Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Underjoyed_sl said:

what your question should be is, "Why don't you like what everybody else likes" Leaving zero room for personal choice

Click to expand...

I like Sushi too. What I don't do is walk into something clearly marked as Mcdonalds and start bitching that there isn't fucking Sushi.


Ugg, real world analogy. I feel fucking dirty now.

Gecko_sl said:

Sen's Fortress in Dark Souls comes to mind.

The problem isn't making really fun or unique zones or content. We have that. The problem remains replayability. Most of us are over grinds, farming, and dailies.

Click to expand...

Could end a dungeon run with the Dragon God fight from Demon Souls. There you run in, and on either side of the dragon are two harpoons you fire to take off 95% of his HP, he falls down and you can hit his face to end him. Difficulty of the fight is getting to the harpoons, not fighting the boss.

I haven't raided since EQ really, so maybe there are dungeons like this, but an idea for a zone that could be done by different tiers of raiders could be

- 20 man dungeon. Zone could have a layout similar to a # . In the middle, you have a boss.
- The raid loot is in a chest, not just from the boss.
- For low geared raids, you could run in. At 4 separate points there would be a switch. One group guards each switch.
- Switches turn the middle of the dungeon similar to one of those games where you try to tilt the middle to control a metal ball to a specific hole.
- Middle room could have dynamically different obstacles and traps to avoid walkthroughs.
- Groups have to communicate in order to make the chest go the desired path.
- Middle part is visible, not from the switch, but elsewhere. So the groups would have to pay attention and guard the switch.
- Each group must control adds. Gets harder the longer it takes.
- If they take too long, a switch is destroyed, or if maybe if they push the chest into the wrong hole in the ground, the boss rages and teleports the raid to the middle room.
- At that point, highly geared guilds might be able to beat him and travel down to get the treasure + his extra raid loot, while low geared groups or pugs would have a much harder time and might wipe.
- Normal mode there would be dropping the treasure. While heroic would be to try to take on the boss as well.

Or

- 40 man dungeon. Similar layout dungeon, think #### stacked upon eachother like a jenga puzzle. (Edit: Don't really have to limit this to 40 man either)
- The entrance of the dungeon could be at the bottom. No need for trash mobs to start the raid.
- Very large area, with a giant door behind it with 7 key slots.
- 7 switches spread across the middle room. Each switch controls a cart attached to rails that go upwards in a # pattern.
- The 8th group could control a switch, turning the elevation and rotation of the # parts.
- When the raid is activated, the room closes and the switches turn on.
- Each group is then responsible to puzzle out the route for the carts down to where they could get them(again, layout could be dynamic), waves again come to destroy the switches.
- If a switch is destroyed, the key from that cart would not be usable on the door.
- The keys would control the raid boss. Each key used, would lower the difficulty of it (different keys to turn off different elemental damages, abilities, etc).
- If they manage to use all keys, lore would dictate that the guardian behind it would understand it was the rightful heir to the treasure, and disapear. No raid boss.
- Could make it so that the different tiers from the boss drops slightly different loot, making it so raids could be tailored. If you could barely handle getting the keys, you would not be able to handle the boss. Should not attempt to do the boss then. Or if you are a top tier guild, you could just skip the puzzle, enter straight into the boss room for a enraged crazy fight only doable by the top 1%.

This would make it so that even low geared guilds could see end content, which might be fun even if they know they would get obliterated. I certainly know I would enter the room of a top 1% world boss just to see it, no matter the absolute certain death, and no matter the death penalty. Difference is from other games is that you are never able to do that due to the trash leading up to said world boss.

I don't know. Are there dungeons like this already?

@Droigan

There are probably encounters that have similarities, at least in part. The main thing is that it's different and takes the player out of the standard design of every single raid member stands in the same room and attacks a boss. Every single raid member sticks together as they work through a raid.

A great solution that would satisfy Kedwyn would have a minor raid for 40 people, but build it so that it has multiple areas that only require 5 people to complete it. Then the final boss needs all 40. You can either zerg the whole thing down, or 5 people can partially complete the dungeon over a week, or do something in between.

I like options and different forms of play. Current games are not very inventive when it comes to raid design.

Draegan_sl said:

So you're looking for some Burger King? I mean, I still don't understand why you brought up McDonalds.

Click to expand...

He wants Chipotle.

Man, as a person who has almost nothing positive to say about EQ, other than "Some of the memories are so intense one way or another I'm pretty sure I was traumatized.", they did one thing I loved that I'm pretty sure no other MMO has done. One of the expansions was called "Dungeons of Norrath" or something like that, and it worked like this;

Go to a quest hub guy in the "theme" of dungeon you want to do (desert, forest, scary castle, etc) and ask for a dungeon quest. He would give you an objective (rescue the princess, collect 20 zombie dicks, kill the lord of pancakes) and a timer would pop up saying 30 minutes or whatever. Your group would zone into an instanced dungeon that was randomly generated. Random halls, rooms, mobs, etc. and you had to try and beat the thing. If you did it under the 30 minutes you got a better reward, but if it took you an hour you still got some lesser reward (I could be wrong, but thats how I remember it).

Now, at the time, the dungeons tended to look a lot alike, and you might even end up going down a hallway with 3 identical rooms or whatever, because there was only so many options. I personally loved the whole thing though. With todays tech you would assume this would be a pretty insanely easy way to create a few thousand fairly different dungeons. On top of that, why couldn't you have a raid set up the same way? Make a pool of 20 bosses, at different levels of complexity, and make 100 different rooms and hallways, a dozen or so types of trash mobs, and bam. One week your guild might go and have 2 bosses and a lot of trash, the next week you might end up with a massive 8 boss dungeon. Seems like that would throw a lot of randomness and replayability into the mix.

Like I said, EQ did it, and I would argue that they didn't even do it very well, and I can't even guess at how many of those dungeons I did, hundreds I'm sure. They were just the most fun thing to do for me. Why not put a scaled up and more polished system like that in a modern mmo? Put some Diablo in my MMO, what could go wrong?

Thoughts?

Onoes_sl said:

Your group would zone into an instanced dungeon that was randomly generated. Random halls, rooms, mobs, etc.
Thoughts?

Click to expand...

The dungeons in LDoN were not randomly generated. There were 6-10 versions of each "theme" and the only random part of it was if you got guk a,b, or c. The mob placement across each map was exactly the same as you leveled up into new level brackets with the exception that higher level creatures would spawn in. Any of the boss/rescue missions had a few options of where they could spawn in at so that was kind of random as well. The Hard versions of each mission were simply the next level bracket of mobs. So if you were say level 22-23, Normal mode you would get the level 20 version and if you chose hard, you would get the level 25 version. We made what we called data sets for every 5 levels starting at 15 or 20 and going up to 60 I think?

I've yet to see a good implementation of randomly generated mob placement for an MMO, especially when you have mobs that patrol specific paths and locations. In order to do something like that right, the entire game/system would have be built on that tech. I'm not saying it can't be done because I'm sure some games probably use a randomly generated system. I just haven't seen it done on any of the MMOs I've worked on. Knowing how spawning works in most MMOs, I just think there would be a lot of issues to work out before you could get it right.

Schags_sl said:

The dungeons in LDoN were not randomly generated. There were 6-10 versions of each "theme" and the only random part of it was if you got guk a,b, or c. The mob placement across each map was exactly the same as you leveled up into new level brackets with the exception that higher level creatures would spawn in. Any of the boss/rescue missions had a few options of where they could spawn in at so that was kind of random as well. The Hard versions of each mission were simply the next level bracket of mobs. So if you were say level 22-23, Normal mode you would get the level 20 version and if you chose hard, you would get the level 25 version. We made what we called data sets for every 5 levels starting at 15 or 20 and going up to 60 I think?

I've yet to see a good implementation of randomly generated mob placement for an MMO, especially when you have mobs that patrol specific paths and locations. In order to do something like that right, the entire game/system would have be built on that tech. I'm not saying it can't be done because I'm sure some games probably use a randomly generated system. I just haven't seen it done on any of the games MMOs I've worked on. Knowing how spawning works in most MMOs, I just think there would be a lot of issues to work out before you could get it right.

Click to expand...

To a certain degree, the wildstar raid mobs are supposed to be somewhat random, in that abilities and environmental hazards are changed to add variance. Of course it's not truly random, since truly random would almost by definition mean un-tuned.

What about modular dungeon design? Have a pool of pathways/rooms and boss encounters pre-designed and pre-populated, then used as modules and mix n' matched together to piece together a "random" dungeon.

Nobody cares about 90% of your opinions.

That said, what paths do some of you plan on playing, and why?

Robot man, hoping the engineer class is a robot pet class, scientist. When a game tells me I can be a robot, in a mech suit, with robot pets, and robot science drones, how do I say no to that?

I would play an Engineer if I knew they did pet classes right (assuming its a pet class). Most of the time, MMOGs don't because for some reason all Devs seems to forget they need to add aoe damage reduction on pets or the pathing is retarded.

As of now, Spellslinger/settler probably, but who knows.

Draegan_sl said:

It's not the same thing at all? It's merely a multiphase encounter that the longer you survive the more loot you get.

Click to expand...

Seriously, hear me out, and think about it. It will take all of a week for players of your calibre to see the very thinly veiled attempt at hiding the stratification.

It's very easy to survive a LFR encounter, harder to survive and complete the Normal mode, and Heroic encounters are so finely tuned that only top tier guilds survive long enough to down it.

The first example I can think of is Firelands, Heroic Ragnaros. Actually seeing what happens after the World in Flames phase is kinda magic, and beating it would have been awesome.

Another really good example (of your Option A) is the Challenge Modes in WoW at the moment. Very few people do them to gold standards. While not a great sample size from my own experience, but Bronze was doable provided you didn't critically fuck up, had a pulse and didn't get DC'd. Silver was doable if you didn't fuck up too often and knew your classes to a mediocre standard. Gold required you to never fuck up, get 100% out of the class you were playing and had a good understanding of how to synergise with the rest of your group.

Most of the people I was playing with at the time looked at the rewards for doing this, said "yeah, sounds like fun" and then later "yeah, I'm going out to get drunk and paw at some fat chicks instead". The rewards weren't good enough to justify the massive increases in skill and co-ordination needed.

So the question is... Is raid/encounter design broken? or are the rewards not good enough? and most importantly -- why are players not engaged by completing hard content for the sake of it, and only do it if you supply them enough yummies.

Let me know if you want the answer to that last question, because I've thought about that too.

Human Warrior Soldier. Human 4 evar. Warrior for tank/dps. Soldier because it seems like it might be the least popular since Interior Decorator and Hitchhiker are likely to be the most popular. Nerd might be down there with Soldier but we'll have to wait and see.

I'm really hoping they announce a different spellcasting class because nothing else sounds appealing.

I will play whatever is the least popular at launch. That way I can bitch about being gimped and be a unique snowflake at the same time. I also will be able to bitch about how much more skill it takes to play the shitty class that I pick.

xzi_sl said:

Nobody cares about 90% of your opinions.

That said, what paths do some of you plan on playing, and why?

Click to expand...

Classwise probably a medic, unless someone else in my group is itching to be a main healer. Probably either spellslinger or esper otherwise. Apathetic about race. Not 100% which side I'm even going, though I expect I'll end up Dominion.

Pathwise, I'm most tempted by scientist, but I'm not convinced there's really a lot to it other than "Click on things, get random lore". Guess I'll find out in beta or early in release. Eventually I'll make all of soldier, settler and scientist. Explorer is the one that interests me least. I prefer my jump puzzles and races in platformers.

Sabbat_sl said:

Seriously, hear me out, and think about it. It will take all of a week for players of your calibre to see the very thinly veiled attempt at hiding the stratification.

It's very easy to survive a LFR encounter, harder to survive and complete the Normal mode, and Heroic encounters are so finely tuned that only top tier guilds survive long enough to down it.

The first example I can think of is Firelands, Heroic Ragnaros. Actually seeing what happens after the World in Flames phase is kinda magic, and beating it would have been awesome.

Another really good example (of your Option A) is the Challenge Modes in WoW at the moment. Very few people do them to gold standards. While not a great sample size from my own experience, but Bronze was doable provided you didn't critically fuck up, had a pulse and didn't get DC'd. Silver was doable if you didn't fuck up too often and knew your classes to a mediocre standard. Gold required you to never fuck up, get 100% out of the class you were playing and had a good understanding of how to synergise with the rest of your group.

Most of the people I was playing with at the time looked at the rewards for doing this, said "yeah, sounds like fun" and then later "yeah, I'm going out to get drunk and paw at some fat chicks instead". The rewards weren't good enough to justify the massive increases in skill and co-ordination needed.

So the question is... Is raid/encounter design broken? or are the rewards not good enough? and most importantly -- why are players not engaged by completing hard content for the sake of it, and only do it if you supply them enough yummies.

Let me know if you want the answer to that last question, because I've thought about that too.

Click to expand...

To your LFR -> NM -> H comparison; it's not the same thing. You're comparing the same encounter with three different difficulty modes (in three different instances) to a single encounter that essentially rewards you the longer you survive. That is not remotely the same thing. Just think on some old school arcade games where no one ever really beat them except some autistic kid in a backwoods mall.

As to your WOW examples, challenge modes. Yes this is something similar, except your rewards aren't dogshit and the dungeon design wasn't boring.

Is raid encounter design broken as you put it? No, it's just boring. Regardless of the rewards, I would rather see more interesting raid dynamics when it comes to actually playing the encounter.

Ultimately, WOW went full retard when they started implementing all the different modes of raids. People don't do hardmode because the can get 99% of the experience by doing the easy as shit raids in a fraction of the time, whenever they want. The rewards for hardmode aren't just there for one, and two, no one cares when you can say you beat the boss of the raid. When 100% of your raiding playerbase says the beat the raid, then is heroic mode really that much more impressive to the majority of players?

Even if you stuck uber gear on hard more, it still wouldn't be the same thing.

That's why these games need to create unique content. Unique faceroll "raids" or group content and unique hardcore 1%er type of stuff a stand behind the statement that the hardest stuff gets the best gear and tell everyone to learn to play.