{"id":1254,"date":"2019-09-03T07:29:21","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T15:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/blog\/?p=1254"},"modified":"2019-09-03T07:29:21","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T15:29:21","slug":"classic-addict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/2019\/09\/03\/classic-addict\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Addict"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A quick update on the CRPG&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Work on the final dungeons continues, inch by inch. I got maps drawn up and I now need to populate them with monsters, treasure, transactions, and so forth. It&#8217;s slow going because I&#8217;m trying  not to hurry; I don&#8217;t want placeholders for something better to come along later. I got some good ideas for the Volcano Fortress! After that only the Dark Tower remains&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also did several code changes to transactions to allow for linear sequences of mob updates. When you find yourself writing the same command over and over with one variance, that&#8217;s a clear sign you could probably collapse it into a single operation. Now I can just say &#8220;Change mobs 5-17 to a MobMonster&#8221; rather than each one individually. It saves a few bytes in the file and is more efficient to write as a command.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From a more &#8220;generic CRPG engine&#8221; standpoint, I would get better mileage if you could provide a list of mob numbers OR a range, and just store those individually in the architecture. But if I just structure my data in the necessary blocks, I don&#8217;t need to do this. My goal isn&#8217;t to create a CRPG engine, just an engine that drives my specific game. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"http:\/\/test.adamantyr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/WoWScrnShot_083019_144326-1024x576.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1257\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/WoWScrnShot_083019_144326-1024x576.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/WoWScrnShot_083019_144326-300x169.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/WoWScrnShot_083019_144326-768x432.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption>Waiting for single mobs&#8230; because in Vanilla WoW, mobs are lethal<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>But in other news&#8230; <em>World of Warcraft Classic<\/em> came out this week&#8230; And yeah, I&#8217;m playing it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m honestly amazed how much I missed the original game. I&#8217;ll cover the differences in broad points:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Money is scarce. Part of this is because the game just started, so there are no high level players dumping money into the lower-end of the economy yet.<\/li><li>Flights are expensive at low levels, you often find yourself going &#8220;A silver piece? Eh, I&#8217;ll walk.&#8221;<\/li><li>Walking everywhere, and not having mounts until much later, has the effect of making the entire game much slower-paced, both for leveling and for questing.<\/li><li>Flight points are relatively rare, there is typically only one per zone, and in the case of starting zones, none. A zone like Stranglethorn Vale becomes very difficult to quest in because there is literally only one flight point there, at the southern tip. (For Alliance, anyway.)<\/li><li>There is also only one graveyard for each zone. This is a pain in the neck, really; it must have been after the first expansion that they added additional graveyards per zone to speed up corpse-running.<\/li><li>The slower pace has the effect of making you pay closer attention to all the fun details in the game. I love going into the inns and just noticing the furniture and decor rather than racing through.<\/li><li>Mana runs out FAST. At some point in regular WoW, they just decided to disable the entire mana mechanic, and use spell cooldowns only as a control. Bah. I like the dependency. Spellcasters are typically DPS, so the cost of doing more damage is exhaustion of mana.<\/li><li>The point-based talent system is far more customizable. I missed having arcane spells with my fire mage. Granted, you can make a pretty broken or useless character, but isn&#8217;t that part of the fun?<\/li><li>Some spells require reagents, which aren&#8217;t always purchasable. I missed that! Now I remember why it was good to get tips to open portals&#8230;<\/li><li>Quest items are not always &#8220;quest items&#8221;, they are sellable. And EVERYTHING takes up bag space.<\/li><li>Many mobs of regular monsters are placed so that they will all aggro if one is attacked. This makes solo questing more difficult, and encourages party play. I hadn&#8217;t recognized this as a design decision in the old days.<\/li><li>I love the classic zones as they once were&#8230; Westfall, for example. I hated the revision post-<em>Cataclysm<\/em>, with the elemental damage everywhere and the hokey <em>C.S.I. Miami<\/em> references.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I love Classic WoW. It feels like an actual world, not a game. And probably the best part is that I&#8217;m gaming with my brother again. The two of us, with friends, played a lot of WoW back in the day, and it feels good to have that connection again. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I figure at some point we&#8217;ll both get bored or frustrated and quit. We disliked the dungeons a lot, because it required teaming up and we were pretty bad at it to start. (We wiped dozens of times in the Deadmines.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also, the middle zones (level 30-50) aren&#8217;t as fun to play in. They are hard to get to and have far less quests. Some even have broken ones. (Dustwallow Marsh comes to mind, with it&#8217;s abruptly aborted narrative about the burned down inn.) So once I get to 30 I&#8217;ll have to see if it&#8217;s still fun to keep going or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I&#8217;ll be interested in seeing is how popular Classic remains, after the initial surge dies down. Will players say they prefer the old over the new? Will that influence Blizzard&#8217;s design decisions? Will the schism in WoW&#8217;s cultural base create two fan bases both fighting for resources and attention? That would be a far more dire and interesting faction split than the Alliance and Horde ever were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A quick update on the CRPG&#8230; Work on the final dungeons continues, inch by inch. I got maps drawn up and I now need to populate them with monsters, treasure, transactions, and so forth. It&#8217;s slow going because I&#8217;m trying &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/2019\/09\/03\/classic-addict\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,6,7,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crpg","category-design","category-gaming","category-personal","category-screenshots","category-ti-994a"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgaeMJ-ke","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1254"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1260,"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions\/1260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.adamantyr.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}