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A thing from Everquest that could benefit Ashes of Creation
Bolorny
Member
that was lost in MMORPGs since WoW, is Emergent Gameplay.
Let me try to explain... though english isn't my native langage and i'm not good at explaining stuff, so it might get clumsy but i'm willing to give it a try anyways.
about Emergent Gameplay :
A quick way to describe Emergent Gameplay would be rather simple : give players very few information and let them figure out how to do things.
It is the complete opposite of hand-guided gameplay, also known as theme-park.
This applies on every aspect of the game, not just combat / dps.
pros : as a player, it is extremely satisfying to figure things out. feelsgoodman
cons : players who just want to smash buttons like those guys who play tabletop RPG games only to roll dices, players who want to be a godlike farmer after 3 minutes play-testing their class, etc... will perform poorly and might end up being unsatisfied and quit.
One notable example of Emergent Gameplay from Everquest : the fight against the goddess Tunare
First, Everquest basic combats were mostly tank-and-spank, but raid bosses added spicy mechanisms that demanded players to find out strategies to take them down.
Second, most raid boss fight required a rotation of Clerics casting Complete Healing on the Main Tank because most highend boss would hit so hard they kill non-tanks in 1 round and tanks in 2-3 rounds, making switching Tanks very difficult, though not impossible, because Complete Healing has a 10-seconds casting time and you had to Land one on the Main Tank every 1-3 sec depending on which boss you were fighting.
Imagine fighting a 50-foot High Elf lady following these rules :
-She stays at her spawn point, can't pull her, she never moves. But you can't fight her with only ranged attacks because once damaged she will summon the player with highest aggro down to her feet and kill them.
-Her auto-attacks are kicks (1 or 2 seconds cooldown) that send her target fly away (unresistible huge knockback effect), she won't summon the tank back after kicking him away, she will kick another meleer instead.
-Her damage is so that she can kill any non-tank class in one kick (OneKickWoman).
If you Zerg her without a strategy, she would simply Kick the tank away, then kick the 2nd tank away, etc... then one-shot all the meleers rapidly before the Tank(s) gets back into melee range, then kick the tank away again, summon healers and one-shot them, summon casters and one-shot them, etc...
Seems impossible, right ? Well, take a few minutes to think about solutions before reading what's next...
Back in the days, someone came up with the right idea : in order to keep the Main Tank in melee range, so that he wouldn't lose aggro, we had to counter the unresistible knockback effect with..... a wall of Ogre players behind the main tank.
The Ogre race is the tallest player race, and there is player collision in Everquest.
Note that it doesn't trivialize the fight at all, it's still a very long and difficult fight, but this key point made an impossible fight possible.
Honestly, who would have thought Player Collision and Race collision box-size could be key mechanisms in a raid boss fight ?
That is what I meant by Emergent Gameplay : the smart use of a game mechanic outside of it's main purpose, without being a glitch/cheat.
And that is just one example out of so many... Everquest was a rather simple game (back in 1999 games weren't as complex as today), but it also was extremely difficult, and overcoming the difficulty was extremely satisfying.
Let me try to explain... though english isn't my native langage and i'm not good at explaining stuff, so it might get clumsy but i'm willing to give it a try anyways.
about Emergent Gameplay :
A quick way to describe Emergent Gameplay would be rather simple : give players very few information and let them figure out how to do things.
It is the complete opposite of hand-guided gameplay, also known as theme-park.
This applies on every aspect of the game, not just combat / dps.
pros : as a player, it is extremely satisfying to figure things out. feelsgoodman
cons : players who just want to smash buttons like those guys who play tabletop RPG games only to roll dices, players who want to be a godlike farmer after 3 minutes play-testing their class, etc... will perform poorly and might end up being unsatisfied and quit.
One notable example of Emergent Gameplay from Everquest : the fight against the goddess Tunare
First, Everquest basic combats were mostly tank-and-spank, but raid bosses added spicy mechanisms that demanded players to find out strategies to take them down.
Second, most raid boss fight required a rotation of Clerics casting Complete Healing on the Main Tank because most highend boss would hit so hard they kill non-tanks in 1 round and tanks in 2-3 rounds, making switching Tanks very difficult, though not impossible, because Complete Healing has a 10-seconds casting time and you had to Land one on the Main Tank every 1-3 sec depending on which boss you were fighting.
Imagine fighting a 50-foot High Elf lady following these rules :
-She stays at her spawn point, can't pull her, she never moves. But you can't fight her with only ranged attacks because once damaged she will summon the player with highest aggro down to her feet and kill them.
-Her auto-attacks are kicks (1 or 2 seconds cooldown) that send her target fly away (unresistible huge knockback effect), she won't summon the tank back after kicking him away, she will kick another meleer instead.
-Her damage is so that she can kill any non-tank class in one kick (OneKickWoman).
If you Zerg her without a strategy, she would simply Kick the tank away, then kick the 2nd tank away, etc... then one-shot all the meleers rapidly before the Tank(s) gets back into melee range, then kick the tank away again, summon healers and one-shot them, summon casters and one-shot them, etc...
Seems impossible, right ? Well, take a few minutes to think about solutions before reading what's next...
Back in the days, someone came up with the right idea : in order to keep the Main Tank in melee range, so that he wouldn't lose aggro, we had to counter the unresistible knockback effect with..... a wall of Ogre players behind the main tank.
The Ogre race is the tallest player race, and there is player collision in Everquest.
Note that it doesn't trivialize the fight at all, it's still a very long and difficult fight, but this key point made an impossible fight possible.
Honestly, who would have thought Player Collision and Race collision box-size could be key mechanisms in a raid boss fight ?
That is what I meant by Emergent Gameplay : the smart use of a game mechanic outside of it's main purpose, without being a glitch/cheat.
And that is just one example out of so many... Everquest was a rather simple game (back in 1999 games weren't as complex as today), but it also was extremely difficult, and overcoming the difficulty was extremely satisfying.
3
Comments
Emergent gameplay is about the developers giving the playerbase tools to create their own content and conflicts that emerge through their actions. „Sandbox“ mmos like Arche Age are known for that.
Both of those (no hand holding + emergent gameplay) seem to be at the core of intrepids design philosophy.
I recall those days, with Tunare. Fun fights, sucky corpse runs. Hours of time wasted, but I was there.
Ya, problem is. Most people can't endure those long complex raids (we need our clicky clicky, faster faster), and the community ended up dumbing epic encounters down and speeding up combat (WoW). So now, we are stuck with a standard. I get it.
Emersion... This is a tough one. Some peeps think emersion is leveling, some think enviornment, some think cosmetics, some think the journey...
I agree. EQ was emersive; there was little internet resources and you had to "ask" questions in game, ask for help (lfg), no maps, no mounts, to much weight, etc etc. You were afraid to leave town, because some mob was outside, and you might loose your level and gear. Loosing my gear!? That's scary! Now, with zerging (die, Rez, die, Rez) who's scared? That's not emersive, imo. But, I digress, we are in a new standard.
Remember seeing someone with an epic? You groveled at their sandals. Now, everyone can buy one. Those epics have no meaning now. I quested months for my, epics, at least I have a story.
The reasons I left EQ? I was charmed by the glitz and glamour WoW offered, and a promise for meaningful PvP. Man was I disillusioned. Sure, we had some fun clearing out all the raid bosses. But we were clearing them so fast, Blizzard had to add more (AQ). Why are we clearing raid content faster than they can produce? That's bad game design. Don't get me started on PvP.
We can only hope, Intrepid gives us a great world to burn. That will be my emersion.
Well, that was my druid. His sister was a human he rescued when her parents were killed by goblins. She found a love for Karana, but respected the Mother of All.
My druid was so welcome in the court of Tunare that he could go and say hello to Wuoshi.
But, the subject. I really do want this sort of gameplay. I want that players should have to figure things out. For me, it makes success more rewarding. I want quests where the player will have to solve riddles or have to unlock clues to get somewhere. Not all quests, but at least some.
Emergent gameplay comes from games with broad, general rules/physics and less contrived stuff. It's also a recipe for a customer service nightmare, so idk if we'll ever see much emergent gameplay on a grand scale like we used to see.
All the information were acquired through dozens and dozens of raid wipes through tests and trials.
That encounter (if the fix with the ogres was intended) sounds absolutely poor game design, I’m assuming this was a high level fight? Making it so that if you didn’t roll an ogre or have a few in your party you’d fail is a stupid way to add difficulty. It pigeon holes the player rather than allowing people to play they want to play. This is something I hope intrepid doesn’t bring into their encounter design.
@Rhaelah I still disagree with the no map thing. But it would be nice if they build encounters without a clear victory strategy
Of course game design was poor. Everquest was released in 1999 and was a significantly low budget game compared to the next mmorpgs.
Also Tunare is a goddess, and as such, the encounter was made in a way that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and not zergable (Everquest had zero instances so some encounters could be zerged down with 300 people).
But the players, starting with zero information, ended up finding a way.
Note that even though a working strategy was found, it still requires 100++ people and 30 minutes or a nearly flawless executed fight to take her down.
What I want to say is that having bosses being difficult only because what "catch" they have is just bad design
― Plato
On the other hand you want the bosses to mean something, and having requirements makes the bosses feel more powerful or impactful. In an inverse sort of way, needing 120 people to kill a boss is a testament to the strength of the boss you’re fighting. And needing certain strategies creates an atmosphere that, in order to play the game, sometimes the game has to play you. Adaptation to what the game throws at you can make mundane fights exhilarating.
In the end, I would be fine with either choice so long as it is implemented fairly.
Didnt they say in a recent video that there would be no maps/mini-maps when your in a dungeon? Of course Im talking about the world, but.. I'll take what I can get. I agree with your statement about the encounters. The stories I hear from EQ's bosses are always the most epic stories.
I think you can have a theme park (or sand park as Steven likes to say) game without hand-guided gameplay.
Regarding dungeons, raids and boss fights I hope the game gives zero information whatsoever. You need to discover things yourself (or go to the wiki 3 months after launch), which is good.
Regarding quests, that's a bit unclear for me still. The game isn't procedurally generated, but the nodes are randomly leveled up (in the sense that each server will be different). With that said, I wish we could have cool story quests, but I wonder if those will be possible with how the Nodes system work.
I like the way OSRS handled quests: not too much information, a couple of hints and maybe a map marker (only if you have discovered that part of the map, perhaps). The first time I completed some quests in OSRS without using tip.it or anything outside of the game, only talking to other people, was very satisfying indeed.
Just look at the number of posts/threads about "Game Feature #45 is too hard/punishing/difficult/time consuming".
The interesting thing about this issue, is that the reason WoW became so "hand holding" was that players went out and started making guides, walkthroughs and Add Ons that basically allowed people to play the game without really having to invest brain power in learning about the game. This was seen by Blizzard and they started moving the game in that direction, seeing how prevalent these were. Don't think this is true? Look out fast people were clearing content in Classic vs in Vanilla.
When Classic dropped, there were 15 years of guides for people to use to get through the content easily.
Now this is interesting in regard to AOC because each server is going to be different based on the actions of the players. Nodes will progress at a different rate and different nodes will be leveled, unlocking different content. It's going to be difficult for these types of guides to be written that will apply to everyone. They will still exist, but people are going to need to explore and experience the game.
For the record, I think guides are great in helping new people to the game. But I feel AOC will be a little bit more resistant to the very linear way of playing where you read a guide that says "Go to A, then B, and level to 10, then head to C and level to 20, when you're done, go to D and kill this to level 50". When each server is different and dynamic, these guides become less helpful.
If we’re talking in dungeons and raids I’m all for no mini map or map as it’s a smaller enclosed area and I can see the enjoyment of mapping that out yourself, however in the incredibly vast open world I think that it is a terrible idea. That is just my opinion though and I’m not trying to stop you having yours