy!) or something that happens to you (like bounty hunters find you).

That doesn't mean you don't benefit from a fight. If you owe money to someone and you decide to fight them instead of talk or pay them, you do gain something from their death: the debt is absolved. But that is an entirely different (and I would say better) reason to fight than "Sorry guys, i have to fight you to get my next ding".

Now to answer your question I'm going to say something even MORE controversial:
There are no XP or levels in Archmage Rises.

Now before everyone starts pelting me with rotten vegetables, there are very good reasons for this:

• Because there is no such thing as levels or xp in real life. You get better at programming by gaining knowledge and experience, not experience POINTs. In Archmage you improve on skills by: using them, paying for training, spell buffs, equipment (found or crafted), or item usage
• Removing levels removes arbitrary "game-y" limits. Find a super powerful spell or item? Great, you can use it right away. As blizzard says, we want you to feel overpowered.
• Games (tabletop, or video) reward you for taking an action not by rewarding you, but by giving you PROGRESS towards a reward (the level). We instead give you the reward. So instead of feeling happy about finding a chest and getting 1,000 xp towards a level up, you find +5 arcane power which immediately makes you more powerful at all arcane spells. You don't have to wait for the "ding".
• It also meshes so well with all the other systems: now you don't have to choose between leaving the tower and fighting baddies so you can get xp so you can level up so you can have more powerful spells. You can stay in your tower, research books, visit libraries, and get more powerful spells.

I want to be really clear: what you love about rpgs (power progression curves, customize skills/feats/abilities) is still all there. It just isn't hampered by a level/xp system. Doing it this way has opened up more paths of progress.

Further reading on rethinking traditional RPG mechanics can be seen in Zach Wood's interesting thought piece on Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ZackWood/20141121/230678/Quit_the_Grind_New_Ways_to_quotLevelquot.php

I'm not doing what i'm doing because of that piece, i had already started and designed archmage's systems by the time he wrote that, but it did show there is an area of research/innovation in this direction. Archmage will be one of the first to prove it out. Or the greatest failure showing what a mistake it is!

<tightens abdomen>
OK, begin the gut punches.

 

[LordYabo]

there is no experience points for combat. None. Nor loot. What you get for winning combat is to keep living and doing what you want.
Simply by removing the power gain reward from combat immediately takes combat from center stage (most games) and puts it back into concert with the other pieces so the game works more as an "ensemble piece".

That's a big incentive to load every time you stumble upon a random fight.
And will give meta feelings of dread, followed by boredom if you decide to actually fight. No carrot at the end of the fight sounds like a bad idea.

That's what Pillars got criticized for in the beta when there was no combat XP, and even Sawyer had to concede this point and made those creature discovery xp points in the end.

It's a permadeath game: you only have one life to live, so death is super scary. Unlike Pillars where I would just reload and try try again. I found the battles, though interesting, just in the way of what I was trying to do with no particular threat.

I'm trying to make the game as close to real-life-being-there as I can. So in real life a bar fight could be your last, so you think twice before going into it. Unlike typical save/load where you just try everything and keep what works.

Now I am also very aware that the more time you pour into a character the more upset you get over them dying and being gone (thank you X-Com). This is why running away from a battle is a valid life and death decision. Just like it is on the tabletop. Sometimes the GM will drop a red dragon down just to show the players DON'T GO HERE, but if they insist and get a TPK, well, that's on the players. They could have run.

So dropping caltrops, fly, teleportation spells, all these things help the player run if they get in over their head.

We're trying to be innovative here (not for innovation sake), and if some of these new ideas suck and aren't fun, then I'll turn back and implement tried and true systems. But I am going to reach for the stars first, and hopefully give you something fresh and new unlike anything you've ever played before.

 

[LordYabo]

Is that the fucking Arcanum music for the first second of that trailer?

No, it is some random strings sample my audio guy used from his audio software library. Turns out some hip hop guy also sourced the same sample in a song and now it looks like we were starting with another song.

 

[LordYabo]

Really liking what I see so far. It is an extremely solid premise and I loved the greenlight video.

Thanks!

Couple of approaches I'd take, if I was making the game myself.
- (series of) Story events triggered by player actions (from Kichikuou/Sengoku Rance). Basically you have a premade pool of things that can happen in the story, depending on what choices the player makes. I.e. you can choose to pursue a certain end game goal, making some factions stand against you. You can maintain a degree of non-linearity and dynamism (if a character gets killed while their story is actively playing, it simply won't be told) but still have a meaningful events happening and means to introduce new characters and antagonists.

That's basically what we are going for. I have a writer on staff who i haven't really engaged yet. The idea is that he writes pieces of stories that the GM AI can then use to string together interesting stories. Sorta like how Castles 1 & 2 did their event system.

Because it is a generated world, I had to create a story editor that could handle not knowing the time, place, or even characters that would be involved in the story. A quote from Malcom Mugridge really helps give some insight here:

All new news is old news happening to new people

In doing some research on this aspect of the game all quests can be boiled down to either the Big 5 or the Big 3 depending on your persuasion. So armed with this I created a new kind of branching story editing tool called BARD:

What makes BARD cool is that you define your characters of the story up front with as much or as little information as you want. Define sex, age, wealth level, name, even portrait. Or define nothing at all. The game then reads in the story file and "casts the roles", just like the casting director for a film. If there is no one to fit a particular role, the world generator creates them.

So by having a library of 100+ stories there is very little chance of repetition, or even if they do repeat they could look entirely different and may not be recognizable as the same. Unless I told you how it worked. Oops.

The next step, and i'm not committing to this but I do want to allow it, is to allow for user generated stories that reside in a single hosted resource. Then every time someone writes a new story, the pool of potential stories for all players goes up and the game gets better and better. There is a lot of magic that has to happen to make this work, but I haven't yet done anything to STOP it from being possible.

- Deeper wife/advisor/golem etc. interaction in your tower (from Dragon Commander). Since this is a one man show, you'll probably have limited resources to spend in writing. I think leaving most of the deeper interactions to certain characters that you have to choose to pursue is a good way to apply a bit more depth, while still leaving a good degree of replayability. You can still leave the dynamically generated characters in towns as they are, but simply have a select few characters that have their own stories (with c&c to influence the way they end up)

Yes. I have an abstract talk/relationship system that gives MUCH more depth to NPCs, but without having to write hundreds or thousands of lines. As your wife/spouse/advisor is an NPC as much as anyone else they are potential targets for being cast in the roles of stories.

- Ways to do some radical things with magic (that change the map permanently, warp or eliminate certain factions etc.)

Again, yes! Raising a volcano on the map, watching the lava flow and destroy villages over years is totally where this is going. Eliminating factions, joining them, all of that.

I realize that more writing is at odds with your random generation approach, but even a tiny amount of "extra" writing would help to make the characters feel more alive and your actions more meaningful.

Agreed!

 

[LordYabo]

Btw, will it have character creation? or complete will it be?

The game begins at your birth where you select if the midwife sees a boy or a girl.
The rest of character creation follows a series of events with choices. Those choices set up how you start in the world, what spells you know, who your friends are, and who your potential rivals/enemies are.
Based on what I've already written for character creation, there are 144 different ways to start.

Oh, and you can die during character creation.

It's a weird new kind of RPG!

 

[Lhynn]

That sounds pretty awesome to be honest.

Will the player be able to select a portrait? If thats the case will the player be able to put his own portraits into the game?

 

[Cyberarmy]

Oh, and you can die during character creation.

11/10 GOTY

 

[ArchAngel]

Finally, and this may elate you, there is no experience points for combat. None. Nor loot.

What do you mean by this? If a dude has a magic amulet and I kill him, can I not take his amulet (and cash)? I don't even really understand the concept of "no loot" in an open-world game.

I want to know this as well. LordYabo you talk about realism and such, but it is also realistic to loot people you kill. Don't give us no loot, that is stupid.

 

[Space Satan]

LordYabo hey, how are you planning to prevent Baldur's Gate and D&D rolling when people just kept rerolling until they rolled 18-18-something chars. Will positives be always countermeasured by negatives or let RNG rule supreme?

 

[xxxCatholicKillahxxx]

Feature creep makes a good servant but a poor master. As someone already stated try to keep the scale of the game you write about in correlation with the game you are able to develop. Otherwise only Vapors will be Rising. Good luck though if a mage focused game doesn't have powerful enough magic nothing will.

 

[LordYabo]

[
But the current system doesn't seem to be set up like that, maybe have in addition to the 3 rows an additional summoning row that is where your mage standing but the summons can also go forward?
Also maybe have something like familiars that are not that powerful in combat?

Your pet and golems can also fight with you. You don't control them, but they absorb hits and dish out damage.

You are right, I haven't thought much about summons. Mainly because when I am unsure of something, I refer back to Raistlin in the novels and pull from there. He never summoned anything and when he became powerful he was very much alone: him and his magic.

We'll talk about summons and shapeshifting with the team. There area lot of ramifications to those.

Thea: The Awakening also has an interesting skill system and challenges, and its fairly similar to your game, you can get a lot of ideas and feedback from that game.

Thanks, i always enjoy seeing how others have solved similar problems.

Have independent active agents. NPC like you that can do stuff and move around. They can be neutral adventurers, enemy rivals or companions that might be commanded around but like you its essential for them move about, mess with your plans and affect the world.

Yup, that's exactly how it works.

You can have a political simulation game on top of the base game. It can quite literally play like a strategy game only that you are not the commander but a random shmuck that messes things

Yes, my favorite kinds of games are strategy games and rpgs. I'm making a strategy game disguised as an rpg. Don't tell anyone.

Nobles are the special AI units that form the political basis of the world, do the warring, and have their own plots, motivations, etc.

We've mostly got this figured out and represents a significant chunk of the 3 years I've thus spent on the game. The game falls apart if the world doesn't feel unique or real.

Also Chris Crawford has been trying to do procedural stories for decades so he has a treasure trove of ideas, they might be a little complex but I am sure you would find something interesting.

Yes, i'm a huge fan of his since i read his book Chris Crawford on Design. He says that games have been going in the wrong direction for years with trying to be more and more realistic graphically yet more restrictive in gameplay. It was because of him I dared to think I could explore this path.

might as well check out the whole Sorcery! series as well as other CYOA games like Swordbreaker, Academagia as it has that adventure feel you are looking for, might be a bit heavy on the scenario writing if you go that route.

Thanks!

lot of ideas can go into this game and you are pretty much in uncharted territory, I don't think you will ever exhaust what you are able to do with this game. Most successful Indie developers live on their expansion packs.

Agreed. You seem to understand the dilemma and the solution.

In fact in this game you should think in terms of four resources: wealth(money, items, tradable assets), status/reputation/relations , magic and information. And all of them should be a challenge to get.

Agreed! One of the challenges of making and marketing the game is its undone yet i have to make trailers and such to build the fanbase. So what you saw implemented is very V1 and will be improved and fleshed out. Sometimes its hard to know where to go with something until it is at least working and then what needs to be changed becomes more evident.

 

[LordYabo]

Are there any spells that will have a major impact on the world / story?
How powerful is magic in the setting could a mage or a few mages level a mountain if they got together?

Your magic scales from power 10 to power 1,000. So end game you become ridiculously powerful. The kind of power where you summon volcanoes, change the weather system, and flatten towns.

Think Raistlin when he flattens a town in a firestorm in the Legends trilogy. (which this avatar pic is from!)

 

[Lord Azlan]

An excellent OP and reminder what I think Codex does best - supporting the Indy RPG developer.

Noted this one and will Green it when I get the chance.

Turn based combat and some degree of randomness in world developing make it very interesting - wish the developer huge success!

 

[Lord Azlan]

LordYabo

Let me clarify what I mean by "unwikiable":
A game where you can't go to the internet to get the answer of what to do or how to solve the problem.
Every world is randomly generated, so there is no way to know if this noble will betray you or not.
Every quest is randomly generated, so there is no way to see where to go to get the quest item.
Even the history of your world is randomly generated which affects some of the parameters of your game. For instance, the availability and power of spells are different from game to game. In your game world, a historical mage may have written a book with level 30 fireball in it, but not in my gameworld. So even here I've put work into making questions like "what's the best spell to use" irrelevant to ask. It also makes for different experiences on different play throughs as the overal strategy and combos change. (It's more involved than this, but this is a good summary)

BRAVO. About time.

Wish you luck but I suspect players will always find a way to wiki it!

 

[Cyberarmy]

We'll talk about summons and shapeshifting with the team. There area lot of ramifications to those.

I can humbly offer you to borrow some ideas from Elminister: The Making of a Mage. It's kinda horrible as a book but got good spell, summon and shapeshifting duels.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Voted yes, but TBH, this game reeks "feature creeps" and "long time in EA."
Your ideas are pretty interesting though, I hope you could make it, but try to get basic functional game in a realistic time frame first of all. Good luck!

 

[HoboForEternity]

This shaping up to be one crazy amazing game. I flew undee my radar when the thread was posted, now reading the devs reply really makes me intrigued


Will vote in teh greenlight for now

 

[Space Satan]

I like overambitious games. But I also remember that I liked That Which Sleeps.

 

[almondblight]

I like overambitious games. But I also remember that I liked That Which Sleeps.

The problem with That Which Sleeps wasn't really that it was overambitious, but rather that it's programmer didn't know how to program and was a pathological liar.

 

[Space Satan]

I like overambitious games. But I also remember that I liked That Which Sleeps.

The problem with That Which Sleeps wasn't really that it was overambitious, but rather that it's programmer didn't know how to program and was a pathological liar.

I bet they drowned in stretch goals. Should he concentrated on actual game and making it work the whole debacle woldn't be so disastrous

 

[vonAchdorf]

Lots of interesting thoughts by he dev and fellow Codexers in this thread. Procedural storytelling (and world building) interests me so I'm really looking forward to where this is going.
Doesn't DF (I never played it) also have a procedural history / stories system?

 

[udm]

Oh, and you can die during character creation.

It's a weird new kind of RPG!

Hell yeah ever since playing PnP Traveller, I've been waiting for a cRPG that does this.

Real fake edit: well of course there is Megatraveller too. Heh.

 

[almondblight]

I bet they drowned in stretch goals. Should he concentrated on actual game and making it work the whole debacle woldn't be so disastrous

I initially thought that too, but:

- Apparently they claimed during the KS that they had a working version of the game. The programmer claims that he can't send that version to anyone, because...reasons.

- There are hundreds of pages on the forums where he's telling people about all the awesome stuff the alpha testers were finding the AI doing and all of the amazing games they've had with the game so far (you can see some examples in the TWS thread). The alpha testers were all made up, and when the other developer asked to get a version of the game, the programmer pretended that he couldn't figure out any way to send the super-cool alpha tester (couldn't use git, couldn't use Google drives, couldn't mail out a thumb drive).

- The programmer cut off contact and tried to avoid the other developer for months.

- When the other developer finally tracked him down to see the state of the game, he basically saw a UI mockup that didn't even have any turns.

Archmage Rises has actually had people play it, and they don't seem to be habitual liars, so I think they have a pretty good chance.