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As long as people keep overusing the word to justify whatever they want Brad's new game to be until the waveform collapses, so be it.
Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO
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Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
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I'd bet against that. Pulling some numbers out of my own ass I would say quests and some voice acting -not the entire game, though afterwards TOR said it wasnt that much of the budget- are 10-20m, maybe somewhat more but not 10x unless you have Hollywood doing your bartender voices. Art/animation I cannot estimate, that might be alot, no idea. However, what you are leaving out is a wasteful middle management that you have in pretty much every larger company, I'll say that's 50m or more thrown away right there. See various hindsight reports on the last couple of MMOs on how wasteful and clueless most management hires, fires and otherwise pisses away money. Firefly, TOR, Copernicus, TESO and so on. THAT is a huge problem, one that this kickstarter hopefully avoids because Brad has already been there, done that (VG).
You really need all those systems working together to make it work, and I hope Pantheon is going to try for that. If you dont keep your gear curve very flat people will not do older content because it's not worth it to them. And I think you need a game that really builds attachment to your character so people are more likely to stick with it instead of jumping back and forth because there wont be catch-up mechanisms for alt leveling (beyond twink gear, I guess). In EQ I liked how GoD had a quest chain going through all the content of the expansion that rewarded an augment that had better stats the further you got into the expansion. Something like that would be nice to keep interest in those areas up even after they are a few years old, and 1 augment (or whatever) out of 20ish that is much better isnt going to explode the itemization.
That's their own fault for making leveling take a matter of days rather then months.
popsicledeath
Potato del Grande
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Not to mention I have to disagree. Gear is great and fun to upgrade, but in early Everquest, people chased levels. Period. Hell I remember when people dinged 50 they would get server wide tells congratulating them. Players raid for gear, but the ultimate carrot is levels. At least it was before developers decided to making leveling so easy you can now level characters 80 levels in a week.
Kickstarter games are about innovation. Because if they don't do something different or don't bring something new to the table, they will never get funded (unless there are some deep pocketed Brad fans out there).
Go look at all the interesting things being made by indies, check out No Man's Sky for instance. You're 100% wrong with your supposition. Big companies won't risk very much in their design unless they stumble on something that just WORKS. EQN is trying something new after their 2nd failed EQN design. Who knows if it works? They really have nothing to lose, and I don't even think their budget is that high either because they are crowdsourcing game elements with Landmark (which is a great idea in it's own right).
Who the hell knows what Titan is and I won't begin to ask and we'll never know unless Alex pops in here and spills the beans.
The one, biggest complaint I have about levels is that it invalidates your content permanently. Once you out level content, it's done. Even when you mentor down in levels, you're just re-doing content for a friend. You personally are not enjoying the content (but you may be enjoying your company).
The biggest argument for non-levels or flattening the curve is so you don't spend a million man hours creating leveling content that is design to become obsolete in a game you want people subscribing to. Why not design a game so that all the content is used for as long as possible compared to the life of the character? It makes more sense from a development point of view.
As a side note, TSW didn't have levels per-se and people really enjoyed that "leveling" experience.
DDO did this. It lessened the problems because instead of AAs you just "remorted" and started all over again with the same character but more points. Te same problems still persist in that design but not as pronounced.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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No. The raid guilds who could clear the old content are already chasing the carrot of the new content without need for the gear reset. All the gear reset does is screw over family guilds that couldn't clear the old content. So that's how you end up with shit like two types of group/raid content (heroics/non-heroics) instead of just one because the developer figures out that without two types of content shitty players will never be able to do current content.
So it is an incredible waste of developer resources. Instead of fucking around with "Heroic" and "Non-Heroic" how about you don't reset the gear, have a flatter itemization and leveling curve which lets the uber guilds chase the carrot of new content while the crappy family guilds finally get their chance on the old content. When a new expansion comes out, rinse and repeat.
Gear resets are stupid on every level (pun intended).
Heallun
Lord Nagafen Raider
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To all saying AA is horizontal power progression--maybe in EQ2, but definitely not in EQ1. AAs made you more powerful and had no limit. It wasn't a matter of adding more choices for you to use, it was absolutely mandatory shit which was essentially leveling up. Or you can tell me all about those raid tanks without CA3/CD3.
That said, I do think it's a good system. Added a reason to continue doing fun leveling things while still gaining something, even if you were simply picking up innate charisma 5 for lols after a while. It also had its flaws as it was essentially a forced timesink to enjoy high end content. Until much later in the expansions, it also was daunting to catch up in AAs as well around TSS, for instance. Around that time they added in accelerated AAs up to a certain number, which while useful, almost seemed to be an admission that it had gotten excessively bloated...as any AA system would that was not truly a horizontal progression but rather a diagonal progression--adding choice to the power progression as it was occuring.
That said, I do think it's a good system. Added a reason to continue doing fun leveling things while still gaining something, even if you were simply picking up innate charisma 5 for lols after a while. It also had its flaws as it was essentially a forced timesink to enjoy high end content. Until much later in the expansions, it also was daunting to catch up in AAs as well around TSS, for instance. Around that time they added in accelerated AAs up to a certain number, which while useful, almost seemed to be an admission that it had gotten excessively bloated...as any AA system would that was not truly a horizontal progression but rather a diagonal progression--adding choice to the power progression as it was occuring.
Gear resets are a great idea if you are making a mass-appeal game where your main focus is bringing in new players or old-coming-back players. it's perfect for games like WOW. I dislike the practice myself, but again it's context.
Hachima
Molten Core Raider
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People chased gear... I remember when EQ first started Ebay wasn't tabo or even against the TOS. I sold dwarven work boots for $25 each constantly and that was off a lvl 35 mob...People holed up and camped things like FBSS, manastones etc. Huge carrots people farmed. The only reason levels were a carrot was to be able to get access to the no drop items.. I'd say items were the driving factor to reach max level.
M59 is a good example of a no level/items aren't important MMO though. The reason it worked was because loot was never really considered permanent. You lost EVERYTHING when you died, minus a few special echanted items that made it soulbound but that was rare. You die and you go out and get a full new set of gear if yours wasn't pillaged. There were still special rare items people were after though which drove the incentive to pvp, but the bulk of a characters strength came from character advancement and not gear. PVE basically a small factor in the game and people leveled to fight other players primarily, not to be able to explore new pve content. PVP intense games aren't an optimal business model though. You always have a losing side and people that lose too much lose interest and stop paying. EVE just barely reached 1/2 mil subs. Its not bad but its not what most investors want to target.
Heallun
Lord Nagafen Raider
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It's not the levels that make the content obsolete. It's the rewards (itemization, namely) being scaled to level. I dare say we camped jboots for as long as it was needed, regardless of the exp and regardless of how hard we could beat drelzna / ancient cyclops' ass. Even items which only had situational use were still useful far beyond their level range in EQ. Gnomish environmental suit (10 resist most) was still a useful chest item for certain AE'ing mobs. Hell, goblin soul caller drops from a lvl 30ish goblin in frontier mountains--and used like a motherfucker at 60 for a cleric MR neck.
Even in WoW, until they raped spirit regen and the blue dragon card, blue dragon was the #1 spirit healer trinket (resto dru, H/disc priest). The chain heal totem was the best totem through WOTLK from old nax 40. These were against blizzard's design philosophy of throwing away your gear every 4-6 months, though, and were promptly nerfed.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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This is always going to happen in any system. Again look at MTG - which is a classic leveless game (and which is an inspiration for EQN so that's why it is relevant to a discussion on MMO). I agree with Hachima that people chase items (as well as levels), so even if EQN was perfectly flat (one tier) they would still have to have something like a total gear reset which likely means either completely redoing content or adding in new content with a new expansion. Because, if they don't people are going to get bored and leave.
The trick is to make the leveling content last as long as possible. If you avoid gear resets as mentioned then high-end content can be used through multiple expansions. Wasn't some Velious content still being farmed during PoP by non-uber/FnF guilds? That's three expansions worth of content (or at least high-end content) being used simultaneously.
popsicledeath
Potato del Grande
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Even after dinging 50 you still chased level 50. Exp loss and raids where you die a lot were a motivating factor to keep playing the game, not to quit as many modern-mmo-ists would have us believe. Having items that were still rare and sought after outside of the raid zones/mobs where exp could be had. It all had pretty good synergy.
While that's true (that big companies won't take much chances) I couldn't help but notice how Indie games are always on the list of the top sold games on Steam, think they are the majority right now. Anyhow..
Pantheoninnovationcould just be that it's a true hardcore PVE MMO (with RZ/VZ like PVP Servers on the side) with the polish VG lacked and enough content, I don't believe there's anything quite like it out there with a decent graphic engine and a real focus on the Western market.
Pantheoninnovationcould just be that it's a true hardcore PVE MMO (with RZ/VZ like PVP Servers on the side) with the polish VG lacked and enough content, I don't believe there's anything quite like it out there with a decent graphic engine and a real focus on the Western market.
Hachima
Molten Core Raider
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I think one of the reasons MTG has been able to stay so profitable is card resets. Basically cards outside of the core set no longer being usable in some tournament formats. Then people have to go out and gather the latest cards, rinse and repeat. Its incentive to basically chase new carrots in the newest expansion instead of sticking with their old favorite super cards.
You kinda just described wow classic in alot of ways, which failed to really work, which is why blizz spent the next 2 expansions experimenting with different difficulties of the same dungeons.
The part of the equation you missed is that unless the content is gated like EQ content was, by the fact that it was dead and not really the fact that it was really that hard it doesn't work, if content is gated because its actually hard then those casuals never are able to do the old content no matter how long you wait unless you are doing stuff like the ICC buff or adding new mid tier content like AQ20/ZG, which take even more dev time than just doing two tiers of difficulty.