Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Amaru_sl said:

I want to see no flying mounts. I hate the way they make the world feel safe and small. Yea you could fill the sky with killer pigeons to still make it feel dangerous while flying, but that is a bit dumb imo. I also prefer to play an MMO where upgradable/customizable ground and boat mount systems are in place. If you have those and then put flying mounts in it basically makes everything else obsolete. (I imagine people will wtf flame me for this)

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I like flying mounts... they add a great deal of immersion and customization, and would like to see them.

However, not just as WoW did it.

- Flying should be an extremely rare and sought after privilege. And that's just the skill to fly.
- Obtaining a mount - mechanical or organic - would involve some significant crafting or adventuring achievements to be able to obtain
- They cost money to operate, either in food or fuel, and you occasionally need to stop to do that
- Have some sort of "cooldown" debuff to prevent them from taking off right after landing... call it "Refueling" (Mechanical) or "Feeding Time" (Organic) or whatever

Lethality_sl said:

I like flying mounts add a great deal of immersion and customization, and would like to see them.

However, not just as WoW did it.

- Flying should be an extremely rare and sought after privilege. And that's just the skill to fly.
- Obtaining a mount - mechanical or organic - would involve some significant crafting or adventuring achievements to be able to obtain
- They cost money to operate, either in food or fuel, and you occasionally need to stop to do that
- Have some sort of "cooldown" debuff to prevent them from taking off right after landing... call it "Refueling" (Mechanical) or "Feeding Time" (Organic) or whatever

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Flying mounts can be cool, but they eventually destroy the immersion by making everything safe and easy to get to (just my opinion of course). And no matter how hard you make them to get, fast forward 2 years and everybody has them and all other mounts systems are obsolete. To me immersion is building up a boat so you can travel to the next continent, having the smith craft you some nice shoes for your horse mount etc. Everytime I got a flying mount, in any game, the feeling of a dangerous would faded quickly. If there is anything I feel strongly against its flying mounts, but I do not disagree that there are many who enjoy and prefer them.

gogojira_sl said:

Here's my selfish and very small request: EQ tracking system.

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+1, Ranger's with Tracking!

A few people started to touch on this earlier but I really would like to see this game incorporate unrestricted items. Being able to twink my subsequent characters on each new play through adds a lot of satisfaction to the experience for me as a player. Equipment that binds has its place and I think the highest end raid gear should be "mostly" bound to the character that loots it but even on those raids I think there should be some non bind gear, or bind on equip rather than pickup sprinkled in and there should be no level requirements on that gear. It bolsters the economy and even adds kind of a political landscape to the game. Items become commodities in a game that allows people to transfer, trade or sell powerful items and it allows people to create markets. But the biggest reason of all is once I have outgeared the highest dungeons I still have something to do during my downtime besides play an alt. I can farm certain items to sell for cash or give to friends or alts, I can create demand and control supply of those commodities if I play enough or have knowledge other people don't and I can use that to my advantage.

Going even further it allows players who do not want to deal with the politics and drama associated with guilds and raiding an avenue to advance their characters to raid tier power. They can farm these items themselves, create that same market, bolster their caches and buy what they want. It lets a player play the game in different, non superficial ways to advance. Also, I would really like to see rare spells make a return. That also becomes a commodity and fosters economic diversity. It also added a lot of flavor to the game and EQ did it very well. If a shaman had torpor his downtime was trivial but without it he was still very useful in a group. It wasn't an all or nothing spell. Things like the group or AoE versions of single target spells. I didn't need my AE slow to function in a group but it was certainly something other players noticed and gave us a little extra edge on split pulls gone bad or add trains. Shamans weren't ever excluded for not having these things but if you did have it you were known on the server and that notoriety could work in your favor. And it wasn't prohibitive. The spells weren't bound, you could sell and trade all of them so it wasn't a case of only the raiders had it. If you farmed up the cash, which was easy enough to do, you could purchase it for yourself.

I would prefer free flight to be kept out of player hands. Special occasions that call for it maybe, but not just having your mount, paying the upkeep to use it and fly around whenever you want. It ruins content and immersion.

This is probably the last MMO I will actively follow. I have no hope that any of the major publishers will take enough risks to create a challenging old-school MMORPG. So here are the things I'd like to see...

• Leveling - Mimic the design of the original Guild Wars from a level/progression perspective. Make max level low (20 to 25) but long and make progression based on skill and gear acquisition.
• World Design - Seamless open world with instanced dungeons. Dungeons would stack instances based on # of people within it, same as EQ2. Content would all be contested.
• Text input to interact with NPCs beyond basic commands (Buy, Sell, Repair, etc.) See11:52 minutes into this Shroud of the Avatar video for modern implentaton.
• Quest begun (or found) through various non obvious triggers. Example: While deep in remote dungeon you find a piece of old parchment. Examine old parchment and find the following text inscribed "Property of R.J." yadda, yadda. No other indications given, other than it being transcribed to your in-game journal. Absolutely, no exclamation points, baubles, light-bulbs, etc over an NPC's head.
• Example of in-game journal...
  
  Spoiler

  
• Quests that reward spells. This is a greatexample.
• Groups Finding - A LFG tool similar to Guild Wars 2. Allow some sort of insta-travel for groups (long cool down (once a day?) "Call of the Hero" type mechanism.) Only possible if they have already previously visited that locale.
• Skills/Spells would be limited like EverQuest. I would break it into in-combat, out-combat. Easliy switch between builds.
• Merchant that sell back what I sell them.
• No floating damage numbers.
• No in-game GPS. If maps are in-game, I would expect them to be the vague "hand-drawn" variety.
• Interesting worthwhile loot. Seethis.
• Epic weapons as the result of epic quests.
• Long cool down, mob pulverizing, hate generating spells. I want Ice Comet back.
• Furthermore, minimize Fire Spell I, Fire Spell II, Fire Spell III usage. Garrison's Mighty Mana Shock, Chaos Flame and Force Spiral of Al'Kabor sound much more memorable.
• Bring back fizzles, misses, etc.
• No to flying mounts.
• Yes to boats
• Fully skinable UI. Hire T. King to do contract work for custom interface. Have him prioritize the Celtic verison first. Make it a Kickstarter goal.
  

I'd like to see loot changed up a bit, have armor that gets more powerful as you level your character instead of always just replacing it with something better. Have tradeskills that can experiment on gear to enhance it's power or change it's capabilities all together. I'd like to see raid gear that does not rot, lets take away armor restrictions....if a chest piece drops and a tank type puts it on then it has stats and abilities for that type of character, if a caster were to put it on then it would become something a caster would wear.

@Xaxius no way can NewCo afford the art costs of a seemless world.

@ Drakurii evolving weapons are cool, I'm personally not interested in evolving armor. I want some loot to look forward too.

Soygen_sl said:

What does that mean? Why would seamless vs zones be any different as far as "art" is concerned?

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I was thinking the same thing. It would be cost = size. The world and "art costs" are limited based on how big you want to make it. My expectation is we're getting a continent the size of Faydwer at release.

Making a big world isn't that expensive, look at games like darkfall, AC, some of the custom worlds made with TES world builder for oblivion/skyrim. Filling those worlds with a thousand quests is what costs money.

But then all those worlds had lots of unused space, tons of places that some dev just plopped a camp down with generic mobs and left it, or places with no mobs at all. Personally I like that kind of world. It never bothered me that an area the size of the barrens in darkfall might have 4-5 mob spawns total, sometimes less. I find it a bit immersion breaking personally when the zones are wall to wall mobs.

Soygen_sl said:

What does that mean? Why would seamless vs zones be any different as far as "art" is concerned?

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Seemless is 5x the cost unless you're okay with craptastic generic, repeated art. Most of VG's budget was blown on the art assets for the seemless world.

No Daily quests.

Creslin_sl said:

Making a big world isn't that expensive, look at games like darkfall, AC, some of the custom worlds made with TES world builder for oblivion/skyrim. Filling those worlds with a thousand quests is what costs money.

But then all those worlds had lots of unused space, tons of places that some dev just plopped a camp down with generic mobs and left it, or places with no mobs at all. Personally I like that kind of world. It never bothered me that an area the size of the barrens in darkfall might have 4-5 mob spawns total, sometimes less. I find it a bit immersion breaking personally when the zones are wall to wall mobs.

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The Karanas is a great example of that.

tad10_sl said:

Seemless is 5x the cost unless you're okay with craptastic generic, repeated art. Most of VG's budget was blown on the art assets for the seemless world.

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There are ways around that. Shroud of the Avatar is crowd sourcing their development to help build-up their art assets. This is one of the advantages of using Unity. Broaden your horizons son.

Xaxius_sl said:

• World Design - Seamless open world with instanced dungeons. Dungeons would stack instances based on # of people within it, same as EQ2. Content would all be contested.
• Epic weapons as the result of epic quests.

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I remember during WoW development reading that dungeons would have a public non-instanced portion and an instance part deeper in... there was what 2 of them in the end? With the non-instanced part being pointless and later completely unseen when the LFG tool teleported you in... at this point WoW could have no dungeon in the outside world, they could exist only in the LFG window.

About epic weapons/quests, I remember when GW2 and FF14 advertised their legendary/relic... but they ended up being the same quest for all weapon kinds with zero lore attached... boring! Bring back long quests different and related to the class' lore (not just epic)

Merlin_sl said:

The Karanas is a great example of that.

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Karanas actually had tons of stuff to do in them. They were just large, and they're from the day when class specific quests where all over the place (compared to WoW, which finally killed all class-specific quests). Go do some Sol Ro armor, some epic quests, you'll visit the Karanas all the damn time. They're not just "big unused space".