What is the purpose of identification?

[spectre]

I agree that the miracle cure all 'remove curse' coupled with the abundance of easy identification ruins the experience a bit (Baldurs Gate I am looking at you right now).

Woudn't it more fun if the priest, instead of a quick pay & remove, said that the curse is too powerful for him to break. Good quest potential here?

Andy if you actually had to do some work to gain the full potential of a magic item. I think Earthdawn is a good example to follow here.

But, I think the real problem is the abundance of magic items in general. Remember BG? If it didn't have blue background, it wasn't worth picking up.
BG2 went further, and ToB reached the pinnacle, and you were hard pressed to find phat lewt that wasn't actually magical.

Such an approach means magical items lose their special status. They just become mundane stuff, with each sheepherder having +1 staff of striking wolves mightily.

Also, a word to those guys who say that you should identify items you've seen on sight. I think while this is a non issue for simplistic things like, +1 arrows.
But, for more complex things, like wands and rods that launch stuff at targets, I think its plausible that each individual item has a unique way of activating. Does it come with a user manual? Do you press a button? Do you speak an activating word, do you just think it? And what word is it anyway. That's what identification should tell you.

 

[elenai]

This is problem of recent DnD games that due balancing there are no magic items anymore.
There is only normal shit, +1 shit,...+5 shit
Its ages I had seen some decent magic item in game(like celestial fury/mirror cloak in BG2).
Things like this sword does 5 more damage and on critical 1d6 fire damage dont impress me anymore. (I ignore loot from anything except boses and stick with first +3 weapon I find.) unless I play something like pools of darkness where every bonus counts.

 

[Thrasher]

Identification could be made more interesting if it gave more information than just stats on the item. How about providing info on who owned it and the item's history?

Identification could open a quest to find out what happened to the owner to lose it, or to return it to the owner's family as an heirloom, or to destroy it because it's an ancient evil artifact, or ...

There's lots of potential quest / story tie-ins that could be done wiht identify. Sadly, this rarely happens.....

 

[RuneLancer]

There's lots of potential quest / story tie-ins that could be done wiht identify. Sadly, this rarely happens.....

This rarely happens because it's not very easy to code at all. Generating random quests is no biggie but if you're going to make it something more than a quick randomly-generated description and a generic "bring item to person 'x' in town 'y'" pesudo-quest, you're going to start having to rack your brain pretty hard to come up with a way to do this in real computer terms...

Unless various items had pre-defined quests, which are much easier to generate than (interesting) random quests are. And some basic quest info should be possible for artifacts and other such uniques - maybe even have 2-3 quests and selectively overlap bits and pieces of them so the actual quest doesn't repeat every game you find the item. Let's see the player run down to that graveyard to find the bones of the lich who created the cursed Armor of Life-Stealing that's slowly sapping their stats away in order to uncurse and remove it.

And why not make such items sometimes be IDed incorrectly? One moment you're putting on your new Armor of Totally Insane Defense +10, the next you're staring at the words "cursed" in red next to your Armor of Frailty -2 in disbelief. And is that a quest monster right around the corner...?

 

[Thrasher]

Yes, it would be hardcoded for specific items, just like most quests are not random.

Occaisional random misidenitifications at lower skill levels would be funny! But may be too hardcore for those weened on recent RPGs (or used to drinking while playing)...

 

[deuxhero]

A fantasy world where a single country has a near monopoly on the pearl (or whatever you use for iding in the world) market and uses it as a magic item tax could be intresting.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Identification could be made more interesting if it gave more information than just stats on the item. How about providing info on who owned it and the item's history?

Identification could open a quest to find out what happened to the owner to lose it, or to return it to the owner's family as an heirloom, or to destroy it because it's an ancient evil artifact, or ...

There's lots of potential quest / story tie-ins that could be done wiht identify. Sadly, this rarely happens.....

That would be interesting in a gameworld which was emergent, but otherwise there would be no point. I.e. the game itself would have to start with a set number of items where the item data tracked what the NPC who carried it was doing. The NPC would be autonominous, wandering around and doing his thing. He'd have to be able to lose it as well as use it for the lost weapon idea.

Of course, if you did that, it would be interesting to have weapons "level up" as they got used. For example, if the NPC kills 20 orcs, the weapon might gain a +1 to killing orcs. Also, a weapon could also become cursed if a certain number of events happen to the NPC who bears the weapon. You might as well use it if you're storing all that info anyway.



Here's something I don't get. Why is there no weapon identifying in sci-fi CRPGs? You kill some aliens and you automatically know how to use the weapons they were carrying, even though they're ALIEN. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Even in Fallout, a player fresh out of the vault probably wouldn't know what a plasma rifle is or does.

 

[Lightknight]

Of course, if you did that, it would be interesting to have weapons "level up" as they got used. For example, if the NPC kills 20 orcs, the weapon might gain a +1 to killing orcs.

I have yet to see a game where weapons would actually get dull after killing 20 orcs. Not reduced durability, but did lower damage.

 

[mondblut]

Wizardry. Pretty much every decent item is cursed, many of them deadly so (negative regeneration). But they are so good you *have* to find some countermeasure to their ill effects and keep using those items. I remember the most precious artifact in Wizardry 7 was a stone giving +2 regeneration. Pretty much useless per se, but allows to deck out fully in nastiest cursed stuff (regens do not stack) and live. On a positive side, cursed items stay on after a class change, even if new class doesn't permit using them, so a newly-made mage keeps all his cursed plate armours and bastard swords handy. I think this exploit was fixed in Wiz8 though.

And there are two levels of identification, a skill which gives basic info and a spell which tells all the details.

Dominions also has a ton of great cursed shit. Typically stuff which attracts all kinds of nasties like underworld angels, dream horrors etc to occasionally attack the wielder. Or give increased chance of insanity. Or cripple him. Too bad all of it wouldn't work in an RPG, it requires wielders to be expendable in the first place.

 

[mondblut]

I have yet to see a game where weapons would actually get dull after killing 20 orcs. Not reduced durability, but did lower damage.

Failure 3 (gasp!). Weapons degrade by use, and their damage gets lower (which is fairly retarded for firearms, they should degrade in accuracy, not damage).

I strongly suspect the same for Betrayal at krondor/in antara, although I don't remember them stating anywhere outright that a 70% sword does less damage than a 100% one, but it is kind of expectable.

 

[DraQ]

I have yet to see a game where weapons would actually get dull after killing 20 orcs. Not reduced durability, but did lower damage.

Failure 3 (gasp!). Weapons degrade by use, and their damage gets lower (which is fairly retarded for firearms, they should degrade in accuracy, not damage).

I strongly suspect the same for Betrayal at krondor/in antara, although I don't remember them stating anywhere outright that a 70% sword does less damage than a 100% one, but it is kind of expectable.

Isn't that the case in TES as well? Or at least TES3.