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Make starting villages hard again
mrwaffles
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Starting villages are currently designed to teach and I agree with this completely. They teach new adventures:
Once the player grasps these concepts, they can easily bypass this area if they reroll or start on a new server. The game even encourages this behavior with having a toggle button, found in some UI menu, to “Disable hints/tutorials”. This is designed to minimize the taxing early level grind and stop popup fatigue (as relates to the hints).
With Ashes there is two important concepts I feel the starting village also needs to teach a player:
-
To do this let us make the starting village surrounding mob camps pretty hard. To first timers it will feel like a crawl out of the starting village for sure, but when they scrape their way out they’ll see just how big the game really is and that it was worth slowing down and not just rushing through content. Hopefully with the struggle they had with killing a few bears they wont underestimate what they see before them.
For veteran players I hope it encourages them to see others around them and instead of easily ignoring them because “I just need to get past this BS so I can start having real fun”. If you really want to “just get through this” then find you a noob and party up and play mentor. You know you are all guilty of seeing someone struggling while you bolt past them to get to your mailbox or a teleport. I hope it will also play as an obstacle for quick rerolls. I’m not saying people shouldn’t reroll, but in fact really get into their roll and layout a well thought out plan. Because screw those red bears, with an agro leash for days, that’s just outside starting zone A.
TLDR;
Starting villages are just meant to teach basics and nothing more. They should have hard mobs to also teach caution and death system. Veterans could take the opportunity to assists new players to “get through” the starting zones faster.
- The games UI
- Movement
- Combat
- Quest system
- Introduction to storyline
- And a bunch more things
Once the player grasps these concepts, they can easily bypass this area if they reroll or start on a new server. The game even encourages this behavior with having a toggle button, found in some UI menu, to “Disable hints/tutorials”. This is designed to minimize the taxing early level grind and stop popup fatigue (as relates to the hints).
With Ashes there is two important concepts I feel the starting village also needs to teach a player:
-
- This game is HARD
- AoC is not forgiving of death
To do this let us make the starting village surrounding mob camps pretty hard. To first timers it will feel like a crawl out of the starting village for sure, but when they scrape their way out they’ll see just how big the game really is and that it was worth slowing down and not just rushing through content. Hopefully with the struggle they had with killing a few bears they wont underestimate what they see before them.
For veteran players I hope it encourages them to see others around them and instead of easily ignoring them because “I just need to get past this BS so I can start having real fun”. If you really want to “just get through this” then find you a noob and party up and play mentor. You know you are all guilty of seeing someone struggling while you bolt past them to get to your mailbox or a teleport. I hope it will also play as an obstacle for quick rerolls. I’m not saying people shouldn’t reroll, but in fact really get into their roll and layout a well thought out plan. Because screw those red bears, with an agro leash for days, that’s just outside starting zone A.
TLDR;
Starting villages are just meant to teach basics and nothing more. They should have hard mobs to also teach caution and death system. Veterans could take the opportunity to assists new players to “get through” the starting zones faster.
3
Comments
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
There've been a few videos about this but this wiki post explains the highlights. Also, if you care much about lore this is where the Divine Gateways are located and where we, as players, came from Sanctus to Verra.
As for your comment about scaling I'm guess the starting areas will be quite a bit away from nodes to allow the node to grow and level. I'd assume they are going to be geographically located around multiple nodes as to not steer players to one single node more then another.
Yeah, my solution would be to just have the divine gates in a node that is just locked at node level 0 or 1, and unaffected, by surrounding nodes. Throw in some race related architecture and call it a day. I don't think it needs to be more complex than that.
A well written in-game reference manual, and the community can fill out the rest.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
It's extremely funny to me in particular because I did this exact same thing to my current dnd group. They have been in the jungles and swamp lands for literal months being attacked by all sorts of "fun" and totally not scary creatures.
As it relates to starting areas. Most games will make you play though zone after zone of preplanned story. It is also common for a game to let you choose zone a or b at level 10 or something. I like a game where I can go straight into the caves, and start mining. Then I realize that monsters in the cave mess me up. So now I am motivated to grind some levels and gold to do well in the mines. It is not exactly like the open world DMing style I described, but closer to it than quest chains.
FFXI, Darkfall, Lineage 2, SWG, Mortal Online, UO, were all like this when I played them.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
The map of Verra shows the starting areas (divine gateways) and two starting settlements attached to each.
Wandering Mist posted a good video recently on implementing tutorials. I'm in favor of being able to skip any tutorial and just look things up in a codex (or ask guildmates, or google) when I need to know something.
Google "viva la dirt league souls logic" if you want an adult comedy take on starting a tough single player RPG.
There's a lot of moments I can relate to. "rolypoly" made me laugh hard.
The PvP part of the game already guarantees there will be plenty of PKers camping any area around a starting zone and going from a brutal PvE straight into a mob of players will likely turn into a gauntlet of frustration and wasted time than a fun game experience
Thanks for the video that was hilarious!
This is kind of my point. The one thing Dark Souls does to new players is pretty much teach them that this is going to hurt. I'm all in favor of skipping tutorial on reply but the mobs difficulty shouldn't be crab level easy starting off.