Gamasutra - New Article Roundup

I found two more articles of interest on Gamasutra today. So lets start with the first one from David Canela about the sounds of Dark Souls.

I recently completed of Dark Souls and its great DLC. My, what a journey it's been! There are a couple of things that Dark Souls does, where I'm not sure if they might have been born out of budget limitations, but they end up creating a wonderful final result. Music is one of them. So let's have a look how the game handles it, as well as the ambiences. If you haven't played it yet: there's only very mild spoilers.

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The second article is from James Cox about RPG character stats.

A major difference between table top games and digital games are that, while we need to do our own math in analog table top games, digital games can keep track of numbers and do our math. This is nice for streamlining experiences.

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More information.

Per the Cox article, I think that hiding the numbers would cause major trauma for some hard-core players. I'm not sure that change would be well received, even if it makes a certain amount of sense.

rjshae said:

Per the Cox article, I think that hiding the numbers would cause major trauma for some hard-core players. I'm not sure that change would be well received, even if it makes a certain amount of sense.

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Hmm, it's an interesting idea, but I agree that it wouldn't go over well with most diehard RPG fans... I could see it working pretty well with a solo action / adventure RPG though. As long as you have some indication when your character is hurt so you know when to heal and some way to know that Sword-A is stronger than Sword-B, I might be interested in a trying a "no numbers" RPG.. If there's no official "level ups" this could be replaced by the "skill books", instructors, etc. that we already see in a lot of RPGs. But because of the lack of numbers most gamers would probably call it an action-adventure game, not an RPG.

And I don't think it would well at all with a party-based / tactical RPG. In those games I feel like the numbers are a crucial part of the strategy... Even if you aren't a min-maxer, you want to at least know the numbers so you know things like "my mage can benefit from these magic boots more than my warrior".

Meh, perhaps the happy medium to just give the player options... If you want to turn off the numbers / even hide health / mana bars, you can, but if you want to see everything you can choose that to... If the computer is calculating the numbers anyway, I don't see why the developer necessarily has to force one choice on you.