I also don't foresee the game going the way of WAR, in fact the 'worst case scenario' isn't actually all that terrible, it'd be the game being a bit like LOTRO... and no I don't mean the Free-to-play bit but being a successful game that is still regularly backed by the developers with new content.
Trion doesn't have a big bad company like EA breathing down their necks, which is why the beta has gone so wonderfully overall.
How did WAR fail? I played the beta, enjoyed it enough but I didn't see a reason to play it since it is essentially the some treadmill as every other MMO.
If a game like WAR can turn a profit and appear to fail so badly (did it even last a year? It died pretty fast...) is the monthly cost too high? Seems kind of insane that they can turn a profit like that.
Released September, 2008.
Edit: WAR failed for a few reasons. One being that I think they bought the spoonfed bullshit Paul Barnett spouted, but also because they halfway through development had EA buy Mythic to 'support' them. Thing is EA wanted a contender to go up against WoW's next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, and so they pushed it to be released a month or two prior to WotLK releasing.
Was a disaster from what I've read, the game didn't even have all the classes in. In the end, after that free month was up... people jumped ship from what was an inferiorly made product to the shiny new expansion of WoW. Obviously not everyone left, since it was the only decent PvP game on the market that wasn't a spreadsheet in space. The fact that our 'depression' happened here in the States at the same time only sealed WAR's fate quicker.
The crafting system tiers is another standard idea that works. You want players to have smaller goals inside of larger goals inside of even larger goals. Tiny carrots along the way to keep them feeling rewarded. You just got a new recipe. Reward. You just finished Novice. Reward. If crafting was simply "I'm 230/255," it would be less interesting. And the refining materials thing, well that's just a time sink. You'll never see those disappear in an MMO. In a singleplayer game, you want to remove any aspect that is boring in any way needlessly, but in an MMO, that doesn't work.
What he was meaning, I think, Is that you cannot early train so you'd have to stop. For instance, Lets say im at 70 crafting. I have enough points to level 20 times. I have to level 5 times, stop, go to sanctum, train again, start crafting. With wow's crafting system of "You can expand your cap 25 points before you reach it" any time after level 50 you could raise your cap from 75 to 150 without having to stop in the middle of your crafting to run to the sanctum to level. It saves you from having to make ONLY enough points to make sure you don't go over the 75 point cap before stopping immediately to go to sanctum to raise your cap.
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I got to 75 crafting by the time I was level 17. Considering the first trainers in argent whatever don't train you past the first level, I had to stop and go to sanctum for every crafting level I needed, or to train whenever I reached a new 10 level plateau.
CorriganX on
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
Hm, that may be the case in Silverwood/Freemarch however I noted that the trainers in Gloamwood/Stonefield have the same title as the ones in Meridian/Sanctum so I imagine you can bump up your crafting 'rank'.
You have to upgrade skills at a vendor because money is created in the economy out of thin air and it needs to be removed. This is one way. They took the most enjoyable road, though, because you can learn new skills/spells on the fly without having to port back to a town to train. You can keep on doing what you're doing until you want to go turn in quests, sell shut, whatever.
But thats why its annoying. You are questing, leveling up, invest the talent points, automatically get the spell/skill, and... its useless because it hits/heals for 75 over 12 seconds or some such when you and your enemies have 1000+ health. So even though you have the ability, you still need to go back to town to train it so it even means anything.
The crafting system tiers is another standard idea that works. You want players to have smaller goals inside of larger goals inside of even larger goals. Tiny carrots along the way to keep them feeling rewarded. You just got a new recipe. Reward. You just finished Novice. Reward. If crafting was simply "I'm 230/255," it would be less interesting. And the refining materials thing, well that's just a time sink. You'll never see those disappear in an MMO. In a singleplayer game, you want to remove any aspect that is boring in any way needlessly, but in an MMO, that doesn't work.
What he was meaning, I think, Is that you cannot early train so you'd have to stop. For instance, Lets say im at 70 crafting. I have enough points to level 20 times. I have to level 5 times, stop, go to sanctum, train again, start crafting. With wow's crafting system of "You can expand your cap 25 points before you reach it" any time after level 50 you could raise your cap from 75 to 150 without having to stop in the middle of your crafting to run to the sanctum to level. It saves you from having to make ONLY enough points to make sure you don't go over the 75 point cap before stopping immediately to go to sanctum to raise your cap.
If you're crafting, you're beside the crafting trainer anyway, no? From what I've seen, the crafting stations have their appropriate trainers right beside them. You say "Go to Sanctum" like it's the only place to train up your crafting. Even if you do need to go there to train into certain tiers, just craft there anyway if that's the issue. The "flight path" system in this game makes that easy enough. Are we going to complain that we have to go "all the way" to Sanctum whenever we want to buy new PVP gear? Whenever we want to pick up a quest to unlock another Soul? Whenever we want to turn in an artifact set? It's a break in the action once you've accomplished X. In my opinion, it actually underlines your accomplishment because you've got to take a little trip (honestly under 2 minutes worth of your time there and back) to proceed.
The crafting system is by no means unique, but I like what I've seen of the higher-end recipes. You need to buy them from a vendor, but you need to "crafting currency," similar to the favour you earn from PVP. It looks like you'll earn it by doing crafting quests, which also give XP and a box of materials as a reward--at least the one I completed did. It adds another element to the usual method of just finding recipes randomly in the world and having to pay oodles of dough to grab them from the AH if you don't want to farm grey mobs for three weeks to find it yourself. Although, I'm sure Rift will feature that as well :P
You have to upgrade skills at a vendor because money is created in the economy out of thin air and it needs to be removed. This is one way. They took the most enjoyable road, though, because you can learn new skills/spells on the fly without having to port back to a town to train. You can keep on doing what you're doing until you want to go turn in quests, sell shut, whatever.
But thats why its annoying. You are questing, leveling up, invest the talent points, automatically get the spell/skill, and... its useless because it hits/heals for 75 over 12 seconds or some such when you and your enemies have 1000+ health. So even though you have the ability, you still need to go back to town to train it so it even means anything.
Really? Not from what I've seen. The leveled up version of ability X for me was slightly better than the vanilla version I automatically got from unlocking it in my talent tree. It's not like the ability you unlock in the third row of your talent tree is going to be level 1, is it? It's going to be relatively close to the level you'd require anyway to unlock it in the first place. Unless you're unlocking something from your third soul that's a low-tier ability and you're 30. Still, you need money sinks in the game. It's not something they can do away with in an MMO. I'd rather run back to level up a skill than have some other form of money sink...... like armour degradation.
RE: Boss abilities; some of you are spoiled on DBM or equivalent mods that are available for Warcraft. Final boss fight in Blackrock Caverns for instance, you mean to tell me you'd know what the hell you were supposed to do on that guy w/o DMB, or that you'd know not to move when you were hit with Shadow Prison unless you mouse overed on your character's debuffs (which are positioned away from buffs with mods and what not)? Come on now.
The boss fights I encountered in Rift were not terribly confusing that I had no idea what to do:
1st boss in Iron Tombs is a tank and spank, second boss has two casters, one whom is a healer and his heal is called "Such and Such of Mending", and the final boss has one main ability where he AOE's the entire room - which yes would be a problem IF the NPC didn't scream "Adventurers - run the hell over to me!"
Now Deepstrike Mines is slightly similar; the only problem we had was the last boss where the tank wasn't keeping aggro, and the healer was running out of mana (he had no pots and was just spamming heals w/o regard to mana); again only mechanic needed to be aware of was him turning and tossing a crystal at your position, one which damaged party the other which healed boss.
As for when the game turns on - yes it's going to take a bit of questing to get those "money" talents. Survivability of pure caster mage goes way the hell up once you have enough points to toss in a second "soul". Pyro/Elem. or Archon at level 20+ is a joy, while I was kind of forced to play Necro/Lock as my questing build. Now while I will say the variability of soul mixing is good - there are pretty much going to be some standard builds that just work the best together. So DPS casters are going to be forced into certain combinations to be most effective probably. At the least, there will be variability in WHAT kind of dps mix you have to choose.
I will say, while crafting is cool, I do not like having to travel to Headquarters or a town with loom/workshop to do so.
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FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
I will say, while crafting is cool, I do not like having to travel to Headquarters or a town with loom/workshop to do so.
I also don't like having to run back to a quest giver to turn in a quest. I'd rather just click "Done" on my quest log and get the next step, instead of it sending me right back to where I was to do something else. But, that sounds stupid, right?
Time sinks are nothing new. In what MMO are there no time sinks like these? There are a lot of problems with Rift that I'd like to see fixed, but the game being an MMO is not one of them.
I don't think needing to look at a debuff to go "Oh hey this says to not his suchandsuch or I'll die, kay" or whatever other mechanic like that is in place is terribly difficult.
Will you die? Yeah, you will. It's an odd concept I guess to people, but when something is still fairly fresh there will be wipes. Best just to shrug it off and keep on trucking to figure out what went wrong.
Yeah, these are the big issues for me. The combat is VERY obfuscated, you cannot really tell what is going on simply by looking at it like you can in WoW (the animation complaints further back in the thread are part of this too). Debuffs are terrible in this regard too, I can cleanse poison/disease? Oh, that'd be cool if I had any fucking clue which debuffs were poisons and diseases.
THIS. When I healed Darkening Deeps I tried dropping a cleanse every now and then when I saw people having debuffs, but I never ever saw something actually drop off. That included the spider packs doing dots named "Venomous Assault" and stuff.
There's just no feedback when you can actually cleanse something.
And spell effects are just very lacking - buffs in particular are just some generic glow most of the time.
Heck, on my Bear Shaman in Age of Conan I had awesome-looking effects for buffs. Some armor buff that made rocks rise up from the ground around me and then crumble away while leaves whirled around me for a few seconds; some offensive buff that made a ghostly bear surround my body, roar and vanish...
The party frames are pretty bad for healing. The green of the hp bar blends into the gray background if you're not looking directly at them.
Single-target buffing is freaking annoying. Make them party- or raid-wide. And make it, you know, not possible for someone else to overwrite my 20 Endurance buff with their 10 Endurance buff.
edit: and this is all stuff I submitted as beta feedback.
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FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Again, I haven't played WOW since before BC, but wasn't the standard UI for that game 10 times worse? I remember spending half of patch day updating my dozen UI mods because I found the game almost unplayable without them.
As far as knowing how to fight certain bosses, the way we did that when I played WOW was to look on the Internet for general strategies. Sure, we could try to figure it out ourselves, and we sometimes did. But for Molten Core, that meant every time we wiped it was generally another half hour of time getting everyone back, ready to go, and trying again.
I'd also like to see some cooler spell effects across the board, but there needs to be a toggle for that. I don't want to have to turn down my graphics when I go on raids/warfronts/invasions because there are forty people with thirty glowing colours around them and my frame-rate drops to 5. Having an "Enhanced spell effects" you can turn on and off would be ideal, so you could still keep graphical settings where you want them, but spell effects would just be more "simple."
It's funny that you mentioned AOC, because that game ran like a bag of assholes when there was a big battle going on--particle effects orgy to be sure. I know some people had no issues, but for whatever reason, it just ran like fucking shit for me. My PC was far more than enough to handle it, too.
Edit: AOC for me in a nutshell: Great quests. Great dialogue. Great NPCs. Very cool zones. See ya later, Tortage! I'm off to experience the rest of this great world! .... wait.... the game runs like shit now for some reason.... there are no quests left.... I've gotta grind the next 40 levels? There are level 80s killing people in the level 30 zone?
I will say, while crafting is cool, I do not like having to travel to Headquarters or a town with loom/workshop to do so.
I also don't like having to run back to a quest giver to turn in a quest. I'd rather just click "Done" on my quest log and get the next step, instead of it sending me right back to where I was to do something else. But, that sounds stupid, right?
Time sinks are nothing new. In what MMO are there no time sinks like these? There are a lot of problems with Rift that I'd like to see fixed, but the game being an MMO is not one of them.
The problem with using crafting as a time sink and forcing people to hotfoot it back to base, is that you're sitting around with a ton of crafting material in your bags, forced to hit up a bank if you want to quest in a dungeon or other areas for example. Yes its an obvious method of slowing you down, but its something even WoW got right when it was first released.
You have to upgrade skills at a vendor because money is created in the economy out of thin air and it needs to be removed. This is one way. They took the most enjoyable road, though, because you can learn new skills/spells on the fly without having to port back to a town to train. You can keep on doing what you're doing until you want to go turn in quests, sell shut, whatever.
But thats why its annoying. You are questing, leveling up, invest the talent points, automatically get the spell/skill, and... its useless because it hits/heals for 75 over 12 seconds or some such when you and your enemies have 1000+ health. So even though you have the ability, you still need to go back to town to train it so it even means anything.
I didn't notice that to be a problem. Whenever I'd gain a new ability it would start at rank 1, yes, but that rank 1 would be applicable to the level I picked it up.
I.e., if I picked up the level 20 ability at level 20, rank one of that ability would be appropriate for a level 20 character.
Now, if you are talking about snagging a skill lower on the tree from another soul, I could see that being kinda annoying, yeah.
RE: Boss abilities; some of you are spoiled on DBM or equivalent mods that are available for Warcraft. Final boss fight in Blackrock Caverns for instance, you mean to tell me you'd know what the hell you were supposed to do on that guy w/o DMB, or that you'd know not to move when you were hit with Shadow Prison unless you mouse overed on your character's debuffs (which are positioned away from buffs with mods and what not)? Come on now.
I don't use anything but the default UI and you are wrong. WoW's debuffs are clearly layed out and explained to you (in rift it does not tell you if a debuff is magic, curse, poison, and disease. Like Echo said, for example, ones that are seemingly a Poison are not, I've spammed my cleanse equivalent for many different debuffs and never had it remove anything). The fight you're talking about was very easy to figure out what to do once you read the debuffs. Yes, obviously, that's the only thing I'm asking for. Boss abilities and what is happening should be clear to the player, this isn't the case with a lot of the NPC abilities in Rift. Hell, mousing over debuffs doesn't always bring up the tooltip either, and like Echo said, this is all feedback I've reported already.
I will say, while crafting is cool, I do not like having to travel to Headquarters or a town with loom/workshop to do so.
I also don't like having to run back to a quest giver to turn in a quest. I'd rather just click "Done" on my quest log and get the next step, instead of it sending me right back to where I was to do something else. But, that sounds stupid, right?
Time sinks are nothing new. In what MMO are there no time sinks like these? There are a lot of problems with Rift that I'd like to see fixed, but the game being an MMO is not one of them.
The problem with using crafting as a time sink and forcing people to hotfoot it back to base, is that you're sitting around with a ton of crafting material in your bags, forced to hit up a bank if you want to quest in a dungeon or other areas for example. Yes its an obvious method of slowing you down, but its something even WoW got right when it was first released.
I guess I'm odd in that I don't see that as a problem. It's inventory management. You've got limited bag space. More of a reason to strive for more/bigger ones. And the bank is there to hold all your shit. Let it do its job.
I'm weird. I don't remember though, was it really possible in WOW to just craft wherever the fuck you wanted? I know for a fact there was a giant anvil in the middle of Ironforge that you'd have to smelt at. So, what are you referring to?
No it wasnt that you were able to craft wherever you wanted, but you could go to the major city anywhere between 50-75 to increase your cap to 150 instead of having to completely get to 75, stop immediately crafting so you don't waste skill ups, go back to town, raise your skill, then go back to a crafting area to finish the rest of your craft, then head back to whatever town you were originally crafting/gathering at.
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FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
No it wasnt that you were able to craft wherever you wanted, but you could go to the major city anywhere between 50-75 to increase your cap to 150 instead of having to completely get to 75, stop immediately crafting so you don't waste skill ups, go back to town, raise your skill, then go back to a crafting area to finish the rest of your craft, then head back to whatever town you were originally crafting/gathering at.
I remember being able to raise my skill levels past my current cap, but he was talking about bag space. I don't see how WOW handled crafting materials taking up bag space any differently. You had to get to a forge/whatever if you wanted to refine your shit, just like in Rift. With all that shit in your bags, you'd want to go to the bank anyway before you go out questing.
Maybe we need a pet, like in Torchlight. Go vendor my shit, boy!
I certainly would not call it a reskinned WoW graphically, however when it comes to the most basic of gameplay... yeah it'll feel similar. Just like WoW wasn't -too- different from MMOs before it.
I really wish people would stop parroting this, because it's completely untrue.
I'm not a fervent Blizzard fan boy, and their game isn't perfect, but they absolutely revolutionized the MMORPG market when they came out. Off the top of my head, things they did that were pretty new and now everyone else does:
1. All classes have special abilities. (in EQ, UO, not really sure about AC, because I didn't play it) if you were a straight warrior, you could just 'attack' with a couple other incidental abilities like taunt, bash, etc. If you weren't a caster you didn't have crazy abilities.
2. Questing. Other games of course had quests, but WoW implemented the quest log, the in-game indictor for who had a quest, and in game tracking of quest completion. To go back to EQ, the biggest MMO before WoW, you had to give an NPC the third degree to figure out what they wanted you to do, and then you had to basically have a notebook/online guide to keep track of what you needed to do.
3. Dungeons as an instance
4. Talent trees.
There are more, and I'm sorry to sort of derail this topic to go on that rant, but it's pretty unfair to play down how much WoW (wether you like it or not) revolutionized the modern MMO game space.
On to RIFT, one problem with the RIFT mechanic is just how repetetive it is. You're right, it is cool to have procedural content, especially one that does appear to factor trackable stats, like how many/what level people are in the area. The problem is it suffers from a visual same-ness that gets old after a while. Granted I only got to the mid 20's so maybe there's more on offer than what I've seen.
One other major beef I had with the game was its system for spawning monsters. I forget what the area is called, but there's this one area in the second zone for the defiants where you go into this crypt. I started out levelling a Chloromancer so it took a while to kill things, and your mana didn't last too long. As soon as I'd kill a mob, it would instantly respawn. This wasn't just once, it was four or five times in a row.
Granted if you were in a group you could blow through it so fast that you could probably just pull away from that instant respawn that it wouldn't make a difference, but solo as a mage, it was damn near impossible to get by a mob ahead of me in a tunnel that would instantly respawn. It seems like the game is oddly balanced for group questing, while not really being explicit about it from a gameplay (not narrative) perspective. Certain games (EQ, FFXI) are obvious mechanically in that you are supposed to group, because your rate of possible xp gain past a certain point is almost non-existant if you're not in a group, whereas this is more like WoW in that it doesn't make it clear that they want you to run around in a group. Probably just a personal pet peeve there.
No it wasnt that you were able to craft wherever you wanted, but you could go to the major city anywhere between 50-75 to increase your cap to 150 instead of having to completely get to 75, stop immediately crafting so you don't waste skill ups, go back to town, raise your skill, then go back to a crafting area to finish the rest of your craft, then head back to whatever town you were originally crafting/gathering at.
I agree with this, they should allow you to train with some 'buffer.' Like if you cap at 75, let you train to 150 at 50, ore maybe even 60.
The one thing that I found weird with crafting is how much easier it is for certain tradeskills to acquire resources vs. others. A good example would be armorer vs. alchemist. The armorer profession needs one type of resource, say copper. They make everythign out of that copper, and when they've made it, if they were just doing it for the skill ups, they can deconstruct it for roughly half of the materials back on average. So say 1 copper chain vest requires 2 copper bars. If they acquire 100 copper bars, they can make the 50 vests, deconstruct them and make 25 more. Alchemists have multiple resources, and no way to reclaim resources when they are making things that they aren't going to use. Hell, as a smith you can even deconstruct quest rewards for a chance at bars rather than sell them, if you'd prefer.
One thing I did like about the professions is it did seems that for the most part same level range items you crafted were actually a bit superior to most quest drops of the same level. In too many games (I'm looking at you WoW) 2/3 of your recipes aren't usefull, even situationally, and at end game your blacksmith has like two or three things that people want.
JAEF, the first half of your complaints are standard fare in an MMO for a reason. These games are first and foremost a money making venture, and as such they need to introduce time/money sinks, frequent carrots, etc.
You have to upgrade skills at a vendor because money is created in the economy out of thin air and it needs to be removed. This is one way. They took the most enjoyable road, though, because you can learn new skills/spells on the fly without having to port back to a town to train. You can keep on doing what you're doing until you want to go turn in quests, sell shut, whatever.
Wait, you can do this? Every time I leveled an even number I was always running back to the class trainer to purchase new levels for my skills! Are you talking about just being able to put more points in your soul? If it's the latter then that is cool. If I'm just perceiving this wrong then move along
Oh and I got my warrior to just a hair from 30 before I quit playing Monday morning. I love him so and will be sad to see my dwarf Gropli go, but I'm excited to try the Defiant zones come release!
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" I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.”
― John Quincy Adams
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drunkenpandarenSlapping all the goblin hamIn the top laneRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
My only regret is that my Guardian Dorf slayer can only be a pansy Guardian and not a manly Defiant.
Years ago, when I switched from EQ to WoW (and decided NOT to play EQ2), this would've been exactly why. I know things get hazy over the years, but this is in a nutshell a pretty good list of why six years ago a lot of people standard playing WoW and EQ died.
1. All classes have special abilities. (in EQ, UO, not really sure about AC, because I didn't play it) if you were a straight warrior, you could just 'attack' with a couple other incidental abilities like taunt, bash, etc. If you weren't a caster you didn't have crazy abilities.
2. Questing. Other games of course had quests, but WoW implemented the quest log, the in-game indictor for who had a quest, and in game tracking of quest completion. To go back to EQ, the biggest MMO before WoW, you had to give an NPC the third degree to figure out what they wanted you to do, and then you had to basically have a notebook/online guide to keep track of what you needed to do.
3. Dungeons as an instance
4. Talent trees.
That's kinda what I'm looking for with Rift. Right now, it just seems to me like there really aren't any compelling differences between WoW and Rift, other than Rift is newer and shinier.
WoW, especially with the recent expansion, is a hell of a game. I'm really looking for something that innovates beyond what Blizzard is doing, sort of like the transition from EQ to WoW. Otherwise, despite being a great, but clone of WoW, I'm not sure why I'd pick it up.
Again, I'm absolutely not trying to offend anyone in this thread, just really looking for/hoping for a good answer.
I don't see Anarchy Online there, or Dark Age of Camelot either. Heck City of Heroes technically released prior to WoW, too.
You're right, DAoC did implement a lot of those features, so I at least partially rescind my comment (specifically the abilities for non-caters). I can't really give the nod to the other two with regards to that though, as they were a completely different genre, as nobody was just a 'warrior.'
No it wasnt that you were able to craft wherever you wanted, but you could go to the major city anywhere between 50-75 to increase your cap to 150 instead of having to completely get to 75, stop immediately crafting so you don't waste skill ups, go back to town, raise your skill, then go back to a crafting area to finish the rest of your craft, then head back to whatever town you were originally crafting/gathering at.
I agree with this, they should allow you to train with some 'buffer.' Like if you cap at 75, let you train to 150 at 50, ore maybe even 60.
The one thing that I found weird with crafting is how much easier it is for certain tradeskills to acquire resources vs. others. A good example would be armorer vs. alchemist. The armorer profession needs one type of resource, say copper. They make everythign out of that copper, and when they've made it, if they were just doing it for the skill ups, they can deconstruct it for roughly half of the materials back on average. So say 1 copper chain vest requires 2 copper bars. If they acquire 100 copper bars, they can make the 50 vests, deconstruct them and make 25 more. Alchemists have multiple resources, and no way to reclaim resources when they are making things that they aren't going to use. Hell, as a smith you can even deconstruct quest rewards for a chance at bars rather than sell them, if you'd prefer.
One thing I did like about the professions is it did seems that for the most part same level range items you crafted were actually a bit superior to most quest drops of the same level. In too many games (I'm looking at you WoW) 2/3 of your recipes aren't usefull, even situationally, and at end game your blacksmith has like two or three things that people want.
Certain trade skills are harder to level than others. This is nothing new. You're going to see an apothecary's dyes, for example, go for much higher on the AH than say, some random armour you make. A weapon/armoursmith, though, is going to need a LOT more copper to level than an apothecary will need herbs.
And your last point, don't expect that to last come late game. This was discussed briefly in one of the previous threads, but crafted gear is never going to be (in any MMO, I think) a viable alternative to stuff you get from drops. I'm talking late-game, specifically. Aside from perhaps really, really rare stuff that takes expensive/rare mats to make, crafted gear is going to be sub-par. You can't expect it to be as good as something the player needs to spend hours grinding favour or waiting on a drop for.
The easier something is to obtain, the less valuable it should be. I've always seen weapon/armour crafting skills in MMOs this way: every item you make is either going to be something a lowbie will want because he just wants a new item quickly, or it's just vendor fodder while you grind your skill up. The things you're really interested in making are the unique recipes. Like, a huge backpack. Or a rare sword. Or a certain shield. The general "armour sets" and stuff on the way up is usually fairly useless.
LOTRO tried to do something with this by having "critical successes" in crafting where the result was more or less the best you could find for your level. All this did was flood the market with all the "failures" that crafters made trying to do this. The critical success armour was exceptionally expensive, and at the end of the game you were needing to find really, really rare materials to even attempt it. It's just another way to have people lose crafting materials by "failing," except instead of losing your materials and getting nothing in return (EQ), you lose your materials and get a vendor trash breastplate.
I found it incredibly frustrating, and it drove me away from acquiring crafted gear. I just went for PVP gear, since it was actually enjoyable working toward it, rather than farming green/grey mobs for an entire day for the chance at possibly getting a piece of gear. I'm pretty sure the end-game PVP gear was miles above the end-game crafted gear anyway, so it was even more pointless to grind that shit.
I wouldn't exactly say CoX had instances. It had warehouses. And lots of boxes. It had "door missions" and larger arcs which were basically "lots of door missions done in a row".
Don't get me wrong, I loved CoX for the 2 years I played it. But uh, it was just downright weird the way it was designed.
Actually from what I can tell, via the recipe merchants you can get some -very- nice stuff Figgy, and for the highest skill levels there are epic level recipes even.
Obviously we don't know where this all will stack up, this is something that can't be gone into very much until we can actually get close to the cap.
Mm, quite true but they wer- wait what not the same genre?
Same game type, both were MMOs. Both I THINK had instances, too, City of Heroes definitely did... had a lot of them, in fact.
I think by "genre" he meant maybe setting? Like, AO was sci-fi? I don't know.
I think a lot of the time, people just never played anything in between EQ and WOW, so it seemed like WOW innovated everything that they picked up from other games.
Not to bash WOW, because I fully believe if you're making a new game in a genre and you're not learning from every other game before you, you're doing it wrong.
I mean, The Realm had instances long before WOW ever did. Anarchy Online also did instanced "dungeons."
Edit: And Maple Story had a quest log, didn't it? That came out in 2003 in Korea. Lowlander, it really seems like you're looking at EQ and then at WOW and not realizing there were a whole mess of MMOs in between that innovated the genre. I'd say the most innovative thing WOW did for the genre was bring it into the mainstream. Which is a good thing.
Actually from what I can tell, via the recipe merchants you can get some -very- nice stuff Figgy, and for the highest skill levels there are epic level recipes even.
Obviously we don't know where this all will stack up, this is something that can't be gone into very much until we can actually get close to the cap.
We shall see. I have a feeling that these epic recipes won't hold up against epic drops or epic PVP gear at that level, though. Either way, I'll be maxing out Apothecary for whoever needs potions/dyes/bombs in the guild.
Sorry, didn't mean to hijack the thread into a "Who had what first" argument.
My example above was very specific to me. I was playing EQ. A friend was in the beta for WoW. I asked him, "Why should I switch to WoW? I really like playing EQ." The above quote was a similiar to what my friend told me. He was right, and I switched.
So let me rephrase my question. I'm a big fan of MMO's, and WoW specifically. What innovations does Rift bring to the genre that are compelling enough for me to switch from WoW to Rift?
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FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
I wasn't responding to you, I was responding to Lowlander saying those were things that WOW did first, which they weren't. Rose coloured glasses and all that.
So let me rephrase my question. I'm a big fan of MMO's, and WoW specifically. What innovations does Rift bring to the genre that are compelling enough for me to switch from WoW to Rift?
If by innovations, we're talking completely new, never-before-seen things in an MMO.... nothing. Rifts are a combination of PQs from WAR and the invasions from Tabula Rasa. So, that's not new. It works well, and I like them, but it's not the first time that shit has happened in an MMO.
I might be able to answer your question better if you tell me what things in WOW you think you'd like to see different in your next MMO.
And your last point, don't expect that to last come late game. This was discussed briefly in one of the previous threads, but crafted gear is never going to be (in any MMO, I think) a viable alternative to stuff you get from drops.
Crafted items are pretty much the standard in EVE, but EVE does this by keeping demand high because you lose everything when you die. This would not go over well in a game trying to compete with WoW :P
But yeah, I agree with you with Rift. That's why I went alchemist in WoW and plan on going runecrafter in Rift; no competition from drops with those professions.
If by innovations, we're talking completely new, never-before-seen things in an MMO.... nothing. Rifts are a combination of PQs from WAR and the invasions from Tabula Rasa. So, that's not new. It works well, and I like them, but it's not the first time that shit has happened in an MMO.
The way I'm reading things, I think you answered his question right there. He's not asking "how does Rift advnace the state of the art MMO?" He -is- asking, "what does Rfit have to differentiate itself from WoW?" with complete disregard to any other game that has already advanced the genre.
To use his own example, if one was playing EQ and then jumped directly to WoW, it doesn't matter that skill trees, spec patch, instances, quest logs UI mods and all of the things the people assign to WoW were actually already developed in other games. From his point of view, the only basis for comparison is EQ vs WoW. WoW has a feature and EQ does not, therefore Wow is "innovative".
So the actual question is: What new things have been put into the MMO genre in the last 8 years that WoW has not captured (yet) but Rift has?
And the answer to that is what you just said:
1. Public grouping - when you come across a group quest in the open world, the automatically allows you to join up with people local to you to accomplish the larger goal. The reward is scaled based on how much you contribute, so the shmoe who joins and goes AFK gets nothing and the guy who is leading the charge every time gets more.
2. Random procedural PvE events - you may find yourself questing/grinding and suddenly the game world changes for the worst and you're on the frontline of a HUGE raid-level battle. Think of it like a 40-man raid event that spawns randomly and basically takes over the zone for an hour. Combine that with an easy to enter public group and it ends up being a lot of fun.
To that I would add:
3. Soul trees - it sounds a lot like WoW's skill trees but it isn't. Picking three souls from a list of eight really allows you to "create a class". Say you want a Hunter but you don't like dealing with pets. In WoW's system, you can choose not to use the pet, but you'll suffer for it since the class is balanced around using that ability. In Rift, you simply choose a different "soul" instead of the pet-based soul. For example you could choose a more tank-ish soul and gain access to abilities that are specifically designed to increase your survivability. Or a "machine" soul and start lobbing grenades. It's really hard to understand just how flexible the system is until you actually try it out. It kind of turns the class-selection question on its head. Rather than saying "I want to be THAT class for THESE specific skills" you instead say "I want skill A, skill B and skill C (which are not part of any one class) and combine them into a new class that doesn't exist." The soul system allows that. You want a stealthing, ranged DPS that can teleport? Sure. You want a CC, magic DPS and healing? Okay. You want a melee tank that has self heals and buffs? Fine.
It sounds like everyone would end up overpowered, but it really isn't. What it is, is a lot of fun.
4. PvP battlegound/area queuing - I don't know if Wow has this, but being able to queue for a PvP battleground from -anywhere- in the world is really nice. You can be off doing your own thing, queue up and keep playing the game. when a slot opens up, you get a requester on the screen and either say "Yes" and go to the battleground or "no" and keep going. If you go in, you are whisked away from wherever you are to the PvP fight, and then when it is over, win or lose, you are dropped back into the game in the exact same spot as when you left.
How did WAR fail? I played the beta, enjoyed it enough but I didn't see a reason to play it since it is essentially the some treadmill as every other MMO.
WAR was really a perfect storm of mistakes. You have serious flaws in how the game was designed, huge ambitious ideas their hardware couldn't physically support, and a product that was rushed out the door before end game content was ready.
Take any one of those and maybe it would have been OK. But with all of it combined the game was a dead man walking from launch.
The biggest problem was RvR. The game really hung its reputation on being a more PvP-centric WoW. They realized there's a good group of gamers out there who want PvP end game over killing digital dragons, and they sought to take those players from WoW (which has historically done a shit job with all forms of PvP - see Tol Barad).
But the entire RvR system sucked. Furthermore once an obstacle for part of the system was fixed, you found the next part of the system sucked harder.
i.e. The keep and battle objective system didn't make it beneficial to actually hold and defend them. So you'd have keep merry-go-round - since you got a chance at loot and renown every time they flipped and diddly shit otherwise.
plus after a couple of early flips, the zone flipping mechanic broke before the bulk of players got to T4.
when that was finally fixed, or people found a work around, they streamed to fortress fights that couldn't handle the sheer number of players there.
(I shit you not, after planning for a zone flip with my guild and a several big alliance guilds, we got to the fortress, and watched hours of work and coordination die because the game couldn't handle what we were looking to do. Within a week at least 25 percent of the folks involved in the push had quit the game).
and when fortress fights were finally fixed and you could push to the enemy city - we found that system was not finished, not well thought out and generally a waste of time.
can't have those kinds of problems on a feature you're hoping to hang your hat on.
the game had other issues too. mirror classes weren't balanced. super broke, game breaking skills went weeks without getting fixed. the entire renown system favored healers not working with others. keeps weren't well designed. the actual pvp lakes in T4 weren't big enough (most were smaller than AV - in a real world map not a BG).
and probably more i'm forgetting.
btw i saw somebody mentioned the game ultimately making money. if that is the case its because of strong sales out of the gate (i believe 1 million boxes sold early on) and huge layoffs a few months after launch.
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FiggyFighter of the night manChampion of the sunRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Or, if you're on Guardian side, the "Join Queue" button might as well change to simply "Join." Seriously. Instant queues.
To the class system, I would add that it also adds a level of non-commitment to creating your character. You don't have to worry about missing out on something you like in X class, because chances are you can try that out too. You're really only "pigeon-holed" into the Calling you choose from the four (Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Cleric). The eight Souls within those callings can be mixed and matched at any time, and even though you start by selecting one (and then quickly a second), you choose a third in the starter area can unlock them all at level 13.
I think they need to do a better job of introducing players to the class system in the starter quests/zones. I made a rather lengthy feedback post in-game about this, but they need to cater to players who aren't going to read over the quest info and then be completely fucking confused 10 levels later when everyone is talking about souls, roles, etc.
Your calling is your base class. Warrior, Mage, Rogue, or Cleric. That's the only actual limiting, permanent choice you need to really make.
Your soul is any one to three of the eight sub-classes within your calling you spec to. You choose one to start, a second right after, and a third a little later. At level 13, you can unlock them all. You can only have one to three active at any one time.
Your role is your "spec," or your current choice of one to three souls. You can unlock a total of four roles, which you can change to on the fly. These can be planted on an action bar as well, so changing from your stealthy, melee-dps rogue to your heally, ranged bard rogue is just a button away. When you change to another role, your action bars are also change. Set them up once for each role, and away you go. You can also create a macro fairly easily in-game that changes all your gear with the same button-press.
So, with that at a glance, it's fairly complicated compared to what players coming from other MMOs are going to expect from the class system. Judging by the amount of times people ask really basic questions about the class system over general chat, the way the terminology is mis-used and causes confusion, and the people who talk about re-rolling "a new rogue," it's not widely fully understood.
I know that, no matter what, some players are just not going to read tutorials or quest info, and they're going to be confused no matter what. That's unavoidable, but there should be a tutorial that beats you over the head about the system, to alleviate the most confusion possible. I can see people getting annoyed with the game simply because they don't realize their annoyances are based on ignorance. For example, people lamenting now choosing Bard as a starter class or complaining that they can't stealth with their Nightblade.
Edit: The underlying problems with WAR were much more poisonous and disastrous than what was wrong with the actual game. The company really fell apart, and the major players involved were the higher-ups. There is a lot of drama surrounding EA-Mythic if you care to dig deeper in Google, but that game was fucked from the get-go, and it was coporatae politics that did it more than anything else.
I did like my CE though. I still have everything in its original condition, including the packaged mini and the game DVD in its original shrink wrap. Beta players could use the beta client to play release. Something Trion has said in their FAQ that we won't be able to do. I don't wanna download several gigs again
Only reason I went with the digital CE for Rift was because I realize what a colossal waste of space all of this stuff is. While it's fantastic nerdy memorabilia, I'll never really do anything with it.
1 - Folks show up to the game who are interested in having a community with their other gamers. Don't need to be invited over for tea and biscuits every night, but it'd be nice to get to know the people you're playing with. I started MMOs in SWG, where you literally knew thousands of other gamers by name. In WAR you knew a ton of the people on the server. in WoW most folks would prefer to never talk to anybody. Hopefully Rift is different.
2 - I see end game rifts mixing with PvP possibly being huge fun.
3 - Rifts in general are a lot of fun. The spontaneous nature of them gives them a leg up over WAR's static PQs. And also I dont' think they'll be ignored in the end game like most of WARs were.
4 - The soul system gives you a ton of flexibility with your character. Its really like being able to play a few different classes with one character, and switch on the fly.
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I also don't foresee the game going the way of WAR, in fact the 'worst case scenario' isn't actually all that terrible, it'd be the game being a bit like LOTRO... and no I don't mean the Free-to-play bit but being a successful game that is still regularly backed by the developers with new content.
Trion doesn't have a big bad company like EA breathing down their necks, which is why the beta has gone so wonderfully overall.
Released September, 2008.
Edit: WAR failed for a few reasons. One being that I think they bought the spoonfed bullshit Paul Barnett spouted, but also because they halfway through development had EA buy Mythic to 'support' them. Thing is EA wanted a contender to go up against WoW's next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, and so they pushed it to be released a month or two prior to WotLK releasing.
Was a disaster from what I've read, the game didn't even have all the classes in. In the end, after that free month was up... people jumped ship from what was an inferiorly made product to the shiny new expansion of WoW. Obviously not everyone left, since it was the only decent PvP game on the market that wasn't a spreadsheet in space. The fact that our 'depression' happened here in the States at the same time only sealed WAR's fate quicker.
What he was meaning, I think, Is that you cannot early train so you'd have to stop. For instance, Lets say im at 70 crafting. I have enough points to level 20 times. I have to level 5 times, stop, go to sanctum, train again, start crafting. With wow's crafting system of "You can expand your cap 25 points before you reach it" any time after level 50 you could raise your cap from 75 to 150 without having to stop in the middle of your crafting to run to the sanctum to level. It saves you from having to make ONLY enough points to make sure you don't go over the 75 point cap before stopping immediately to go to sanctum to raise your cap.
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
But thats why its annoying. You are questing, leveling up, invest the talent points, automatically get the spell/skill, and... its useless because it hits/heals for 75 over 12 seconds or some such when you and your enemies have 1000+ health. So even though you have the ability, you still need to go back to town to train it so it even means anything.
If you're crafting, you're beside the crafting trainer anyway, no? From what I've seen, the crafting stations have their appropriate trainers right beside them. You say "Go to Sanctum" like it's the only place to train up your crafting. Even if you do need to go there to train into certain tiers, just craft there anyway if that's the issue. The "flight path" system in this game makes that easy enough. Are we going to complain that we have to go "all the way" to Sanctum whenever we want to buy new PVP gear? Whenever we want to pick up a quest to unlock another Soul? Whenever we want to turn in an artifact set? It's a break in the action once you've accomplished X. In my opinion, it actually underlines your accomplishment because you've got to take a little trip (honestly under 2 minutes worth of your time there and back) to proceed.
The crafting system is by no means unique, but I like what I've seen of the higher-end recipes. You need to buy them from a vendor, but you need to "crafting currency," similar to the favour you earn from PVP. It looks like you'll earn it by doing crafting quests, which also give XP and a box of materials as a reward--at least the one I completed did. It adds another element to the usual method of just finding recipes randomly in the world and having to pay oodles of dough to grab them from the AH if you don't want to farm grey mobs for three weeks to find it yourself. Although, I'm sure Rift will feature that as well :P
Really? Not from what I've seen. The leveled up version of ability X for me was slightly better than the vanilla version I automatically got from unlocking it in my talent tree. It's not like the ability you unlock in the third row of your talent tree is going to be level 1, is it? It's going to be relatively close to the level you'd require anyway to unlock it in the first place. Unless you're unlocking something from your third soul that's a low-tier ability and you're 30. Still, you need money sinks in the game. It's not something they can do away with in an MMO. I'd rather run back to level up a skill than have some other form of money sink...... like armour degradation.
The boss fights I encountered in Rift were not terribly confusing that I had no idea what to do:
1st boss in Iron Tombs is a tank and spank, second boss has two casters, one whom is a healer and his heal is called "Such and Such of Mending", and the final boss has one main ability where he AOE's the entire room - which yes would be a problem IF the NPC didn't scream "Adventurers - run the hell over to me!"
Now Deepstrike Mines is slightly similar; the only problem we had was the last boss where the tank wasn't keeping aggro, and the healer was running out of mana (he had no pots and was just spamming heals w/o regard to mana); again only mechanic needed to be aware of was him turning and tossing a crystal at your position, one which damaged party the other which healed boss.
As for when the game turns on - yes it's going to take a bit of questing to get those "money" talents. Survivability of pure caster mage goes way the hell up once you have enough points to toss in a second "soul". Pyro/Elem. or Archon at level 20+ is a joy, while I was kind of forced to play Necro/Lock as my questing build. Now while I will say the variability of soul mixing is good - there are pretty much going to be some standard builds that just work the best together. So DPS casters are going to be forced into certain combinations to be most effective probably. At the least, there will be variability in WHAT kind of dps mix you have to choose.
I will say, while crafting is cool, I do not like having to travel to Headquarters or a town with loom/workshop to do so.
I also don't like having to run back to a quest giver to turn in a quest. I'd rather just click "Done" on my quest log and get the next step, instead of it sending me right back to where I was to do something else. But, that sounds stupid, right?
Time sinks are nothing new. In what MMO are there no time sinks like these? There are a lot of problems with Rift that I'd like to see fixed, but the game being an MMO is not one of them.
Will you die? Yeah, you will. It's an odd concept I guess to people, but when something is still fairly fresh there will be wipes. Best just to shrug it off and keep on trucking to figure out what went wrong.
THIS. When I healed Darkening Deeps I tried dropping a cleanse every now and then when I saw people having debuffs, but I never ever saw something actually drop off. That included the spider packs doing dots named "Venomous Assault" and stuff.
There's just no feedback when you can actually cleanse something.
And spell effects are just very lacking - buffs in particular are just some generic glow most of the time.
Heck, on my Bear Shaman in Age of Conan I had awesome-looking effects for buffs. Some armor buff that made rocks rise up from the ground around me and then crumble away while leaves whirled around me for a few seconds; some offensive buff that made a ghostly bear surround my body, roar and vanish...
The party frames are pretty bad for healing. The green of the hp bar blends into the gray background if you're not looking directly at them.
Single-target buffing is freaking annoying. Make them party- or raid-wide. And make it, you know, not possible for someone else to overwrite my 20 Endurance buff with their 10 Endurance buff.
edit: and this is all stuff I submitted as beta feedback.
As far as knowing how to fight certain bosses, the way we did that when I played WOW was to look on the Internet for general strategies. Sure, we could try to figure it out ourselves, and we sometimes did. But for Molten Core, that meant every time we wiped it was generally another half hour of time getting everyone back, ready to go, and trying again.
I'd also like to see some cooler spell effects across the board, but there needs to be a toggle for that. I don't want to have to turn down my graphics when I go on raids/warfronts/invasions because there are forty people with thirty glowing colours around them and my frame-rate drops to 5. Having an "Enhanced spell effects" you can turn on and off would be ideal, so you could still keep graphical settings where you want them, but spell effects would just be more "simple."
It's funny that you mentioned AOC, because that game ran like a bag of assholes when there was a big battle going on--particle effects orgy to be sure. I know some people had no issues, but for whatever reason, it just ran like fucking shit for me. My PC was far more than enough to handle it, too.
Edit: AOC for me in a nutshell: Great quests. Great dialogue. Great NPCs. Very cool zones. See ya later, Tortage! I'm off to experience the rest of this great world! .... wait.... the game runs like shit now for some reason.... there are no quests left.... I've gotta grind the next 40 levels? There are level 80s killing people in the level 30 zone?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev_4Ct1yuEs
The problem with using crafting as a time sink and forcing people to hotfoot it back to base, is that you're sitting around with a ton of crafting material in your bags, forced to hit up a bank if you want to quest in a dungeon or other areas for example. Yes its an obvious method of slowing you down, but its something even WoW got right when it was first released.
I didn't notice that to be a problem. Whenever I'd gain a new ability it would start at rank 1, yes, but that rank 1 would be applicable to the level I picked it up.
I.e., if I picked up the level 20 ability at level 20, rank one of that ability would be appropriate for a level 20 character.
Now, if you are talking about snagging a skill lower on the tree from another soul, I could see that being kinda annoying, yeah.
I don't use anything but the default UI and you are wrong. WoW's debuffs are clearly layed out and explained to you (in rift it does not tell you if a debuff is magic, curse, poison, and disease. Like Echo said, for example, ones that are seemingly a Poison are not, I've spammed my cleanse equivalent for many different debuffs and never had it remove anything). The fight you're talking about was very easy to figure out what to do once you read the debuffs. Yes, obviously, that's the only thing I'm asking for. Boss abilities and what is happening should be clear to the player, this isn't the case with a lot of the NPC abilities in Rift. Hell, mousing over debuffs doesn't always bring up the tooltip either, and like Echo said, this is all feedback I've reported already.
I guess I'm odd in that I don't see that as a problem. It's inventory management. You've got limited bag space. More of a reason to strive for more/bigger ones. And the bank is there to hold all your shit. Let it do its job.
I'm weird. I don't remember though, was it really possible in WOW to just craft wherever the fuck you wanted? I know for a fact there was a giant anvil in the middle of Ironforge that you'd have to smelt at. So, what are you referring to?
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
I remember being able to raise my skill levels past my current cap, but he was talking about bag space. I don't see how WOW handled crafting materials taking up bag space any differently. You had to get to a forge/whatever if you wanted to refine your shit, just like in Rift. With all that shit in your bags, you'd want to go to the bank anyway before you go out questing.
Maybe we need a pet, like in Torchlight. Go vendor my shit, boy!
I really wish people would stop parroting this, because it's completely untrue.
I'm not a fervent Blizzard fan boy, and their game isn't perfect, but they absolutely revolutionized the MMORPG market when they came out. Off the top of my head, things they did that were pretty new and now everyone else does:
1. All classes have special abilities. (in EQ, UO, not really sure about AC, because I didn't play it) if you were a straight warrior, you could just 'attack' with a couple other incidental abilities like taunt, bash, etc. If you weren't a caster you didn't have crazy abilities.
2. Questing. Other games of course had quests, but WoW implemented the quest log, the in-game indictor for who had a quest, and in game tracking of quest completion. To go back to EQ, the biggest MMO before WoW, you had to give an NPC the third degree to figure out what they wanted you to do, and then you had to basically have a notebook/online guide to keep track of what you needed to do.
3. Dungeons as an instance
4. Talent trees.
There are more, and I'm sorry to sort of derail this topic to go on that rant, but it's pretty unfair to play down how much WoW (wether you like it or not) revolutionized the modern MMO game space.
On to RIFT, one problem with the RIFT mechanic is just how repetetive it is. You're right, it is cool to have procedural content, especially one that does appear to factor trackable stats, like how many/what level people are in the area. The problem is it suffers from a visual same-ness that gets old after a while. Granted I only got to the mid 20's so maybe there's more on offer than what I've seen.
One other major beef I had with the game was its system for spawning monsters. I forget what the area is called, but there's this one area in the second zone for the defiants where you go into this crypt. I started out levelling a Chloromancer so it took a while to kill things, and your mana didn't last too long. As soon as I'd kill a mob, it would instantly respawn. This wasn't just once, it was four or five times in a row.
Granted if you were in a group you could blow through it so fast that you could probably just pull away from that instant respawn that it wouldn't make a difference, but solo as a mage, it was damn near impossible to get by a mob ahead of me in a tunnel that would instantly respawn. It seems like the game is oddly balanced for group questing, while not really being explicit about it from a gameplay (not narrative) perspective. Certain games (EQ, FFXI) are obvious mechanically in that you are supposed to group, because your rate of possible xp gain past a certain point is almost non-existant if you're not in a group, whereas this is more like WoW in that it doesn't make it clear that they want you to run around in a group. Probably just a personal pet peeve there.
I agree with this, they should allow you to train with some 'buffer.' Like if you cap at 75, let you train to 150 at 50, ore maybe even 60.
The one thing that I found weird with crafting is how much easier it is for certain tradeskills to acquire resources vs. others. A good example would be armorer vs. alchemist. The armorer profession needs one type of resource, say copper. They make everythign out of that copper, and when they've made it, if they were just doing it for the skill ups, they can deconstruct it for roughly half of the materials back on average. So say 1 copper chain vest requires 2 copper bars. If they acquire 100 copper bars, they can make the 50 vests, deconstruct them and make 25 more. Alchemists have multiple resources, and no way to reclaim resources when they are making things that they aren't going to use. Hell, as a smith you can even deconstruct quest rewards for a chance at bars rather than sell them, if you'd prefer.
One thing I did like about the professions is it did seems that for the most part same level range items you crafted were actually a bit superior to most quest drops of the same level. In too many games (I'm looking at you WoW) 2/3 of your recipes aren't usefull, even situationally, and at end game your blacksmith has like two or three things that people want.
Wait, you can do this? Every time I leveled an even number I was always running back to the class trainer to purchase new levels for my skills! Are you talking about just being able to put more points in your soul? If it's the latter then that is cool. If I'm just perceiving this wrong then move along
Oh and I got my warrior to just a hair from 30 before I quit playing Monday morning. I love him so and will be sad to see my dwarf Gropli go, but I'm excited to try the Defiant zones come release!
― John Quincy Adams
His beard is so manly.
Steam: pandas_gota_gun
That's kinda what I'm looking for with Rift. Right now, it just seems to me like there really aren't any compelling differences between WoW and Rift, other than Rift is newer and shinier.
WoW, especially with the recent expansion, is a hell of a game. I'm really looking for something that innovates beyond what Blizzard is doing, sort of like the transition from EQ to WoW. Otherwise, despite being a great, but clone of WoW, I'm not sure why I'd pick it up.
Again, I'm absolutely not trying to offend anyone in this thread, just really looking for/hoping for a good answer.
Thanks.
You're right, DAoC did implement a lot of those features, so I at least partially rescind my comment (specifically the abilities for non-caters). I can't really give the nod to the other two with regards to that though, as they were a completely different genre, as nobody was just a 'warrior.'
Same game type, both were MMOs. Both I THINK had instances, too, City of Heroes definitely did... had a lot of them, in fact.
Certain trade skills are harder to level than others. This is nothing new. You're going to see an apothecary's dyes, for example, go for much higher on the AH than say, some random armour you make. A weapon/armoursmith, though, is going to need a LOT more copper to level than an apothecary will need herbs.
And your last point, don't expect that to last come late game. This was discussed briefly in one of the previous threads, but crafted gear is never going to be (in any MMO, I think) a viable alternative to stuff you get from drops. I'm talking late-game, specifically. Aside from perhaps really, really rare stuff that takes expensive/rare mats to make, crafted gear is going to be sub-par. You can't expect it to be as good as something the player needs to spend hours grinding favour or waiting on a drop for.
The easier something is to obtain, the less valuable it should be. I've always seen weapon/armour crafting skills in MMOs this way: every item you make is either going to be something a lowbie will want because he just wants a new item quickly, or it's just vendor fodder while you grind your skill up. The things you're really interested in making are the unique recipes. Like, a huge backpack. Or a rare sword. Or a certain shield. The general "armour sets" and stuff on the way up is usually fairly useless.
LOTRO tried to do something with this by having "critical successes" in crafting where the result was more or less the best you could find for your level. All this did was flood the market with all the "failures" that crafters made trying to do this. The critical success armour was exceptionally expensive, and at the end of the game you were needing to find really, really rare materials to even attempt it. It's just another way to have people lose crafting materials by "failing," except instead of losing your materials and getting nothing in return (EQ), you lose your materials and get a vendor trash breastplate.
I found it incredibly frustrating, and it drove me away from acquiring crafted gear. I just went for PVP gear, since it was actually enjoyable working toward it, rather than farming green/grey mobs for an entire day for the chance at possibly getting a piece of gear. I'm pretty sure the end-game PVP gear was miles above the end-game crafted gear anyway, so it was even more pointless to grind that shit.
Don't get me wrong, I loved CoX for the 2 years I played it. But uh, it was just downright weird the way it was designed.
Obviously we don't know where this all will stack up, this is something that can't be gone into very much until we can actually get close to the cap.
I think by "genre" he meant maybe setting? Like, AO was sci-fi? I don't know.
I think a lot of the time, people just never played anything in between EQ and WOW, so it seemed like WOW innovated everything that they picked up from other games.
Not to bash WOW, because I fully believe if you're making a new game in a genre and you're not learning from every other game before you, you're doing it wrong.
I mean, The Realm had instances long before WOW ever did. Anarchy Online also did instanced "dungeons."
Edit: And Maple Story had a quest log, didn't it? That came out in 2003 in Korea. Lowlander, it really seems like you're looking at EQ and then at WOW and not realizing there were a whole mess of MMOs in between that innovated the genre. I'd say the most innovative thing WOW did for the genre was bring it into the mainstream. Which is a good thing.
We shall see. I have a feeling that these epic recipes won't hold up against epic drops or epic PVP gear at that level, though. Either way, I'll be maxing out Apothecary for whoever needs potions/dyes/bombs in the guild.
My example above was very specific to me. I was playing EQ. A friend was in the beta for WoW. I asked him, "Why should I switch to WoW? I really like playing EQ." The above quote was a similiar to what my friend told me. He was right, and I switched.
So let me rephrase my question. I'm a big fan of MMO's, and WoW specifically. What innovations does Rift bring to the genre that are compelling enough for me to switch from WoW to Rift?
If by innovations, we're talking completely new, never-before-seen things in an MMO.... nothing. Rifts are a combination of PQs from WAR and the invasions from Tabula Rasa. So, that's not new. It works well, and I like them, but it's not the first time that shit has happened in an MMO.
I might be able to answer your question better if you tell me what things in WOW you think you'd like to see different in your next MMO.
Crafted items are pretty much the standard in EVE, but EVE does this by keeping demand high because you lose everything when you die. This would not go over well in a game trying to compete with WoW :P
But yeah, I agree with you with Rift. That's why I went alchemist in WoW and plan on going runecrafter in Rift; no competition from drops with those professions.
The way I'm reading things, I think you answered his question right there. He's not asking "how does Rift advnace the state of the art MMO?" He -is- asking, "what does Rfit have to differentiate itself from WoW?" with complete disregard to any other game that has already advanced the genre.
To use his own example, if one was playing EQ and then jumped directly to WoW, it doesn't matter that skill trees, spec patch, instances, quest logs UI mods and all of the things the people assign to WoW were actually already developed in other games. From his point of view, the only basis for comparison is EQ vs WoW. WoW has a feature and EQ does not, therefore Wow is "innovative".
So the actual question is: What new things have been put into the MMO genre in the last 8 years that WoW has not captured (yet) but Rift has?
And the answer to that is what you just said:
1. Public grouping - when you come across a group quest in the open world, the automatically allows you to join up with people local to you to accomplish the larger goal. The reward is scaled based on how much you contribute, so the shmoe who joins and goes AFK gets nothing and the guy who is leading the charge every time gets more.
2. Random procedural PvE events - you may find yourself questing/grinding and suddenly the game world changes for the worst and you're on the frontline of a HUGE raid-level battle. Think of it like a 40-man raid event that spawns randomly and basically takes over the zone for an hour. Combine that with an easy to enter public group and it ends up being a lot of fun.
To that I would add:
3. Soul trees - it sounds a lot like WoW's skill trees but it isn't. Picking three souls from a list of eight really allows you to "create a class". Say you want a Hunter but you don't like dealing with pets. In WoW's system, you can choose not to use the pet, but you'll suffer for it since the class is balanced around using that ability. In Rift, you simply choose a different "soul" instead of the pet-based soul. For example you could choose a more tank-ish soul and gain access to abilities that are specifically designed to increase your survivability. Or a "machine" soul and start lobbing grenades. It's really hard to understand just how flexible the system is until you actually try it out. It kind of turns the class-selection question on its head. Rather than saying "I want to be THAT class for THESE specific skills" you instead say "I want skill A, skill B and skill C (which are not part of any one class) and combine them into a new class that doesn't exist." The soul system allows that. You want a stealthing, ranged DPS that can teleport? Sure. You want a CC, magic DPS and healing? Okay. You want a melee tank that has self heals and buffs? Fine.
It sounds like everyone would end up overpowered, but it really isn't. What it is, is a lot of fun.
4. PvP battlegound/area queuing - I don't know if Wow has this, but being able to queue for a PvP battleground from -anywhere- in the world is really nice. You can be off doing your own thing, queue up and keep playing the game. when a slot opens up, you get a requester on the screen and either say "Yes" and go to the battleground or "no" and keep going. If you go in, you are whisked away from wherever you are to the PvP fight, and then when it is over, win or lose, you are dropped back into the game in the exact same spot as when you left.
WAR was really a perfect storm of mistakes. You have serious flaws in how the game was designed, huge ambitious ideas their hardware couldn't physically support, and a product that was rushed out the door before end game content was ready.
Take any one of those and maybe it would have been OK. But with all of it combined the game was a dead man walking from launch.
The biggest problem was RvR. The game really hung its reputation on being a more PvP-centric WoW. They realized there's a good group of gamers out there who want PvP end game over killing digital dragons, and they sought to take those players from WoW (which has historically done a shit job with all forms of PvP - see Tol Barad).
But the entire RvR system sucked. Furthermore once an obstacle for part of the system was fixed, you found the next part of the system sucked harder.
i.e. The keep and battle objective system didn't make it beneficial to actually hold and defend them. So you'd have keep merry-go-round - since you got a chance at loot and renown every time they flipped and diddly shit otherwise.
plus after a couple of early flips, the zone flipping mechanic broke before the bulk of players got to T4.
when that was finally fixed, or people found a work around, they streamed to fortress fights that couldn't handle the sheer number of players there.
(I shit you not, after planning for a zone flip with my guild and a several big alliance guilds, we got to the fortress, and watched hours of work and coordination die because the game couldn't handle what we were looking to do. Within a week at least 25 percent of the folks involved in the push had quit the game).
and when fortress fights were finally fixed and you could push to the enemy city - we found that system was not finished, not well thought out and generally a waste of time.
can't have those kinds of problems on a feature you're hoping to hang your hat on.
the game had other issues too. mirror classes weren't balanced. super broke, game breaking skills went weeks without getting fixed. the entire renown system favored healers not working with others. keeps weren't well designed. the actual pvp lakes in T4 weren't big enough (most were smaller than AV - in a real world map not a BG).
and probably more i'm forgetting.
btw i saw somebody mentioned the game ultimately making money. if that is the case its because of strong sales out of the gate (i believe 1 million boxes sold early on) and huge layoffs a few months after launch.
Empire - Veela Server
To the class system, I would add that it also adds a level of non-commitment to creating your character. You don't have to worry about missing out on something you like in X class, because chances are you can try that out too. You're really only "pigeon-holed" into the Calling you choose from the four (Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Cleric). The eight Souls within those callings can be mixed and matched at any time, and even though you start by selecting one (and then quickly a second), you choose a third in the starter area can unlock them all at level 13.
I think they need to do a better job of introducing players to the class system in the starter quests/zones. I made a rather lengthy feedback post in-game about this, but they need to cater to players who aren't going to read over the quest info and then be completely fucking confused 10 levels later when everyone is talking about souls, roles, etc.
Your calling is your base class. Warrior, Mage, Rogue, or Cleric. That's the only actual limiting, permanent choice you need to really make.
Your soul is any one to three of the eight sub-classes within your calling you spec to. You choose one to start, a second right after, and a third a little later. At level 13, you can unlock them all. You can only have one to three active at any one time.
Your role is your "spec," or your current choice of one to three souls. You can unlock a total of four roles, which you can change to on the fly. These can be planted on an action bar as well, so changing from your stealthy, melee-dps rogue to your heally, ranged bard rogue is just a button away. When you change to another role, your action bars are also change. Set them up once for each role, and away you go. You can also create a macro fairly easily in-game that changes all your gear with the same button-press.
So, with that at a glance, it's fairly complicated compared to what players coming from other MMOs are going to expect from the class system. Judging by the amount of times people ask really basic questions about the class system over general chat, the way the terminology is mis-used and causes confusion, and the people who talk about re-rolling "a new rogue," it's not widely fully understood.
I know that, no matter what, some players are just not going to read tutorials or quest info, and they're going to be confused no matter what. That's unavoidable, but there should be a tutorial that beats you over the head about the system, to alleviate the most confusion possible. I can see people getting annoyed with the game simply because they don't realize their annoyances are based on ignorance. For example, people lamenting now choosing Bard as a starter class or complaining that they can't stealth with their Nightblade.
Edit: The underlying problems with WAR were much more poisonous and disastrous than what was wrong with the actual game. The company really fell apart, and the major players involved were the higher-ups. There is a lot of drama surrounding EA-Mythic if you care to dig deeper in Google, but that game was fucked from the get-go, and it was coporatae politics that did it more than anything else.
I did like my CE though. I still have everything in its original condition, including the packaged mini and the game DVD in its original shrink wrap. Beta players could use the beta client to play release. Something Trion has said in their FAQ that we won't be able to do. I don't wanna download several gigs again
Only reason I went with the digital CE for Rift was because I realize what a colossal waste of space all of this stuff is. While it's fantastic nerdy memorabilia, I'll never really do anything with it.
1 - Folks show up to the game who are interested in having a community with their other gamers. Don't need to be invited over for tea and biscuits every night, but it'd be nice to get to know the people you're playing with. I started MMOs in SWG, where you literally knew thousands of other gamers by name. In WAR you knew a ton of the people on the server. in WoW most folks would prefer to never talk to anybody. Hopefully Rift is different.
2 - I see end game rifts mixing with PvP possibly being huge fun.
3 - Rifts in general are a lot of fun. The spontaneous nature of them gives them a leg up over WAR's static PQs. And also I dont' think they'll be ignored in the end game like most of WARs were.
4 - The soul system gives you a ton of flexibility with your character. Its really like being able to play a few different classes with one character, and switch on the fly.
Empire - Veela Server