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AAA successful formula vs Elden Ring Attitude ( for AoC ideas) (GOTY 2022)
MybroViajero
Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GxzPymc8u4What is more important?
Follow a formula that can ensure (not always) that your game sells or have the attitude to do things differently to create something unique.
Elden Ring contains much of the successful formula of the Souls games but at the same time it has an attitude to follow its own path thanks to this it has managed to create a unique environment and immersion that is reflected in the satisfaction of its players giving it very positive reviews.
How could this be interpreted for AoC?
What Elden Ring things could give AoC ideas?
What Elden Ring things shouldn't give AoC ideas?
Some developers think that Elden Ring does not deserve the success that it currently has, why would that be?
Any negative or positive contribution that comes from Elden Ring is welcome for the good of AoC
2
Comments
Having the attitude to follow your own path to be successful is different from 100% copying a formula.
Features I like so far (in no particular order)
The main thing I don't like is the console porting to PC makes the controls awkward at times, and the customization for UI is limited.
Overall it's a good place to go for ideas
I love how a lot of the environments tell a story. I love seeing something in the world and wondering what happened in the area. This is made easier to notice by the minimalist HUD which hides itself whenever it can. It really helps with immersion and i hope they take a similar approach.
I like the none-linear gameplay. It always feels like there is a lot you can do besides following the main story. One thing MMOs can have a problem with is how linear they can be. The multiplayer, competitive environment encourages you to race to max level. Not only do games encourage this by rewarding a lot of power with levels that make other forms of progression easier but any items you could earn at low levels will be outclassed by items that are given to you in later levels, making any extra time spent getting an item feel wasted.
One of the options the Elden Ring gives you is enhancement, which allows you to keep any weapon you find relevant throughout the game. I could see it feeling better to spend time getting items while leveling if there is a system like this that gives you the option to keep the gear you earn relevant.
As for developer comments, here is a comment from the Executive Producer (thanks Talents) of Riots MMO before the game dropped.
Interesting! So, what other examples or things would you want to see having to do with lore and environments?
I also personally think this idea that UI had to do with how you interacted and felt with the world is very intriguing ^_^
He's the Executive Producer, not the Creative Director. The closest person to being a CD that we know of is Mark Yetter when it comes to the Riot MMO since his title is "Game Director".
I don't think a lot about these things but i can try to give my assumptions.
For lore, i think mystery is very powerful since it allows players to think about the lore instead of just knowing it. Allows players to speculate and come up with their own theories. Even if things are heavily implied, not giving a concrete answer gives the community that wiggle room to change assumptions, create new hypotheses, and go down crazy rabbit holes of speculation.
For environment, wither you're using it during combat, traversing it, or it's telling you a story, the more the environment makes you think, the better. During combat, it is nice if you can use it to hide or get a positional advantage. When trying to get places, it's good if the path isn't always clear so you have to figure out how to get to where you want to go. I already mentioned i like when a place is designed in a way that hints of previous events that occurred in the location.
While typing this, i realized that my idea of fun definitely involves thinking so not sure how true that is for everyone.
My friends and I played some co-op and the sheer amount of things each of us had uniquely experienced or found that could be shared with the others was incredible. Most games today either don’t hide anything, or hold your hand so much you don’t ever need to worry about sharing info with other people.
Ashes of Creation should have that feel
Despite liking this, it doesn't apply to MMOS. People won't take the time, they will just look at a guide, or have an addon telling you where the quest zone is.
Someone will have to take the time to figure it out to make the guide. There are also guides for everything in Elden Ring.
I don't see the presence of guides as being a good reason to make content brain dead. For starters, there are people, like those who make the guides, who enjoy figuring it out. There are people who are going to at least make some attempt at figuring it out before looking for a guide. When using guides, it's not uncommon for you to have to adapt it for your situation and figure some elements out. Lastly, even if you use a guide, doesn't mean you can't appreciate what you had to do and the effort put into creating it.
When it comes to Ashes, the game also has it's node system that changes the world as well as the content in it. Guides made on one server wont tell you everything on another. They also can become outdated as time passes and content changes.
To me, Elden Ring disproves your logic. Even though we have the internet that can tell us everything, people are still able to enjoy a game that doesn't.
Sure. Though I wouldn't take those players into account when designing the difficulty level, it would just lead to a watered down experience across the board (i.e. Lost Ark, FFXIV, most mobile RPGs).
Set a higher standard and let others water it down for the Philistines.
By that same token the level of effort Elden Ring goes to actually subtly hinting, giving context clues, and giving various 'break point' mechanics to essentially let the player modify their own difficulty level in exploration is quite in depth. This game definitely has a bunch of 'hand holding', but importantly you can opt out of it.
For example, finding caves/dungeons, there are six levels. From hardest to easiest difficult:
Hardcore difficulty no map, just explore logical locations and let the context clues of area design and your sense of observation be your guide. There are rules to where you find caves and dungeons, but it requires real explorers experience and observation skills. All the context clues here are in the level design.
The next level keeps things immersive by making cryptic clues via merchants and npcs. Spend money to get slightly more info, sometimes npc's will also give you info. Making the most of these hints requires explorer skill and good level design.
The next level of ease are the spirit statues. These will point a vague direction. You still have to explore the local area and have basic explorer knowledge to investigate safely and quickly. Sometimes they will show you the way directly, sometimes they can be frustratingly difficult in only giving you basic information, but in a way that's just the difference between a truly difficult to find dungeon and an easier one.
The second easiest level is of course the map markers. You may argue where this falls on the hierarchy, but they make the marks on the map just obscure enough that it's not always clear, it's inconsistently helpful, and due to lack of autopathing, doesn't actually show you how to GET to a place. Still, it lets completionists get most exploration done quickly.
Finally, the easiest thing is those damn candelabras that literally walk you to the dungeon. These are brilliant, however they are not available for all dungeons, and they do a good job of teaching an inexperienced player the basics of what to look for if they pay good enough attention. It's a mechanic designed to help you grow as an explorer.
Lastly you can obviously just look up a guide. The ultimate 'fail point' level. But they serve their own purpose.
Each layer of difficulty builds on the previous in an elegant way. It's up to you how many hints there are, but there are hints to get if you are stuck, and there are ways to get hints without getting to 'look it up on youtube just so you can stop being frustrated. Now, I would call ALL of these levels 'hand holding'. But it is quite frankly, the best WAY to handhold because there are so many fail safes from you going to the darkside of 'looking up a guide' that most people will never feel that pressure if they really want to enjoy the experience. At the bare minimum I want at least 'well designed subtle context clues', NPC hints, and vague map clues. However I really believe that the two different statues/candleabras are really effective 'optional difficulty levels' while also being good teachers when executed properly. More importantly they don't really tell you how to open locked dungeons which is a whole other layer of tools the game has to alter difficulty level, exploration, and immersion.
More games need this type of optional difficulty system in order to tamp down on the amount of guides that are even 'need'. Because once you look up a guide for one thing, it becomes exponentially 'easier' to give in to the temptation or have things 'spoiled. I think most of these systems could easily go in ashes with some careful intentional design and effort. The principles that go into creating these systems are applicable to many other areas of the game not just 'finding dungeons.' This type of 'pro-player' 'pro-optional difficulty' style of thinking is the thing that will radically save gaming and it's slowly becoming more prevalent in the industry.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
We should expect to be on our toes, adapting to those changes, as we try to comprehend the context of the lore unlocked by the various factions controlling Castles month by month. And as different races govern the various Nodes.
Which Religion dominates a server should also bring novelty to the lore of a server. As well as which Social Orgs are dominant.
I don't think the devs can do much hand-holding in that regard.
Contextual clues are good as long as they are vague - especially if it’s provided by an NPC. Some of my favorite quest types are the ‘lost person’ quests. Guard Thomas in Elwynn for example.
The spoon fed way to deliver this quest is with specific location descriptions, markers, notifications, and contextual clues that all by scream ‘you’ve arrived.’ As if players are idiots.
A quest giver would know some specifics: what do some of the folks on the patrol look like, what was the objective of the patrol, and if the quest giver is familiar with a landmark on that patrol route.
Then turn the player loose. If a patrol encountered light resistance maybe they pursed their quarry and got caught in weather - or a larger ambush. Maybe there was an act of mutiny, or the patrol was waylaid by brigands and are going to be ransomed or sold to slavers.
Whatever it is, the answers are going to be in tells vaguely in THAT direction. It’s on the player to risk the dangers to find out for the quest giver. The dude with the quest knew - why the hell does he need me?
From a design perspective, I wouldn’t want to build any additional handholding tools for the player, because I know at least 25-100 YouTubers will cover this exact quest at some point.
I think the biggest flaw with 'leave it to youtubers' is the same reason 'leave it to the community for onboarding' is flawed. If your user experience in game is bad, it's simply going to leave people either hanging or dependent on external sources. In short, it lowers the game quality and relies on community networks that aren't always going to be active. The longer a game can keep you in the GAME to solve a problem, the better the overall end user experience. Guides SHOULD be the 'last resort' for anyone actually serious about exploration. But a poorly built system can lead to FOMO, frustration, and an over all poor teaching experience. These ultimately lead to poor new user experiences, poor retention, and poor content engagement in ANY part of the game, not just exploration.
For example if you make exploration completely randomized by node and randomize context clues to introduce artificial difficulty in exploration, I think that would be anti-player design and lead to people finding exploration to be a relatively shallow and dismissable piece of content. Why? Because it invalidates exploration based skills. If the context clues are random in favor of 'not hand holding', then there is nothing to learn nor skills to master. People WILL go to those youtubers and your content will be broken down for scrap (whatever the end game reward is) and nothing else. This over all leads to a waste of effort in the other parts of the design around the content.
If exploration is going to be a major part of this game, there needs to be actual DESIGN around it and actually practicable and masterable skills with a few set game play loops. I think that's my over all difference of opinion from you. If there are skills and content in a game, then they need to be taught by the game in an experiential and engaging way and the reward system needs to work around it. If people want to SKIP your content because they aren't the target audience for that content by 'using youtube videos' that doesn't invalidate the content. But an explorer's first instinct is PROBABLY not going to be 'look it up on youtube.' Not teaching skills and making things skill-less and/or frustrating without effect multiple tiers of hint giving for difficult otoh absolutely WILL invalidate your content and be welfare for those youtube accounts just as it does in any other action adventure puzzle game.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
That has destroyed so much immersion in the last MMOs that it seems customary for that to happen and it really scares me that it will happen to AoC.
It is strange but that has not happened to Elden Ring, as it is so divergent in its construction and open world, I think that helped a lot so that it did not happen so much.
Yes but those videos came out after their release, not before.
When NW came out, it was already known what to do in almost all the content.
When LA came out, it was already known what to do in almost all the content.
Visual cue games do this, but have low replayability... twitch skill games do it but have high skill requirements compared to the average population, and tactics/strategy games do it but it depends on their dynamism.
Most well-received games these days seem to be some combination of the three, no reason why an MMO can't be too.
I'm not a big fan of questing for xp because I think they take too much time/resources that could be better spent into the end game where we will ultimately spend most of the time anyways. Therefore I think that most quests should be "hand-holding" because there should only be quests that guide you around the game. Save the elaborate quests for meaningful items/events at end game.
AoC wants to promote partying up and dungeon-crawling in shared dungeons therefore you need to have people grouping up early on in your game. If you design your game to have quests that take you from 1-Max lvl then people are going to be rushing around from quest to quest, the only parties formed will be 5min parties to kill the tough mobs for some quest and the only interaction between each other might be a "gg" at the end.
Instead I think you want your quests to guide people to places of interest, tell them what they can do for solo/group play and tell them to talk to you once they reach the next milestone you have setup for them. Players will then either form groups or go solo in order to meet those requirements and come back when they are ready.
Typically, we are forced to spend months and years in endgame - waiting for new content - because players are able to race through content faster than devs can create it.
But, the true goal of MMORPGs is to forever have new quests.
Being stuck in endgame is a failure - not a goal.
Fun and well-being correlate with variety. God of War's world was constructed in a way that maximized variety. One moment you are in Velhaim, then Nephelhaim then somewhere else etc. etc. The whole world changed. Every world(and part of the main map with the boat) gave new stories, new enemies, different objectives, different level design and it's own unique side-quests which felt fresh every time etc. Exploration was hella addictive. I never felt so addicted to exploring in any other game.
This is true for AoC as well because Steven wants to build a living world in which each zone changes overtime and unlocks different content based on the actions of every player on the server.
The combat in God of War was crisp as fuck. It was simple, responsive, offered difficulty and it was left up to the player what he wanted to do with it. Thanks to it being simple and responsive it allowed the player to combine the few simple moves in many different ways. This created player-driven variety in terms of the combat which was amazing and never before felt. The game used combinations of different types of very simple enemies combined with different environment elements to create very complex situations for the player to figure out how to surmount using their positioning and their own custom build and custom way of sequencing the abilities. (This was felt more when playing on the higher difficulties of the game.)
I really dislike Souls games in this regard because the combat is very clunky and slow. It almost feels like a turn based game and it feels like the Devs created each weapon and encounter with a specific way to be played disallowing the player to do anything other than what the Devs had in mind.
The only bad part of God of War which I felt was that some abilities were almost completely identical to each other.
If AoC can build such an addictive to explore world, such crisp, responsive combat and such clever use of combining simple enemies together and using environment to create clever and complex combat situations as last GoW did then I'll probably become a helpless AoC addict