Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Rift did have some challenging instances early on before it all got nerfed. But even so, it was only scripts that you could learn once and then forever find them easy. Like I remember there was the wolfman guy who runs in to the light and you have to keep him out of it, but its tank and spank otherwise. And there is the big spider that shoots a web to cocoon random people and as dps you had to attack that person to remove their web or they couldnt do anything.

But if anything, that's the stuff you were talking about being lame because once you know what happens, its the same every time, that's why all modern instances bore me. EQ wasnt really like that because there were virtually no scripted encounters. All the bad shit that happened was just random, some noob trains past you with 20 mobs or you accidentally go near a wanderer and it aggroes you and also pulls a nearby room full of mobs with it, or a runner slips away in to mistmoore and pulls out 500 mobs.

It could be an easy game though. If you just soloed blue mobs as a necro or something, or if you had a good group that just fought blues and were careful with pulling and didn't go anywhere dangerous. Playing it again now (like p99) and knowing all the tricks, its a pretty easy experience because you just grind it out somewhere safe. It's only when you try to push the envelope and take on the mobs that give that little bit extra XP or have a nice item, and then suddenly things are prone to going wrong. But still, it was in general a tough game. Mobs didn't go splat when you tapped 123 so you had to be prepared to root stuff that was beating on you or run to the tank and disengage and hope he gets aggro or whatever. You had to think and react, not just stand at the back following the crowd spamming your numbers.

Also the pathing was terrible which was infuriating when you died because of it but it could make things more exciting. Like places like Cazic Thule wouldn't have been half as fun if it wasn't for the insane pathing. There could see a lizard right in front of you and you shoot it with your bow and it runs in the opposite direction, opens a door, agroes a nearby wanderer in the tunnel and that runs through the tunnel looking for a waypoint and aggroes 10 mobs and then they all finally find their way to you. Crazy broken shit, but it made things really exciting as a group. Also random linkdead people because internet was bad in 1999. My dream game would try to recreate all that somehow but in a logical way.

One thing i see folks talking about mob resistances and damage reduction. The cool thing about these mechanics is they add another lever to encounters ( i.e. class X may have bonus damage of the types to fight certain mobs thus increasing the value of that class in certain situations like a cleric with undead ).

Also, loot gets more interesting.. as a melee type in DDO you are likely carrying a slash / pierce / crush weapon with various effects. Skeletons are the obvious ( need a good crush weap ) but oozes ( and others ) get interesting as well and can prove a tough encounter if you are not prepared ( this goes way beyond HPS of course ).

Makes weapons like a bow that adds crushing damage even if aquired at a lower level a high value weapon through all levels and this can help with the "ok lets not just have +gooder items" thing...

shabushabu_sl said:

in DDO you are likely carrying a slash / pierce / crush weapon with various effects. Skeletons are the obvious ( need a good crush weap ) but oozes ( and others ) get interesting

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That is an interesting mechanic. I think EQ2 used the same idea, cant pierce skellys well but you can smash them with a 1hb or whatever. Also in vanguard early beta, there was the ability to hit different body parts with your weapon, like arms, legs, head, and it had effects like stunning them if you bonk on the head. Maybe they could elaborate on that idea this time and actually manage to take it through to release rather than scrapping it

But really I am more inclined to agree with the guy on the last page who says just remake EQ1 and then go from there. It would be good to get a really solid base and then you can always build on top of that as time goes on.

Sabbat_sl said:

You talk about EQ being hard, because youmight encounter a wolf that was 20 levels higher than you. All NPC power (bar a few of those pesky undercons, you know the ones I mean.. that fucking derv for example) was linked to level. There was also no mention at what level you'd no longer be able to reliably solo something.

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First of all I think EQ is "harsh" not "hard".
Secondly, EQ is harsh because for many classes if you encounter creatures at YOUR LEVEL not prepared you will die.
For some classes (like warrior) even creatures 5 levels below you can and will kill you.

EQ harshness is not only due to every monster being A LOT MORE POWERFUL in comparison to your average monster in recent MMORPGs, no. EQ harshness is due to a combination of things like Death Penalty, Corpse Runs, DeLeveling, Faction Hits which leads to KOS in towns... just to name a few.

Fish1_sl said:

That is an interesting mechanic. I think EQ2 used the same idea, cant pierce skellys well but you can smash them with a 1hb or whatever. Also in vanguard early beta, there was the ability to hit different body parts with your weapon, like arms, legs, head, and it had effects like stunning them if you bonk on the head. Maybe they could elaborate on that idea this time and actually manage to take it through to release rather than scrapping it

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I don't remember any such system existing in Vanguard.

Tmac47_sl said:

My point wasn't that there wasn't a skill cap, just that the curve isn't so massive. With less skills, even unskilled players can experience the feeling of champion mastery.

It's the difference between a Silver/Gold player in LoL and a professional. There's a HUGE gap there, while the argument could still be made that players in Silver/Gold have "mastered" certain aspects of the game.

I almost elaborated in my post, but assumed (wrongly) that I didn't need to.

We agree.

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Gotcha. I agree that we agree.

Denaut_sl said:

I don't remember any such system existing in Vanguard.

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Damage Reduction and typing was not in vanguard to my knowledge outside of magic types.. which was cool in itself but it was in eq2 especially on raid mobs. ( this was early in eq2 days tho not sure if is still there ).

The cool use of that mechanic is DDO it really opens up loot in a big ass way and adds levers to encounters to make them more complex... for example, what do you do if you are a mage with ice / fire / negative energy dmg and you are facing a mix of skeletons and zombies and something that resists fire..

Well then you have problems potentially... you can't just go blasting away without thinking about what you are doing and that is the type of game i want to play.

Laura_sl said:

You know what I hate about recent games?
Is too much symmetry.

I don't want EVERY class to have 10 skills.
I don't want classes to feel/look the same at all.

Another good thing about EverQuest is when casters have bazzilions of spells (Which they can only use 8 of them at the same time) melee classes have very few skills.
Bards uses their "spells" differently; twisting.

I don't want predictable game mechanics. I want things to feel odd and asymmetrical. Because perfectly refined systems and mechanics feels too gamy to me.

I want one class to solo better than others. I want a class to group better than others. I want a class to be able to travel better than others.
Variety, Variety is the key. Push variety and uncertainty to the limit.

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Laura_sl said:

First of all I think EQ is "harsh" not "hard".
Secondly, EQ is harsh because for many classes if you encounter creatures at YOUR LEVEL not prepared you will die.
For some classes (like warrior) even creatures 5 levels below you can and will kill you.

EQ harshness is not only due to every monster being A LOT MORE POWERFUL in comparison to your average monster in recent MMORPGs, no. EQ harshness is due to a combination of things like Death Penalty, Corpse Runs, DeLeveling, Faction Hits which leads to KOS in towns... just to name a few.

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I agree that EQ was harsher then current-gen games, so dont take this the wrong way, but: Your whole argument boils down to the path of least resistance in EQ was fighting mobs a few levels below you so thats what people did, while in newer games the path of least resistance has you fighting mobs at your level+1. You want the difficulty of EQ in new games, fight your way through some caves that are 5 levels above you. You want EQ easy-mode, kill blues on zone line in Overthere.

I think back then people were less likely to take this easy route if they had a more challenging but also more rewarding alternative. Thats not done anymore, and while I agree newer games are easier, mainstream players also dont want to challenge themselves, they just want the rewards. They existed in EQ just the same, but there were less of them, now they are the majority and get catered to by devs for obvious reasons (money).

So I guess what I am saying is, relative power level is a pointless measure as long as some easy mob gives xp, no matter how little, thats the route people will go. My solution would be to put alot of the difficulty not into the individual mob power, but require good awareness and decision-making to avoid adds or similar bad situations even outside. Dungeons will sort themselves out, my fear is the outdoors will be the quick'n'easy xp farm.

Denaut_sl said:

I don't remember any such system existing in Vanguard.

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Sadly it was dropped some time around Beta 2 So was a lot of stuff. They had a slow tactical almost turn based combat system that got cut too

I love the concept of Rift. If they'd have simply taken out all the solo-quest-hub-progression and slowed down exp it would have been awesome. The dungeons were fun and challenging, despite being instanced they at least weren't mindless. The Rift system was cool. Both dungeons and rifts had the potential for being evolved into even more group oriented content than it already was with heroic dungeons, raid rifts. The problem is instead of challenging to players to team up to survive in a harsh world, they made a very linear, solo-friend, quest-hub system to overall what was at times a fun and challenging game. So, what did you get? A bunch of people soloing to max level and getting bored. Or soloing to max level and being retarded in group content. The more group-oriented version of Rift was pretty fun, though, especially with the class system that could help meet challenges (instead of just using the ONE solo spec that was 'best' to level).

Oh well, hopefully the lesson is learned. I think Rift would have been more successful if it did away with the split personality because nobody was happy and it split the player-base into two very distinct play-styles. Half the player base would be complaining their quest hub got overrun from a rogue rift, while the other half would be complaining nobody was participating in the rifts so they were pointless.

Pick a design philosophy and for fuck sake stick with it.

In alot of ways I dislike quests in MMO's. To me they just get in the way, example: Player A joins the group just for the quest and once done ditches, Player B didnt have the quest so you have to backtrack to get them caught up, and then Player C joins to replace Player A but doesnt have the quest so you have to backtrack again.

I am sure Im in the minority but I would be fine with zero quests in the game, just exp, loot, and exploration as the motivating factors.

I love quests, just not what it means today. Quests should not be for main progression. Epic quests were great. Level 20 armor quests were great.

Fish1_sl said:

.....But even so, it was only scripts that you could learn once and then forever find them easy.

....EQ wasnt really like that because there were virtually no scripted encounters.

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Not sure if serious.

I mean, random Death Touches were, umm, random, and I guess it was fun to randomly wipe while doing everything right because of randomness beyond your control?

I love EQ and want slower combat. But let's not go crazy and start pretending EQ was particularly complex.

Fish1_sl said:

Sadly it was dropped some time around Beta 2

So was a lot of stuff. They had a slow tactical almost turn based combat system that got cut too

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Because it was bad. Think: Magic the Gathering when you want to be playing real-time, interactive, 3D dungeons and dragons.

I think they actually found a decent balance with the direction they were going and having the ability to counter spell and reactive abilities. The problem was then combat got tuned to be too fast, mobs cast shit instantly, you had too many hotkeys to spam, etc, and it got pushed back. On the encounters where counter spelling or reactive abilities were actually important and you had time to react and calculate what you were doing, it was an awesome mechanic.

The real tragedy of Vanguard is that people think mechanics like counter spelling and reactive abilities and rescues and triggered chain abilities and weaknesses and dual-target is all a bunch of junk because the game was built on shit hardware/tech. The reality, though, is Vanguard's combat design/philosophy was pretty awesome.

In short, no, spending 3 seconds between every attack to check if you can tap enough mana wasn't fun in a mmorpg. What it became was, though. Then what that became wasn't as fun as combat was generally too fast to really react or bother with the deliberate countering sort of system.

And we keep talking about Vanguard so much because this is Brad's chance to do it right! Vanguard design, with new tech, in a smaller, more focused, group-based world.... Vanguard not fucked up is the game we're all circle jerking over. FACT.

popsicledeath_sl said:

Not sure if serious.

I mean, random Death Touches were, umm, random, and I guess it was fun to randomly wipe while doing everything right because of randomness beyond your control?

I love EQ and want slower combat. But let's not go crazy and start pretending EQ was particularly complex.

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Yea serious. Not saying it was complex though, just that mobs were all the same, it was either casters or melee bastards, or occasionally an archer. And that's it, you kill shit. It didn't really need scripted encounters like WoW style, it was just tank n spank the melees or do whatever to the casters. Some of the bosses had a few tricks but nothing major. A lot of the random stuff was just getting an add from one of the many wanderers, or trains, or someone messing up or the mad pathing and bugs. I remember pulling a mob in Paw, it was by itself in a little alcove so I nabbed him, and then 20 seconds later 10 mobs show up who all aggroed from the room behind that wall. That's what was random in EQ, or a train. Or getting 3 resists in a row of your root or whatever. It was only basic stuff but it randomised stuff.

So I gather the kickstart is in three weeks? Will be interesting to see the response.