Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Because he has Direct Messages turned off in his account settings.

Next question?

Evernothing said:

Because he has Direct Messages turned off in his account settings.

Next question?

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Added you on Discord. Will hit you up there.

I’ve hopped on the stream a few times this past week. He‘s super chill and is willing to answer questions, which is usually interesting given his background.

It’s still early in development, obviously, but it feels a lot like EQ so far. They sound like they’re interested in avoiding instancing. That’s enough to get me excited.

Dizzam said:

I’ve hopped on the stream a few times this past week. He‘s super chill and is willing to answer questions, which is usually interesting given his background.

It’s still early in development, obviously, but it feels a lot like EQ so far. They sound like they’re interested in avoiding instancing. That’s enough to get me excited.

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From what I heard, Nick is very anti-instancing and 'alive world' feeling. I've mentioned that raiding disputes may not be in their best interest to police constantly. It'll be interesting to see what goes in. I know Shawn has first-hand experience with balancing a raid encounter and encounter sizes, instancing pretty much solves the issue. It's something the EQ team wanted since launch when he was there, and was the reason that housing was pushed out to House of Thule many years down the road; the tech wasn't there for it yet. It is now, but...the question then becomes, "Do we want open-world raid content to be a community effort to take down, or instanced so that the encounter becomes challenging?' rather than 'is it technically feasible for this milestone?' like the question was for years at SOE.

Secrets said:

From what I heard, Nick is very anti-instancing and 'alive world' feeling. I've mentioned that raiding disputes may not be in their best interest to police constantly. It'll be interesting to see what goes in. I know Shawn has first-hand experience with balancing a raid encounter and encounter sizes, instancing pretty much solves the issue. It's something the EQ team wanted since launch when he was there, and was the reason that housing was pushed out to House of Thule many years down the road; the tech wasn't there for it yet. It is now, but...the question then becomes, "Do we want open-world raid content to be a community effort to take down, or instanced so that the encounter becomes challenging?' rather than 'is it technically feasible for this milestone?' like the question was for years at SOE.

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When I asked about it on the stream (and I’m paraphrasing here), Shawn said he was leaning toward instancing but then Nick came up with a list of reasons not to do instancing that were at least convincing enough to put some more thought into it.

I think instancing was one of the nails in the old-MMO coffin. It simultaneously destroys immersion and hurts the “community” feeling.

In EQ, I logged on to be part of a world. You had to work together with other guilds to share the limited resources, or pay the price. One guild could race another guild for a raid boss. Or could help another guild finish off a raid boss that they couldn’t quite kill. If I heard a better guild was trying a new raid boss, most of the time at least, I could follow and watch from afar. There were never areas of the world that I couldn’t access just because I wasn’t part of the right group/guild. And the actions of one group/guild affected all others on the server.

In WoW, on the other hand, I just logged in to play with my group or guild. It was still fun, but it never felt as much like a living world to me. It didn’t matter what anyone else on the server was doing. Frankly, I didn’t know (or need to know) any of the other guilds on the server because there wasn’t a good reason to. We could always just start up our own private dungeon/raid.

Obviously, each approach has pros and cons. Did it suck when all of the good camping spots were taken in a dungeon or when another guild logged on early in the morning to kill a raid boss before we could? Of course. But the fact that the actions of those other players had an impact on how I could play the game, while limiting, made me feel like part of something bigger than just my guild.

I've always wondered why every developer seems to take a binary approach to instancing. Either pretty much everything is instanced, or nothing is. Why?

In either scenario you are designing a dungeon, so why not have an uninstanced overworld version and an instanced version. It's the same assets either way. They can even drop the same gear but the incentive to doing the overworld, contested version would be to make all the loot that drops tradeable/sellable and have no (or lower) level requirements. And everything in the instanced version is soulbound and has level requirements.

I absolutely hate that every developer seems to take an anti-twinking stance in MMOs these days. Give us back twink gear, encourage alts and interraction, but give people an alternative if what they want to do is completely camped.

Herewegoagain.gif? Or is this something to actually follow up on? The moment nirgon starts fanboying this it’s toast

Kirun said:

Yeah, I've been fucking around with DAoC lately and last year was EQ. I forgot how awesome twinking was back in the early MMO days. It's frustrating that so many of the "modern" ones do everything possible to let you "catch up" or play with friends (deleveling, upscaling, etc.), but you can't twink alts/friends at all. It makes no fucking sense.

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I just want a game that lets me put 2 lammys, a fungi and cowl of mortality on a lvl 1 ranger.

ZyyzYzzy said:

Lammys? What are you some kind of poor? BoC and SoD

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bro I dont need that aggro as a ranger

Tmac said:

This is a good point. Why not both.gif?

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One of the designs I was working on for a new 'TLP-style' EQ server involved having both instancing and open world content available, but loot was on lockouts. All loot drops were on personal loot and NPCs had varying rarities for drops - doing it in the open world just meant you could bring more characters and have a more chance at loot, whereas instancing may drop more items and of better quality.

Instancing would be restricted by raid sizes and have the same lockouts shared with open world, so the choice would be up to the player on what to do. Instances could also have varying difficulties in the future, allowing content to be reused and thus always relevant in some way.

Also, open world would allow everyone to engage and based on contribution to the encounter, ranked by a few categories: healing, amount of damage taken, crowd control used, amount of damage done, adds killed. The raid encounters would essentially keep the same difficulty beyond that - they're glorified public quests, and that's fine. Not all raid encounters would keep their original design under that system, gaining mechanics at specific player count thresholds.

That way, you'd have people who enjoy 'contesting' content and instancing the content in the same area. And certain quests which would otherwise be cockblocked (ie; Wizard Epic in Plane of Fear) would no longer be cockblocked because they'd be instanced only. NPCs on long respawns for turnins like that are stupidly designed and it's amazing how long TLPs have gone without fixing that issue.

However, I had to double down focus on my career, the stuff I do outside of emu, and the best way to pass ideas like this on was through getting involved with passion projects done by people who have 'been there before'. This so happens to be the best one I have come across yet, and they're very positive... but also realistic with their goals.

I thought LDoN group instancing was really good because it basically saved "pick up groups" in EQ. Sure you could get PUGs during PoP but grouping was becoming much more gear-centric. The nice part about LDoN was that it allowed people who were in PoTime to group with someone in just bazaar gear and still be successful AND have a reason to do it(points for augments). I always liked that. It seems to me that instancing could be successful alongside open world content if it was looked at as a way for people of all types of play to group together, but to not expect top tier items/gear from it.

Khane said:

I've always wondered why every developer seems to take a binary approach to instancing. Either pretty much everything is instanced, or nothing is. Why?

In either scenario you are designing a dungeon, so why not have an uninstanced overworld version and an instanced version. It's the same assets either way. They can even drop the same gear but the incentive to doing the overworld, contested version would be to make all the loot that drops tradeable/sellable and have no (or lower) level requirements. And everything in the instanced version is soulbound and has level requirements.

I absolutely hate that every developer seems to take an anti-twinking stance in MMOs these days. Give us back twink gear, encourage alts and interraction, but give people an alternative if what they want to do is completely camped.

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This is so good it needs reposting over and over and over. This is how you design games for mass audiences.

When will climbing be in the game?!

Kaines said:

This is so good it needs reposting over and over and over. This is how you design games for mass audiences.

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Might be how you design games for mass audiences, but designing games for mass audiences is how we got here. I don’t think having instance versions of open world dungeons solves the problem. It takes the same toll on immersion and community as instancing alone. And doing the same work for less of a reward just because you’re in the instanced version instead of the open world version would be frustrating.