Ultima Return: The Hardcore Lives of Adventurers!
I totally missed the fact that Sergorn Dragon, at the Ultima Return website, posted a second development diary for the project late last month, detailing some of the efforts they have been making at building world simulation systems into Neverwinter Nights 2 that replicate — or at least homage — similar systems from the Ultima games.
The diary entry focuses on three systems in particular: food, resting, and injury. A fair bit of detail is given about each system, so do be sure to read the whole post. Here’s a sample, from the section on resting:
Sleeping in RPGs usually has one single purpose, and it hasn’t really changed over the years – it’s about healing your characters. But it tends to have a downside because it often leads to a point where sleeping become the magical solution to heal all your woes. So you combat, get hurt in the process… and then sleep, leaving you most of the times with a completely healthy party. While there is always the risks of stumbling upon random encounters while sleeping, it is rather minimal compared to the benefits and a lot of gamers will usually save before sleeping anyway, just in case!
So this basically creates what we’d name the “sleep/heal” cheat, which is actually a basic feature in Neverwinter Nights 2 and most of the RPGs that allows sleeping.
This lad us to some careful thinking on how to make theses aspects more realistic and interesting. And of course: harder.
So we decided to implement two factors to sleeping: dangerosity and comfortability.Dangerosity as you would expect determine the chances of an enemy encounter happening while you sleep – which goes from never to almost every time.
Comfortability is where it gets interesting. Because indeed: why should sleeping in a comfy bed have the same effect as sleeping into a dungeon?
It’s not quite a full-on, hard-core sleeping system; your characters won’t catch cold for sleeping outside in a rainstorm. But they won’t sleep very well either, in that case.
Now, if only a certain world designer would get off his lazy ass and finish designing areas for the project’s prologue…
In the Infinity Engine games, just sleeping didn’t heal you much at all. It just refreshed your cleric’s healing spells, allowing you to heal up after resting (it’s true that after Baldur’s Gate 1, the rest command did the casting for you automatically, but it wasn’t guaranteed that you’d fully heal if you slept only 8 hours).
I guess for NWN, Bioware decided that it was easier on the player to just make resting directly heal you. But as with so many other simplifications in videogames, something was lost.
Making resting/healing more complex had the salutary effect of encouraging the player not to abuse the feature. The more meaningful day/night cycle in the Infinity Engine games also contributed to this – you didn’t want to sleep too long and find yourself wandering around the forest at midnight.
Resting may help healing, but is only one part. Properly cleaning the wound as soon as possible, stitching it, wrapping it and applying regular cleaning and herbal antibiotics is probably the fastest way to get your health back realistically. Eating regular and healthy food and not being subjected to high stress levels would probably complement the treatment cycle.
@Infinitron – Yeah this worked rather well in Infinity engine but sleeping has basically been simplified with each subsequent game, and now it was removed altogether.
@Sanctimonia – This actually reminds me of an old adventure/RPG game from the ’90 called Robinson Requiem. It had a strong focus on survival and you basically had to do all this stuff on wounds to heal.
The first person horror game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth had an interesting pseudo-realistic wound/healing system. You had to apply different items to different types of wounds – sutures, bandages, poison antidotes. You’d bleed out if you were severely wounded and didn’t do anything about it. If you were lightly wounded, you’d actually recover to an extent, over time.
I like the way D&D (4th ed.) handles healing and resting. You have a pool of healing surges that you can spend whenever someone heals you with a spell or whatnot. And can spend as many as you want in between encounters during a short rest, sort of like NWN2, but with the limitation of finite surges. Then, when you later take an uninterrupted extended rest, you get all of your surges back.
Hitpoints aren’t just an abstraction of physical wounds and exhaustion, but also the will to continue fighting.
@SERGORN – That’s pretty cool. The way I look at it, realism only sucks when it’s tedious or makes the game mind-numbingly difficult. If the process can be made as streamlined and/or automatic as possible then it adds to the “story” without sacrifice.
For example, having to go through an inventory menu, drag a bandage to your left arm, etc., etc. is tedious. Having a rest option which does this automatically to varying success based on the relevant items already being in your inventory (or a party member’s) would be awesome. You just tell them to rest and someone breaks out the needle, thread and bandages automatically. The guy with nothing useful medically would just break out the ale and lute and cheer everyone up with a song while the dirty, painful work was performed.