Hello, everyone.
One of the most mysterious items in <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> is the so-called "Experience Bomb". It is very rare, so rare that I sometimes doubt it even exists.
Well, here I compile some of the Information once given by Lar I recently found.
You can make up you mind about that in the "go figure" style, but all I can do is give you this information which was once posted in a thread written between 22-08-2000 23:19 and 24-08-2000 12:13 .
Remember that visual effect you saw on a skeleton (burning glowing skeleton which was being sucked into the ground). We actually have several of those things, and originally the idea was to use them for special deaths. However, just this evening, we thought of this thing called the experience bomb, and as it makes a lot of sense gameplay wise, we started to use these animations for what is now officially called the experience bomb. Here's how we defined it in the design doc :
"Dealt randomly throughout the game, killing certain monsters can yield what is called an experience bomb. A special visual effect is played , and the player is rewarded with 10 times the experience points of the monster he killed..."
Lar
Hmmm, I knew I had to elaborate on it Actually, I was just checking if you were all still alive
The experience bomb is being explained as the result of learning something particulary useful in a fight, e.g. a new trick which you hadn't thought of before. It works well gameplay wise because it is rare, and when you get it, you are a happy trooper. Because of critical hits, the idea was not to give such a bomb a huge damage blow (which you get because of the critical hits).The monsters to which it is attached are the common ones (meaning monsters you've been fighting already for some time), so not the rare ones. Why ? Because the reasoning goes, when fighting such monsters, you tend to get used to them, and you get a chance to try out new things and once in a while, this leads you to a new insight. (so, no, you don't get it for monsters which deal out huge amounts of exp.)
As for dealing it out randomly, it is not as random as you would think - you first have to make your enemy a common one (meaning, you must have dealt with them enough in order to be eligible for an experience bomb).
As for Tutamun's cheat idea. The same goes for critical hits in a way. In general, load/save is cheating and as a developer you cannot balance against that.
Lar
Alrik Fassbauer.
