Map Puzzles, Oui ou non?

[Asvarduil]

Personally, while I enjoy a good grind as much as anyone, I also enjoy some puzzles that require magic or skills to be used in an intelligent fashion.  However, having only played games like EQ and WoW, I've never seen puzzles successfully implemented, besides a part of Feralas in WoW (which was a platform-jumping affair for a quest objective.)

Since Eclipse is a 2D Engine, I have two questions:

1) In an MMO, is a puzzle even viable?
2) If #1 is yes, what architectures have you found to be effective among your players?

[Mr. Bob Firefarter]

A puzzle that might be inplemented in Eclipse, is buttons pressed in a specific order.

[Guest]

We actually have some puzzles in Ambardia.

Some of our most popular puzzles are our lava mazes. As son as you step into the room and the start spot of these your character has its position saved as a return portal so that if you fail and die you can type /return to start over. Then you have to navigate your way across a certain distance of tiles but only one path will get you across alive. We also have this same style of maze were you have to wear lava boots to even do it as some tiles kill and some tiles require the boots or you die.
Article: [http://www.funtouchgamer.com/ambardiaforum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=34](http://www.funtouchgamer.com/ambardiaforum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=34)

Another neat puzzle we have is a tesseract maze. A tesseract maze is a maze that once begun all the doors lead to rooms in an infinite loop. Such as you enter the tesseract and you see 4 doors. You choose a door and it leads to another room with 4 more doors. The trick is that all the door in 6 diffrent rooms all lead somehow back to one of the other rooms and thus an idiot would continue walking into rooms and never getting out. I have made it so that there are tons of items laying about all over the place sort of clittering all the rooms up. However one of the items is a key and one of the rooms has a door thats not like the others that can be opened with the key thus freeing the player from the tesseract.

We also have a cool quest were your character ends up jailed and the only way out is to find certain items in the cell to make a pick lock, once you pick the cell door you have to move only when the guard is looking away or he throws you back in.

We have a few othe more complicated puzzles and trickery in Ambardia as well. It's a lot of fun trying to think of ways to use the engine in non conventional means to come up with some of this stuff. The tesseract for instance doesnt even require any coding and its a lot of fun.

[Asvarduil]

The Tesseract sounds like a clever idea - and just like the Lost Woods from the Zelda games!  I like Zelda.

:D

One I've got the algorithms for in Ander's Journey is a game of Simon.  There's these sigils I've put in strategic locations; simply repeat the randomly-generated combination and either the sigil will dissolve temporarily, or you get teleported, or things appear…goodies galore.  My Simon implementation sounds like DNA Virus's idea.

Hmmm...keep 'em coming!

[Guest]

Oh a classic one is the endless tunnel trick.

A player enters or continues into a tunnel or dungeon until at some point they realize there not getting anywhere, they just keep going and going and going until they get smart and just go one map back wards to get out of it. This is a death trap to eliminate idiots, lol.

[Guest]

The maze warp puzzle.

We have this Ancient Maze in Ambardia that's a hoot. At least the GM's think it is, lol.

You first have to complete a quest to get the Ancient key, then you enter the maze. Its a big maze (30 maps) and its all stone walls and stone floors with lots of scattered rocks and bones about. There are also a lot of mostly annoying attack on site npc's that keep you distracted. The maze is not complicated in itself however there are about 20 warps about that will teleport you to a diffrent area of the maze. If you continue to hit these warps that are disquised as a certain looking stone and kinda in camo you will almost certainly never get out of the maze by finding its center and drinking a Garden Warp potion. Loads of fun here.

Full Article: [http://www.funtouchgamer.com/ambardiaforum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33](http://www.funtouchgamer.com/ambardiaforum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33)

[Robin]

We had a tesseract maze on an older version of Silverdale. Glad you reminded me about it, I'll have to add it in to the new dungeon we're adding. It always got a lot of attention. People even plotted out a path through it and posted it on the forums.

As a programmer, I do lose a bit of innovation when creating puzzles and things like that. Instead of looking at existing features in a different way, I'd generally just program the feature in from scratch.

[Anna Comnena]

Stwalart's Tale had some simple but effective map puzzles in the dungeons. You can do interesting things with the key and key open tile attributes.

[Asvarduil]

I actually had an idea (now that I'm experimenting with SadScript) that could work out really well.

in Frellynor, my design-phase MMO, I'm not doing the whole level-up system thing; you gain stats purely by tracking gear down, doing quests, tradeskilling, or daily PvP missions.  I also like Push-Block puzzles in games.  In Frellynor I was going to give pushblocks a twist: the higher your "Attack" power, the better ability you have to move blocks color-coded to a ATK threshold (red, for example, would take a very minor level of strength, orange would be a bit more demanding, and so on…)

I am planning for a ghetto-instance dungeon/PvP system (no, no, not the leet, probably elegantly coded one Blizzard uses in WoW, or that Ragnarok Online adopted...), and I think this would be at least an adequate design idea because:

1 - It forces people to _actually think_, and
2 - It forces players to hunt gear, or travel with a buddy.

I'm also planning on throwing those Def-gearers and Tech-gearers a bone too, so that melee fighters and their Atk-stacking don't get too far out of control.

Comments on this "stat-capped" ideal?