Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Nemesis · Mar 6, 2023

Woefully Inept said:
Update 29: Feedback & Preparations — Monsters & Memories

Hi all! The big theme from last month involved our focus on the Friends & Family testing that we kicked off at the end of the year. Read more about that in last month’s update . The testing has continued and we’ve stayed busy reacting to the feedback. While that’s been going on, we’ve als

monstersandmemories.com

forehead · Mar 6, 2023

Tearofsoul · Mar 6, 2023

The zone they are working on feels like the child of Freeport + Maj'Dul.

Secrets · Mar 6, 2023

Tearofsoul said:
The zone they are working on feels like the child of Freeport + Maj'Dul.

Pretty much. It felt very much more like Freeport than Maj'Dul though when I was running around.

I am really glad they're making forward, steady progress that they can tangibly show off. It's awesome.

Kirun · Mar 6, 2023

Giant fucking omega cities like that are a fucking chore in MMOs. There's a reason nobody really hung out in Stormwind or Ogrimmar until they added flying mounts.

Ikkan · Mar 7, 2023

Kirun said:
Giant fucking omega cities like that are a fucking chore in MMOs. There's a reason nobody really hung out in Stormwind or Ogrimmar until they added flying mounts.

Was that true for your server? When I played in classic Orgrimmar was the hub city for Horde on Firetree.

forehead · Mar 7, 2023

Kirun said:
Giant fucking omega cities like that are a fucking chore in MMOs. There's a reason nobody really hung out in Stormwind or Ogrimmar until they added flying mounts.

Shawn has talked a lot about having gameplay reasons to come to and stay in the cities. But yeah, I doubt their other cities will be this large.

Kirun · Mar 7, 2023

Ikkan said:
Was that true for your server? When I played in classic Orgrimmar was the hub city for Horde on Firetree.

Ironforge and Undercity were both the main "hubs" in classic for both of the servers I played on. It wasn't until they added flying in the old world (Cata, I think?) that the big ass cities became the hubs.

Giant cities are always a failure in MMOs and a complete waste of dev time. It's cool for a couple screenshots the first time or two you see it, but after a while, I just want to bank and/or use the AH. And if that is a 20 minute slog every fucking time I head into town? Players will check out fast.

Mur · Mar 7, 2023

Their plan iirc is to actually have alot of content in the cities themselves. Good places for players with certain factions to do some grinding, as well as a whole sewer system, than is actually more than just a place for the evils to sneak into the city. I would love to see a Waterdeep style undercity, something like a U/LGuk right under town.

But yeah, big cities are usually kind of a waste.

Torrid · Mar 7, 2023

Ridiculously large buildings is a pet peeve of mine as well. I liked classic EQ's more cramped cities, which were more immersive, realistic and charming to me. Also it forces players to be closer together which makes the game feel more multiplayer. I understand that third person cameras sort of require larger buildings but I'd just assume force a first person perspective as well. Of course I don't expect any game to actually do that for reasons.

Ikkan · Mar 8, 2023

I believe the city they're currently working on is supposed to be a major hub city - not a racial starting city. I think the racial starting areas are suppose to be significantly smaller, with a few of these larger hubs in the game(I haven't seen a lot of streams in the last few months so I could be wrong now). I never really thought about large cities being a waste, but that does make sense looking back at a lot of MMOs I've played over the years. The city they're working on looks really cool so hopefully they find reasons to keep players in it beyond buy/sell/buffs/bank/tradeskills.

Sylas · Mar 8, 2023

Theres a difference between ridiculously large buildings and ridiculously large cities. WoW had over the top ridiculously large buildings but that matches its aesthetic, you need gates that large to fit through with shoulderpads like that. All the cities though were all pretty small. EQ1 had small cities with realistic sized buildings for the most part.

Shit like eq2 and vanguard is where we started seeing ridiculously oversized buildings in ridiculously oversized cities.

Hop on the vanguard emulator and get lost in some of those cities, jesus fucking christ talk about waste of space.

"Yeah heres some ruins and shit of a city with walls the size, height and thickness, of the great pyramids of egypt."
"Wait, ruins? How did the city fall? Walls were too large to maintain im guessing"
"No they were besieged by..."
"Gonna stop you right there. Unless the next word is dragons, they werent besieged by shit. 500 foot thick 500 foot high walls around this city, how the fuck you getting besieged?

Also since there are dragons in this world why the fuck would you ever build structures like this?"

Hateyou · Mar 8, 2023

Sylas said:
Theres a difference between ridiculously large buildings and ridiculously large cities. WoW had over the top ridiculously large buildings but that matches its aesthetic, you need gates that large to fit through with shoulderpads like that. All the cities though were all pretty small. EQ1 had small cities with realistic sized buildings for the most part.

Shit like eq2 and vanguard is where we started seeing ridiculously oversized buildings in ridiculously oversized cities.

Hop on the vanguard emulator and get lost in some of those cities, jesus fucking christ talk about waste of space.

"Yeah heres some ruins and shit of a city with walls the size, height and thickness, of the great pyramids of egypt."
"Wait, ruins? How did the city fall? Walls were too large to maintain im guessing"
"No they were besieged by..."
"Gonna stop you right there. Unless the next word is dragons, they werent besieged by shit. 500 foot thick 500 foot high walls around this city, how the fuck you getting besieged?

Also since there are dragons in this world why the fuck would you ever build structures like this?"

Yeah vanguards giant city on Thestra was a shit design. Vendors and quest people you actually needed were buried in deep and confusing areas. I don’t mind big cities but the important places you actually need to get to need to be easily accessible. The big desert city was a better design, it had paths in and out of the ring, and all the stuff you needed was in the ring.

Torrid · Mar 8, 2023

Katta Castellum is the first example in my head. Katta was so dumb that the zone acted like a barrier in that if you wanted to access the zones on either side then you would not consider taking a route which had you run through the city. The aesthetic was fine but the size was ridiculous.

Kirun · Mar 9, 2023

Mur said:
Their plan iirc is to actually have alot of content in the cities themselves. Good places for players with certain factions to do some grinding, as well as a whole sewer system, than is actually more than just a place for the evils to sneak into the city. I would love to see a Waterdeep style undercity, something like a U/LGuk right under town.

In other words, it's going to fucking suck and players will avoid it like the plague if they can help it.

forehead · Mar 12, 2023

If you’re afraid of a big city wait until you find out merchants are picky about what vendor trash they’ll buy off you.

Secrets · Mar 12, 2023

forehead said:
If you’re afraid of a big city wait until you find out merchants are picky about what vendor trash they’ll buy off you.

That was my least favorite part of the test so far.

Cybsled · Mar 12, 2023

Sylas said:
Theres a difference between ridiculously large buildings and ridiculously large cities. WoW had over the top ridiculously large buildings but that matches its aesthetic, you need gates that large to fit through with shoulderpads like that. All the cities though were all pretty small. EQ1 had small cities with realistic sized buildings for the most part.

That probably has more to do with the change from 1st to 3rd person as the default means of interacting with the game world. When you're in 3rd person, you now have to account for the elevated camera following the player around, which requires larger indoor spaces lest you run into camera clipping, obscured characters, or other issues in that vein.

DickTrickle · Mar 12, 2023

Torrid said:
Katta Castellum is the first example in my head. Katta was so dumb that the zone acted like a barrier in that if you wanted to access the zones on either side then you would not consider taking a route which had you run through the city. The aesthetic was fine but the size was ridiculous.

Seru was even worse and neither city had much reason to go there. I feel like the intention was to make them more useful than they turned out to be.

Cybsled · Mar 12, 2023

Luclin zone size was basically "hey guys, we have mounts now! Imagine if you had a mount...you could cross this more quickly!"

Until you could afford a horse, you had to deal with zones designed to assume you had a horse

Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

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