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Content of EQ Next Panel - highlights (Storybricks)
Nanfoodle
Member LegendaryPosts: 10,901
Because every video of this you cant understand whats being said someone on the Lankmark forums did some highlights of the Panel. Thanks Khandro. More highlights here. Hope this helps =-)
Content of EQ Next Panel
(Storybricks CTO and Lead Designer, SoE Lead Content Designers, T. Michaels)
Youtube:
1. Dynamic world changes based upon both NPC, Mob, and Player actions
2. No traditional quest hubs; you have to find the content (guided by journal "Rohsong", discovered via exploring, etc)
3. Concept core: You are living a Life of Consequence... what you do MATTERS
4. NPCs and Mobs will be a bit different; they have their own drives and motivations, they move around, they react based upon elements of AI for their personal motivations, their racial motivations, their class motivations, and of course, how they perceive you (and how you engage with them).
Inference: You cannot always be sure the reception you will receive; knowing your own situation (i.e., current faction, past choices, etc) are going to figure into how (or if) an NPC or mob is glad to see you, will talk to you, will offer you chances to interact or access their content, etc.
5. The Rohsong journal not only offers you content, but REMEMBERS YOUR CHOICES and DEEDS.
Inference: Game accesses your journal to determine how (or if) it needs to interact with you; welcome you, attack you, offer you content, etc.
6. Storybricks allows the game designers to drop NPCs and mobs with different or opposing drives into the world and allow them to independently operate based solely upon them when encountering other NPCs, mobs, or players.
7. Kithicor confirmed for Next.
8. Exclusive Demo!!
- Simulation of how player choices and NPC/Mob AI engage and operate.
- Dynamic story generation; how player interacts determines what content/quest/opportunies are created and introduced into the world.
- Conflict points, loot/reward locations, monster locations, etc are set during these interactions.
- The drives of each mob or NPC introduced may differ/complement/oppose any other mob or NPC or player.
- The result is a unique encounter that responds to each player according to their specific history, deeds, and choices.
9. T. Michaels mentions Druids in this panel; while watching as scenario unfolds without player intervention, he says, "Is there a Druid in the audience?" (Could have just been a joke, or could have been a slip up.)
Inferences:
- The world is driven by "karma" of the player - everything you do has the potential to, at some point in your game life, make a difference or even significantly change the entire server's game experience.
- If players do not engage an area's content, it continues to evolve and change based upon the AI of the NPCs and mobs in the area. This means that certain areas of the world may be much more dangerous (or less so) depending upon whether or not players have chosen to engage that content.
- It is entirely possible that an area will become so overrun by NPCs and/or mobs that it becomes inaccessible OR requires a coordinated effort by the server's players to effect a change in the area/make it accessible.
- It is entirely possible to create the circumstances for a server-wide conflict/event even though it is not part of the
"overall design plan" of SoE! (On the other hand, it could just trigger an existing/defined "Rallying Call".)
Comments
I am not getting 60 fps, but I am not having any problems and the game is not even optimized. I disagree about it being ugly, but that is opinion and everyone has a different one. I enjoy the sun and moon and the shadows they cast. I think the colors are vibrant and lend themselves to a fantasy world. Why use it? Because it is cool.
My machines running Landmark right now:
3 year old desktop - i7 2700k, gtx 570, 16g ram, ssd - settings ultra everything - never drops below 30 fps
3 year old laptop (daughter plays on it) - i72630qm, gtx 560m, 16g ram, ssd - settings around medium, but tweaked a bit, 25 fps
new laptop - i7 4700hq, gtx 870m, 16g ram, ssd - everything ultra - never drops below 30 fps
I think bandwidth seems to be a bigger issue than specs though. You are not going to be able to play this game on dial up. At all. I was struggling the first few weeks of alpha, but I upgraded my internet from 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps and it was a lot better for me.
All hail our new EQ next overlords. Queue the *Halleluiah* choir!
2. No traditional quest hubs; you have to find the content (guided by journal "Rohsong", discovered via exploring, etc)
I don't care about anything other then this, no matter how bad the game looks, costs, or plays I will be all over this like a fat kid on a twinkie! OMFG the death of quest hubs and exploration centric content can't get here soon enough!!!!
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Performance is never perfect across the board, welcome to PC gaming.
Ugly is subjective.
While it doesn't require Voxels, the potential with them is much greater.
Don't want to define or argue about what a "sanbox" is, but at least in EQN/Landmark players can build/destroy and impact the world to some degree instead of simply being an open world and having the "sandbox" title applied like all the rest coming out.
Sadly no game is 100% perfect for everyone.
None of the emergent AI stuff requires voxels, but the fully destructible world does. This also lends itself to more realistic sieges, especially since different materials will have different strengths. Unlike other games where siege is just -> Hit the door or scripted section of the wall until it opens up!
With fully destructible environment, you can break into fortresses and attack outposts in countless different ways. Not to mention everything else it can offer, like the layers of the game world and accessing them randomly.
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By ugly I mean the horrible LOD after a certain distance.
And no you arent running over 30 fps with no drops on ultra with shadows at the highest no matter your setup. And I dont mean standing around either. I can play the game on Ultra and average 30 fps ( with a better rig ) with drops in the teens and some highs in the 40s MAYBE 50s depending on the area. Near a decent claim? Forget about it.
Internet matters with this game because they stream everything which is also another bad idea.
As for the above post about voxels allowing more ... More what? You cant destroy terrain to trap creatures in for easy kills because that will be viewed as an exploit no doubt. Mining? I dont think I want to see thousands of holes in the ground ruining the landscape because people are mining. I would be fine with a Ultima Online setup when it came to mining.
What else? Building homes? Sounds great but voxel homes look terrible with all the smudges and bleed effect that happens. When you are at the perfect distance they look ok but close up.. Yikes.
Magic combos destroying landscape during battles? Again that goes back to combat exploits and I am sure people would end up not liking it in PvP either after being trapped for the 1000th time by the same combo that everyone would be using.
Castle Seiges? That can already be done with basic physics.
I dont think voxels bring anything major to the MMORPG genre and from what I can tell will end up being more of a headache for the devs than anything.
You stay sassy!
I imagine it will. Making stuff in these games always brings certain players in but this is a huge change of direction for making a world come alive. It will either feel natural and interesting or turn into nothing more than a more complex public quest system. I have yet to play a single mmo who's "dynamic" public quest system wasn't boring and repetitive.
The issue for me is when a game's system becomes too apparent and I am distracted from the game world. Rift was a good example. I found myself amused by the rift spawns for the first few hours and then it simply became repetitive. WAR pub quests were the worst.
You stay sassy!
Storybricks look promising. I really hope it turns out to be what they say it is. From the highlights the point on an area of the game ignored by players could turn into an event that would take many players to over come. That has me excited. How many times does the community outgrow an area? With a tiered system you would not outgrow an area and to top it off the zones that dont get used much would turn into an event that would bring players back to old areas making it so you never outgrow an area. That could be fun. Hay guys you gota see whats going on in the Desert of Ro, the Sand Giants have made a fortified city, time to raid =-)
I had a bard alt in EQ1 as well and swarm kited as well but the scale they are talking about is not a level you could solo. You are thinking 15 years ago when what they are shooting for has never been done. As for going back to lower tiers to play, this is something they say they are shooting for. I tend to trust SoE as they have made many good and solid MMOs. More then any other company I can think of. For sure no other MMOs have had their duration. But I am not a fan boy shouting they are going to save MMOs and be the WoW killer. I just understand what they are shooting for and hope they hit that target. Nothing would make me happier.
Step right up! Step right up! Take a gander at Dr. Georgeson's wonder tonic. It cures Themeparkidus, Questhubosis, and will even give you relief from Staticmob Sickness! Guaranteed not to glitch or hump trees. This little bottle contains a miracle cure for all that ails you in mmorpgs!
I agree they will have a lot of optimizing to do in order to run the plan they have smoothly. Already in Landmark they have repetitive checks like character animations. When you jump off of a surface the system constantly checks for water below you and if it detects water will put you in a dive animation.
In EQN there are checks for voxel type like the Elementalist being able to change the ground to ice and freeze players who are on ice with another ability. I can only imagine how many "state checks" there will be in a world filled with all of this processing going on via constantly evolving content.
Now these are issues I can understand instead of "It's SOE run for the hills" or a picture of Tony the Tiger.
A question I have is, out of the major stuff they have hyped, what do you think isn't possible or highly unlikely? And why? Do you have any evidence to back these opinions up or just simply skeptical because new stuff is just plain crazy?
I'm not a designer of anything myself, but to me, for a company to not only say "We are making a destructible world" but to also say it won't revolve around instancing and will be an "open world" is pretty bold. We've never seen it and because of this, have nothing to compare it to. No Trove doesn't count.
Obviously other companies have made very big claims before, but usually they are "dynamic world" "never ending fun" etc which are fairly meaningless. Tech either works or it doesn't. If Storybricks AI has NPCs walking into building walls for hours, I'm not going to be too impressed with their "needs/wants" unless they need a headache.
Another question I have is, wouldn't it be pretty stupid to make such bold claims if they didn't have it tested or proven to some extent? Would be disastrous for another year to pass and they go "Oops we forgot that people like to play in groups and stuff, our bad, voxels are out."
Rally Calls are supposed to be huge events with massive numbers in one area. Don't you think they might have a better grasp on the tech and limits then you or I who simply don't have access to the same things as them, unless you've snuck into SOE HQ in the middle of the night...
I understand when people say they hate action combat or think multi-classing is stupid, that's their opinion. But to say voxels or whatever won't work without any evidence seems kind of prejudice and going beyond being skeptical. We can look at Landmark and assume that such things might not work due to it's performance issues, but again, this could be any number of things causing the problems (such as claims and player created stuff covering the world, not to mention it is Alpha/Beta status).
For me, I'll at least give them the benefit of the doubt before doubting them.
Not sure if you've seen early tech testing videos/demos, I know Black Desert and Camelot Unchained showed them off for recent examples. Where they spawned hundreds of characters on screen to test if the system could handle it and see what would happen. Obviously not a true representation of a real experience, but just an example that they have ways of testing things that don't revolve around you or I seeing. I've seen "gameplay" videos and or streams since of both and notice lag issues with just a few players/npcs on screen where hundreds of dummies were flawless. Lots of kinks to work out.
Once all these systems are completed and mashed together, the total package might be underwhelming and simply not fun for some, but that's a lot different than the systems not working at all.
You and I might both see a magic trick. I might swear it was real, you might swear it was fake. Until I see what really happened, I'll let the illusion make me happy. Guess I see games the same. Until someone rips the blinders off and I see something that wasn't their before, I'm not going to make up reasons to doubt just because doubting is safer or the wise thing to do.
If I did, I would simply put any anticipation or hype for games on complete hold until release. If you can't have a little fun and let the hype train take you at least a couple stops, might as well just wait until the train makes it all the way to the end to make sure there are no cliffs anywhere. I'll take the risk myself.
I think a lot of it comes from people's past experiences and they can't understand how something so complex and advanced can actually run well enough to support the kind of ideas they are pushing.
Aion for example, while looked good for it's time no doubt but didn't have things like voxels or world destruction, emphasized huge scale pvp fort raids that would draw in 100's of players, yet once you started getting more than 30 or 40 players in the area, performance became really bad, and it wasn't even anywhere near as complex as what EQN is trying.
People remember playing EQ and doing a raid and having to turn down all the particle effects and eye candy as much as possible, looking down at the floor just to maintain decent frame rates lol.
Then they hear about a game like EQN with fully destructible environments, highly animated characters with advanced facial animations, complex AI systems and it just seems too good to be true based on passed experiences.
But that said, I don't think it's going to be nearly as bad as people are thinking it's going to be. I certainly think that this is going to push systems. This isn't going to be your typical blizzard game where it'll run on low end systems just fine. But it's not going to be unreasonable.
Right now in Landmark, Max settings and just turning off shadows gets me a solid 60fps constant even as I roam around and I'm near impressive structures players have built. I have a pretty awesome PC (3570k OCed to 4.7ghz, 8gb of ram and 2x 780 GTXs in SLI), but also take in the consideration that EQN will launch in a year from now, and will have been vastly optimized since then with a lot better driver support when it does.
I can easily see a midgrade system of 2015 (something like a i5 CPU non-OCed, 8gb of ram, single 770 GTX / 860 GTX) playing the game capped out at 1080p with little to no issues).
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For me, if they say they are able to do X and are able to, regardless if I need a 5 year old PC or the best of the best, they still did what they said. Going the high end route is a very poor design choice to me as it cuts out the majority of possible customers (Looking at EQ2/VG), but they still achieved making all the systems work together and for the lucky few that can play, GG.
Now if they say all of this is possible on a 5 year old PC in a "playable" state, yet I have to turn everything off, stare at the ground (lol I totally forgot about that), and still stutter step, they didn't live up to their promise.
I actually believe they said during the reveal or soon after that they plan to have scaled settings to make it as accessible as possible, but I might be mistaken and that could mean whatever anyway.
Even with optimization, I'm assuming EQN will need at least a few things (8gb ram, i3+, video card made within last couple years, etc) and that some of those old no longer white office PCs that people can play WoW on, might not cut it. Which might cut down on their target audience, but hopefully not too much. By the time EQN rolls out, probably looking at a $500 or less box if people haven't upgraded in the last few years already. If people want PhysX (already shown I think), then maybe they will need to start thinking about upgrading to a bit more beefier machine. As it will be F2P, should have a few extra dollars to spend even.
Anyway, as I ramble on, still sounds like people simply can't believe it is even technically possible to do what SOE is saying, as in AI can't do what Storybricks is saying and Voxels can't work when you have 50 people on screen going crazy, even though Rally Calls are a promised common occurrence. Regardless of PC specs. Glad I'm not one of them. No fun at all.
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I'm with you on this. When i tried ArchAge, i just felt like i stepped back in time 5 years ago. The quest hubs really need to die off already. The only problem i have with EQN is that SOE might not pull it off too good. I'm really not liking Landmark's direction at all, and EQN is going to be basically using Landmark's tech and mechanics. Storybricks does sound interesting though, and i'll give it a chance in Landmark whenever it comes out.
I"m sure a very small percentage of the playerbase will be able to run high details..
Having everything moving around and encouraging exploration is a great thing, but my worry isn't that they can make things change, but instead I wonder what kind of content that you will have moving around. MMO's have quite a lot of issues with static quests with static monsters that ends up broken, how simple do the quests have to be so that they don't break while using storybricks?
Storybricks sounds amazing on paper, but I have serious doubts about how it turns out and the actual content that the game will have.
I run Landmark between 50-60 FPS most of the time with the highest setting possible except shadow (high only, has opposed to Ultra) at 1650x1050 on a single 770 GTX. If I set shadows at Ultra I drop by 10FPS.
The real problem is the dips in FPS, but those are either caused by everything running in a single thread (shadows/LOD) or downloading stuff not fast enough. They are changing both soon (they showed their new algo in the Tech evolution panel) and also bringing multi-threading optimizations at some point.
I played GW2 to death and they did get rid of quest hubs. The chain of events that happened after most people ran away because step 1 of a public event was over made me laugh. Thats one area GW2 shined. Most people would run to the few highlighted areas on the map and miss 75% of the content lol.
Oh yay, a feature list! I haven't seen one of those before. Looking all pretty, boasting of amazing things yet to pass.
I want to see it in action before I believe a single word.