Environmental hazards: gating in MMOs

I have always found that gating, when done well, can be a huge motivator for me to play a game more or better. The best example of this I can think of is in old school runescape where certain quests (which were themselves gated by skill checks and pre-requisite quests) unlocked entire areas and mechanics. To feel like your progress and achievements made the world a bigger place and a bigger playground for you to play in was deeply satisfying. Most other games accomplish this by zone level. In vanilla WoW, I was excited to level up to see new zones like winterspring and the searing gorge that I sometimes would fly over in my flight paths.

In AoC, there is much less of a sense of gating for the biomes. You could in principle waltz to any biome at any time and know that at least there will be areas (i.e. near the roads) that will be safe for even a lvl 1 player. Seeing a volcano looming in the distance that you could visit is cool, but to be able to just walk to it/up it whenever takes away the possibility of building up anticipation and the mystery of a biome.

I propose that AoC could take advantage of environmental hazards to gate biomes and add a sense of preparation that will make exploration of new biomes exciting and rewarding. I do not propose any survival-game mechanic, just a simple gear check: the player could have an item slot dedicated to dealing with environmental hazards with no combat stat benefit (like a second cloak slot), that could allow for safe traversal of a particular biome type. Each biome would have just this one item to gate its entry without some repetitive loop and roads + the node settlement itself would be exempt from any environmental hazard impact. Furthermore, having an appropriate mount type would exempt the player from any hazard debuff during mounted movement through the respective biome.

The cloak for each biome could have 3 tiers. Tier1 for general zone exploration, tier2 for dungeon access and tier3 for raid/special area access. The access to the first tier of cloak could be as trivial as trading 10 hides of a plentiful mob in the biome to an existing NPC at the settlement (even lvl 1 settlement) or could be crafted by players for super cheap. This should be with the exception of the very first cloak that would be given to you at the divine gate (you can choose which biome cloak) so players can go where they want initially without being delayed. Tier 2/3 cloaks would require some biome specific resources that could either be bought or collected by the player and again, either crafted by players or by some NPC in the node (or the NPC could teach the blueprint). Of course tier 2/3 cloaks would only be acquired at node levels that spawn dungeons, raids or special world boss areas. T3 cloaks should only be required for high end raiding.

This makes the environmental hazard mechanic also act as a sort of 'attunement' mechanic. This attunement would have some nice side effects for the player-base and the world. It will specialize guilds and groups for their specific biome (early on in the game, before everyone eventually gets every hazard cloak). Similarly, it gives gatherers more identity as they may gather from areas not accessible by every player. It also helps put some minimal cost for zerging efforts. Lastly, it could easily be used as an actual attunement mechanic and prevent massive cluster-fucks of players of all levels interfering with efforts to take down a world boss. If only players with correct T3 cloaks can access the area with the world boss, it will be a much more focused contest between a few guilds fighting for the world boss while other guilds/players will be trying to earn their T3 cloaks or providing support around this special hazard zone (e.g. if players die in the T3 zone they would spawn outside so mercenaries could still be hired to slow down these players from getting back into the T3 zone).

These anti-hazard cloaks could have their own space to avoid taking up inventory (like the keychain in vanilla WoW) and could be freely switched between to match the hazard at hand. The developers would also have a few variables to play around with to match the desired effect. For example they could be bind on pickup to avoid buying/selling of them. They could have increasing costs to earn as you own more cloak types making it a bit more effortful to gain access to more and more biomes (but still very attainable).

The actual consequence of the hazard could be reduced movement speed and combat effectiveness (should be quite a hefty debuff). It should allow players to kill single mobs of the type required for the materials to get the T1 cloak but would provide a huge disadvantage fighting stronger mobs/elites or in PvP. To avoid this being annoying for world travel, roads would be free of this hazard so players could pass through the zone just fine and with a bit more investment, you could own an appropriate mount to just run through the zone ignoring roads if they please. For example scaly reptile mounts would allow safe passage in jungles, wooly mounts in frozen biomes etc.

Lastly, there is some forum post about using cloaks for camouflage (which imo should include reducing mob agro radius in the matching biome) and other fun RP stuff that this would pair well with.

Anyways, this hazard system would make it exciting to explore and travel to new biomes with a sense of preparation and progress without tedium. It will have no huge impact in preventing certain nodes from being competitive even early on in the server's life and specialize players early without impacting the accessibility of the world much in the long run.

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Comments

Geophysical Ninja

Boanergese wrote: »

At level 10 I don't want to have to weave some furs in order to go into a winter biome is what I was trying to say.

I feel you. At one point, I was super excited about the hypothermia mod in Skyrim. That got old rather quickly. I am no longer a fan of survival mechanics.

neuroguy

Geophysical Ninja wrote: »

Boanergese wrote: »

At level 10 I don't want to have to weave some furs in order to go into a winter biome is what I was trying to say.

I feel you. At one point, I was super excited about the hypothermia mod in Skyrim. That got old rather quickly. I am no longer a fan of survival mechanics.

Yeah, I was really hoping to avoid a survival feel in the proposed mechanic but I'm missing something. There needs to be more freedom early on for players that the 1 cloak per biome doesn't really provide. I stand by the fact that no zone levels and free access to the whole world makes no particular biome special or exciting to travel to but I haven't come up with a good solution, maybe close though...?

If players can travel to any biome freely up until a certain level (15?20?) where their character has 'acclimated' to ~3 biomes they've spent the most time in and now they need cloaks for all other biomes that their body had not grown accustomed to? Haha I don't know :P I think the spirit of my desire has been well communicated already though.

neuroguy

Rohkai wrote: »

I personally feel that the only "Gating" needed is the level of the zone it's self. If I'm level 10 and I go walking into a lv50 zone, I expect to get my arse handed to me, quite unceremoniously I might add. I do think that a cautious individual should be able to stick to roads, and skirting around hazards should still be able to pass through that zone. If I roll an Orc, but my friend decides to roll a Dwarf, and we want to play together... one of us is running at lv2ish to the starter zone the other is in.

But 'zones' in AoC do not have levels. Every part of the world will have harder content the further you go away from the road and settlement as Atama mentioned; and the higher the node level, the harder the content furthest from 'civilization' will be. So there is no real gating by level when it comes to the visual experience of the biomes. There may parts of the geography within each biome that may be gated by lvl assuming the node has a high enough lvl, but all biomes will always be accessible to anyone and everyone with the possibility that there may be no content high enough lvl for you (but never will there be an absence of content for lower lvl characters, or so I understand).

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