Winter Tail

A small handful of games, especially indie games and roguelikes (Dwarf Fortress is the capital offender of this) are praised for having a large amount of depth and detail to them, from a huge amount of equipment for every conceivable slot, to your own vital organs having their own HP values. The question though is: "Is it worth it?"

I find that some of the games I really like are the ones that put a lot of effort in the mechanics and a lot of detail into them. Like, a sword's lacerations causing large amounts of bleeding, or a rapier or spear disrupting and killing vital organs, or a club shattering bones and rendering the mob immobile.

The problem is though, it's rarely ever balanced well, and it greatly multiplies the required processing power when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it. I'm no biologist, but off the top of my head, I can name at least twenty parts of the human body that can be lacerated, pierced, or crushed. It stops you being superhuman, but at the same time, an arrow that gets lucky can take out your eye or a vital organ, and someone with a rapier is probably the most dangerous thing on earth if you don't have advanced means of healing.

Though it can contribute greatly if done right, excessive detail can have a huge amount of downsides. Lemme list a few assuming the worst-case scenario.


[B]1: Inventory management.[/B]

I prefer to equip a Fullplate, instead of a Left Boot, Right Boot, Left Pauldron, Right Pauldron, Helmet, Chain Skirt, Upper Armor, Left Gauntlet, Right Gauntlet, Left Legging, Right Legging, Helmet, Cape, Belt...

Most games require multiple suits of armor for multiple situations. Things that ignore defense mean you'll have to strip it off to retain a dodge bonus if it gives a penalty, and armor + water is seldom a good combination in any kind of game with physics.

I'll admit that it lets you go into detail on appearance, but it still means a million slots are taken up by one suit of armor and the ONE piece I don't have is the one that gets me skewered through five organs from one arrow. Bad luck or shot-calling AI can really ruin your life if you don't know what a pauldron is. If the list is sorted by alphabet, then it gets really annoying, assuming it's sorted at all. Materia Magica is a nasty offender of this, but the defense system of the game means that each part of your body has its own defenses against certain types of damage. My character is covered in awesome armor that has 20s on everything except exotic. Go ahead and laugh when she is killed by someone half her level.


[B]2: Too easy to die.[/B]

Everything is poisonous, everything is poisonous when not cooked, a fall can break a leg and kill you, a single stroke of bad luck can kill you. Don't get me started on poison. Did I mention sickness? Sickness is a royal pain in the ass that will either rot your eyes out or keep you at 5% HP meaning one blow will instantly kill you.

Most games with excessive detail take great delight in coming up with at least 600 ways to kill you with nothing more than a rotten apple. Nethack is a particularly bad offender of this. Eat bad food? You're dead. Or in Ultima, step into a poisoned swamp? Nice knowing you.

If the game uses your blood as HP and the functions of your vital organs, a single wound followed by incapacitation will make you bleed to death even though light wounds like that naturally heal just fine in real life. Seen this on a few games, but it means I don't have to chase things down.


[B]3: Perm damage.[/B]

Love it or hate it, I'm divided on this. Getting a limb hacked off, or worse, your leg, that's gonna ruin your entire life unless you have a means to create artificial limbs or regenerate them. Of course, it works both ways, finding an effective means to dismember opponents makes them far less troublesome.

Of course, according to the trope of "The computer is a cheating bastard", it's likely that a handful of monsters, especially late-game monsters, will have the ability to pop limbs back onto themselves or completely regrow them good as new, meaning mutilation is a bad thing. Holy Hell...

[B]4: Processor goes crazy.[/B]

This is the biggest problem with too much detail in a game. Even something that uses virtually no graphics whatsoever can be slowed down to a snail's crawl from the sheer amount of calculations per second. As I've mentioned a few times, Dwarf Fortress is VERY guilty of this once you do something like break open a route to Hell or hit the population cap or not kill cats. Once it starts to eat up that much RAM, problems begin. A good bit of code optimization means that you can have this done in chunks or only call those details when they're absolutely relevant instead of a constant passive process and making a billion calculations per second on top of said demons from Hell. Funny that, I always thought Hell was full of devils.


So even though extreme detail can really add to a game, you need to be pretty damn careful with it or else you'll end up with a load of annoyances instead of a quality title.

Of course, the biggest advantage of complexity and depth and everything being independent adds for extreme amounts of creativity, for example, [URL="http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0"]here's a rather grim and also hilarious thread[/URL] on how to trap, breed, and harvest mermaids on Dwarf Fortress, people coming up with increasingly creative ways to raise Hell for their valuable bones. I personally like the trapdoor method. Minecraft isn't too detailed at all,

It's hard to strike a balance, but when that balance is found, the result is always awesome. I find the line is not going overboard on equipment and not having every vital organ statted, everything else from that is fair game however, especially if there's a basic physics element in play.