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The beautiful, enchanted world of Driftmoon trembles in the shadow of a forgotten evil, for the dark King Ixal is again gathering his forces. Hope lies in an unlikely alliance: A young man joins forces with a little firefly dreaming of stardom, a panther queen with the ego of a moon whale, and a very determined fellow who's lost everything but his bones, and still hasn't given up. Knowing nothing of the amazing adventures and the fearsome foes that await them, the party embarks on a journey like no other. Driftmoon is an adventure-roleplaying game, full of exploration, smiles and surprises, captivating stories and quests, charming characters, and countless delightful details.

Report RSS Driftmoon - Shop Shop Shop!

See how the merchants and shops in Driftmoon are better.

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Driftmoon Merchant

What would a roleplaying game be without those little shop and their curious, possibly useful merchandise? I'm speaking metaphorically of course, the plain truth is that removing the shops from most games means you'd have no place to sell your loot, and no place to get a refill of health potions. Sound familiar?

From a typical game design perspective shops are money sinks. The player gets money and items for killing monsters, and they need a way to spend that money, otherwise the money is worthless. And nearly always, the only way to spend the money is to get better gear and more health potions. As far as game designers go, health and mana potions, and other single use items, are the best invention of all time. The player spends their money and they don't get anything more than a bit of health for it. I don't want to do it like that.

You see, the point of a game designer is to make sure the player has an incentive to keep playing. You have to take away his money, so that he feels the need to find more money and play more! This is especially relevant in massive multiplayer games, where you really have to force the player to give up their money, otherwise you get problems with inflation. But the constant deprivation of value from my character always feels like daytime robbery me. In any game I play, I never use single use items. I don't use health potions, I don't use single use wands, I don't even use arrows! I'm the kind of guy who likes to amass a fortune, and never use it before the game ends. Driftmoon must do better than that! :)

In recent games I've also found an increasing trend in game economies towards more expensive items. Normal items that are prohibitively expensive, or luxury items as some call them. The idea is that once you get it, you can show it to a friend and see their envious looks. I don't really see the point of this in single player games, but they seem to be creeping down from multiplayer games. Well at least you have some place to put your money in. Obviously the items cannot be very useful, just expensive and pretty, otherwise it'd throw off the game balance. But where's the fun in all this? Showing off your fancy character sounds, well, pretty unfun to me. There won't be any useless but expensive items in Driftmoon.

So how are the shops in Driftmoon better? First of all, some types of items can only be found in shops, such as powerful magic armor. Sure, you can eventually find an equally good item on your travels. But it might not be a bad idea to buy that Murdered Man's Helmet the shop owner is showing you. You get a long lasting benefit from buying it, since it'll take a while for you to find a better one, not just a few minutes like it does in many games.

Secondly, some items like ingredients can always be found from the nature, you just have to collect them. But you can also buy them from shops for a pretty cheap price, you're not getting swindled by a merchant selling health potions for a million gold per piece. But if you're like me, and could never think of buying something you only use once, you might still want to do the extra work of collecting the ingredients yourself - it's even a lot of fun since you never know what you're gonna get.

For those of the Modding persuasion: You can open up the shop interface with a simple script in our Incredible Level Editor. :)

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Awesome_ninja
Awesome_ninja

awesome!
Love the looting system.
Quick question tho, can it have some moments when you bought everything you could and don't know what to spend money on, because you have the most powerful armor and best sword at the moment, because you killed so many monsters/sold so many items?
In some games it was a fairly ground breaking gameplay mechanic for me, such as Fable 1 for example.

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ville.monkkonen Author
ville.monkkonen

I don't know how many items there will be before the end, but I think there might be one or two stores where you'll have to think what you're going to spend your money on. Of course the point is, that if you spend a whole lot of money on something, it'll also have to be awesome - so there's still a lot of work for me. :)

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ChristopherDeer
ChristopherDeer

I knew this would be damn good !

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