Invisible walls .... why?

[Deadlock]

Sunrise quest. Why can't I jump from the inner walkway down to ground level in the Abbey?

I hate invisible walls. I thought I'd get that out before i have a beer. Happy Friday :)

[Scrapco]

Sunrise quest. Why can't I jump from the inner walkway down to ground level in the Abbey?

I hate invisible walls. I thought I'd get that out before i have a beer. Happy Friday :)

Quest design = rails

[Cookiegum]

Sunrise quest. Why can't I jump from the inner walkway down to ground level in the Abbey?

I hate invisible walls. I thought I'd get that out before i have a beer. Happy Friday :)

It is even worse. Try to rotate the camera and it get pushed by those invisble walls. It is the worst corridor ever.

[bracelet]

Sunrise quest. Why can't I jump from the inner walkway down to ground level in the Abbey?

I hate invisible walls. I thought I'd get that out before i have a beer. Happy Friday :)

I was thinking about this about an hour ago. I was looking up from the ground and noticed all those scarecrow up there. Wouldn't it be fun if I could agro them all before I even went in the Abby? But alas -invisible walls. I think that is why they are there.

[J1NG]

Invisible Walls are never there to keep you from something. But to keep someting (which could include you) "in".

In this case (of many), it's to keep the Scarecrows from falling off when triggered and chasing (and subsequently pathing out over the edge) after you. They want the scarecrows eliminated not lead off the edge and ignored afterwards throughout the rest of the run.

J1NG

[Deadlock]

Invisible Walls are never there to keep you from something. But to keep someting (which could include you) "in".

In this case (of many), it's to keep the Scarecrows from falling off when triggered and chasing (and subsequently pathing out over the edge) after you. They want the scarecrows eliminated not lead off the edge and ignored afterwards throughout the rest of the run.

J1NG

I hear you man, but in the grand scheme of things does it really matter? Who cares if you can run into the lower courtyard and nuke the straw-stuffed-bar-stewards from below? Are they really going to present more of a challenge when you're *ahem* "surprised" by them springing to life up top? Basically nobody can defend this wall being there to protect them ... it would almost be a ... straw man argument?

Drop the walls. Burn the strawmen. And if an unintended consequence of this is that we create a Rogue(tm)-friendly strategy to drag them down and outsmart the strawmen for when you go up top then that's a win-win :)

[FlavoredSoul]

Basically nobody can defend this wall being there to protect them ... it would almost be a ... straw man argument?)

Someone making an argument you disagree with is not in any way a "stawman argument".

[blerkington]

The thing I most dislike about invisible walls is when they are used to block access to somewhere it looks like we can go.

Sunrise is a good example of that. It wouldn't annoy me nearly as much if a visible barrier had been used to make it clear we weren't supposed to be able to jump down. Those immersion-breaking invisible walls also stifle creative play, as other people have pointed out. It just feels like a GM cheat being built into the quest design, and it makes no sense in terms of how the game world normally works.

The final quest in the u38 pack is also very bad because of the poor visibility in the area where the luminous mushrooms are hidden. Again, it's a personal preference, but I'd prefer if SSG were more careful with invisible walls, vines, hanging tapestries, low ceilings and anything else that interact so poorly with the third person camera view, but if anything they seem to be doing this more and more all the time. One of my least favourite ways to die in this game is because the dated engine is preventing me from seeing properly.

Thanks.

[vryxnr]

Someone making an argument you disagree with is not in any way a "stawman argument".

I know text does not convey inflections/tone, but the above was (in my opinion) a joke. A play on words. "Straw man" in this case referring to the scarecrows: literal man-shaped beings made out of straw. The use of pauses/space via " ... " was what (to me) indicated the tongue-in-cheek nature of the message.

As for the actual topic: I too hate invisible walls with no in-game reasoning behind them. The Demonweb and it's quests have MANY of them that are there only to made sure we players do not take certain paths. What is that? A ledge in the distance? I think I can jump there! *tries* *hits an invisible wall and falls towards the gaping abyss below* ... and they are not boarders either. You fall along it for a while, then you can start moving again under it. There are some that are in quest that are separating two areas you can walk on. So in this case, the invisible wall is to prevent you from taking a longer, potentially harder (as in it requires jumping skills to get to) path that happens to have less enemies on it. *rage*

[HAL]

Sunrise is a good example of that. It wouldn't annoy me nearly as much if a visible barrier had been used to make it clear we weren't supposed to be able to jump down. Those immersion-breaking invisible walls also stifle creative play, as other people have pointed out. It just feels like a GM cheat being built into the quest design, and it makes no sense in terms of how the game world normally works.

Imagine you were playing TT D&D:

GM: "As you run from the hoard of monsters, you are brought up short by a cliff. Below the cliff is a wide river with moderate rapids."

Player: "I jump off the cliff rather than face the hoard of monsters alone."

GM: "As you approach the edge of the cliff, you are stopped by an invisible force. It is almost like there is an invisible wall stopping you from jumping off the cliff."

It's a silly device. Make real walls.

[Dalris_Thane]

Sunrise quest. Why can't I jump from the inner walkway down to ground level in the Abbey?

I hate invisible walls. I thought I'd get that out before i have a beer. Happy Friday :)

Agreed. I personally despise invisible walls. Like... you couldn't render a real wall? Make a glowing barrier City of Heroes (CoH) style? Anything? Bueller? Bueller?

Yet they have them in most games. By now, I don't believe that all those devs are lazy. It's got to be a "suits" decision. Cut costs. Cut time. Something.

I mean, in most games, including this one... you're stuck somewhere, you can just /release (or teleport, or waypoint, or whatever the game mechanic) and you're back in the game... no harm no foul.

You know, I fell through the world and saw the underneath of CoH... and I didn't get scarred for life. I didn't unsub. I went "Oh. Weird. Cool." and teleported back to my Supergroup base and kept on playing.

But whatever. You can't argue with "suits".

[Niminae]

Imagine you were playing TT D&D:

GM: "As you run from the hoard of monsters, you are brought up short by a cliff. Below the cliff is a wide river with moderate rapids."

Player: "I jump off the cliff rather than face the hoard of monsters alone."

GM: "As you approach the edge of the cliff, you are stopped by an invisible force. It is almost like there is an invisible wall stopping you from jumping off the cliff."

It's a silly device. Make real walls.

But we're not playing D&D. There is no GM who can "wing it" when the players do something unexpected and unplanned for and take the adventure away from their prepared plan.

Also, you've given a poor example. If the GM wants you to fight the monsters and hasn't prepared for the eventuality of a water escape, it goes more like this:

GM: "As you run from the hoard of monsters, you are brought up short by a cliff. Below the cliff is a wide river, forced by the cliffs into a swift, swirling, and deadly combination of spinning rapids and whirlpools only broken by slippery rock shards. Surviving a fall into that would take a miracle!"

And then the Wizard casts Fly and ferries the party across the river on a Tenser's Floating Disk. But that's beside the point...

[HAL]

But we're not playing D&D. There is no GM who can "wing it" when the players do something unexpected and unplanned for and take the adventure away from their prepared plan.

Also, you've given a poor example. If the GM wants you to fight the monsters and hasn't prepared for the eventuality of a water escape,

I'm sorry if you have had poor GMs in the past so that you feel that a GM wanting to force the party in an obvious direction through brute force is ok. I made that example to show bad storytelling.

[Niminae]

I'm sorry if you have had poor GMs in the past so that you feel that a GM wanting to force the party in an obvious direction through brute force is ok. I made that example to show bad storytelling.

Your example was indeed an example of bad storytelling. That's why I offered up a better example of how the DM might put up an "invisible wall" even without seeming to do so.

I am sorry if you feel that wandering around in an unprepared, unsupervised sandbox is more enjoyable than participating in a shared story that the players and DM all create together.