QOTD: How hard do YOU think open world content should be?

first and foremost i wanna sincerely thank all of you who wished me a happy birthday
doe i wasn't able to go too the shooting range due to my moms surgery that day i was able to have cake for the first time in years! so seriously thank you all who wished me a happy birthday, it made my day in many ways

now lets get onto todays topic!
QOTD: How hard do YOU think open world content should be? aka the tittle of this discussion!
do you think random open world content should be able to be soloed or do you think it should be made for small group sizes varying from 3-6 players?
lmk what you guys think!

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Sathrago

As this is going to have open world dungeons and bosses... The mobs themselves should be beefy and able to put the hurt on players of an equivalent level. In a pure dps race players should be able to 1v1 any normal mob but struggle once there are 3 or more. 6+ should be death for most classes but will be skewed if a class can aoe slow/damage similar to frost mages in classic wow.

And as for elites, for the most part you shouldnt be able to solo them with the exception of pet classes for obvious reasons. Perhaps you can kite one to death but yeah thats about it. Lastly, bosses should never be soloable.

This is all assuming appropriate area/level design.

Khronus

Hard AF

I want the world to be a dangerous place that makes us each think....Should I leave my home today or should I sit in my cozy little tavern and play silly mini games with others? On top of that I want people to think "Should I go farming for materials ro should I go farming for people for their farmed materials?".

I want it to feel punishing but highly rewarding for teamwork. Mindless button mashing to mow through mobs just isn't fun.

Yuquiyu

absolutely agreed!

Khronus wrote: »

Hard AF

so completely unplayable? cool cool

Nagash

See that's hard to say to be honest. I do love hard content but it has to be mechanically hard and not just a mob that takes 10 minutes to kill because its a ball of flesh.

mcstackerson

I want to say a medium difficulty, at least for normal mobs. It shouldn't be too much trouble to solo one, trying to kill 2-3 at a time should mean you will probably need to recover your health afterwards, and 5+ should mean you are in trouble.

FliP

Something essential as main quests should not be that hard. If you want to raise your difficulty, you can always go to higher level spots.

The leveling/questing experience should be balanced to be just right. It can be a bit more challenging when the game tries to teach you something, but otherwise the difficulty should be appropriate learning towards moderate to easy (if you followed all the steps and tasks the game told you to do).

Maezriel

Sathrago wrote: »

As this is going to have open world dungeons and bosses... The mobs themselves should be beefy and able to put the hurt on players of an equivalent level. In a pure dps race players should be able to 1v1 any normal mob but struggle once there are 3 or more. 6+ should be death for most classes but will be skewed if a class can aoe slow/damage similar to frost mages in classic wow.

And as for elites, for the most part you shouldnt be able to solo them with the exception of pet classes for obvious reasons. Perhaps you can kite one to death but yeah thats about it. Lastly, bosses should never be soloable.

This is all assuming appropriate area/level design.

I can agree w/ most of this, but I would add that elites should be soloable by those that know their class well. Groups can always make things easier and elites should present a challenge, but I like knowing that there's at least a chance if I play well.

Sathrago

Maezriel wrote: »

Sathrago wrote: »

As this is going to have open world dungeons and bosses... The mobs themselves should be beefy and able to put the hurt on players of an equivalent level. In a pure dps race players should be able to 1v1 any normal mob but struggle once there are 3 or more. 6+ should be death for most classes but will be skewed if a class can aoe slow/damage similar to frost mages in classic wow.

And as for elites, for the most part you shouldnt be able to solo them with the exception of pet classes for obvious reasons. Perhaps you can kite one to death but yeah thats about it. Lastly, bosses should never be soloable.

This is all assuming appropriate area/level design.

I can agree w/ most of this, but I would add that elites should be soloable by those that know their class well. Groups can always make things easier and elites should present a challenge, but I like knowing that there's at least a chance if I play well.

Ah yeah I meant that when i said "for the most part". I was trying to just stick with pure mechanics vs mechanics.

McShave

I want the mobs in Ashes to be challenging. I don't want this game to be a mindless button smashing to gain loot kinda game. Make me plan my pulls, and punish me for pulling too many mobs.

I also want to see elite monsters be elite again. If I have to bring some friends along to kill these elite guys, that just makes it feel like an mmo to me. Of course it should be worth killing these elite monsters. If they don't give a nice reward, like a blue item or crafting material, then elite monsters are just a nuisance to be avoided.

Dygz

Size doesn't matter.
I play RPGs for the story experience; not for the challenge.
I'm a casual challenge player rather than a hardcore challenge player.
I just want interesting stuff to do.
I don't need the mobs to be "difficult".

I would like the mobs to have diverse interactions so that I'm not always using the same 5 abilities in the exact same order or just based on cooldowns.
In WoW, I'm playing an Alliance Human for the first time ever (because I can finally create a character who looks like me). Druid is not available, so I'm playing a Rogue. Rogue as an ability called Kick which interrupts spell-casting. Normally, I use Kick fairly early in my rotation, but against Mages, I hold off on Kick until I see them start to cast. I'd like to be thinking, "Oh! If they are spellcasting Fireball, I'm going to counter with Hail."
I really just want to be able to think through different strategies with different mobs. And, I'd like to be able to adjust to and complement the abilities that other characters around me might be using.

I also wish we had more complex mobs. Pantheon game design has dispositions: Blood-thirsty; Cunning; Alarmist; Sniper; Pyrophobic.
I'd love to have some like that added into the mix.

George_Black

Up to lv 25 players should be able to solo with good gains.

After 25 a duo trio is best till 35 for good gains. Solo should slow down a lot.

35-40 should be a group effort to maintain good gains.

40-50 gains should be hard and slow for a group and fruitless for non group. If you wanna solo/small team past 40 expect death to be very ez and returns very small and slow

Open world should be hard.
Archers should use bows, not spears. Players should maintain good provisions and groups should look for a good composition, not yolo.

Warth

Normal monster should be killable 1v1 by the player. Taking up to 3 would be okay as well, no mindless group leashing would be good though.
Elites should require anything between 2-4 People. Certain Specs should be able to solo them thuogh.
Boss for 1-2 Groups
Raidbosses for 5 Groups
World Bosses for 5+ Groups

Raidbosses und Group Sized Bosses

In terms of actual mechanical difficulty. I don't think that bosses need to be easier than Instanced Bosses at all. Just give the players attempting the boss a defensible access to the boss room, which can be a portal (as we have seen in the AoC Dungeons already) or narrow chokepoints you have to pass in order to get to the boss arena. People who want to try the boss undisturbed can just bring a second or even third raid to help defend their attempt. If people can't kill certain bosses, because all their attempts get disturbed by a rivaling guild, that there are still a couple of options available:

bring more people to defend your raid
Ally up with other guilds to help defend each other's boss attempts
make a pact with your rivaling guild

If they can't do that, then they shouldn't be the ones killing the boss in the first place.
Its supposed to be a social game about community. Let the community resolve these issue through social interaction instead of arbitrary or pseudo instancing.

Regular Monsters

should be killable alone, but each one of them should have the possibility of killing you, if you just mindlessly hammer on your buttons. There is a lot of games, where monsters have deeper mechanics which you can simply ignore., as failing them has basicaly no consequences (maybe 5% damage to your health).

I pray that AoC won't be one of them. Each monster doesn't need a plethora of mechanics, but failing them should hurt significantly with the threat of dying for multiple failures. These mechanics should be knowledge based or telegraphed, not random to keep the player a fair chance to not die at all if he plays properly.

Cathartidae

Warth wrote: »

Regular Monsters

should be killable alone, but each one of them should have the possibility of killing you, if you just mindlessly hammer on your buttons. There is a lot of games, where monsters have deeper mechanics which you can simply ignore., as failing them has basicaly no consequences (maybe 5% damage to your health).

I pray that AoC won't be one of them. Each monster doesn't need a plethora of mechanics, but failing them should hurt significantly with the threat of dying for multiple failures. These mechanics should be knowledge based or telegraphed, not random to keep the player a fair chance to not die at all if he plays properly.

I like this point about 1v1 monsters a lot - they can be easily handled, but you have to be paying attention to 'not stand in the fire'
I think that's a great way to reward conscious play, and it lets you handle things way above your level if you play well enough

Vhaeyne

@Yuquiyu Maybe you should start putting the date in the thread topic. Something like (12/3/2020) Or something. Might make it easier to keep track of these. I do like them. On to the topic...

I do like difficulty in my open world content. I want to see more of a focus on needing groups to do anything.
It is one of the things that was so good about FFXI. Getting anywhere was a time sync, finding a group was a time sync, being in a group was a time sync. All of this made the game feel more rewarding. When you could not find a group you were stuck doing content under your level. Which was fine. It made you want to socialize more. It made you want to be apart of communities within the game to get into groups faster. Then when you log on, you have people asking you to come do things within minutes. If you conduct yourself right, you end up having so many opportunities that you have to turn down groups. Sure, you can get that in any game, but when everything is so hard solo that you need a group to do just about anything. The socialization just ends up being better. You would have to have player a old school MMO to really get a feel for this.

Crosim

I totally agree with Vhaeyne, dates would be great.

As for difficulty, I think it should be hard but fair. Open-world content for classic wow is an ok example of mob-danger. However, I do feel like things should slowly ramp up to be harder to always solo. Playing with others should always be a bonus, and I feel like group experience should appropriately reflect this. If fighting equal level normal mobs is a bit of a danger, playing with a duo should let you mostly relax, but playing with a full party in an open world dungeon or elite area should always be the most efficient.

PlagueMonk

The majority of it should be soloable, depending on level. So at cap level I should be able to go anywhere and have a decent chance of killing something.

Of course I also think there should be some OW bosses / things that require both a full group and a raid to take down.

DiscoDuke

Older gamers such as myself who grew up playing tabletop D&D do not have the fast reflexes of the younger gamers. It would be extremely frustrating to support the games development only to find that the majority of the games content will never be experienced due to a difficulty cap. There are plenty of combat, survival approached games. To take such a well designed and complex game, will all the deep systems and make if too difficult to play, would drive a significant share of the market away. Make the game too easy, and the reward for playing looses its value. Make it too hard and many will never enjoy all that the game has to offer. The key is finding the balance.

OnlyOne

On a scale of 1 to Random Skyrim Bear encounters.... Bears all the way.

Mename

mcstackerson wrote: »

I want to say a medium difficulty, at least for normal mobs. It shouldn't be too much trouble to solo one, trying to kill 2-3 at a time should mean you will probably need to recover your health afterwards, and 5+ should mean you are in trouble.

I agree. You have to allow those solo types some way to play. Just not Monty hall easy.

Michael

I definitely enjoy having to actually watch my step in an open world environment. I don't want to be able to just run on through a camp of Pygmies and be just fine. Being attacked 2-3 monsters that aren't very small creatures should be difficult enough to where you actually have to pay attention. Maybe at least in areas like Village or greater. I can understand in the lower node tiers like Wilderness, Expedition, and Camp maybe could be a little on the easier side for newer players. But I would like to see the difficulty get more difficult to how I described it once you are at the Village stage.

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