Yes. And that's why I was saying that it is impossible to have the 10-bear-ass-oh-and-go-there-next experience in such a world. It can't work in a really large world because your designers can't write and place all those quests.
Zoned, not sharded (/nitpick).
It doesn't matter if you have no quests because people will always congregate together around something. You have to design ways to keep people spread out and that's typically almost impossible. It'll depend on what kind of game they are making. If it has PVP, people will come together. If it has mass PVE people will come together. If it's loot centric then people will congregate around the popular dungeons where other people are.
Spreading people out is important in the early game when the initial rush of players overloads the servers. But after the game has aged and the population has stableized, then the problem becomes players being too spread out with nobody to play with.
It'll be different - I think it'll be good too, but that's because I have a hard time imagining SOE botching this release. Too much is on the line for them to fuck it up mightily.
I would say it's the inevitable future of all theme-park MMOs. Not for all MMOs in general.
That's why starting areas based on races is important.
I kinda hope they are just going old school and making the game they want to make and not giving the forum vocal minorities to much time to piss and moan with calls of changing this and that. Other games have done that and well we can see how many awesome MMO's have come out since WoW. Gamers think they know what they want until they get it and then decide they do not want it. I used to bad mouth SOE like many others but when you sit back and look they are really no more worse or better than every other company to come out with a game in the last 10 years.
Theme park has nothing to do with it. It works in every situation and can improve all mmos of every type. Even EvE could make use of the possibilites without diluting their core sandbox philosophy or their gameplay. Thinking a mega-server only works for theme park mmos just shows a serious lack of imagination, nothing more.
That's easy to say, but most studios are extremely limited with their resources and most of the time don't have the hours or man power to concentrate on that much content at any given time.That's why starting areas based on races is important.
Heck make every race has a few options to start in.
Also, make content for all kind of players. The soloers, the Duo, The Group. Indoor and Outdoor. Easy and Hard. Don't forget other dimensions of game play which everyone actually neglect. Crafting, Farming, Harvesting, Hunting, Stealing from a City, Guarding a City, Job Career in a City... Vanguard tried the diplomacy thing but let's face it, it's just a Mini Card Game. Let's expand beyond the "combat" game and you'll get a player base that have different preferences spread out all over the map.
You see a dungeon being overrun?
Easy solution, improve the other deserted dungeons of equal level/difficulty or create new equally good ones. How hard it is to create a new dungeon with all its lore and NPCs? seriously? I would do this for free for any developer if they provided manageable tools
For once consider balance as an overall world thing and not only for class-to-class power struggle.
You can have quests you need to pick up first exist alongside objectives/tasks/quests that are always present. Whatever objective the designers put in just has to make sense. I'm not gonna scalp every orc without reason on the odd chance some dorf three zones over might want to make a new rug, but I might keep the shattered crown of the giant king just in case someone pays well for it. Under that reason 99% of quests in WoW arent quests, yea. Talk about an overused term when even various sci-fi games use it (I think it was TOR actually, but EVE's use of dungeon is equally annoying).
Exactly. If they add quests, legendary items, epic weapons etc those names need to mean something, and not be the same as the various kill bounties for wildlife.
I obviously have no clue but with everything EVE is calculating not only per ship but per weapon, trajectory, transversal velocity missile speed, explosion radii etc it ends up being more load on the server then your typical theme park. CCP is bought servers that cost more then total GDP of some countries. Of course it is easier to buy run-of-the-mill servers fit for 5000 connections and just buy more, put them all online and merge them when they are deserted three months later. Its the McDonalds way of server management. I hope with the stated goal of SOE that from PS2 on they design games for a successful decade or more and not for a year, they realize all the trouble the old server structure brings and try something new. I'd settle for like a 2 servers per continent/language solution, as long as they dont just switch on dozens of them each day of the launch week like the last few releases.
I'll probably regret it but yea I put some faith into SOE. Its like Microsoft was the ultimate devil a dozen years ago and suddenly you look around and they're the good guys. Joke aside the reason I dare to hope for a new and different project with EQN is that they didnt screw up PS2, and quarter after launch still seem pretty commited to improving it further. they took their 10 year old PS1, left out their grave mistakes (mechas) and updated it for 2012 standards, without going for the FPS standard of 30-60 players maps (instances) that every other game in the last decade used. If they do the same with EQ1 I'll be happy.
I started saying it when Smed mentioned a destructible world. Remember his forest analogy?
