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Suggestions from a MMO player with 20 Years of Exp
ArchivedUser
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So just to preface this post, I have been playing MMOs basically since they were a thing, I hope the devs see this because I've contributed to the kickstarter and I think their ideas truly could reinvent the MMO genre. I believe much like Sharif that it's high time that something changed. Additional Info: (I have played wow the most out of the MMOs I've played but I think for most of us that will be the case, so my opinions may or may not be influenced by the different stages of that game). I have played MMOs hardcore, semi hardcore, and casual as my life has changed throughout the years and as my needs changed. Following this I will list a couple things that I believe to be pivotal to this game's success:
The Game Needs to be Difficult - I'm not talking dark souls difficult, but the game has to be challenging. I don't want to start level one and just one shot everything in the game, force us to use the game you created to our advantage. Force us to use that potion of strength or what have you to defeat a mob, don't make all of the hard work you put into these items become trivial as we just vendor everything in our bags that we don't need because the game difficulty is trivial.
Make the Main Cities Where the Player-base Wants to Be - Now this may seem like a stupid suggestion to some, but I assure you there is nothing more boring than sitting in your player housing, farming cabbages, because it is the most efficient way to play the game. Player housing should be something that you visit maybe once a day, admire your achievements, and then go back out into the world. The reason I say this is because, this is a MMO, the players NEED to see each other. They need to see a living breathing world, or what's the point?
Combat - Now I know the devs say combat is only 5% done, but I do need to slip a little comment in on this. Combat should be reactive AND proactive. IMO timers are silly, you shouldn't know that every 30 seconds the boss is going to slam the ground right in front of him, or that he will do a giant AOE. I realize this may be an unpopular opinion but we are talking a living breathing world, if you were really in this world would the boss really do a frontal slam every 30 seconds? I think not. Bosses should be dynamic by design, it will be frustrating at first when you die the first few times to a random frontal slam, but as humans we learn from our mistakes. If we just blow through combat every single time, then PVE becomes trivial, unless the difficulty is so damn high that only people who play 60 hours a week can access the content through gear. Bosses SHOULD be like dark souls (or legend of zelda if you prefer) in my opinion, the difficulty is high, but the reward is high for playing well, even if you don't have the exact gear necessary to do the encounter. (this is mostly for solo content and I'm not even going to get into group content or I will ramble all day about raids, they have everquest devs they should know their end game pretty well).
Puzzles - We are talking an open world here, I cannot understate the power of someone just starting to play the game, realizing they can jump pretty far, and jumping up to a ledge and finding a chest there, just for exploring. This will have a profound effect on players, the ability to explore an open world and find new things in nooks and crannies that they have never been, will add to the life of this game immensely.
Scale - This world has to be huge, if you are talking city-state vs city-state warfare, there has to be an immense sense of scale to this game. Not to mention caravans, epic beasts, natural disasters, etc. All of these would benefit from an epic sense of scale. Along with this goes teleportation or flying, if you want to hold onto that sense of scale teleportation, flying, or any other type of semi-instant travel has to be insanely expensive, or VERY hard to get. Something for people to work towards, but only after they have explored the entire continent/game, should they have access to it.
Gear - Gear is a great thing, I love gear, but I think that being able to make your gear look like anything you want is a mistake for a fledgling MMO. If I spent a ridiculous amount of effort to get the best gear in the game, people should know it. You shouldn't be level 3 and have access to look like the biggest badass in the game, it defeats part of the purpose of the gear itself. This serves a dual purpose, it keeps people invested in your game, and it adds to immersion. People stay immersed because if every single loon on a street corner had a +99 flaming halberd then it takes you out of the fantasy, if ONE person has the +99 flaming halberd it showed them that it is possible to get to that point while giving them a reason to keep playing (if they are a min-maxer like me). If they are all about the role-play fantasy it servers the exact same purpose, just in a different way.
7. End Game - There has to be stuff for the top players to do, and a decent amount of it, not going to say anything more about this.
In conclusion, this game has the potential to be one of the greatest mmo's to come out in 10 years, only because of the dev's ingenuity and creativity. I desperately want to see this project succeed, and I think if you add these new ideas to the knowledge of the mistakes other MMO's have made in the past. We could finally be looking at a totally new genre, one where cash grabs and jokes about "the wow-killer" are a thing of the past.
Comments
Also, why are you talking about bosses with timed attacks when bosses will be controlled by players?
To increase difficulty and stop some xploits, for which i know well from another game called AOC (age of conan) but this could have already been talked about.
Ashes is a revolutionary MMORPG that will not have an endgame.
The world is a dynamic world which reacts to what the players are doing.
So, it's continual content rather than static content - therefore, no endgame.
There will be enough bosses controlled by players that the ones that aren't will be insignificant. Combat will be proactive and reactive because the majority of the challenging combat will be player avatars v player avatars.
Ashes doesn't have any of that.
The upper echelon of Ashes will not be focused on raid bosses.
Rather they will be focused on preventing their cities from being destroyed by sieges from rival cities and/or attacking other cities...defending and attacking caravan runs and defending or attacking as participants in monster coin events.
The inadequacies of AI bosses will be insignificant because there will be plenty of opportunities to fight players who are not as predictable as AI.
As player characters and as epic monsters.
What if there is no end game, as we are accustomed to it? What if, instead, there is an endless branching of possible playstyles and activities that we want to do, not that we feel obligated to do? What then? What possibilities then exist? What new ways of playing and truly enjoying the game, rather than doing another bloody job, will exist?
I honestly hope folk learn to look past the inculcation and explore the vastness that is being offered up. ANet said "We want the whole game to be endgame," and the folk came in screaming "We don't have endgame, we're leaving!" ANet's response was to create ever-harder content that required grinding in order to have it ... and thus stopped seeking alternatives to offer to us to let us continue on, discovering more and newer things that can exist outside of "endgame."
Just my .02/worth.
You said it perfectly. it should not be seen as a game to complete with the best items but to have fun with friends and be part of this living world
If you are fighting a Murbolg boss, you might know from past experience that you should be wary of its poisonous tail spike attacks. There will (hopefully) be tells, but you should never know exactly when these attacks will happen.
You should feel progression as your character levels (gear + abilities) and as you acquire more skill at playing the character. Not because every fight is pretty much the same and you have the timings burned into your brain by repetition.
If the game designers are listening, I would hope you design the encounters to be random enough to prevent there ever being addons/mods that can tell you where to stand and what buttons to press at each point in the fight.
I look forward to each of the releases, videos, etc., that they do so we can see progress and how it goes. I'm hoping that 'early' next year we'll be able to start the alpha 1 game play, though when its ready for it, not just because of the timeline.
I'm hoping that this game will last at least 10 years, if not longer. If they make all the things work they've talked about, this should be an easy goal to achieve.
Everything in the game must ultimately progress toward this objective; whether it be learning to be a great bard/mage/cleric etc, improving production skills as a farmer or craftsman; and honing your combat and gear through PvP and PvE. Tying this all together should be a deep and compelling lore; which amplifies this threat over time and touches every individual with some sense of responsibility.
The twist to this in Ashes is that some nodes may be less threatened by this enemy, or may even be bolstered by it. So with the node system there may not be a simple endgame with one victory condition. The risk here is demotivating people by not having a clear reason to progress. If the threat devolves into an unwinnable war, then what reason do I have to log in and level my character?
I would add that I hope player skill will be an important factor, so PvP is not all about who has better gear, but who has better combination of skill and gear.
Progression does not necessarily mean grinding. Although some MMORPGS do make it seem like this! To me progression is motion toward a goal. In its purest form this is the sense of achievement as I improve my gear, gain new abilities and become increasingly skilled at playing my characters. This could be progression as a craftsman, gatherer, fighter etc.
To avoid confusion, I'll use the phrase "victory condition" rather than endgame, because a victory condition does not imply that the game is over. If Ashes is well designed (which I'm sure it will be), all such progression contributes toward a victory condition. Whether this be a node-oriented victory or a global victory condition or both.
1.Yes, the game has to be difficult, no denying that. then again, what you are competing for is the limited resources that the world offers. players will make things more difficult for each other. and as you saw, while minions may seem kinda weak, that's because they are minions. bosses and world bosses will certainly be quite tough.
2. Main Cities.
Honestly, I'm ashamed of all of you that answered. how did you miss this? The main city, a.k.a the metropolies will take forever to develop and be impossible to maintain alone. metropolis will be where there are most people(and the strongest ones.)
3. certainly an interesting idea, I'd say, it's certainly quite taxing to develop. I'd say an AI to decide which attack the boss will use, with some RNG to decide exactly which move. that way you can actually predict what the boss might do, so you'll still have to rely on skill, but it won't destroy the immersion.
4. I'm not sure of what Steven has in mind for this, but we'll see.
5.That has been confirmed. The only flying mount, the Dragon, can only be obtained by being a mayor of a metropolis(so 5 there), King/Queen of a Castle(That'd be like what, another 5) and as a Very rare drop from a world boss, with a 30 day timer. Oh and also, lose your post, and you lose the dragon.
6. There are going to be Rare, KS only weapon and armor skins, and also if you want to look cool, you'd probably have to buy the avatars, or work for it. so yeah, both the more free-ish players and the payers are happy.
7. Mayor,King/Queen, Open world PVP, guiding newer players, Hunting for rule breakers, so on so forth. There are honestly a LOT of things you can do. heck, you can't even run every dungeon without basically building all nodes up to metropolis and then destroying all of them. that'll take years. bottom line though, there's always going to be stuff for you to do.
Progression does not mean grinding.
Progression refers to advancing your character's skills and abilities - as opposed to raiding for BiS gear once your skills and abilities have all maxed.
Ashes has several paths of horizontal progression in addition to vertical progression.
Grind came to be associated with progression because it has turned out that most of gameplay is stuck in the end game while waiting for the devs to create more new progression content.
So, instead of ever questing, we ended up ever raiding. 2 months max of progression and then 12-24 months of raiding for BiS gear.
15 years later, gamers consider raiding to be the real game and progression just a tedious time sink that's a needless obstacle slowing access to the real game.
Grind is just being stuck doing tedious, repetitive content, when you'd rather be enjoying some other non-tedious content.
So... my original point is that you made a long list of suggestions that mostly just polished the old features and mechanics that everyone is tired of while completely ignoring the revo features and mechanics Ashes will implement to revolutionize the genre.
In Ashes, instanced raids and dungeons will be rare.
Repeatedly defeating the same boss will be rare. We won't be memorizing scripted attacks - we won't be using the same strategies over and over again - because we won't be fighting the same boss over and over again.
If you think Ashes must revolutionize AI, you're in for a disappointment. That's not one of the 4 pillars.
Instead. the devs are focused on adding more ways for players to combat each other - via sieges and caravans and meaningful conflict as well as the nodes continuing to churn out new tasks and events and narratives and mobs.
If players end up complaining that the boss AI is too predictable, the game is doomed by the simple fact that people are even focused that heavily on the AI.
Basically you posted a long list of polishes that would make WoW 3.0 shine, rather than address the Ashes game design.
You are awere this game does have endgame? High level nodes will create high level events, this is ashes endgame. There are also high level dungeons, the hardest dungeon in game will naturally become eng game, weather you want it or not. End game is simply the hardest content of the game.