Once I was satisfied that the first level of my 100-level Morrowind Ancestral Tomb was ready for actual gameplay all that was left was to test it by actually playing through it. I decided that the best way to do so would be to use only the "vanilla" game (GOTY version), so I created a
Redguard warrior dude named Samson and started a game from scratch. With only
Fargoth's Ring, the Iron Sparksword retrieved from the corpse of
Tarhiel and a suit of
Dark Brotherhood armor retrieved from a would-be assassin, I headed straight for the tomb entrance immediately after finishing character generation. To make a potentially long story short, the first few fights inside the tomb were difficult but by no means impossible and once I started accumulating the necessities of dungeon-crawling such as thieve's tools and potions the gameplay seemed to be balanced well enough (you can see the statistics at the bottom of the image posted here). By the time Samson reached the exit of this first level he had gained a character level and was well-equipped and ready for more action. So now I need to get started on level two...
Sorry; I saw this the day it went up, but I've been getting a new companion up and running, and getting several new features that I had ideas for added and revised. I keep getting side-tracked and forgetting to comment.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I like the design of the level from what I can see (though I still think a hundred of these will be a fairly massive undertaking); but it looks like a lot of cell to keep track of when clearing it out. Also seems like the sort of thing where a whole party would be more appropriate -- but that may just be because from the construction kit view it reminds so strongly of the tomb tileset in NWN.
I'd been meaning to ask for awhile but was too scatterbrained to remember: were you a D&D player? I ask, because I keep thinking I remember a module that had/was based around a hundred-level-deep dungeon; but for the life of me I can not remember a name to go with the idea so I'm not sure if I'm imagining it or not.
I have indeed played P&P 3rd ed. D&D; never got exposed to a 100-level dungeon there though. This project is actually inspired by (and if ever publicly released will be labeled as an homage to) a few slightly older but similar GenMod-based dungeons by modders such as Qwert and Blockhead. My levels are indeed intended to be a bit convoluted, but keep in mind that in Morrowind there's a handy little map that fills itself in as the player moves through any interior cell (thus it shouldn't be so bad). I have a few other tricks up my sleeves, but I'm going to save mention of those for later posts...
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