That said, there are things I'd like to wish for as improvements to the game system...
-An autosave just before very important, potentially game-ending or -altering events. Sometimes these weren't apparent as being important until later.
-An interactive FAQ - the game has a lot of promise as advisors, but I think it would be nice to actually ASK them specific questions, like "Why do I keep failing this heroquest?" or "How can I build up my sheep herds?"
-Different starting locations and neighbours. The game would be very different if you started in the Colymar tribe...or as the ducks! Okay, that one would require a huge rewrite, but you get the idea.
-Making geography more important to the game...maybe it is and I just can't tell. It would have been nice to see locations of ore or bone on the map, say, and know I might lose one in a war or to a new tribe - or grab an extra from a neighbour. For that matter, it would have been really nice to see where the town was on the map, despite the fact that I never had it for very long.
-More situations/encounters...you could probably re-use art for different scenes without fans complaining, if the encounter were substantially different. Several of the pictures are vague enough to cover several themes.
-Even better would be a program that would allow fans to write their own situations - I've seen some of the programming used to create a scene somewhere (some web page) and it looked understandable...let fans do the work for you!
-Several major storylines, or rather, endings possible, with build-up. Knowing the game would end with the Feathered Horse Queen (or in my case, the...what was it...Brilliant Horse King? Can't recall) did make the climax less exciting. Knowing there could be, say, three possible ways the story would bend, but not knowing which until certain portents came to pass, would make even the early years more exciting.
-More interaction on the Tribal council...the politics of the tribe was probably the most fun for me, and it would have been nice to see more specifics and more troubles. Who had more seats? Who was stirring up trouble? For that matter, every time someone asked me to make a decision on a case in the tribe, I ended up with my nobles advising me about who would be better to kiss up to...nobody ever said 'I think X is lying' or 'Y is obviously in the right!'. Did I just have machiavellian nobles, or doesn't the game care if I'm fair?
-An explanation at the end of the game would have been SO appreciated. The end of the game was ever-so-slightly anticlimatic. It would have been SO much fun to actually be able to go back through the text and read all the explanations...as one example, what the HECK was the dragon-humanoid-thing doing asking about which virtue we liked best? I chose Justice and nothing ever came of it - obviously, at least. What other decisions did I make that had subtle effects? There were a lot of decisions I made where the end result wasn't always clear. It would be nice to have all those kept in a separate file and only released as text once the game ends.
Okay, I'm a dreamer (and complainer)! I really loved the game, and I'll be playing it again (and again...). I did see some flaws, but overall I think it was an exciting new release.
> So many things could happen that I wouldn't want to take anyone's
> orders until we're sure we're going to ship. (Of course, if any of
> you have won the lottery or made a killing in the stock market before
> the dot-com crash, we'd be happy to be your clients if you want to be
> a patron of the arts :-)
Out of curiousity, and feel free to delete this if you feel it's getting too personal, how much does it cost to produce a market-quality game like KoDP these days? Not that I could afford it in my wildest dreams, but it'd be nice to think about things I could do when I won $10 million.
> Heroquests definitely test your hero, and there are many chances for
> failure. There are certainly things you can do to increase your odds.
> But think of it like soccer. What could be simpler? Just kick the
> ball past the goalie and into the net. The net's a lot bigger than
> the goalie, after all. How come it only actually happens a couple
> times in a game?
Here's another possibility - it might be interesting if different character types (based on attributes or perhaps god worshipped, something manageable) had a single different action they could attempt in given situations - similar to the way combat has been done, I'd guess. But in a heroquest, perhaps a worshipper of Eurmal could do something silly and get past a tight spot in a HQ - or bollox it up and be booted out.
Dave
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