Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Best/Worst Systems from Other Games
What are the "best" things from other games in your opinion? Here are some of my favorites.
DAoC - Reactionary, positional, and chain styles (combat maneuvers)
-If you parried an attack, you could start a combat chain. Certain attacks only worked from specific positions, and the hardest hitting attacks typically came at the end of those 3-4 attack chains. This allowed skill to outplay button mashing.
SWG - Resource stats made the gathering in this game so interesting. It allowed variation in crafting. While the crafting in the game wasn't a unique system in itself, I think the variation from Crafter A to Crafter B made it one of the better systems out there.
EQ2/WAR - Taunts worked in PvP in EQ2, changing the target of another player. In Warhammer, taunting a player increased the damage you did to them until they swapped to you. A great mechanic for tanks in PvP that helped them to control fights.
Public/world quests (Rift/Warhammer/WOW) is something that has really caught on. I think there are a lot of people doing it right now. In WOW, it's not used to build community though. People are doing it to get done as quick as possible. I think if you create world quests that are designed to create more forced interaction with players, it will allow people to meet more players that they normally wouldn't. I think there is an opportunity for players to create world quests as well. Rift created public quest chains which I thought was cool. You could do more with this. Allow people to chain world quests into additional steps that get harder and harder. What if step 3 of a public quest required a group, and you could only do it with people who completed step 2 as well?
One thing I love is epic quest chains. Maybe I'm the only one...I don't know. The Onyxia Key, the Ahn'Qiraj opening, even the AQ event where we summoned hundreds off bosses after farming thousands of stupid cultist robes. EQ had some great chains to unlock dungeons. SWG screwed it up with the Jedi unlocks...but they were close to doing it right. DAOC had ToA which was really fun...even if it ruined the game. I'm sure there were others in Age of Conan/Rifts/Aion/etc...I just can't remember it all off the top of my head. It may be harder if your content is mostly player driven. But epic content should require epic series of events to unlock it!
On the other side...what are some systems that you think missed the mark?
Player investment into locations seems to be something that they have strong plans for. I think that's very important. Letting people run around and circle cap existing castles and just reclaim them when they can outzerg the other "faction" is a big failure for world pvp. I'm not a fan of zerging as it is, so when you let people avoid fights like WAR/Aion did and still gain RP by capturing uncontested nodes....not good.
DAoC - Reactionary, positional, and chain styles (combat maneuvers)
-If you parried an attack, you could start a combat chain. Certain attacks only worked from specific positions, and the hardest hitting attacks typically came at the end of those 3-4 attack chains. This allowed skill to outplay button mashing.
SWG - Resource stats made the gathering in this game so interesting. It allowed variation in crafting. While the crafting in the game wasn't a unique system in itself, I think the variation from Crafter A to Crafter B made it one of the better systems out there.
EQ2/WAR - Taunts worked in PvP in EQ2, changing the target of another player. In Warhammer, taunting a player increased the damage you did to them until they swapped to you. A great mechanic for tanks in PvP that helped them to control fights.
Public/world quests (Rift/Warhammer/WOW) is something that has really caught on. I think there are a lot of people doing it right now. In WOW, it's not used to build community though. People are doing it to get done as quick as possible. I think if you create world quests that are designed to create more forced interaction with players, it will allow people to meet more players that they normally wouldn't. I think there is an opportunity for players to create world quests as well. Rift created public quest chains which I thought was cool. You could do more with this. Allow people to chain world quests into additional steps that get harder and harder. What if step 3 of a public quest required a group, and you could only do it with people who completed step 2 as well?
One thing I love is epic quest chains. Maybe I'm the only one...I don't know. The Onyxia Key, the Ahn'Qiraj opening, even the AQ event where we summoned hundreds off bosses after farming thousands of stupid cultist robes. EQ had some great chains to unlock dungeons. SWG screwed it up with the Jedi unlocks...but they were close to doing it right. DAOC had ToA which was really fun...even if it ruined the game. I'm sure there were others in Age of Conan/Rifts/Aion/etc...I just can't remember it all off the top of my head. It may be harder if your content is mostly player driven. But epic content should require epic series of events to unlock it!
On the other side...what are some systems that you think missed the mark?
Player investment into locations seems to be something that they have strong plans for. I think that's very important. Letting people run around and circle cap existing castles and just reclaim them when they can outzerg the other "faction" is a big failure for world pvp. I'm not a fan of zerging as it is, so when you let people avoid fights like WAR/Aion did and still gain RP by capturing uncontested nodes....not good.
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Comments
I think many MMOs got things right and the same got things wrong.
Economy - Guild wars 2 had the best auction house imo...it included everyone who played the game.....great bid/ask system...good lord, it was basically like a stock market. I think ESO took the word for worst way of dealing with it, especially before they opened guild traders up for public purchases, but I still think it blew hard.
Crafting
You could buy it from other players, you could earn it from pvp, you could craft it yourself, you could pve for it. It was all equivalent.
While in theory it makes perfect sense...let everyone get there. As a hardcore player it meant I was basically done gearing up within 2 weeks because I could get 2 pieces here, 1 there, buy 2 others, and then make the last of it and have a full set of gear. It made me not really want to do anything in the game at that point, because it didn't feel like there was a reward for the time investment.
Albion Online has a great auction house system. It's localized so you can't just transfer goods safely to dangerous zones. It also prevented someone from just totally dominating a market. On top of that you had buy orders and sell orders. If you weren't in a hurry to get something, you could put up a buy order for the price you want to pay, and eventually you'd probably get it if you made a reasonable offer.
Nowdays its crap.
World of Warcraft personally has the lore. They have so much lore and history that just really defines the world and history and it's just a great story.
Another thing if you guys have ever played a game called Abzu, it's a really interesting underwater kind of exploration game. With ashes of creations stunning graphics if they did something like Abzu with the exploration and vague story it would be so cool.
Minecraft, XD. I love minecrafts building, it's so unique, that players can truly take the ideas and buildings from their head and put them into a game. I wish games had more building customization other then just the ones created by developers. A house building engine thing would be super cool in my opinion.
Sorry for the rant >.<
Oh, and S.W.T.O.R.'s color unification thing. Where instead of having a bunch of miss matched colors for gear you can unify them and they color code nicely.
ESO - The diversity you can have with your build, from attribute points(Magicka, Health, Stamina), being able to put points into whichever, the amount of gear builds you can have with the set bonuses, and then all the different skill lines you can learn and different morphs!
S.W.T.O.R - The color unification option, where you can unify all your gear colors to set colors. So unlike in wow you don't have to transmog all your gear but instead you can make all your gear have the same color so you don't look like a rainbow!
Minecraft - The diversity and limitless building possibilities, I know Minecraft ins't exactly close to being in the same realm as mmorpgs but I just wanted to put it in here because of their building. Minecraft building is truly limitless, you can build almost anything you can think of, from castles to dragons to statues of huge gods. I personally would love to see an mmorpg make a type of building creation engine, like for character creation, the height, the size, the types of walls, roofs, windows, etc. Some type of creation engine to do all that so you can truly love your house because you built it exactly how you'd want it.
That's all, sorry for the rant >.<
Elder Scrolls Online - Their quests/missions are much more fun and interesting since the NPCs and dialog are non static. The NPCs actually move and walk around and so on instead for just standing there.
Other games have this static boring NPCs, you approach a static NPC and start talking to them, it turns out they are in a great danger and need help protecting them... but they just stand there.. idling.. there is no connection between the quest/mission and how they move/behave. And as soon as I have saved them they just stand there.. idling again until next player come by.. I also miss the rewards of saving the city or killing the big bad dragon.. you get some loot but that's it. The very second you finish the quest you can walk trough the city and everything is exactly the same.. I just saved the city dammit, a little appreciation would be nice..
Crafting
SWG - We all know it and remember it but I loved the customization options and the experimentation possibilities. The more you focus on being a crafter the more experimentation points you get and the better stuff you could make. And this together with a resource quality dependence made each item unique and you never know just how powerful thar rifle the enemy was holding. I actually hate games where everything is the same, all weapons made from the same recipe have the exact same stats.. boooorrrinnnggg
Skills
I like flexibility and love the idea that if you use the skill you get better with it. I don't like skills you just can buy and *poff* suddenly you are an expert marksman even tho you never held a rifle before.
UO and SWG (and probably some other games) had this and it was fun. To become a master Rifleman you had to start from the bottom and use your rifle a lot of times.
ESO skills where way to static and boring for me (I never reached the end game so I can only reflect on the lower tier skills) and you could only have 5 skills "on screen" instead of "all" of them.
Rift had a nice thing with Souls where you can have several different builds on your char and you could be a tank/healer/dps with any class although some classes where better then others on being tank and so on.
But maybe it was a little bit too easy and to flexible since I could be anything and could easily switch between then out of combat...
Housing
I think housing is a important part of the game and I loved Rift instances since you could easily buy a mansion and decorate the heck out of it. The houses where pretty and had nice views and I could feel like a king if I wanted to.
Furniture and trophies was easy to come by so you could make your place realy cool and the "only" limit was you imagination.
Swg was nice too but the house plans and designs was soo ugly and boring. Nice tho that you could place a house anywhere ish. Also nice that you build your furniture but the variety was limited.
ESO have the worst housing system. You get puny rooms that costs real $$$ and the furniture took a long time to make collect.
Trade
Wen it comes to trade I'm one of the crazy ones who like graphs and price history and do on. Much like the stock market. This because I don't want to be forced to buy stuff at ridiculous prices just because someone have been hoard the stuff and cranked up the prices. I want price history so I can se the trends and how it evolves. Also how many people selling this item and how many items per person. No need for names just numbers.
Crafting: Of course, SWG. One of the best aspects of this was the ephemeral and variable nature of resource stats. It was wonderful to discover a new exotic copper! One that would never reappear. And the blueprints, and harvesters, and the experimentation. I could just go on, but you all know this. The upshot of all this is that in this crafting system, you really could truly distinguish yourself and become an actual Craftsman, not just another crafter. You didn't just make the same metal bits that every other crafter made. I know that the team has said that they don't like RNG (thank GOD), and I agree that some games (I'm looking at YOU, ArcheAge) horribly abused this and made crafting so non-fun, but the kind of RNG that you can harness and tame with greater and greater skill, that's ok in my book.
Skills - I've always been a fan of limited action set (LAS) skill usage. I don't want 12 hotbars with 87 buttons, make me choose refine, as long as there is enough diversity in the skillset to allow me to truly distinguish my build from others. An important aspect of skill choice, by the way, is to allow players to choose only the skills they want for their build. PLEASE do not make me wade through a skill tree and spend points on a bunch of crap skills that I won't ever use, just so that I can get the one or two that I want. ArcheAge got this right, once you level-unlock, you can make your build out of any of the skills anywhere in a skill set, no pre-requisites. This truly facilitates build diversity, when everyone can choose ANY skill anywhere in the tree to be part of their build.
Housing - Let's face it, the ArcheAge land rush sucked, but non-instanced housing is necessarily precious and scarce and that's the only kind of housing I'm interested in. I want to see my house on the horizon, I want to see the sunset from my front porch. Another thing AA got right was allowing players to place homes where they wanted to, random locations and directions. Shroud of the Avatar has pre-defined lots and that's admittedly less subject to abuse, but it generates boring cities. I actually prefer AA's more organically built towns and villages. But here's where most housing systems go wrong: they give you all these great tools for decorating houses, but then there's no reason for anyone to come and admire your creation. In this regard, SWG got it so right. Being able to sell my guns out of my house meant that all of the work that I did to fix it up was seen by the public every time they came to buy a gun. I actually paid a RL interior designer 1 million credits to design my house and it was a beauty, with gun racks to display my weapons, and gorgeous artwork. THAT's what makes all the decorating worthwhile. Believe it or not, The Sims Online also got this right. The more people who came to your house, the more money you made. Incent people to visit, and all that decorating will be worth it!
Farming - I don't mean mobs, I mean agriculture. Albion Online has one of the best systems here, with a skill tree that forces you to specialize, creating opportunity to distinguish yourself as the most efficient Wheat Soup cook, or the most efficient Cattle rancher. No jacks of all trades. But when it comes to actual crop and livestock farming, I have to give another shout out to ArcheAge. They nailed it with widely variable crop timings and varieties, hand-placed crops instead of pre-defined rows, meaningful climate biomes, etc. Black Desert Online had a very sweet system of crop evolution, where you could take ordinary seeds and eventually get them to mature into more advanced varieties. Farming is fun and should be a necessary part of any game that celebrates community and infrastructure development.
So many great games and so many great ideas. I hope to see AoC take on the best and create new standards.
Abilities and Decks - The Secret World (original, not the Legends)
Housing - ArcheAge (but with more liberally allowed placement)
Farming and Trade runs - ArcheAge
Ship Combat - Allods Online (without any competition)
Ground Combat - BDO
Character Creation - BDO
Lore and Story - World of Warcraft / The Secret World
Amount and quality of instanced content (dungeons, raids, mini games) - WoW / WildStar / Allods Online
Payment - Vanilla WoW (pure subscription, though I don't have any issues with optional cosmetics sold in cash shop, granted that cosmetics can also be gained by simply playing the game as well)
The grind in most eastern mmos is also horrible and boring.
For me, the gear in GW2 was really stale. For most of the leveling experience the gear looked the same. You don't really ever stand out or look different until you buy costumes or gear appearances. I think that is just lazy and lame.
WOW does have the best lore.
SWTOR has the best story telling, though ESO is right behind it.
Wildstar had the best dungeons before Carbine nerfed them for the free-to-play launch.
It was quite an involved system and it took as long to level as your craft as it did your adventuring level. The gathering was cool as you could gather with other people on the same node to gain more mats, plus the nodes had a chance of dropping rare and super rare materials that could be used to make even more powerful gear.
Each of the 3 continents had its own unique look to its crafted gear and you had to seek out crafters to teach you how to craft in that style, it was quite involved and took a considerable time investment to master. Oh and you could not do everything on one character so you needed several alts if you wanted to be able to craft everything.
Crafting or building houses required a good deal of effort as the ability to make different components for houses required you to undertake quests to find objects to study and thus learn how to make them, such as corner stones for houses. These were often in some hard to get at places and required the help of a party just to get near, being in some of the open world dungeons. Houses also required items from all of the crafts such as thatching for rooves, stone working, woodworking, it was a real collaboration of the skills.
Was far from perfect but I enjoyed it a great deal.