Originally Posted by Galred
From a design standpoint, I don't think Blizzard needs to actually duplicate 25-man encounters for 10-man and 5-man version. They just need to have encounters which evoke the flavor of that 25-man encounter!
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And I want to throw one more idea out there regarding
how to do this: NPCs.
Just think about the General Rajaxx fight. Pretty neat. Part of making the encounter work is keeping an eye on and supporting your NPC allies. They definitely contribute to the
feel of the fight.
Sure, duplicating Vaelastrasz as a 5-man would be difficult as hell without destroying the feel of it. But what about making it a 40-man, but only 5 are
players?
One danger people might point out of going that route is, you don't want to take the outcome of the fight out of the hands of the players. You don't want to just sit back and have it be NPC-versus-NPC. But you don't
have to. Let me elaborate.
Consider the game "Sid Meyer's Pirates!". You play one character. When you board a ship, you do not board it alone. There's a huge fight going on all around you as all of your pirates fight the defenders of the ship. However,
your character is in a one-on-one duel with the captain of that ship. As
you're doing well,
your NPC allies are bolstered and do more damage, and are slower to be damaged. If you do poorly, the reverse is true. You see the fighting going on around you, but you also have a numeric summary of the fight up near the top of the screen ("merde, I've only got 73 pirates left, and the galleon has 126 guards remaining").
There are two ways to win the fight: actually
defeat the enemy captain, in which case the other side's NPCs all surrender, or do
just well enough that your NPCs whittle their NPCs down below a certain level, in which case the enemy captain surrenders. The outcome in both cases depend on the actions of the individual player, but you get a "mass combat"
vibe. Could
this be made to work in a 5-man setting?