Concepts to avoid

George_Black

Since Im bored out of my mind, having finished with Elden Ring, I sometimes login to eso.
And what do I see? Yet another gameplay mistake, this time combat related.

ESO is introducing yet another bad gear set. It boosts your stats, but you can only slot half your active abilities in your hotbar.


What is this? What's wrong with these developers? Not only they turned they game into a solo experience, being not challenging and 90% npc interaction gameplay, not only all the combat is random AoE dmg coming from gear dealing damage with you doing nothing but:
normal attack
Heal yourself
Land a critical hit now they want to remove half the abilities from players hotbars.




Once again I caution Intrepid to bring back active combat (not talking about action vs tab target) back into the game.

Yes, give us stats and let us choose which ones we want to focus on, give us heavy, medium and robe armor with their pros and cons, but ultimately bring back large hotbars and individual ability cooldowns (based on their impact and utilities).
And nice animations...

SongRune

Well, ESO was always going to go in that direction...

George_Black

Ye, I welcome people to post their cautionary tales. It doesnt have to relate to what I posted.

Sathrago

My advice for mmo makers is to avoid creating inconveniences for the sake of monetary gain or time spent played.

So to use eso as an example for the monetary gain, their reagent storage system. This garbage forces anyone wanting to engage with professions to pay for the premium subscription or suffer severe lack of storage space. There is no other reason save to make money off creating an artificial problem the player wants to subvert and giving them one way to do it, paying up.

The next example is blatant time gating to forcefully increase player metrics. We look to world of warcrafts renown system in the latest expansion, where it simultaneously encouraged you to play daily to fill it out but also cut you off from progression once you got to a certain threshold, forcing you to wait 2-4 weeks for the next section to be opened up so that you can rinse and repeat.


Another thing I wish games would avoid is locking content behind microtransactions. I believe Warframe approach this the best way possible. Last time I checked, outside of rare promotional or founder items, all cosmetics, weapons, etc can be earned ingame through gameplay. You can even trade other players for their shop currency allowing you to directly purchase from their shop in a free to play friendly manner. Yes this impacts the sales but is just a much more enjoyable experience for casual and hardcore players alike. Whales can whale and people that want to play for free can do so without feeling heavily pressured to spend money on the game.

SirChancelot

I kind of worry about overcorrection with the level of difficulty. I don't want something mindless, but there is a point where making it too hardcore will hurt the game.

Yeah I know even Stephen says the game isn't going to be for everyone, that's well and fine, but if there isn't enough of a player base to keep it running or to fill out all the servers after the launch surge it's going to feel bad even for the hardcore players when their world starts to empty.

Basically I'm worried about Wildstar happening again, the game becoming too difficult and exclusive at high levels that their late game retention tanked.

Voxtrium

@SirChancelot The core gameplay loop centers around player to player interaction... sieges caravans etc, thats only as hard as one makes it. The rest is just balance and something we cant speak onto yet