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Items, loot, gear.
Turel_Azure
Member Posts: 60
In a large majority of MMORPGs, there are items that help make your character more powerful, or simply make them look different. There are a few MMOs that are able to avoid items, but the majority use items to form an entire side-game in itself, some of which grow to immense complexity (EVE and SWG, I'm looking at you).
But as for a favored item setup, a great deal of questions come up in all MMOs that have items:
A) How much of a character's power comes from items?
How should items effect a character, especially equipment?
C) How in depth should crafting be for items? What percent of the items in a game should be made from crafting?
What are your thoughts on these big questions?
For me
A) I dislike that 80% of a character's functionality comes from items for most classes in games like EQ or Warcraft. I really enjoyed the in depth items of SWG and EVE, but I'm definately of the thought that items should all just be tools: items that help you perform better with specific aspects, but by no means define how you perform. So, for example, if you are a sniper, a weapon that increases accuracy would be nice, or one that adds more damage, but you could not have both.
I'm a fan of the help with skills, but don't effect your core character. A character's core attributes and nature should not be influenced by items without some very special circumstances. Armor shouldn't make you smarter, just absorb damage.
C) As deep as you can go. Colors, patterns, bonuses, everything as customizable as possible, and having a way of individuals garnering reputation for their goods is a great way to do business, as long as it doesn't scale out of hand.
Comments
mmhhmm go on......
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If items are not powerful, then it is a lot less fun to get them. And you cannot have it both ways.
A good mix of character development and cool, powerful loot is what make the hack-n-slash genre fun.
It seems like Blizzard started, or at least capitalized, on this trend of being obscenely gear heavy. I think I agree with the OP. Gear that changes the characteristics of the character should be very very rare. I could see a magical wizards hat making you smarter, or boots that make you run faster, but for the vast majority of items, even at end game, should have reasonable properties based on what the item is. Armor should have defensive properties. Weapons should have damage related properties.
D&D and D&D Online have done a pretty job with this although some of their gear is still obscenely overpowered.
I'm picking a rather arbitrary number, but I'd say somewhere between 10 and 20% would be a good level for gear.
In other words, gear could add at a minimum 10% of your ability to a max of 20%. At the low end, if you do 10 points of damage, and special sword would make it 11 points of damage, for example, at the high end, 12.
As for crafting, again crafted items should be some where between 10 and 20% better than other items in the game.
If you can find a sword taht does 10 points, a crafter can make a similar sword taht does 11 or 12 pints of damage. Same for mana, or other stats, modify for a sci fi game, etc.
I think the loot whore philosophy of mmo design has completely killed the genre.
So its been dead since around 1999 with EQ=) The genre didn't last long did it?
Heh, I was trying to get a discussion here, but it sounds like I more got a room full of nodding-in-agreement heads.
Okay, let me ask you this:
Age of Conan played their items in the middle, as described above. They made them Warcraft style in how you obtain them, but limited their impact to a mere 8% of character power. They've since increased it some, but by most means players had little interest in the items.
Crafting too was quickly min/maxed for all classes quickly after it came out, with most players wearing high end crafted-gem items.
This game made items low key but in a Warcraft style to obtain. However, in my opinion, items in AoC were an overall failure that ended up not contributing to the game at all (not to mention some ugly armor). So going the middle of the road as suggested above already hasn't worked.
What should be different?
To re-iterate my opinion: I like the idea of item balance, and tailoring it to your purposes. Let's take your standard fantasy MMO, and let's say you like big swords. But in what way? Let's say you can have a big sword that is lighter weight, so it swings faster. Or instead you could put weight on it to swing it harder, but have a longer recovery. What if you gave it a serrated edge, so it made bleeding last longer, or something. What if you enchanted it with lightning? None of these things make your character outright more powerful, but in your hands and with your tactics, it helps you just the same. You find the best gear for what you want to do, but the item isn't necessarily more powerful than the next one.
Or, on the other hand, you could have items that are varied in levels of strength, but within limits. I think everyone agrees that end game items should not make or break a fight, as it often times negates the skill of the player with a large enough difference. I mean, in Warcraft, you cannot compete without full epic gear in PVP. And even then, better epic gear usually means the better geared one wins....and is rewarded with even better epic gear :P
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Chasing the next upgrade is part of what keeps MMORPGs addictive. It's not absolutely crucial for a game to have great item progression to remain fun (and overdoing it can be irritating to players, since they don't get to keep items very long), but it's a cheap way to keep things more interesting.
Really the next hurdle in item design is finding a way for gear to involve some more interesting active player decisions without it being a nightmare of UI. Basically where gear choice echoes the types of interesting decisions you make in talent trees and the like.
80% of your character's DPS doesn't come from gear. I recently ran some tests on a 70 rogue of mine in WOW actually. The results:
Choosing to use Abilities accounts for roughly 50% of your total DPS as a rogue.
Naked, the rogue did ~300 DPS.
Geared, the rogue did ~450 DPS.
So gear made up only 33% of my rogue's DPS output, player skill 50%, and base stats 17%. Talents are in there too, but I didn't do talent vs. non-talent tests (and admittedly my talent build for the tests I did run was weakly constructed.)
Granted, this was a level 70 character with some raid/PVP epics, so it breaks the curve a little bit -- but it breaks it by making gear seem more important than normal!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
My warcraft view may be a little skewed, as I played a warrior.
DPS Naked would probably end up around 400 DPS at 80 with a vendor bought weapon...
But he's usually around 2200 DPS...
A) How much of a character's power comes from items?
Very little, if any. I've always thought a good idea would be a system where the gear/equipment you use doesn't effect how powerful your abilities are but instead effects what abilities you have available to use.
The rest is all asthetics, with more difficult to obtain gear making you look more powerful, or having different gear "sets" to collect for the achiever types to maintain a certain look and maybe give a very slight bonus (no more then say 5% over all)
I have hope that FF XIV will do something cool as they have hinted at weapons being very important to your characters advancement and developement. I am thinking something like Tales of Vesperia where using a certain weapon will "unlock" different skills you can use, so you have to choose which weapons to use when and try and unlock as many different and varied skills as possible.
All different types of weapons and armor should have strengths and weaknesses, so instead of a game where all you presented with are obvious upgrades, you have a lot of true choice... rather then just the problem solving of min/maxing.
C) How in depth should crafting be for items? What percent of the items in a game should be made from crafting?
Personally I don't really care for crafting all too much, I play MMOs to do fun cool stuff, kill stuff, advance a toon, and play with others.
I'd like a system where crafting is fun and involves some degree of player skill. Why no game has used mini-games for crafting and gathering yet, I don't know. And not just click and wait and item combination mini-games, but actual mini-games. Think stuff like... the fishing in the more recent Zelda games.
So it's not about numbers and resource quality and the rest of that tedius crap but instead about the crafters skill at playing the game.
As for what percent of items.. some people like to build chairs and houses and fill them with the chairs and tables they've built. That's cool. Some people feel proud to wear armor that they made, that's cool too.
I think there is a way to make it so crafters can be "on par" in terms of power level with people who instead choose to get their gear through other means, be it soloing, small group PvE, raids, PvP.. whatever.
Unfortunately if you make it simply about time investment and grinding resources, there is no skill involved. Only tedium. Dedication and effort should be rewarded, yes, but so should skill.
A challenging raid encounter that takes a few hours should yield the same power level items as something that could be crafted, but the crafted item should take a lot more time to create because there is no element of skill involved.
Still a 50% increase in your damage from gear seems to indicate gear is quite important.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Well it is. You're playing an videogame RPG, a genre where one of the main goals of the systems is to offload some of the raw twitch skill onto Gear, Base Stats, and Strategic Decision-Making.
I don't understand why the players who seem most attached to RPGs being RPGs have somehow switched sides in this thread to agreeing with the OP, who is obviously someone who wants other factors to make up a larger portion of his success/failure.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Ah, right. Thanks for pointing this out. I'd forgot that my rogue tests weren't truly "naked"; I had left my normal weapons equipped.
So yeah, that bumps up the importance of gear considerably in my breakdown.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
So its been dead since around 1999 with EQ=) The genre didn't last long did it?
Yeah maybe killed is too strong of a work. But in 1999 with EQ is when the genre started going backwards instead of forward. Moved from being online worlds to console style rpgs.
So its been dead since around 1999 with EQ=) The genre didn't last long did it?
Yeah maybe killed is too strong of a work. But in 1999 with EQ is when the genre started going backwards instead of forward. Moved from being online worlds to console style rpgs.
I love comments like this. You can hardly consider the genre in existence in 1999! There were what, 3 MMORPGs at the time? 4? And the lot of them in total had less subs than a good number of games these days launch with. I'm a child of that era too guys but..get over it. The world has moved on.
Anyway, subject at had. Gear-centric MMOs. In the end I don't think it matters. You could make a player's output determined by gear, and you'll have everyone cookie-cuttering with the same items once they figure out the optimal combo.
Or you could make it skill (character's skills, not the player's ability to play) based. At which point the focus just shifts to min-maxing those abilities. You still end up with a clone legion.
Or you can make it entirely based on the player's ability to play the game, and make gear and stats be near-meaningless. They call that Counterstrike.
In the end you're not going to win. The one advantage of a gear-centric power structure is that the players have to do something to get that gear, and the gear becomes a "physical", "tangible" trophy of accomplishment. I realzie the current difficulty scale of most MMOs makes that laughable, but it's still tru most players feel more accomplished looting a shiny purple than they do getting 2 more skill points, or whatever.
I'm going to add my opinion on this.
I like item-centric games. I love getting TONS of awesome varied loot. Nothing is more fun than killing mob after mob, hoping for some new, cool item to drop. And when it does, it makes your character twice as powerful as you were. Then you feel uber for a little while while you level up, and then you find even more, better loot!!
This tactic has been used and proven since Diablo. People love loot. Exactly the opposite in AoC (as someone above mentioned). The game had lots of loot, but the loot didn't do much for your character's "power". It just looked different sometimes. It was lackluster.
I do however, wish more games would add more "right-clickable" items though. EQ had some of the most awesome loot because of this. If you ever played a necro with the Circlet of Shadow (pre-nerf) you know what I'm talking about. The way the game was designed, you could only have 8 spells memorized at a time. But with right-clickables you could have more, and sometimes you'd have access to spells not normally for your class. Instant-cast spells, etc. It was great, and it changed the way you played your character. Gameplay changes due to new items is absolutely the best IMO.
If getting gear is fun and not a grind then a gear based game is just fine. Just as a level based game is fine if they levels aren't simply grinded out and the progression is fun.
If it's not, then I'd rather have no gear and/or no levels.
At the launch of CoH, my friends were really put off by no loot drops. And I agree, it lessens the fun factor by not having the possibility of cool loot. It didn't kill the game for me, but notice they added some approximation of loot drops to CoH, with salvage, and enhancements. But it's not the same and I think it negatively impacted that game.
Notice Champions will have loot drops. So Cryptic learned people DO want it.
I tend to look at CoX as Cryptic learning what NOT to do when designing a game.
Starting with partnering with NCSoft. But yes, hoping they do things right with Champions.
That is how I personally would like to see it being made.