Realistic: don't find piece of armors on animals, for example, but only animal parts.
Then you could craft leather armors with animal parts, but realism here.
Skill based: a butcher should find meat on animals. A pillager could find more gold on corpse, a miner could get some ore from metal veins. An alchemist could identify that this skeleton's skull is just the perfect one for some alchemical powdering, for example.
...More good suggestions SNIPPED...
Exactly. Good suggestions.
To me, The Dragon Knight Saga felt like a creative advance on a game format that was already getting tired and derivative. Many other game makers seemed to be dumbing their output down and just making kids games with endless random loot drops and a conveyor belt of enemies with pretty graphics and sparkly effects to cover up the basic simplicity and repetitiveness of the design. Fair enough, there's obviously a market for it, so why not? But some companies, such as Larian, seemed to be trying to go forwards into new territory.
This game currently feels like a big step backwards. It's an old fashioned RPG with prettier graphics added, a lot more stupid crates every few metres, the same old parade of stereotypes, and some pretty dull dialogue. It feels like something they found in Black Isle's old waste paper basket and added a fresh coat of paint and a few hundred more crates and barrels to.
After reading the Kickstarter hype I was hoping for something fresh and original. What a major disappointment this is!
Improving your equipment and developing your skills is always going to be a big part of these games, but does it have to be so darned cheesey? I'm certainly not asking for hyper-realism but at least I'd like to be able to suspend disbelief long enough to be able have some involvement in the story. Yes, I would like to earn my improved equipment and skills in a way that was at least vaguely realistic, not by collecting a torrent of randomly generated rubbish in containers that clearly would have no reason whatever for being there except to keep giving the player another little present to open every five seconds. It gets so lame very quickly.
I'd like to be able to walk into a town that actually felt a little bit like a community. Here, we have the usual locations - docks, tavern, shops, town hall, etc but not even the pretence that it might actually be able to function as such, or that more than a handful of the NPCs may have some sort of home in the area. It all just looks plonked down to tick the location boxes and provide a backdrop for some more barrels and crates.
Then I'd like to be able to have some conversations that were actually worth reading and get involved in some interesting action that would allow me to get better equipment - either through getting paid and being able to buy items, being offered a specific item as repayment, or perhaps looting equipment from a dead enemy's corpse or camp that might conceivably have been used by them, and so on. I've no problem with finding some equipment randomly but couldn't it be better done? An occasional hidden coin purse, a chest with some old armour in an attic, etc. but not in barrels every few metres.
Ditto for improving skills. Make it more realistic - have the improvement connected to both training and to actual performance. Currently it looks as if Larian are trying to put in something for everybody - the old school rpg fans, the puzzle solvers, the Diablo crowd, the barrel smashers and loot junkies, and all the others. But if they get it wrong they run the real risk of pleasing nobody.
One would certainly hope that the uninspired dialogue and cliche characters would be improved considerably before release date but the basic loot system seems to be entrenched in this game now - and, to be fair to Larian, in many others too - which is a pity. Of course, many players will probably like it, and I wish them all the best. It's probably my own fault for persisting with a genre that now mostly seems to aim at younger players in a mass market. Maybe it's time I finally accepted that it's time to grow up and move on to other entertainments. It was interesting to have the chance to see what a game looked like at the Alpha stage and I don't grudge Larian a single cent of the Aus $46 it cost me. But I certainly hope that they can turn this from something that looks suspiciously like a turkey into something closer to an eagle before release date.
End of rant.
