Dragonshard Peek #1
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 935
For me, the real magic happened when we had two diametrically opposed features and we had to figure out how to make it work. It was in those times that the designers really rose to the challenge of capturing the feel of D&D without losing the edge of RTS.
A great example was experience and leveling up. In D&D, characters acquire experience based on individual actions, each acquiring at their own rate. This system has been attempted in RTSs, and has failed miserably every time. By this, I mean that it failed to capture the essence of the leveling experience. You see, in a fast-paced war game, your soldiers are dying all the time, and you manage them in groups rather than individually. The result is that, unless you're an expert player, you can never really control which units stay alive and which die. This leads to what I call the "desensitization of a game system". After trying futilely to keep your more experienced units alive, you realize there's no point and you stop trying and start ignoring that system. The end result is that an entire game system gets thrown out of the game experience.
