Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Was anyone else a fan of the way DAoC handled the instanced PvP while leveling up? Granted it was only so successful due to the smaller server sizes, but the idea could be expanded.

Zehn - Vhex said:

No, it"s bad. It sucks to get a new badass shiny whatever and then..oops nobody cares. Now back to looking exactly the same as every other fucking necromancer. Yay!

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Well ok, but then if you had forms where gear actually made you LOOK different would it be cool?

Daezuel said:

Well ok, but then if you had forms where gear actually made you LOOK different would it be cool?

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I didn"t take the time to design my characters looks, and get all that gear, to to be stuck in a ridiculous tree, or moonkin all the time.
I was a druid. And I was not happy when moonkin and tree were introduced.

Looking badass is a huge part of mmos. It"s very counterproductive considering how much emphasis people put on the looks of their character.

Which I suppose also opens up the discussion of class gear, and any one set of gear being the absolute best.

Its just as lame when everyone in the game is all wearing the same set of gear because that one set is clearly better then everything else.

Competitive alternate gear/specs within a single class would be nice as well.

Lumie said:

What I don"t get

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Who the fuck let you out of FoH general. Get the fuck out.

Daezuel said:

Well ok,

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Eh, at that point it"s a time-investment feasibility question. Dev"s try to occam"s razor shit. The shadow priest scenario is borderline as is. If nothing else, just add an interface switch/command line switch/different spell line that has the same effects minus the graphic (which is what Necro"s in EQ were asking for. Lichform without the Lich), minor glyph, etc...

There might be some people that still enjoy the form look for whatever reason I suppose. I"ll admit sometimes I did like turning into a skeleton. But I"d like to have been able to turn that shit off as well.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Eh, at that point it"s a time-investment feasibility question. Dev"s try to occam"s razor shit. The shadow priest scenario is borderline as is. If nothing else, just add an interface switch/command line switch/different spell line that has the same effects minus the graphic (which is what Necro"s in EQ were asking for. Lichform without the Lich), minor glyph, etc...

There might be some people that still enjoy the form look for whatever reason I suppose. I"ll admit sometimes I did like turning into a skeleton. But I"d like to have been able to turn that shit off as well.

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I get you, though time-investment wise I"d have to think a lot of it on Blizz"s part is just laziness. They have more money than god to employ graphics artists. Yeah, treeform is pretty gay...maybe it"d be a lot cooler if you transformed into a tree to do your uber amazing top of the line spell or something and it only lasted 30 seconds or whatever.

I mean shit, we"re wearing t3 again...son of a...I do kinda love what they did in EQ2 with appearance slots, that"s an idea that needs to be copied. (though ok, in pvp it"s nice knowing by sight what kinda gear someone is wearing at a glance) What needs to be done is a crafting/drop system where you can have crafters DESIGN gear with a system with the flexibility of COH"s char creation system.

I"m actually quite surprised that hasn"t been developed in an MMO yet, customization of your gear/avatar would be a HUGE draw imo.

Blizzard operates in a different time-space continuum however. 2 years for us is really only 3 months for them. That"s why when we spend several months pointing out something is broken it still takes them about a year to fix it.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Oh yeah, Curt. Heart to heart on this one. Please for the love of god listen to the EQ necromancer and WoW druid community from the past 10 goddamn years. Should you have a class with a spell that changes what they look like and it"s an ability that is typically permanantly up...slap yourself for being a dick.

Nobody likes that shit past the first hour. I was sick to death by the first day that my necro -always- looked the same no matter what I had. Druids are sick to death of the same shit.

As part of the spell casting graphic? Sure, why not. But for the love of god, do not be that guy.

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This is the sole reason I"ve never been able to level a druid. Always wanted to play one, but the idea of being stuck in form almost the entire time I"m playing turns me off completely. Doesn"t help that both tree form and moonkin look lame as hell.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

I can tell you what the point of not having each rank be named is. Can you tell me what the separate names is? What it adds to the game?

A better approach, by the way, would be to learn from Blizzard about ranks of spells (rather than going through all of that shit again) and just have the same spell with class quests to make it more powerful. Best of both worlds.

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The point in having creatively named spells/abilities adds immersion to your experience, as I said in my earlier post. In a game like EQ (moreso in the early days) I"d argue that having the players immersed in their world was more of a priority than implementing fun and interesting game mechanics. They wanted to take that high fantasy genre of Tolkien, Jordan, etc and give it the full 3D treatment.

That being said, having ultimately the same spell (i.e Fireball) that scales throughout your entire characters career is pretty anticlimactic in a RP sense. The point of the name is to reflect your character"s rising power. The name (in addition to the added spell effects) made you feel that you were making strides with what your character could accomplish. It"s adds something more interesting than going up to a trainer and training Frostbolt rank 11.

The problem with this is that, there are only so many synonyms. Once the game ages several years, it requires some stretched creativity at the least to think up an alternative to "Fireball." Hell, just go look up all the different names for a druid damage shield in EQ now. WoW saw that and knew it would be one less headache to have one spell and rank them to infinity. I can appreciate that, so you"re probably right in the sense that you need to strike a healthy medium.

At the same time though, I think it depends on what you want your game to be. As a developer, do you want your players to be drawn into your world? To make it as palpably real as possible? If so, then the auxiliary details of the game need to compliment that. As I said before, Blizzard wasn"t concerned with that, which is why many of it"s aesthetics are more mechanical than immersive.

I agree with a certain amount of what you say but I disagree on what made EQ or immersive or WoW non-immersive. While I think WoW has really jumped the shark in some ways regarding respect of its game world as a world rather than...whatever it is...it is the overall design that is at fault for its lack of immersiveness. The lack of consequences for death, lack of meaningful travel, etc. It also constantly breaks the fourth wall now which pisses me off to no small degree.

I disagree with Yahtzee at least once or twice in every review but I think his definition of "immersion" here is pretty spot-on:

The Escapist : Video Galleries : Zero Punctuation : Oblivion

And yes, the problem with having special snowflake names for spells is it isn"t forward-looking. Fire/Fira/Firaga was great and all that but it was easy to figure out and tended to stop at the third iteration. MMOs aren"t that finite. I also think it"s pretty transparent when Spell B is just Spell A with more damages and mana costs. How about we just say "fuck the whole thing" and actually make people quest for their ability upgrades? When did association with your class stop being meaningful? Why is it not OK for someone to do a quest chain to gain a level or unlock a tier of them?

ETC.

Well, I certainly don"t think the names of spells, etc is the defining thing that made EQ and other games of that ilk immersive, but they are part of it. I also don"t think the lack of creatively named spells/abilities makes your game non-immersive, I"m simply saying the existence of them is a small piece of adding to that immersion.

Take Ice Comet for example. I remember in the early days of EQ when the mere mention of Ice Comet made Wizzies wet themselves. Would Frostbolt rank 9 have done that? The world may never know...

I don"t want to derail into a WoW vs. EQ discussion, because god knows there"s been enough of that. But part of WoW"s immersion-less qualities stem from it"s art direction, death mechanics (as you say), and overall ease of access and travel times (or lackthereof).

Would EQ have been just as immersive if it had used the WoW spell model? Probably. Vice versa would probably also be true.

All I"m saying is that when your trying to create a rich, believable fantasy world, you add in those little details as much as possible. It may not make a difference to a lot of people, but for some it does.

The art direction in WoW is fine. EQ1 is a prime example of art direction gone wrong, IMO. You can still goto the old world zones in WoW, and things still look like they mesh with the rest of the gameworld. That, imo, is good art direction. WoW is subtly able to improve how the game looks, while at the sametime not changing how they look in relation to old assets. In EQ1, going back to the old world after a couple expansions was rather jarring in terms of how things looked...it was like seeing a Broadway play in the newer zones, then going back to the old haunts and it had all the realism of a 2nd grade school play. Especially when they began the model upgrades for players, yet left the 20 polygon gnolls running around still and the simple texture homes/trees.

Immersion is a bullshit term anyways since everyone has their own definition. I find WoW to much more immersive because of the things you claim impede it. Yay for arbitrariness!

I remember in the early days of EQ when the mere mention of Ice Comet made Wizzies wet themselves. Would Frostbolt rank 9 have done that?

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Ice Comet made us wet our pants because it did 2x the damage of the previous damage spell and almost 5x the damage of the previous spell rank. If frostbolt rank 9 was a 5x damage up over frostbolt rank 8 sure as shit I would wet myself.

We ultimately end up acronyming it all anyways so it doesn"t really matter.

If you want it to be more immersive, (which is a meainingless word to begin with but fuck it I"ll roll with it), they need to work on how you get the spells. Not what the fuck you call it. You could name a spell "Mike Phelps mighty bong hit" but it wouldn"t mean dick if all I do is go to a trainer and buy the spell after killing 300 antelope or whatever other retarded wildlife creature developers eventually start phoning it in with.

Edit:

Which brings me to another topic, one I"ve briefly covered before. ENOUGH WITH MUNDANE CREATURES. Go to the fucking store, get a DnD monster manual and start stealing shit. If I have to kill one more fucking wolf, bear, deer, cat, tiger, boar, giraffe or any other such creature I will begin to stab your staff, in real life.

There is no excuse. None. If you go, "But we have this cute series of quests where..."

No. Stop it right now. I don"t give a shit if I"m level one and you want to express how weak I am where my first quest is to go kill garden snakes, I want you to go off yourself because the gaming community will be better off without you. You have made a terrible game decision and should be goddamn ashamed of yourself.

That"s your homework assignment for Tuesday Curt. You go to your staff, you ask them "Hey, has anyone started implementing anything that involves killing wolves or boars or other boring shit like that?"

Then you come back here, the answer better be no or you need to go and slap some fools.

This man speaks the truth. There"s no real reason to have gamers wandering around slaughtering wildlife.

Wolves are only boring if poorly implemented.

Don"t fuck with wolves.

Amen.

If I ever have to kill a_giant_rat or a_honey_badger in an MMORPG I"ll fill said MMORPG"s HQ with the rodent in question. In WoW, I started as a human warrior, and killing kobolds for newbie quests was infinitely more appealing than punching snakes and rats in the face as a monk in EQ; then I rolled a Druid and my time was wasted killing "rabid" bears and wolves in Darkshore, instead of quelling a gnoll armie in EQ"s Blackburrow.

If you want to make a player feel like a hero you shouldn"t look to the Orkin commercials for inspiration. Either use the mythology or come up with your own, but stop making snakes kick me to death outside of Qeynos" walls!

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Wolves are only boring if poorly implemented.

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So wolf t-shirts should be end-game loot?

I agree with the animals comment. However, i"ve noticed it seems to bother me less if there"s a variation of NPC models in the starting areas. I hate with theres only 2-3. But if you vary the encounters to where your not killing things 9x in a row, it never seemed as bad.

Also, along these same lines. I hate...hate...generic item names. Maybe I"m alone on this, because I seem to be alone on the spell-naming thing, but I really hate it when theres little or no creativity invovled in the creation of items/gear.

If I see anymore items named as if they were plugged into a RNG like Black Gloves of the Bear/Wolf/Eagle, etc in any future games I"m going to be sorely dissapointed. Items always seemed to mean more to me when they were somehow related with the mob that dropped them. But maybe that"s the RP plug in me speaking.

The wolf being boring when poorly implemented is exactly why wild life usually fails terribly. IF the AI could support interesting mechanics, you could have interesting wild life. Wild life that kills each other, hunt in packs(not group of mobs with social aggro, but real packs with mobs surrounding you and getting bigger hits in your back and retreating when low hp while snaring the shit of you) and stuff like that.

But you see wolves standing next to deers, and when you attack a wolf that"s wandering around in some shitty woods, looking like he ate some shrooms and has no idea what going on and runs up to you then melees you even though he has not a chance of killing you, yeah it"s retarded.

Might as well have a goblin, or whatever. The issue I guess is you can only create so many monsters, and while there"s a fuck ton of possible monsters, you then run into immersion issues if you use a too wide selection, for example greek/norse/egyptian mythology have tons of monsters, but they don"t always fit right with your universe. You can make your own version of those mobs obviously, like blizzard did with Minotaurs. Nowadays you show a minotaur to random joe, and he"ll say it"s a tauren.


However the big advantage of using animals is pretty obvious. They"re easy to make. You have tons of illustration, and you don"t have to make sure they look "right", since you just copy the real thing. Making an imaginary monster look "right" can take more time. You can also use sounds from a premade bank and stuff like that. You know like the crocodile wow sound that"s the same as the UO fizzle. Or UO crocodiles for that matter. They also somewhat add a "real" feeling to your woods and stuff, when there"s wolves and bears. It looks retarded, but still fits because most people are used to the image. It"s like armored bikinis. Stupid, but ultimately fits.

Zehn - Vhex said:

That"s your homework assignment for Tuesday Curt. You go to your staff, you ask them "Hey, has anyone started implementing anything that involves killing wolves or boars or other boring shit like that?"

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Here"s the thing: you can create interesting and interactive story regardless of mechanics. In WotLK, there are very deep quest lines whose mechanics are very shallow and they"re worth it for the lore alone if you"re a fan. The question is how do you make content that engages the player in such a way that they"re actually playing a *gasp* RPG in the day of database sites and rampant spoilers.

Many devs have gotten lazy and given up trying to one-up the dataminers and include all information inside the game. Look at WAR, which came with what you"d normally alt-tab to a database site to find built into its journal. People want to stop alt-tabbing to play MMOs, but I think many companies assume that means making everything stupidly simple instead of coming up with a way to serve fresh content you don"twantto alt-tab for.

I think truly the only way you can continue the quest-leveling paradigm that has become dominant since WoW is to randomize chain quests based on a preset number of events and then use metadata to chain them together in a coherent pattern. In that way database sites would only include the constituent parts (which locations/mobs within those could be randomized too) and not a full walkthrough. The trick is designers have to be willing to award critical thinking and problem solving just as well as killing. If you have a "solve a mystery" quest line which takes actual effort and lasts 2 hours, it should award just as much if not more exp than "kill 30 wolves/dire wolves/wolfmother/felwolves/wolfgod" chains.

Just take away the carrot. Find a way to make an MMORPG where the Single Solitary Important Thing in the game isn"t primarily getting max level, and people won"t speed through your content to get to max level.

As-is, a big chunk of the population of WoW isn"t playing because of sweet quests and lore. They are just playing because they want to get real big numbers; level 80, purple gear, tradeskills maxed, a high arena rating, and once they get the big numbers, they can attack the hardest content, which means they "win" the game in some sense. You are never going to get people like that to pay attention to your leveling content unless you make it interest them more than big numbers and winning, which may or may not be possible in the sort of game we"re acclimated to as a "MMORPG."