Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

The flipside is it was always a bitch finding a party who knew what the fuck they were doing ;/ Back when I played, most XP groups lost me more then what I actually gained.

Cybsled said:

The flipside is it was always a bitch finding a party who knew what the fuck they were doing ;/ Back when I played, most XP groups lost me more then what I actually gained.

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That was true a couple of years ago, but not so much now. When the game launched four years ago I used to play in Japanese parties, because I"m in the UK. Generally, they are so much better at the technical aspects of games; they"re use of skill chains really set them apart.

It took two or three years for Westerners to catch up (I largely blame that on their use of worldwide servers), but now even most pugs have a semblance of ability (when you can actually get a party together).

The combat and class system are beyond reproach, but so many other aspects of the game are horrible. Nevertheless, players will go back time and time again to give it another go, because of those two systems that are so attractive.


Imagine that class and combat system, with WoW like content for solo, party and raids, with a decent loot system. Thats what I"m expecting from the MMO they have been developing for the last couple of years. Again, the thing that could work against them would be if they continue to insist on worldwide servers.


To chip in on instancing, its not what most of us on this type of forum want to see, but if a game is after massive commercial success instancing is a must. I"d suggest a LoN like system, with dynamically generated instances for both solo and group play - maybe even raid.

We will something like this in 38 Studios game. The little Curt has given away is they are aiming for a multi billion dollar franchise (he has said that twice on this thread alone). That means massive commercial success for the game and that demands instancing.

Flight said:

(ffxi)Weapon skills are skill based, with level caps. Each class gets different caps for each weapon type. At certain skill levels you receive new special attacks. The chart above shows how these different skills can be chained and produce various effects. They produce significant damage or bonuses. Only two classes can do these chains on their own and then far more limited than multiple characters.

Individual attacks and specific chains have elements attached to them. There is further significance because :

i) mobs all have elemental attributes and are weak to some element types and strong against others;

ii) Mage classes can add additional effects at the end of combat chains, using spells associated with the element type to produce "bursts". These are like an additional chain at the end, producing further damage and effects.


The whole system is based on Shinto, as is the entire game, but that can be ignored in analyzing and performing the mechanics. The true genius behind it is that it is the only system in any MMORPG that makes a partys potential truly greater than the sum of its parts. It also produces many more class possibilities, in terms of enabling and promoting class and party mechanics.


No other combat system comes close; after using it every other games party combat seems incredibly boring.

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Bump for emphasis, despite the incredible grind that was leveling in ffxi, the combat system really made it far more tolerable. In fact i dont think the level grind would have been manageable in any other game due to the tedium. I suppose eq2 tried at the synergy idea with the heroic opportunity mechanic, but failed miserably. I"d go so far as to suggest outright stealing ffxi"s job system, and skillchain system (but replacing names as needed so its a bit less obvious), maybe slightly speeding up the pace of combat and reducing leveling time. Combine that with a complex raid game like what wow has, and that"d definitely be a game i"d play.

I"ve posted it before but will say again, i dont know why no game has tried to approach the crafting realm differently. Rather than produce a billion of an item in large quantities to level up, have leveling based on spending a large amount of time crafting 1 item, including all the minutiae of the item, each to transition from apprentice -> journeyman -> master. Once this item is crafted, then for future items the production can be instant/quicker to produce mass amounts for gameplay practicality. In otherwords, if you"re a blacksmith, and for example you need to craft a particular sword to graduate to mastercraftsman, you need to get the mats/mold the hilt then mold the blade/do other stuff that i"d have no idea about since im not a weaponsmith in rl - basically have people go through the entire stepwise exhaustive process, and once thats done they are now master crafters and dont have to go through the detailed steps again. I suppose this could be considered boring as well but might have more potential to be interesting than the current norm which is gather 5 million clumps of the same mats, click a button and make 500 of an item to gain levels.

Flight said:

That was true a couple of years ago, but not so much now. When the game launched four years ago I used to play in Japanese parties, because I"m in the UK. Generally, they are so much better at the technical aspects of games; they"re use of skill chains really set them apart.

It took two or three years for Westerners to catch up (I largely blame that on their use of worldwide servers), but now even most pugs have a semblance of ability (when you can actually get a party together).

The combat and class system are beyond reproach, but so many other aspects of the game are horrible. Nevertheless, players will go back time and time again to give it another go, because of those two systems that are so attractive.


Imagine that class and combat system, with WoW like content for solo, party and raids, with a decent loot system. Thats what I"m expecting from the MMO they have been developing for the last couple of years. Again, the thing that could work against them would be if they continue to insist on worldwide servers.


To chip in on instancing, its not what most of us on this type of forum want to see, but if a game is after massive commercial success instancing is a must. I"d suggest a LoN like system, with dynamically generated instances for both solo and group play - maybe even raid.

We will something like this in 38 Studios game. The little Curt has given away is they are aiming for a multi billion dollar franchise (he has said that twice on this thread alone). That means massive commercial success for the game and that demands instancing.

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I am curious to know thoughts on instancing. I don"t know that I care one way or the other and it"s not something that ever intrudes on my enjoyment of a game because lag and all the stuff that made instancing/zoning an issue in EQ are non existent for me anymore.

Does it take away from enjoyment? Stop the immersion? I know that I was horribly turned off in WoW when I realized that the "live" dungeons and caves I was exploring in the early game were just stamped copies of each other with no real depth.

I do think, right now anyway, that instancing is a must to doll out massive in depth content with your dungeons and zones, that might change.

I was all about a huge one zone world when this idea was fermenting years ago, only to learn that solution made almost zero sense for a million different reasons.

LOL asking that is like asking if .999~ = 1.

Twobit Whore said:

LOL asking that is like asking if .999~ = 1.

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In that there is only one right answer and the other answer is wrong, or in that it causes a shitload of mouthbreathers to start arguing and showcasing how dumb they are?

Gnome Eater said:

in that it causes a shitload of mouthbreathers to start arguing and showcasing how dumb they are?

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This. Everyone is going to think something different and have a million reasons why. And then you"ll have a few who just don"t care.

Personally I don"t care. I like instancing. I like knowing that if me and my group is good enough we will get to the nameds and get our loots and complete our quests without worrying about high levels slumming, morons griefing or anything else that can intefere. But if there are tools and systems in place to combat those negatives then it doesn"t matter if it"s uninstanced.

Ngruk said:

I know that I was horribly turned off in WoW when I realized that the "live" dungeons and caves I was exploring in the early game were just stamped copies of each other with no real depth.

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That"s a bit different, though. Those caves suffered from the usual "lack of content production time" which leads to the same houses copied over and over, or, in your case, the same caves copied over and over again.

During beta, there were far more copies. A couple of caves were redone before live, but they clearly lacked time to finish those.

But that"s different from instancing. Those caves are small, and not intended to be "dungeons", the largest of them can be explored in 20mn (solo, at the right level). Though some of them were large enough, they might have warranted be promoted to a full dungeon. I"m thinking of the Felwood cave here.

I was all about a huge one zone world when this idea was fermenting years ago, only to learn that solution made almost zero sense for a million different reasons.

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There"s always plenty of good reasons to instance zones, and plenty of good reasons not to instance zones. Usually pretty different ones.

I am personally partisan of the "consensual hallucination" zoning model, aka zoneless instances.

The idea is that there"s absolutely no reason why you need a loading screen when entering an instanced dungeon. You should be able to step into the instance by simply crossing the threshold.

That has some serious implications in immersion, though. You turn around, you see the people outside from inside. And, with proper geometry tricks (think EQ zone lines twisty corridors...), there"s no reason why you don"t see people inside the instance that aren"t too far in from outside.

The net code simply has to avoid sending any info on people across instances. A quick and dirty trick is that people entering a different instance from yours simply take off and run around the corner, passing you by. If they come back to the exit, you make a fictitious run from the depth of the instance.

This is specially useful if you want immersive housing. You can house people in various rooms & appartments in a game city. They open their window, and have a nice view of the marketplace below them - with players (and NPC) running back and forth - from the perspective of your own instance. For bonus effect, when windows are opened, people can see one of the appartment instance (typically, they"ll see the head of the owner sticking), either at random, or if one of the owner is on your friend list or in your guild, him by preference.

Of course, it has rather severe implications on the server architecture. You can"t spawn separate process per group, you need a fairly complex multi-threaded instance. Lots of bug potential. But it destroys the instance portal non-immersiveness.

My opinion on instancing is that it is obviously useful, and also necessary for current/next-gen games due to the larger population we will see. However, it is also overdone in games like WoW.

One solution we came up with in the [Game Dev] thread was to have non-instanced versions of the dungeon for normal play, and then if at least one member of the group had the main quest for the dungeon they could access the instanced version, which would have additional content and dynamic scripted events (much easier to do in an instance). This would allow you to incorporate more story-driven, character focused dungeon crawls that only an instance can provide, but outside of that also allow players to just roam into a dungeon and possibly meet new people and make new friends - an experience many of us miss from EverQuest.

Alternatively, you could simply avoid what you mentioned WoW has done with the "stamped" caves and buildings. I noticed this too, and it annoys me. If the time was spent to flesh out these "world dungeons" you could actually come up with some very interesting areas that played like a non-instanced dungeon and would add alot of excitement to the world when an adventurer stumbled upon them.

One example I can think of is the "Deathforge" from WoW, located in Shadowmoon Valley. This could"ve been an incredible non-instanced dungeon focusing on the Deathforge creations the demons seem to control (they are seen all over outland) with lore as to how they were created, maybe a wing where some have revolted and escaped demon control and allow you to build faction with them.

If you went that route you could use normal instances for regular dungeons, and still appease both crowds.

Ngruk said:

instancing

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I may not be the majority, so go with what sells, but I personally hate it.

I think something along the lines of what EQ2 did was ok, and I really really loved the idea of what Vanguard claimed it would do.

VG said it would have these things called AES(Advanced Encounter System). A dungeon would not be instanced so you could have multiple groups in there, easy replacement if a group member leaves etc. However if your group "triggers" an AES, which could be done by anything in theory from loot, stepping over a certain area, killing a certain mob...yada yada, then you would have an AES spawn just for you.

Short dumb example I remember hearing once was that you are in some gnoll dungeon, one of the mobs drops a "Note to the King" now the king spawns in a certain area and only you can fight him. Other people that see him would not be able to attack.

But I think we can also become much more high tech here as well.I dislike instancing because I feel that it takes away from the community feel of being inside a dungeon. What I mean by community feel is things like I stated above, groups interacting, teaming up, conflicting, replacing members when they leave. I also think instancing is good because of what it offers; scripted events, and private areas.

What if there was a dungeon that was not instanced but the "boss" rooms, or area"s with scripts was? Almost like an invisible zone line. Enter the room and you see the Gnoll King, next group enters and they see him also, but not you. The ROOM is instanced? I don"t know if this is the answer but doesn"t that solve the problems? It still allows for private attempts at bosses and unique scripted events but keeps the area as a whole a public venue. What do other people feel about this? And for discussion let"s assume there is some method of preventing people of just reforming a group to kill the king endlessly or whatever.

Flight said:

I"d be very interested to know who is responsible for quality at 38 Studios and who is the guy ultimately answerable for it (I don"t personally do quality but its an area of interest to me).

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Every. Last. One of us.

Biggest advantages of instancing is that it helps cut down on lag by limiting the number of people in the "zone" and helps cut down on fighting over spawns. Over use of instancing can, however, kill any real "feel" for the world.

I would love to see both and I think there is no reason why you couldnt have both in game and be successful.

A perfect game for me would be a zone like Sebilis with a simple key quest to access and then great loot for it"s level. Open zone and non-instanced.

I would also like to see a great quest line like the Van Cleef quest in WoW and then having a Deamines type instance that is done very well and really pulls the player into the world.

I would like to have camps of some sort like the Frenzied Ghoul that are never tied to quests but drop a nice item or 2 like a FBSS. Again the loot would have to be lore or else you could really abuse that type of mob. Again, these types of camps dont have to be the norm like in EQ, but man I really miss stuff like this in MMOs.

I think LDoNs for solo and group are great ideas.

Also, and I have said this before but something "new" that you might think about Curt, is a 100 level dungeon like Lufia had, or at least an idea similiar. The character would enter the instance and start at lvl 1 and with no equipment. Exp would be increased and he would acquire loot in order to complete the instance. Red chests would be "only usable for that session" and then disappear after the player left the dungeon. Blue chests, however, would be loot he could leave the instance with. Also that loot would be allowed back into the instance if he ran it again. In essence, it would be a twinked character inside the instance as he would start at lvl 1 again and without equipment save the blue items. In order to complete it, basically the characeter would need to acquire a good amount of blue pieces in order to reach the final mob. In game time would be about 2-3 hrs to complete the entire instance solo with good blue equipment. Basically a game within a game. I played that 100 lvl dungeon in Lufia so many times. I loved it.

Please make raid content contested. There"s nothing like the glory days of EQ.

Please dont make raid content contested. I dont have time to compete with college kids playing 60+ hrs a week.

You need a fine balance between instances and open content. Instanced story events, scripted challenges etc all need to be instanced in my opinion so the work you put into it is fully realized without other screwing up.

World Design: You need a full open world that is full and living. The how you achieve this is a long discussion that gets too detailed to put on paper here without any back and forth or discussion. Suffice it to say, you will require to use zone and world architecture to funnel players from the "wide empty land" (SEE: VG) into Valleys etc where you can populate the land with trees and grass to give the illusion of a full living world.

World design should be just that, not zone design. "Zones need to complement each other.

Grave said:

My opinion on instancing is that it is obviously useful, and also necessary for current/next-gen games due to the larger population we will see. However, it is also overdone in games like WoW.

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A good summation. You have to instance but you don"t have to instance like WoW. Instancing is best when you need to do some significant story driven content -- a great example are the early Chapter quests in LOTRO and the class quests (also LOTRO). In those cases (similiar to what Grave suggested) your party would have its own copy of the dungeon.

Also i think instancing is necessary for things like WoW battlegrounds -- PvP for non PvP servers where you need to get a bunch of people together that may be widely scattered over the world and where you have a lot of people who want to simultaneously play the same BG (just don"t go retarded and split the player base like WoW).

Otherwise I prefer population balancing instancing for popular dungeons. Dungeons are "public" but new instances will spawn when they reach a pre-determined maximum number of players in an instance (50? 100? depends on the instance obviously). Of course players should still be able to choose which instance they can go into -- even if one is at "max" population so that they can group with their friends.

And it is absolutely fine to have a few completely non-instanced dungeons but you will need to make appropriate Boss spawning modifications to prevent massive cockblocking. For example, Bosses can be spawnable by players after collecting appropriate drops (VG does this a lot for some of the non-APW dungeons) or Bosses have reasonable refresh rates.

Last, but not least, it is okay to have a very few long-respawn timer non-instanced bosses (overland or a special boss in one of the non-instanced dungeson) but you will need to be very careful on itemization. You can"t have everyone in the game competing for one spawn, because that spawn drops jboots or their GMG equivalent-- something everyone needs.

Ngruk said:

I am curious to know thoughts on instancing. I don"t know that I care one way or the other and it"s not something that ever intrudes on my enjoyment of a game because lag and all the stuff that made instancing/zoning an issue in EQ are non existent for me anymore.

Does it take away from enjoyment? Stop the immersion? I know that I was horribly turned off in WoW when I realized that the "live" dungeons and caves I was exploring in the early game were just stamped copies of each other with no real depth.

I do think, right now anyway, that instancing is a must to doll out massive in depth content with your dungeons and zones, that might change.

I was all about a huge one zone world when this idea was fermenting years ago, only to learn that solution made almost zero sense for a million different reasons.

Click to expand...

I think a great game should have both instanced and non-instanced dungeons. Blizzard"s winged/linear approach to dungeons is perfect for instancing. Only problem is it gets very stale after a while, so why not have one instanced and one non-instanced dungeon at every order of magnitude of levels....so say every 7-8 levels you want a new dungeon. Have one that is a winged/instanced and one that is not-instanced and non-linear similar to some EQ dungeons. Of course you would need some new ideas to combat camping/leap-frogging/training unless you want some of those mechanics in your game. I think some healthy competitiveness over some item drops would add a little excitement to a game like WoW.

Vanguards concepts in the initial FAQ had a couple good ideas to avoid camping... like encounter-route"s that would spawn a named mob just for your group that couldn"t be stolen...or gather item x, y, and z which would be scattered throughout the dungeon that would spawn a named. But also have some open boss encounters to add a little competitive edge.

Little or none of this was actually implemented mind you...but if someone competent executed these ideas it could make for some fun dungeon-crawling.

tad10 said:

Otherwise I prefer population balancing instancing for popular dungeons. Dungeons are "public" but new instances will spawn when they reach a pre-determined maximum number of players in an instance (50? 100? depends on the instance obviously). Of course players should still be able to choose which instance they can go into -- even if one is at "max" population so that they can group with their friends.

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This is good. I liked that about eq2.

Instancing is needed if like WoW you use them to equip your people.
What people fail to remember is that EQ dungeons initially were more leveling grounds then loot grounds. Sure you had named that dropped loot, but who seriously has the time or inclination to do 12+ hour camps of the lord or ghoul magi?
So I suppose the question is, what do you want to use your instances for?
Progressing a quest/story line, or as loot pinatas?

If you make your dungeons loot centric ala WoW then you need to instance. The shared dungeons in EQ2 were not used nearly as much as the group instance ones. Even when you did go into the shared ones in EQ2, if there were more then 2 groups in the dungeon you would be lucky to find anything worth looting. In those situations you dont care who you are killing or why, you only care about getting to him first each and every time.

Personally I prefer instanced content to shared. As a paying customer I dont see why I need to spend my night camping a spawn spot to maybe get a chance of experiencing content and getting my phat lewt.

People who seriously want all contested spawns must not play the same WoW I do. Can you image a server that has 5+ guilds on illidan? Do you really want to go back to zone rotations? Why should guilds get table scraps just because they are in a different time zone?