Gameplay vs Innovation. Vote please, for yours will change the outcome of the game.

[Your Amish Daddy]

While I'm always one for creative ideas; I've got one for you I personally think is the pits. I got picked up as a primary writer for a game that is probably not gonna net me one thin dime, but provide me one HELL of a good story to publish.

Ok, his idea is an innovative spell casting system for the PC version. He wants the user to actually type out a word to cast the spell, in an active combat setting. While I think this is innovative; I do not think Jane and Jack Richardson are going to enjoy this feature when they're taking on more than 3 or 4 guys that have guns. His idea is you open your book, and type the word for the spell that you want to cast. So for like Fire it's Fira, right out of Final Fantasy. Anyway; after typing it the character stops to cast it. So that's what, eight possible seconds of looking, typing and casting. When those guys with MP5's already ventilated you, right? Well that's his idea. For the 360, he wanted a VOICE RECOGNITION SYSTEM. Yeah, like that'll happen, right? That'd cost millions to achieve, and individual variations in voice would complicate the entire system, along with microphone quality, background noise and other stuff.

Mine is more of a ripoff from WOW/other games that have skill uses. But instead of having a mana pool, I plan on using a timed spell system. Instead of casting the spell, sacrificing the mana cost, and then waiting, I figure no mana cost, and keep the timer. The idea involves casting of the spell, and a count down I call focus time. That time is there to allow the brain to re-focus after casting the spell. You can cast it again immediately, while it's in count down, but you will get randomized values for the spell. Like if we're gonna use fireball, and it's intended damage was 112-200 the first cast, the second one could be 50-60, or even 3-900, and it's range and stability would go down or up, or whatever. Since he wants this game to be on both 360 and PC, I figure this system will work a lot better, since you don't have to fumble with a keyboard, or screw up the pronunciation with the mic, or your cat sneeze and you cast freeze instead of heal.

What do you guys think?

[pigflipper]

You know, I used to type to cast spells...in MUDs. This is the graphical age, no more typing during combat, especially if its real time and not turn based.

[everyguy]

Your idea is definitely better. With the other idea, I guess the players will eventually remember the words for the important spells, but it's still too clunky having to type it during combat. What if you can't touch typeL What if you misspell it, but don't realize it until you hit the enter key and it goes bad? It doesn't add anything to the realism or fun of the game.

[primesuspect]

Dungeon Master had an awesome spellcraft system, made up of phonetic symbols that you would click on to "spell" words. Once you had the word spelled out, you clicked a cast button and if you did it right, it worked.

You could sort of build your own spells because the rune system was divided into something like "element", "effect" and "strength" (it's been over 10 years since I've played this game, so give me some license here)... So earth would have a symbol called "Mon", for example.. If you wanted to build an earthquake spell it would be something like:

Mon Kath Ra

And the symbol for MON was a little triangle, KATH would be a bunch of squiggles or something, etc.

The end result was a simple, quick to learn system that still had an awesome level of immersion - you felt like you had learned a new language. It was quick to cast and yet still provided a real fantasy flair.