Din's Curse - Earthquakes

Steven Peeler's latest blog entry describes the addition of earthquakes to Din's Curse:

So yesterday I added in an earthquake event. It's a pretty simple thing, every once in a while there will be an earthquake that shakes things up and will damage things nearby. However because there are so many systems that work together it has a bigger impact than you'd expect.
Everything in the area getting damaged a little bit will probably be minor to the player, except when they are foolishly running around with low health. It will usually flatten fragile things like barrels and crates. Really unstable things are going to cause problems, like exploding barrels and energy vortexes will go boom. Of course this can set off a chain reaction of other unstable things.

More information.

This sounds like a very cool game mechanic. Can't wait to see how it's implemented. Should be fun.

it does sound cool (better than soil erosion, for example) but how do you implement such a mechanic and make it both realistic and not gamebreaking?

I hope it also does positive things, like reveal secret areas, pop open locked doors, etc.

If there's one statement I can make unequivocally, across genre lines and spanning game mechanics, it's that I HATE to have my screen shaken around. HATE HATE HATE!

But it sounds interesting. I do love that living gameworld stuff.

The earthquakes can reveal secrets and break things like locked doors and chests.

Yeesh: There is an option to turn off the screen shaking stuff.

This sounds really cool. Is there any warning, so you can get to a safe place, or do they happen rather suddenly? I'd at least like the chance to run away from the exploding barrels, if there is a quake, and not just get blow to smitherines. That would kind of suck.

Right now you don't get any real warning, but that's a good idea.

Sweet. Maybe 1 or 2 small tremors first, so you know to run like hell for safty. This really does sound very cool. OMG could this be that incredibly elusive thing they call innovation. I think it is.