Sweet Sweet Loot! or Sweet Sweet Loot?

The loot treadmill is very hard to get off of.  I am guilty of logging hours (okay, months) into Diablo and Borderlands looking for shiny, super rare pieces of whatever.   I am not sure of the phychology behind it - why do we care about puffing out our virtual chests - proudly trotting around with a rare item that we found because we grinded hours into a game and finally got a little lucky.  Yay?  Or pathetic?

Who just leaves this treasure out here in the open?

Action/RPGs in particular seem forever changed in this respect.   Diablo 2, Dungeon Siege, Sacred, Torchlight, and all of the others now hang their hat on (and seem to live and die based on) how much loot they can shove into the dungeons, and then how well they allow the player to manage all of that lootings (aka, interface).

Can a respectable and fun action/RPG be made that doesn't actively and purposely enable our loot addictions?  I think so.   

Treasure is a legitimate and important reward in any game that attempts to strike a sense of adventure and discovery into it's players.    But do we need to water it all down with a river of [sometimes] redundant and [often] uninteresting rewards?   Lately I've found that the loot/reward scheme and progression of items is so bland, structured, and predictable that it actually sucks the life out of 99% of the loot, and thus, any real sense of reward.  Maybe, just maybe, if I kill this boss for the 45th time he will drop that +5 awesomeness ring - that would be so much cooler than my +4 awesomeness ring!  Ugh.

The treadmill is still tempting - sometimes I think I see tasty little carrots hanging out there - and I think, "hey maybe I'll get back on for a couple hours."   It's not worth the sweat.    And I don't want to have to wade through a garbage pile for that one carrot.

So what to do, what to do.   Back to basics I say.   Remember when treasure was rare?   When it didn't diarrhea (verb) out of every nook, cranny, pot, enemy, chest and so forth?   Remember when you figured out how to find the red boomerang by throwing the blue one in a little pond underneath a hidden waterfall?  Oh baby.  Now that is satisfaction - that is reward that brings a smile (rather than delusional excitement) to the player.  And you didn't need to find 700 other worthless boomerangs first.

Legend of Kiflame will attempt to recreate the lost art of making treasure feel like actual treasure, not the gold nugget among piles of copper.   Rather than "hey cover up the rare loot with piles of mediocre shit," it becomes "hide treasure throughout the game and let the player earn it."

Maybe you can talk him into just giving it to you?

I find the former design approach a bit lazy honestly.  It succeeds in convincing players to hunt around for hours for somewhat inevitable payoff based on "hours in = reward out."  But that experience fails as a substitution for fun gameplay - maybe not when is was a bit of novelty, but now it's worn out it's welcome.

So will there be lots of loot in Legend of Kilflame?  Yes there will.   But the intent is to have created a variety of treasure that  is earned through the adventurous gameplay.  You won't pay for the best items with additional hours of your life.   It's your well-deserved reward for exploring the world and progressing through the story.