Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Monster/Mob diversity and Monster/Mob variation of attacks
As far as i know we currently know nearly nothing about the actual enemies that we are going to see in AoC and what kind of attacks we will see from mobs. Yes we have seen some gameplay but we don´t have much information, except that we have seen a few enemies.
In my opinion it is very important that we have a huge variety of different monsters with different attacks.
That is the purpose of this thread: I wan´t to hear you opinion on monster diversity.
My Opinion:
Most people here will probably spend a lot of time in AoC.
And i think most people will agree that it will get boring really fast if you just have one type of a specific enemy.
Lets take the mushrooms we have seen multiple times as an example.
If there is only one type of mushroom all over Verra i think most of you will probably hate these mushrooms after a month. And the sooner you hate a specific mob the sonner you will think of it as grinding wenn killing this mob.
In my opinion there are 4 possibilities to bypass this:
1. Reskin/different models of Mobs to add variety:
Just a visual difference of the same mob.
From this you get at least a litte bit of visual variety.
2. Reskin of Mobs with impact on the attacks:
Examples:
Green mushroom: poison cloud (AoE)
Red mushroom: Fire bolt (DoT due to "on fire")
Blue mushroom: Ice attack (CC stun)
3. Mob-Subtypes:
Subtypes of mobs with different abilities and/or strength level.
Baby mushroom, Exploding mushroom, Juggernaut Mushroom, Flying mushroom, etc.
Examples (while considering point 2.):
Green Baby mushroom: small Poison cloud and nearly no HP
Green Juggernaut mushroom: giant Poison cloud and a lot of HP and additional Armor and a charge attack
Green Flying mushroom: leaves a trail of poison and will fly fast in a random pattern.
4. Attack variety of one specific mob.
Independent from the first 3 points. If a normal mushroom has like 10 different skills and different behaviours it will take longer until you think that normal mushrooms are boring opponents.
In my ideal world all 4 points would be present in the game.
What are you all thinking about this?
Do you have additional wishes or "must-haves"on Mobs?
Is there maybe some of this already confirmed?
In my opinion it is very important that we have a huge variety of different monsters with different attacks.
That is the purpose of this thread: I wan´t to hear you opinion on monster diversity.
My Opinion:
Most people here will probably spend a lot of time in AoC.
And i think most people will agree that it will get boring really fast if you just have one type of a specific enemy.
Lets take the mushrooms we have seen multiple times as an example.
If there is only one type of mushroom all over Verra i think most of you will probably hate these mushrooms after a month. And the sooner you hate a specific mob the sonner you will think of it as grinding wenn killing this mob.
In my opinion there are 4 possibilities to bypass this:
1. Reskin/different models of Mobs to add variety:
Just a visual difference of the same mob.
From this you get at least a litte bit of visual variety.
2. Reskin of Mobs with impact on the attacks:
Examples:
Green mushroom: poison cloud (AoE)
Red mushroom: Fire bolt (DoT due to "on fire")
Blue mushroom: Ice attack (CC stun)
3. Mob-Subtypes:
Subtypes of mobs with different abilities and/or strength level.
Baby mushroom, Exploding mushroom, Juggernaut Mushroom, Flying mushroom, etc.
Examples (while considering point 2.):
Green Baby mushroom: small Poison cloud and nearly no HP
Green Juggernaut mushroom: giant Poison cloud and a lot of HP and additional Armor and a charge attack
Green Flying mushroom: leaves a trail of poison and will fly fast in a random pattern.
4. Attack variety of one specific mob.
Independent from the first 3 points. If a normal mushroom has like 10 different skills and different behaviours it will take longer until you think that normal mushrooms are boring opponents.
In my ideal world all 4 points would be present in the game.
What are you all thinking about this?
Do you have additional wishes or "must-haves"on Mobs?
Is there maybe some of this already confirmed?
0
Comments
I hope there will be regular monsters with low AI and hard monsters on barren parts of the map with higher AI.
My ideal opponents would be somewhat similar to runescapes.
Mobs in poisonous dungeons that force you to react against if you dont want to be killed.
You see their animation loading their bow or whatever and you have to dodge or los it if you dont want to take a heavy blow.
You must pay caution to where you fight so you dont pull more than you can handle.
If you party up you need to move towards higher mob crowds to make it worthwhile and risk pulling too many and wiping.
A quest line to introduce you to them and special gear that you need to process the pieces they drop. Like a sinew that you can craft into a bow string, but its extreme difficult to harvest intact, making them extremely rare.
Easier monsters that drop normal crafting resources, like hides, mushrooms, teeth, claws, meat, bone, etc. They should also be unique, like you can find mushrooms alive and moving in only certain parts of the map and the skills they use are unique to mushrooms, some with poison powder, some with stun spore and things like that.
Then on other parts of the map you wont find the skills recycled. If there are poisonous effects they are not displayed with similar animations. Like demons could instead have a claw attack that leaves a dot, dragons that breath poison.
I would also like it if all of the monsters didnt get along. You couldnt find demons around mushrooms but have their own comfort areas.
Mushrooms like wet, demons dark areas etc.
The deeper you go into that area the harder the mobs become.
It would also be great to have hostile clans and cults of different races with intelligence, so you could kill them for resources or beginner weapons/armor, so not everything you wore while leveling had to be from crafting.
We also know that mobs by the road will be easy, the mobs in the forest more difficult and the mobs up the mountain more difficult still in each node. But don't just give us different mobs or simply increase stats to get this difficulty. I'd like to see smarter AI with this increased difficulty, maybe small packs instead of single mobs, pack synergy, environmental hazards etc. Essentially, try to achieve this enhanced difficulty as you move deeper and deeper in the wilderness through different means. You don't just need to go from imps to goblins to trolls, you can have only imps by the road, forest and mountain and make the encounters very different in difficulty.
Red mushroom: pepper spray. Causes blindness.
This fits definitely better to mushrooms than my example.
And since we are talking magic mushrooms here (looking suspicously at undead tea-master @nagash)
We could add another mushroom with hallucination effects. You start seeing powerful demons and weird forms around you for a few seconds if this mushroom hits you.
These will get your old bones rattling
So in your opinion it would be okay if the whole game had only one type of mob? Fighting the same mushrooms for eternity?
On the other hand, all nodes won't have the same difficulty/level of mobs as the level of each node also dictates the difficulty, i.e. the higher the node level, the more dangerous the mobs may be in that node (but also following the previous pattern I mentioned).
A white LvL1 bear and then a light grey LvL5 bear etc. ?
Add diversity is one of the most important things in games ever for me.
Important things: Mechanics, Graphics, Monster-Design(Design at all), Gameplay.
We were talking about monsters/enemies. And guess what ... you also have enemies in endgame.
And as you said: "gameplay (=mostly combat)" is important.
Now tell me: How good exactly is your gameplay if you just have one type of enemy with only one type of attack in the whole endgame?
And thats what this thread is about. Variety of monsters/enemies and their attacks.
If you´re okay with having just one boss (yes bosses are also enemies/monsters) in the endgame then go ahead. But you can´t tell anyone that the vast majority of players don´t care.
There are even words for it: "boss mob" or "named mob".
Please excuse me for i have not explicitly stated that i also mean bosses.
Next time i write something about mobs i will use the word enemy. Hope that includes all types of non friendly NPCs for everybody.
I have no idea why Akmaa is even on these forums when all he's looking from an mmo is already in bdo.
They have cool combat and their only content is normal oneshot mobs that barely differ from another.
You should accept that there are people who are looking up to everything Steven is selling, fantasy, immersion, polish, changes in game based on reason and not on greed.
We love the vision Steven has. He's making mmo for the experience of imagination, not grinding and efficiency optimization.
I want to be amazed fighting monsters, leveling and unveiling new nodes and monsters.
I am not the only one, that is why there is a market for a game like that and that is why AoC exists and is getting huge amounts of support from mmo community, even thought the game is still far from release.
This topic is here for people to release their imagination and tell us what they can see, not for you to talk down people just because they can see round Tellus or a way to wirelessly transfer power.
Regarding both predator/prey relationships between mobs and also the seasons that will change in the game, here is a rw parallel that could be in game:
The great annual migrations in Africa and (formerly) in North America, where buffalo or wildebeasts or reeboks and other game animals move from season to season followed by wolves and lions and attacked by Crocs at the river crossings. In AoC we could have herds of mobs which migrate across nodes in sync with the seasons, they could be preyed upon by other mobs along the way.
The lucky hunter who puts down a freehold next to a migration path might be the first player to realize what is going on. Those with a keen eye to the game environment would have an advantage. Those who expect to have AoC like other games they have played would never expect something like this.