I was hunting deer in Palia (they are called something else, but they are deer) and slowly collecting the tufts of fur, occasional antler and stuff from each one I killed, and I was thinking how stupid this was. Clear back to EverQuest, or even back before, to Ultima Online, you would kill a critter, and you’d only get the occasional paw, maybe every third one would have some fur, the really rare one might have a liver you could store in your bank for a few years until you really needed it…
Everyone accepts it now that no matter how carefully you squeeze the life out of a cute woodland creature, you won’t be able to use more than a small fraction of the kill. Why is that?
It all comes down to the need to get experience. In real life, if you killed one deer a year (usually all you can kill, given hunting license restrictions), congratulations, you’re a bona fide hunter. In EverQuest, if you killed one deer a year, you weren’t getting those leather mittens made anytime soon.
So what if… when you killed a deer, you had to figure out how to get those 200-300 pounds of meat and fur back to your home? Killing a deer would just be the start. You’d find a way to get it home — maybe with a wagon, maybe you have some help — but once home, you could get a lot of hide from it, all the bones, all the meat. You’d be rewarded for the effort. Of course, maybe wolves and bears would be following your scent. Maybe someone would try to take it from you. But the reward would make the risk worth it.
I was asked what would happen in dungeons, where you could loot maybe one thing and then be forced to leave. Well heck, that’s the opening scene to The Raiders of the Lost Ark. And why would anyone think they’d be able to single handedly clear out a dungeon full of treasure? A lone adventurer couldn’t even clear out my basement, and there aren’t many monsters there. I think.
Maybe in a game like EverQuest, all anyone really wants to do is kill stuff. That’s the game loop. But Palia? It just doesn’t make sense in a game that tries to deemphasize wholesale slaughter. I’m feeling really bad for all the deer I kill. They panic and flee, but I just walk forward, slowly, like a psycho killer, calmly taking them down with arrow after arrow, looting their scrap of fur, a small piece of meat, or the occasional antler.
Kills should be important. And I’m really surprised that in Palia, they didn’t try to do something more.
I could have written this post myself, it echoes my thoughts on it exactly. I’ve always wondered why we loot a single eye from creatures when the majority of them have two. The only way I could eventually come to some rational thought over it is that I’m SUCH a bad hunter that I’ve pulverized anything else of use.
Right? Just encourages the wholesale slaughter of innocent woodland creatures. It’s sad, really.
There’s a lot to say about this whole topic – way too much for a comment. If it wasn’t Blaugust, when I already have way too many posts in hand already, I’d write a response post. I still might. For now, I’ll just say that once again we’re dancing around the volcano of whether these things are supposed to be just games or if we want them to be something more. I used to swing one way but now I swing the other, mostly.
On Palia, I really like the mechanics of the hunting there but I was very surprised to find it included at all. It seems entirely out of keeping with the tone of the game. I don’t think I’d have put it in.
The developers clearly think otherwise because they’ve taken the trouble not just to create hunting for the game but to write a bunch of speeches for the hunting trainer in which he makes the moral case for what you’re doing. He kind of glosses over the deer but he specifically calls out those cute little gopher creatures as an invasive species and tells you to kill as many as you can. He wants them eradicated.
On the not being able to carry all that loot out of a dungeon thing… who can say what’s possible in a world that has actual, working magic? My D&D group in the eighties carried a portable hole everywhere. We could and did loot grand pianos and sofas as a matter of course. We took everything that wasn’t bolted down and most of that if we were in the mood. In most mmorpgs everyone walks around with the unstated equivalent of that portable hole in the form of multiple backpacks that can fit horses inside. It’s magic even if it isn’t overtly stated as such.
But that’s another topic for a psot not a comment!
Part of it might be the attention span of most gamers. If you only had to kill one animal to get you through the winter, so to speak, the designers would have to make getting that kill into some kind of quest line or something. Most gamers want to kill stuff, but not actually spend the time and patience to hunt something. Like how do you simulate sitting in your tree stand for 4 hours waiting for a suitable deer to come wandering past without boring the player?
It might have been possible back in the day when we were all staring at our meditation screens waiting for our mana to come back while we chatted with other players, but I don’t think today’s gamer would stand for it.
I remember crafting in EverQuest. Crafting high end jewelry took a very long time just to gather everything and all the subcombines and stuff. KILLING stuff in EQ took hours to find the rare component or just enough components. I think in the end the time commitment would be similar. Maybe hunters would be rare enough so that their services would be as values as enchanters were.