Loot

A big bugbear of mine in games is mobs that don't drop what they have on them.  Let me explain.  I was reminded of this recently in The Division.  I kill a bad guy who was clearly shooting me with a firearm of some kind, and he drops, gloves, or a backpack, or a scarf, or nothing at all.  Or a completely different gun.

In Pitfallen / Underland / or 'Doings in the Dark' as Alastair Cornish (he's the Creative Director of Splash Damage by the way, and I spent a highly entertaining Saturday a few weeks back, tabletop roleplaying with him.  He gives good dice.)  In this game we're going to do things differently.

WYSIWYG loot.  What you see is what you get.  (+ a few extras if applicable, because obviously you can't tell what's in a guy's pouch until you open it up!) WYSIWYG+ I might call it - conceptually at least.

I wrote about this in a blog I used to tend about as frequently as my garden. For completeness I'll include the link - (You kill the poison turtle and it drops a magic battleaxe) - the blog in general contains some meandering, unedited insights into what I like and don't like about games, with a slight leaning towards tabletop RPG, but there's quite a lot of videogame content too. If you do click-through, don't come blabbing to me about poor sentence construction and typos, I did warn you about the lack of edit - but you might, and I hope you do, find something of interest there....

Anyway, in brief, it goes on about mobs dropping what you expect them to.  You kill a guy with a sword, you can loot his sword... and his breastplate, and his boots and everything else you can see on his person.  Depending on how he died, it might be a bloodstained shirt. You get the idea.

In the game this will be handled by loot tables specific to each creature (maybe shared amongst creatures for the sake of efficiency, and we may employ additional tables for the contents of their pouches).  That's a lot of tables you might think.  But it's important to get this stuff right, I'd counter, and anyway, if we're smart about the way we pre-load stuff, then I can't imagine it slowing the game down any.

The game will have to generate environment beyond that which you see on the screen anyway, so there's no loading time, but we probably won't bundle in the loot at the point.  I like the idea of looting a corpse taking some time, rather than the stuff spraying out in a cloud or arcade bonus.  So the time it takes to loot could be the time it takes to lookup what the loot should be.  I even have a solution for environment loading time (The Dreamscape) but that's for another post.

And with that I shall bid you good night.

Farewell sweet prince / princesses.