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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
If there are going to be Verra holidays that match real world celebrations, they should include more than just US holidays.
But religious holidays transcripted from IRL into the game (exp. Easter, Christmas etc....) -> hard no!
When the weak waver on their path, my spirit shall be their guide
When the strong fall to darkness, my heart shall be their beacon
Formerly T-Elf
Whatever holidays you put in the game, they have to make sense in-world. Doesn't have to be the most thorough explanation, but the NPCs at least need to acknowledge that there's a holiday season and that's why I'm seeing everyone in Santa hats.
Trash infos that arent importend for a basicly working Game ...
Do YOUR HOMEWORK with the Basics ... rest of it is just play around like thinks that arent importend...
Work, Work and Work!-> on the Basics and a playable Game .. Not on Thinks that are useless for Release.
Thx
all Hyped Game where the same Trash as a 0,99€ Cent Game from Steam
Rather, I would prefer to see the people of towns show some sign of celebration times, whether holiday or perhaps an event for stage 3+ nodes of a travelling fair that gives the mood.
For the world itself, i'd prefer to see the monster and drop spawns to reflect the 'holiday' such as more Undead around Halloween, more Elementals around the Solstices, and possibly treasure hunts promoting PVP for Easter and X-mas.
I would have suggested seasonal foods and games for the Taverns would fit but the weekly seasonal at the moment won't fit that unless we get in lore that each year is 52 weekly seasons long (Game of Thrones did have winter was coming for far longer than a year).
Examples from personal experience, with pros and cons:
From Lineage 2, new year or Christmas event: each day you get a snowball, you speak to a chain of NPCs, each of them is located near seasonal decoration - one near Christmas tree, another near snowman etc. You spend 5 minutes, pay special attention to seasonal decorations, get holiday mood, and a set potions or something like that - nothing special but pretty useful. The only problem is that it was beneficial to be done on each character, so a player resulted in running between same NPCs for an hour each day, which is pretty boring but has to be done to save efforts on other grind.
From Bless Unleashed, Halloween event: a pumpkin mini-boss spawns on a city plaza, 10 minutes after it spawns in another city, then next one, then after they are killed there comes 8h cooldown. From the boss you get coins that you can exchange for goodies, lots of them can be exchanged for limited-time cosmetics, the rest is exchanged for useless consumables. At the beginning the boss was killed in 2 minutes, allowing enough time to tp to another city, check in-game mail, chat with clan in discord, get back to watching soap opera on another monitor - common afk event. After most players got enough coins for cosmetics, there was little players to fight the boss, which took over 30 mins each boss, most players dropped this activity and the other ways to farm coins to get limited cosmetics were just as slow as fighting the boss. And obviously there was no way to get untradeable cosmetics with 2 characters on same account - both coins and cosmetics were bound to character and you could not participate with both in killing same boss.
Suggestions:
- event rewards should be beneficial enough to participate but not so valuable to force players drop other activities
- event should not take more than 30 mins per day, regardless of the number of player's characters
- event activity must be accessible by any character on the account, but the rewards and number of accomplishing should be limited to account not the character. Make sure reward is not tradeable, there are no cases when reward is strongly desired to be obtained by several characters to prevent extra grind or cases similar to the above when a player had to decide which one of his characters will get limited time cosmetics
- event activities should not strongly rely on cooperation with other players - it should be solo, or small groups without need of understanding mechanics (like 5 person dungeon or boss fight that don't require you to spend an hour to form a party of players familiar with mechanics or explain them to everyone on party, or wait half a day for clan members to get online), or scheduled an a specific time to guarantee participation of enough players (but be sure to do something in case there are little players willing to participate making event difficult for those who do want to participate)
Under such conditions players will be very happy to see new events, especially related to actual holidays.
Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons (precursors of Stardewvalley) achieves this by adding 3 extra types of dialogue to NPC's dialogue pools:
These dialogue lines are only turned on in the week before and after the event, but they really help to mark the occasion, and it feels more like the town comes to life.
Personally, i like the exclusivity of logging in during a halloween, christmas, or spring event, and grinding a bit for the special armor or item that drops during that holiday/season. Now, this does not mean to make the events grind heavy, for most players will likely be busy with our families or offline friends during the holidays. A good balance of "work for the reward" and "have fun" should be key to a successful event, such as a holiday specific quest with a good plot.
As for the seasons being so short, the only problem i see is that the exclusivity of items and armor dropped during those seasons will decrease and become more 'common'. It might also burnout players faster if everything the seasons offer is available so quick.
@CROW3 - they're trying to steal your IDENTITY!!!
Hehe. There’s two of us now, one more and it’s murder time. 😉
Will the real crow, please stand up, please stand up?
I enjoy christmas like everyone else, but I dont need it in my games as well. Especially if the holidays are religion specific or US specific. Couldnt care less for any thanksgivings. High fantasy has no need of that. If you implement some Vera specific holidays, then I would be impressed
That said, when you schedule them is important as well. We, the players and the GMs, DO live in the real world and we get affected by real life holidays. There's a different vibe in the air around holiday seasons, and people get into the spirit of the real life holidays (to various degrees). So while I feel like in-game holidays are better, I also think it helps to put them close to real life holidays too, so players are more into the holiday spirit. It fits better to me. It doesn't have to be the same holiday, but you'll still get a similar feeling if there's a real holiday going on as well.
The other thing I've say is that I've played in several games where there were in-games holidays in times that were not around real life holidays, and they were not received well. They seemed rather random and easily forgotten. Since they weren't close to real life holidays, people were like "What's this random thing? Eh, whatever."
As people have noted, doing new things each year is good, but not everything. I've played in games where each year people looked forward to Trick or Treat, bobbing for apples, and other things. Traditional events for holidays are good, too. So while some new things are good, some things should be done every time as well.
I would highly encourage Intrepid to do real life seasonal events. And i think they will, because it would be a huge financial miss not to. Holidays are typically very stale with releases on content as developers are out of office and it's easy to just recycle holiday content each year to keep players entertained. It is also a time where people are sitting at home not doing much = gaming. It is often a time where people have some extra money to spend = spending it on time limited seasonal in-store items.