Frankly I would summarize your whole posting as you putting your hands
over your ears and singing "lalalalala, I cant hear you, I cant hear
you".
For example this: no, it really wasnt a point.
Getting a group on another continent and requiring 90 minutes to ever get there was no point, it was a design error. People simply wouldnt wait this long. You wouldnt get that group. End of story.
This pretty much forced you to get to whatever area you wanted to do and wait endlessly in hope of getting a group there at some point.
Dont know what area you needed to go ? Didnt have a dedicated group of friends to play with ? Playing from europe, which had a lot less players ? Your loss.
Fast travel (a) made sure you knew where the areas for your level you could go to on each continent are (b) allowed you to get there fairly quickly.
And that in a game which, as I said, allowed you to go to maxlevel(*) in less than a week.
Design error, plain and simple.
(*) 50, not 55. The walk from 50 to 55 was long and painful.
Fast travel takes away one of the basic building blocks of a great community that relies on each other instead of themselves.
In my opinion of course.
Edit: Sorry wanted to clarify that while wiz/druid ports were fast travel they made you communicate with another person to make happen. They weren't just some npc or portal you stepped through. I'm perfectly okay with this type of travel in the later levels.
That map looks like it is a low detail representation, maybe a all the way zoomed out map showing a few highlights. I don't find it to be very inspiring despite my hopes for the game. The style of the map and its legend doesn't appeal to me.
MMORPG players are often like Hobbits: They don't like Adventures
I Feel like there is a big forrest missing, something like "sweden" in size of the world map, some great green wild forrest, that ends in a dark twisted evil forrest, that keeps trying to engulf the green one, some hidden pole against one another. Not like its never seen in, but it would be awesome for this game. Maybe Faerthale is a large forrest ending in Vae wood.. i dunno... faerthale just looks plain...
But awesome map, i bet there is a lof of challenge to find there, some Game of Thrones inspiration as well, (nice) Cant wait to explore this, and create great new memories based on hard encounter, and success of overcomming or achieving that spell, item, title, or community respect ingame.
EQ1 had fast travel options - druids and wizards. If Pantheon has NO fast travel options it would be a massive failure.
The chance of Pantheon not having fast travel options of some sort = zero
Player controlled fasts travel is what i believe everyone prefers in an old school setting such as this. Encouraging interaction and building interdependence is important to me. What i don't want to see is being able to just open the map and away i go with a click of the mouse ala GW2 or flight paths in almost every other MMO. Let the players handle that.
And as we quickly spotted at the beginning of the thread - at least one more continent is missing, since only 6 of the 9 racial cities are found on this map.
Frankly I would summarize your whole posting as you putting your hands
over your ears and singing "lalalalala, I cant hear you, I cant hear
you".
For example this: no, it really wasnt a point.
Getting a group on another continent and requiring 90 minutes to ever get there was no point, it was a design error. People simply wouldnt wait this long. You wouldnt get that group. End of story.
This pretty much forced you to get to whatever area you wanted to do and wait endlessly in hope of getting a group there at some point.
Dont know what area you needed to go ? Didnt have a dedicated group of friends to play with ? Playing from europe, which had a lot less players ? Your loss.
Fast travel (a) made sure you knew where the areas for your level you could go to on each continent are (b) allowed you to get there fairly quickly.
And that in a game which, as I said, allowed you to go to maxlevel(*) in less than a week.
Design error, plain and simple.
(*) 50, not 55. The walk from 50 to 55 was long and painful.
I was talking about EQ in terms of getting lost (EQ had no minimap and no filled out maps for many years, so getting lost was possible), it is obvious from your discussion, your experience is with Vanguard, more specifically SOEs mainstreamed version of Vanguard, the "Vanguard" that many talk of being the decline of the game.
What you like about fast travel is the hand holding we tire of with mainstream games today. You say that fast travel "(a) made sure you knew where the areas for your level you could go to on
each continent are (b) allowed you to get there fairly quickly." which is exactly the point why we didn't like it.
First off, the game was about exploration and yet you claim the benefit of it was that it told you exactly where you needed to go and then handed you the means to get there instantly. What you like defeats the entire point of exploration, defeats the entire point of what I am talking about.
Have you even read Brad's blog comments, his discussion in the Pantheon forums? Have you read the "game tenants", Pantheons goals and features? The reason I say is that everything you claim you want, is counter to the goals of this game.
You want features that invalidate exploration and make the game a typical mainstream lobby game. You want classes to be balanced between each other in the other thread and complain about aspects of inventory management, etc... Read the tenants, read Brad's discussion, read the forums on Pantheons site. What you want is not what this game is about.
This game will have difficult content, down time, corpse runs, and while soloing will be possible, it won't be catered to. There will be travel like in EQ and early Vanguard. There will be no hand holding in quests, pointy arrows on the optimal leveling areas, etc... This is not a mainstream game, it is being designed for a specific niche audience in the spirit of EQ and Vanguard (not SoE vanguard, but Brad's Vanguard).
The people here excited about Pantheon are not interested in another mainstream game. There are numerous games out there that serve that so called "superior design" you mention with plenty of instant fast travel all over the world, no character management, and bouncing balls showing the way to the fastest and most optimal exp area rather than having to think, read and discern for ones self. If all that was what people wanted, Brad would have no reason to make Pantheon.
Sounds like you need to do a bit of reading on Pantheon (and that of early EQ) because you may find the game does not serve your expected interests.
Also, by the way, in EQ it took much longer to level and the zones were not cleanly segregated by level as is common in games today. You actually had to go into the zones and explore to find the ideal levels and types of mobs. It was... you know, part of the game?
EQ1 had fast travel options - druids and wizards. If Pantheon has NO fast travel options it would be a massive failure.
The chance of Pantheon not having fast travel options of some sort = zero
I think what is meant about fast travel is the instant travel hubs where any class can port around the world at will with ease. That is what they did with Planes of Power and what most mainstream games these days do with fast ports all over the world.
EQ had fast travel with classes, but it was limited. You had to have a wizard/druid and they had to be of the level to actually port other people (level 20+) and be of the level to which that spell was accessible (which varied).
EQ1 had fast travel options - druids and wizards. If Pantheon has NO fast travel options it would be a massive failure.
The chance of Pantheon not having fast travel options of some sort = zero
Player controlled fasts travel is what i believe everyone prefers in an old school setting such as this. Encouraging interaction and building interdependence is important to me. What i don't want to see is being able to just open the map and away i go with a click of the mouse ala GW2 or flight paths in almost every other MMO. Let the players handle that.
Exactly. That is the point. Players should be interdependent on classes which may not have certain travel spells until a given time. This gives need for run speed spells and the like, making other classes desired. This entire aspect of design is what created that pro/con system of selecting a race and class. All of these things are taken for granted in mmos today. They removed the game play of their design, which in my opinion is why the games have become narrow hack and slash action clones with shallow focus and play.
I was talking about EQ in terms of getting lost (EQ had no minimap
and no filled out maps for many years, so getting lost was possible), it
is obvious from your discussion, your experience is with Vanguard, more
specifically SOEs mainstreamed version of Vanguard, the "Vanguard" that
many talk of being the decline of the game.
What you like about
fast travel is the hand holding we tire of with mainstream games today.
You say that fast travel "(a) made sure you knew where the areas for
your level you could go to on
each continent are (b) allowed you to get there fairly quickly." which
is exactly the point why we didn't like it.
First off, the game
was about exploration and yet you claim the benefit of it was that it
told you exactly where you needed to go and then handed you the means to
get there instantly. What you like defeats the entire point of
exploration, defeats the entire point of what I am talking about.
Have
you even read Brad's blog comments, his discussion in the Pantheon
forums? Have you read the "game tenants", Pantheons goals and features?
The reason I say is that everything you claim you want, is counter to
the goals of this game.
You want features that invalidate
exploration and make the game a typical mainstream lobby game. You want
classes to be balanced between each other in the other thread and
complain about aspects of inventory management, etc... Read the tenants,
read Brad's discussion, read the forums on Pantheons site. What you
want is not what this game is about.
This game will have
difficult content, down time, corpse runs, and while soloing will be
possible, it won't be catered to. There will be travel like in EQ and
early Vanguard. There will be no hand holding in quests, pointy arrows
on the optimal leveling areas, etc... This is not a mainstream game, it
is being designed for a specific niche audience in the spirit of EQ and
Vanguard (not SoE vanguard, but Brad's Vanguard).
The people
here excited about Pantheon are not interested in another mainstream
game. There are numerous games out there that serve that so called
"superior design" you mention with plenty of instant fast travel all
over the world, no character management, and bouncing balls showing the
way to the fastest and most optimal exp area rather than having to
think, read and discern for ones self. If all that was what people
wanted, Brad would have no reason to make Pantheon.
Sounds like
you need to do a bit of reading on Pantheon (and that of early EQ)
because you may find the game does not serve your expected interests.
Also,
by the way, in EQ it took much longer to level and the zones were not
cleanly segregated by level as is common in games today. You actually
had to go into the zones and explore to find the ideal levels and types
of mobs. It was... you know, part of the game?
I think at this point the main problem is that we want the same, but speak about it differently.
Vanguard was in no way, ever, as you describe it. It had plenty difficult content. It had corpse runs. It didnt carter to solists, ever. That classes like especially Disciple have been able to solo dungeons didnt mean it was easy, didnt mean it was always actually possible, didnt mean it was even remotely fast, and didnt mean they've been supposed to. Dungeons have been designed for groups, really.
The thing Vanguard did NOT have was downtime. The only classes which had
downtime have been solo Warriors and Monks. Those had no way of healing
(well Monk had one ability, but it was on a long recast timer; maybe they got more on higher levels, I dont know, my Monks never went very far) and healing
items have been both rare, expensive, and incredibly weak.
And early Vanguard had tons of ways of travel. They had mounts, from level 10 on, and portals for binding to. With diplomacy, one could get mounts for free. They had ships, even if they've been extremely buggy. They already talked about flying mounts - took them quite a while to actually implement those, but they talked about that from the get go. Portals have been quickly introduced, too, simply because the ships have been so buggy.
I dont see how Pantheon wouldnt strive for class balance. I specifically said that the selection of classes left out all the Vanguard classes that have been overpowered, specifically Disciple and Necromancer. Necromancer was replaced with Summoner instead. I think now that the only reason they left out Blood Mage because they wanted three classes of each type - I think Warrior, Crusader and Dire Lord are the tanks, Rogue, Ranger and Monk are the melee damage dealers, Cleric, Druid and Shaman are the healers, and Wizard, Summoner and Enchanter are the magic damage dealers.
What I fight for in the other thread is not class balance, which is already "in" anyway, but NO BORING CLASSES. So I dont want to sit down during battle on a healer so I get faster mana regeneration. Its just passive and stupid. I enjoyed all healer classes in Vanguard massively simply because they could do so much more than just heal.
I have read all about Pantheon I came across, but I thought the forums would be closed. Turns out that at least readonly I can indeed access them.
Exactly. That is the point. Players should be interdependent on classes
which may not have certain travel spells until a given time. This gives
need for run speed spells and the like, making other classes desired.
This entire aspect of design is what created that pro/con system of
selecting a race and class. All of these things are taken for granted in
mmos today. They removed the game play of their design, which in my
opinion is why the games have become narrow hack and slash action clones
with shallow focus and play.
The main tools I want from a game to avoid shallow gameplay is
(a) Tough opponents that offer a challenge
(b) Intelligent dungeon design that makes you think about how to progress in them
(c)
Complex and varied combat thats not "press button A, press button B,
press button C, repeat", but actually dynamic and you have to think
about which button to press next. Ideally I would want a good player to
be about 10 to 20 times more efficient than a button masher that never
bothered to think about what he's doing.
EQ1 had fast travel options - druids and wizards. If Pantheon has NO fast travel options it would be a massive failure.
The chance of Pantheon not having fast travel options of some sort = zero
Player controlled fasts travel is what i believe everyone prefers in an old school setting such as this. Encouraging interaction and building interdependence is important to me. What i don't want to see is being able to just open the map and away i go with a click of the mouse ala GW2 or flight paths in almost every other MMO. Let the players handle that.
Exactly. That is the point. Players should be interdependent on classes which may not have certain travel spells until a given time. This gives need for run speed spells and the like, making other classes desired. This entire aspect of design is what created that pro/con system of selecting a race and class. All of these things are taken for granted in mmos today. They removed the game play of their design, which in my opinion is why the games have become narrow hack and slash action clones with shallow focus and play.
I edited my post to reflect my thoughts on that. I definitely agree with player ports like EQ1 had with Wizzy/Druid. I am against the new style as you both ahve mentioned like flight paths/double click on the map kind of thing. I should have said that instead of what I said haha
Trying to stay on topic, what you have to understand about Pantheon, is that they won't be doing the lobby game design. They want a virtual world where there is realism involved. Going across the map takes time and planning or the assistance of other players if you aren't capable of teleporting.
In EQ and Vanguard, players leveled up in entirely different places because there were points of interest for wide ranges of people spread all across the world. The experience of 1 player was often very unique from that of other players, and they were sort of defined by that early experience. You had players in EQ who started on the west side of the world and leveled entirely from that area. Others started on the opposite side. During that process you became acquainted with those who stuck to those areas, and met many brand new faces at higher levels who had a different experience on the other side of the world. This was even more pronounced in Vanguard where you could level to cap entirely on a single continent.
This added a lot of variety, gave everyone the feeling of a unique origins story, and it also helped the replayability of the game. That also made the world seem vast because you weren't able to hop back and forth on a whim.
I think at this point the main problem is that we want the same, but speak about it differently. ***snip***
I didn't mean to imply that Vanguard was easy, even with all the mainstreaming SoE did to it, it was still more of itself than what it became. I played it at release and off and on during its years. I watched it change in many ways from its original design as they attempted to pick up mainstream players. Those changes were subtle and while seemingly insignificant as to the core play, they were integral to the over all aspect and feel of a game such as it was. One of the biggest killers of a game is when it starts discarding elements of play using "convenience" as the excuse.
I thought Vanguard was a bit too spamy for my tastes and while I found the classes extremely interesting in the various implementations, I dislike the approach of every class having multiple role focuses. That I think lends to the problem of community building.
I have read all about Pantheon I came across, but I thought the forums
would be closed. Turns out that at least readonly I can indeed access
them.
Yep, you can read the discussions, you just can't take part in them unless you sub. It makes sense, those who are truly interested in seeing the game as such put the money up to do so. I can't tell you how many times I saw MMOs take design directions from players that never had any intention of playing or staying in the game for very long (ie LoTRO).
The main tools I want from a game to avoid shallow gameplay is
(a) Tough opponents that offer a challenge
(b) Intelligent dungeon design that makes you think about how to progress in them
(c)
Complex and varied combat thats not "press button A, press button B,
press button C, repeat", but actually dynamic and you have to think
about which button to press next. Ideally I would want a good player to
be about 10 to 20 times more efficient than a button masher that never
bothered to think about what he's doing.
For me, it is more than just challenge. It is a style of play. For instance, I want fights to last much much longer than they do today in games. I want them to be like EQ, where it took minutes to kill a trash mob, not fractions of a second.
I want to have to worry fights taking too long and there being a pathing add, or a re-pop. I want the camp breaking difficulties of old where only a top notch group is capable of even getting back into an area, much less holding it. The game should be more about just the combat, there should be concerns about the environment, the surroundings, the time it takes to move through it, moving mobs, running out of mana or dealing with a mob that runs off and alerts an entire area leading to a massive train.
I don't want a theme park experience where everything is neatly organized and provided in a manner as if it were all planned to be approached a certain way. I want the holy trinity again with the need for a tank, healer, and crowd control. I don't want DPS to be the focused solution to fights, rather people should have to pull out all kinds of interesting abilities to succeed in the encounter, that is rooting, fearing, mezing, stunning, charming, etc... should all be tools not only useful, but required for successful play. Those who approach spamming DPS should fail miserably.
EQ was an immensely enjoyable and deep play experience and yet much of the combat was very slow and with little "button smashing". The point is, it is not the "buttons" that make the combat, but many subtle elements of play that combine to create that experience.
So we may want the same things, but I think we disagree how it should be achieved. You may think things like travel, Class interdependence, inventory management, etc... are small features, but I think them to be the difference between games today and games back then.
Pantheon is a spiritual successor to both EQ and Vanguard. There are some things that worked in both, some things that didn't. I will say from near 20 years of experience in MMOs and a lot of reflection on systems, that travel makes or breaks a game world immersive experience. It is one among many reasons that EQ had a massive population decline after the release of Plane of Power. Quick travel made a large and open world feel small and insignificant. I think what they are trying to achieve with Pantheon, is that world experience again and that means a lot of "conveniences" people take for granted in games today will have to go away in order to provide that sort of experience.
EQ1 had fast travel options - druids and wizards. If Pantheon has NO fast travel options it would be a massive failure.
The chance of Pantheon not having fast travel options of some sort = zero
Player controlled fasts travel is what i believe everyone prefers in an old school setting such as this. Encouraging interaction and building interdependence is important to me. What i don't want to see is being able to just open the map and away i go with a click of the mouse ala GW2 or flight paths in almost every other MMO. Let the players handle that.
Exactly. That is the point. Players should be interdependent on classes which may not have certain travel spells until a given time. This gives need for run speed spells and the like, making other classes desired. This entire aspect of design is what created that pro/con system of selecting a race and class. All of these things are taken for granted in mmos today. They removed the game play of their design, which in my opinion is why the games have become narrow hack and slash action clones with shallow focus and play.
I edited my post to reflect my thoughts on that. I definitely agree with player ports like EQ1 had with Wizzy/Druid. I am against the new style as you both ahve mentioned like flight paths/double click on the map kind of thing. I should have said that instead of what I said haha
Yeah, another point is that EQ for instance did staggering content. That is, there were wide ranges of mobs within a given zone and in many there were max level mobs so it was not uncommon to see a high level player running through an old zone heading to camp some high level mobs that spawned.
Those high levels would often interact with the low level players as they were in a zone. They would offer buffs to lower levels, assist them at times with a good rez or the like. If all players are easily able to hop around without effort, this sort of subtle interaction goes away. That high level zipping through several of the older zones to get to another area doesn't run into that other player, offer help, or provide any opportunity for interaction. What you end up with instead is people all sitting around in some hub city while the world is empty of travelers because travel is trivial.
Trying to stay on topic, what you have to understand about Pantheon, is that they won't be doing the lobby game design. They want a virtual world where there is realism involved. Going across the map takes time and planning or the assistance of other players if you aren't capable of teleporting.
In EQ and Vanguard, players leveled up in entirely different places because there were points of interest for wide ranges of people spread all across the world. The experience of 1 player was often very unique from that of other players, and they were sort of defined by that early experience. You had players in EQ who started on the west side of the world and leveled entirely from that area. Others started on the opposite side. During that process you became acquainted with those who stuck to those areas, and met many brand new faces at higher levels who had a different experience on the other side of the world. This was even more pronounced in Vanguard where you could level to cap entirely on a single continent.
This added a lot of variety, gave everyone the feeling of a unique origins story, and it also helped the replayability of the game. That also made the world seem vast because you weren't able to hop back and forth on a whim.
You know, one thing they really need to focus on is the ability to easily adapt the game rules between servers with minimal effort. If they can streamline that management process, it could solve a lot of the problems with these discussions.
I think back to the many games today which are complete garbage because they threw out their original design focus to cater to mainstream (EQ, EQ2, LoTRO, DDO, Rift, WoW, etc...) and think what would happen if they had kept independent rule sets between some servers. So instead of changing the entire game to some new mainstream appeal, they open up a new server and apply it only to that. This way, everyone gets what they want.
I remember reading about such possibilities in the Pantheon forums and hearing Brad talk about the possibility of different rule set servers. This approach I think could solve the whole problem with games today. The trick would be in creating a system that would allow for easy adjustment of such features in design. If they could somehow create a content management utility that would track the changes and themes of a given server and allow for them to implement variations without too much difficulty, it could be a practical solution and the benefit would be that people get the general focus of game they want (obviously there would have to be some concessions in a persons selection of a server). I think this would be the ultimate goal of MMO design. A tailored experience fitted to a given genre of play style.
It would also be interesting to see which types of servers are the most popular.
Can't wait for this, so anxious to get into the alpha and start helping this move along!!!
Same here. I'm already fantasizing in my head about the game, this and I'll probably take a weeks vacation.............Only a REAL MMO PLAYER could understand the feeling.
As I stated before, Pentheon will attract way more players than they even expect.
As far as " helping this move along ". I would like to see some public reaction on game play before I invest..............If the core game is good I plan on investing heavy, At least my level of heavy, I don't have millions !!!!
Their is a big difference between bugs and core mechanics. Bugs can be fixed.
The need for fast travel depends on the population. If you have enough people then you can level up in a few close by areas and not need to travel every time you login. But if you dont have the people for that then you HAVE to include fast travel. No group will hold your spot for a half hour while you travel.
The need for fast travel depends on the population. If you have enough people then you can level up in a few close by areas and not need to travel every time you login. But if you dont have the people for that then you HAVE to include fast travel. No group will hold your spot for a half hour while you travel.
Its strange that people look at it so backwards today. I never reserved a spot in another zone and then traveled; I went to an area and found a group when I was nearby. If I wanted to do something with a group of people, we planned ahead of time to do so. Part of the fun of older MMOs was that social aspect.
I, for one, don't want another game that is always my way, right away. There are already plenty of lobby game MMOs that offer that. I want a world where things don't come easy and its up to the players to find ways to overcome those challenges.
I think at this point the main problem is that we want the same, but speak about it differently. ***snip***
I didn't mean to imply that Vanguard was easy, even with all the mainstreaming SoE did to it, it was still more of itself than what it became. I played it at release and off and on during its years. I watched it change in many ways from its original design as they attempted to pick up mainstream players. Those changes were subtle and while seemingly insignificant as to the core play, they were integral to the over all aspect and feel of a game such as it was. One of the biggest killers of a game is when it starts discarding elements of play using "convenience" as the excuse.
I thought Vanguard was a bit too spamy for my tastes and while I found the classes extremely interesting in the various implementations, I dislike the approach of every class having multiple role focuses. That I think lends to the problem of community building.
I have read all about Pantheon I came across, but I thought the forums
would be closed. Turns out that at least readonly I can indeed access
them.
Yep, you can read the discussions, you just can't take part in them unless you sub. It makes sense, those who are truly interested in seeing the game as such put the money up to do so. I can't tell you how many times I saw MMOs take design directions from players that never had any intention of playing or staying in the game for very long (ie LoTRO).
The main tools I want from a game to avoid shallow gameplay is
(a) Tough opponents that offer a challenge
(b) Intelligent dungeon design that makes you think about how to progress in them
(c)
Complex and varied combat thats not "press button A, press button B,
press button C, repeat", but actually dynamic and you have to think
about which button to press next. Ideally I would want a good player to
be about 10 to 20 times more efficient than a button masher that never
bothered to think about what he's doing.
For me, it is more than just challenge. It is a style of play. For instance, I want fights to last much much longer than they do today in games. I want them to be like EQ, where it took minutes to kill a trash mob, not fractions of a second.
I want to have to worry fights taking too long and there being a pathing add, or a re-pop. I want the camp breaking difficulties of old where only a top notch group is capable of even getting back into an area, much less holding it. The game should be more about just the combat, there should be concerns about the environment, the surroundings, the time it takes to move through it, moving mobs, running out of mana or dealing with a mob that runs off and alerts an entire area leading to a massive train.
I don't want a theme park experience where everything is neatly organized and provided in a manner as if it were all planned to be approached a certain way. I want the holy trinity again with the need for a tank, healer, and crowd control. I don't want DPS to be the focused solution to fights, rather people should have to pull out all kinds of interesting abilities to succeed in the encounter, that is rooting, fearing, mezing, stunning, charming, etc... should all be tools not only useful, but required for successful play. Those who approach spamming DPS should fail miserably.
EQ was an immensely enjoyable and deep play experience and yet much of the combat was very slow and with little "button smashing". The point is, it is not the "buttons" that make the combat, but many subtle elements of play that combine to create that experience.
So we may want the same things, but I think we disagree how it should be achieved. You may think things like travel, Class interdependence, inventory management, etc... are small features, but I think them to be the difference between games today and games back then.
Pantheon is a spiritual successor to both EQ and Vanguard. There are some things that worked in both, some things that didn't. I will say from near 20 years of experience in MMOs and a lot of reflection on systems, that travel makes or breaks a game world immersive experience. It is one among many reasons that EQ had a massive population decline after the release of Plane of Power. Quick travel made a large and open world feel small and insignificant. I think what they are trying to achieve with Pantheon, is that world experience again and that means a lot of "conveniences" people take for granted in games today will have to go away in order to provide that sort of experience.
Just to clarify, you can access and post on the boards by being a donor or a subscriber.
EQ1 had fast travel options - druids and wizards. If Pantheon has NO fast travel options it would be a massive failure.
The chance of Pantheon not having fast travel options of some sort = zero
Player controlled fasts travel is what i believe everyone prefers in an old school setting such as this. Encouraging interaction and building interdependence is important to me. What i don't want to see is being able to just open the map and away i go with a click of the mouse ala GW2 or flight paths in almost every other MMO. Let the players handle that.
Exactly. That is the point. Players should be interdependent on classes which may not have certain travel spells until a given time. This gives need for run speed spells and the like, making other classes desired. This entire aspect of design is what created that pro/con system of selecting a race and class. All of these things are taken for granted in mmos today. They removed the game play of their design, which in my opinion is why the games have become narrow hack and slash action clones with shallow focus and play.
I edited my post to reflect my thoughts on that. I definitely agree with player ports like EQ1 had with Wizzy/Druid. I am against the new style as you both ahve mentioned like flight paths/double click on the map kind of thing. I should have said that instead of what I said haha
Yeah, another point is that EQ for instance did staggering content. That is, there were wide ranges of mobs within a given zone and in many there were max level mobs so it was not uncommon to see a high level player running through an old zone heading to camp some high level mobs that spawned.
Those high levels would often interact with the low level players as they were in a zone. They would offer buffs to lower levels, assist them at times with a good rez or the like. If all players are easily able to hop around without effort, this sort of subtle interaction goes away. That high level zipping through several of the older zones to get to another area doesn't run into that other player, offer help, or provide any opportunity for interaction. What you end up with instead is people all sitting around in some hub city while the world is empty of travelers because travel is trivial.
There are many ways to keep travel meaningful, one could be to have dynamic events that are triggered by player proximity and based on the level of the person or group running through the area. Random lost treasure chests spawns. Random chance for gathering nodes to produce high level ingredients in low level areas. Some parts of a high level quest or epic quest that spawn in lower level areas, encouraging cross level participation. The point being that there are many good reasons for disparate levels interacting with each other in older zones for both the social and game play aspects.
The need for fast travel depends on the population. If you have enough people then you can level up in a few close by areas and not need to travel every time you login. But if you dont have the people for that then you HAVE to include fast travel. No group will hold your spot for a half hour while you travel.
Its strange that people look at it so backwards today. I never reserved a spot in another zone and then traveled; I went to an area and found a group when I was nearby.
Like I said, if you have the population where you know if you go to zone X you will be able to find a group when you get there then you dont need fast travel. But you are assuming that you go to the area and find a group. If the population doesnt support that assumption then you may travel a half hour and find no group there. So what do you do, travel another half hour and hope you find a group when you get there?
And now someone will say "I always have a group because Im in a good guild and we bring our own group". Thats nice for you. But what do you do when your healer has to leave and the only replacement is a half hour away? Do you and the other 4 people all wait?
This is exactly why vanguard added portals. At first they werent needed. But without a really good population they became needed. Thats all im saying.
The need for fast travel depends on the population. If you have
enough people then you can level up in a few close by areas and not need
to travel every time you login. But if you dont have the people for
that then you HAVE to include fast travel. No group will hold your spot
for a half hour while you travel.
Exactly what I'm saying.
Also, it depends upon level speed. If it takes you years to get to maxlevel, you'll be staying in the same area for many hours if not days, and traveling to the next location in 90 minutes is no big deal.
But if the travel to maxlevel only takes days, switching to new areas will happen very, very often. Traveling for 90 min to an area that you'll spend only 30 min in is pretty awful.
The need for fast travel depends on the population. If you have
enough people then you can level up in a few close by areas and not need
to travel every time you login. But if you dont have the people for
that then you HAVE to include fast travel. No group will hold your spot
for a half hour while you travel.
Exactly what I'm saying.
Also, it depends upon level speed. If it takes you years to get to maxlevel, you'll be staying in the same area for many hours if not days, and traveling to the next location in 90 minutes is no big deal.
But if the travel to maxlevel only takes days, switching to new areas will happen very, very often. Traveling for 90 min to an area that you'll spend only 30 min in is pretty awful.
I personally would wait the 30-90 minutes for the replacement or if the group wanted to continue on we would find a way to make it work. That's what was so great about EQ, people couldn't always find the "best" group make-up and found ways to get XP either way. I think that's what people refer to as emergent game play.
I'm hoping the leveling speed is very very slow where people won't be able to rush through the content or will burn out trying. My reasoning for this is due to my personal experience with slower leveling. Again from my experience or observations, when the leveling is slowed down the community seems to come together more and the focus shifts to playing the game instead of rushing to the end content.
The need for fast travel depends on the population. If you have
enough people then you can level up in a few close by areas and not need
to travel every time you login. But if you dont have the people for
that then you HAVE to include fast travel. No group will hold your spot
for a half hour while you travel.
Exactly what I'm saying.
Also, it depends upon level speed. If it takes you years to get to maxlevel, you'll be staying in the same area for many hours if not days, and traveling to the next location in 90 minutes is no big deal.
But if the travel to maxlevel only takes days, switching to new areas will happen very, very often. Traveling for 90 min to an area that you'll spend only 30 min in is pretty awful.
Well, from the podcasts and forum discussions, leveling is likely to take a very long time. When I was talking about no mainstream fast travel, I was pretty much assuming that leveling would take a long long time as it is a component of the older style of play that Pantheon is bringing back. I am hoping it is early EQ level of time to level in the game where it took the average player 8-12 months to hit max level. It was not uncommon to have many people barely nearing max level by the time new content was being released.
Comments
Frankly I would summarize your whole posting as you putting your hands over your ears and singing "lalalalala, I cant hear you, I cant hear you".
For example this: no, it really wasnt a point.
Getting a group on another continent and requiring 90 minutes to ever get there was no point, it was a design error. People simply wouldnt wait this long. You wouldnt get that group. End of story.
This pretty much forced you to get to whatever area you wanted to do and wait endlessly in hope of getting a group there at some point.
Dont know what area you needed to go ? Didnt have a dedicated group of friends to play with ? Playing from europe, which had a lot less players ? Your loss.
Fast travel (a) made sure you knew where the areas for your level you could go to on each continent are (b) allowed you to get there fairly quickly.
And that in a game which, as I said, allowed you to go to maxlevel(*) in less than a week.
Design error, plain and simple.
(*) 50, not 55. The walk from 50 to 55 was long and painful.
In my opinion of course.
Edit: Sorry wanted to clarify that while wiz/druid ports were fast travel they made you communicate with another person to make happen. They weren't just some npc or portal you stepped through. I'm perfectly okay with this type of travel in the later levels.
And as we quickly spotted at the beginning of the thread - at least one more continent is missing, since only 6 of the 9 racial cities are found on this map.
I was talking about EQ in terms of getting lost (EQ had no minimap and no filled out maps for many years, so getting lost was possible), it is obvious from your discussion, your experience is with Vanguard, more specifically SOEs mainstreamed version of Vanguard, the "Vanguard" that many talk of being the decline of the game.
What you like about fast travel is the hand holding we tire of with mainstream games today. You say that fast travel "(a) made sure you knew where the areas for your level you could go to on each continent are (b) allowed you to get there fairly quickly." which is exactly the point why we didn't like it.
First off, the game was about exploration and yet you claim the benefit of it was that it told you exactly where you needed to go and then handed you the means to get there instantly. What you like defeats the entire point of exploration, defeats the entire point of what I am talking about.
Have you even read Brad's blog comments, his discussion in the Pantheon forums? Have you read the "game tenants", Pantheons goals and features? The reason I say is that everything you claim you want, is counter to the goals of this game.
You want features that invalidate exploration and make the game a typical mainstream lobby game. You want classes to be balanced between each other in the other thread and complain about aspects of inventory management, etc... Read the tenants, read Brad's discussion, read the forums on Pantheons site. What you want is not what this game is about.
This game will have difficult content, down time, corpse runs, and while soloing will be possible, it won't be catered to. There will be travel like in EQ and early Vanguard. There will be no hand holding in quests, pointy arrows on the optimal leveling areas, etc... This is not a mainstream game, it is being designed for a specific niche audience in the spirit of EQ and Vanguard (not SoE vanguard, but Brad's Vanguard).
The people here excited about Pantheon are not interested in another mainstream game. There are numerous games out there that serve that so called "superior design" you mention with plenty of instant fast travel all over the world, no character management, and bouncing balls showing the way to the fastest and most optimal exp area rather than having to think, read and discern for ones self. If all that was what people wanted, Brad would have no reason to make Pantheon.
Sounds like you need to do a bit of reading on Pantheon (and that of early EQ) because you may find the game does not serve your expected interests.
Also, by the way, in EQ it took much longer to level and the zones were not cleanly segregated by level as is common in games today. You actually had to go into the zones and explore to find the ideal levels and types of mobs. It was... you know, part of the game?
EQ had fast travel with classes, but it was limited. You had to have a wizard/druid and they had to be of the level to actually port other people (level 20+) and be of the level to which that spell was accessible (which varied).
Vanguard was in no way, ever, as you describe it. It had plenty difficult content. It had corpse runs. It didnt carter to solists, ever. That classes like especially Disciple have been able to solo dungeons didnt mean it was easy, didnt mean it was always actually possible, didnt mean it was even remotely fast, and didnt mean they've been supposed to. Dungeons have been designed for groups, really.
The thing Vanguard did NOT have was downtime. The only classes which had downtime have been solo Warriors and Monks. Those had no way of healing (well Monk had one ability, but it was on a long recast timer; maybe they got more on higher levels, I dont know, my Monks never went very far) and healing items have been both rare, expensive, and incredibly weak.
And early Vanguard had tons of ways of travel. They had mounts, from level 10 on, and portals for binding to. With diplomacy, one could get mounts for free. They had ships, even if they've been extremely buggy. They already talked about flying mounts - took them quite a while to actually implement those, but they talked about that from the get go. Portals have been quickly introduced, too, simply because the ships have been so buggy.
I dont see how Pantheon wouldnt strive for class balance. I specifically said that the selection of classes left out all the Vanguard classes that have been overpowered, specifically Disciple and Necromancer. Necromancer was replaced with Summoner instead. I think now that the only reason they left out Blood Mage because they wanted three classes of each type - I think Warrior, Crusader and Dire Lord are the tanks, Rogue, Ranger and Monk are the melee damage dealers, Cleric, Druid and Shaman are the healers, and Wizard, Summoner and Enchanter are the magic damage dealers.
What I fight for in the other thread is not class balance, which is already "in" anyway, but NO BORING CLASSES. So I dont want to sit down during battle on a healer so I get faster mana regeneration. Its just passive and stupid. I enjoyed all healer classes in Vanguard massively simply because they could do so much more than just heal.
I have read all about Pantheon I came across, but I thought the forums would be closed. Turns out that at least readonly I can indeed access them.
The main tools I want from a game to avoid shallow gameplay is
(a) Tough opponents that offer a challenge
(b) Intelligent dungeon design that makes you think about how to progress in them
(c) Complex and varied combat thats not "press button A, press button B, press button C, repeat", but actually dynamic and you have to think about which button to press next. Ideally I would want a good player to be about 10 to 20 times more efficient than a button masher that never bothered to think about what he's doing.
I edited my post to reflect my thoughts on that. I definitely agree with player ports like EQ1 had with Wizzy/Druid. I am against the new style as you both ahve mentioned like flight paths/double click on the map kind of thing. I should have said that instead of what I said haha
In EQ and Vanguard, players leveled up in entirely different places because there were points of interest for wide ranges of people spread all across the world. The experience of 1 player was often very unique from that of other players, and they were sort of defined by that early experience. You had players in EQ who started on the west side of the world and leveled entirely from that area. Others started on the opposite side. During that process you became acquainted with those who stuck to those areas, and met many brand new faces at higher levels who had a different experience on the other side of the world. This was even more pronounced in Vanguard where you could level to cap entirely on a single continent.
This added a lot of variety, gave everyone the feeling of a unique origins story, and it also helped the replayability of the game. That also made the world seem vast because you weren't able to hop back and forth on a whim.
I thought Vanguard was a bit too spamy for my tastes and while I found the classes extremely interesting in the various implementations, I dislike the approach of every class having multiple role focuses. That I think lends to the problem of community building.
For me, it is more than just challenge. It is a style of play. For instance, I want fights to last much much longer than they do today in games. I want them to be like EQ, where it took minutes to kill a trash mob, not fractions of a second.
I want to have to worry fights taking too long and there being a pathing add, or a re-pop. I want the camp breaking difficulties of old where only a top notch group is capable of even getting back into an area, much less holding it. The game should be more about just the combat, there should be concerns about the environment, the surroundings, the time it takes to move through it, moving mobs, running out of mana or dealing with a mob that runs off and alerts an entire area leading to a massive train.
I don't want a theme park experience where everything is neatly organized and provided in a manner as if it were all planned to be approached a certain way. I want the holy trinity again with the need for a tank, healer, and crowd control. I don't want DPS to be the focused solution to fights, rather people should have to pull out all kinds of interesting abilities to succeed in the encounter, that is rooting, fearing, mezing, stunning, charming, etc... should all be tools not only useful, but required for successful play. Those who approach spamming DPS should fail miserably.
EQ was an immensely enjoyable and deep play experience and yet much of the combat was very slow and with little "button smashing". The point is, it is not the "buttons" that make the combat, but many subtle elements of play that combine to create that experience.
So we may want the same things, but I think we disagree how it should be achieved. You may think things like travel, Class interdependence, inventory management, etc... are small features, but I think them to be the difference between games today and games back then.
Pantheon is a spiritual successor to both EQ and Vanguard. There are some things that worked in both, some things that didn't. I will say from near 20 years of experience in MMOs and a lot of reflection on systems, that travel makes or breaks a game world immersive experience. It is one among many reasons that EQ had a massive population decline after the release of Plane of Power. Quick travel made a large and open world feel small and insignificant. I think what they are trying to achieve with Pantheon, is that world experience again and that means a lot of "conveniences" people take for granted in games today will have to go away in order to provide that sort of experience.
Yeah, another point is that EQ for instance did staggering content. That is, there were wide ranges of mobs within a given zone and in many there were max level mobs so it was not uncommon to see a high level player running through an old zone heading to camp some high level mobs that spawned.
Those high levels would often interact with the low level players as they were in a zone. They would offer buffs to lower levels, assist them at times with a good rez or the like. If all players are easily able to hop around without effort, this sort of subtle interaction goes away. That high level zipping through several of the older zones to get to another area doesn't run into that other player, offer help, or provide any opportunity for interaction. What you end up with instead is people all sitting around in some hub city while the world is empty of travelers because travel is trivial.
You know, one thing they really need to focus on is the ability to easily adapt the game rules between servers with minimal effort. If they can streamline that management process, it could solve a lot of the problems with these discussions.
I think back to the many games today which are complete garbage because they threw out their original design focus to cater to mainstream (EQ, EQ2, LoTRO, DDO, Rift, WoW, etc...) and think what would happen if they had kept independent rule sets between some servers. So instead of changing the entire game to some new mainstream appeal, they open up a new server and apply it only to that. This way, everyone gets what they want.
I remember reading about such possibilities in the Pantheon forums and hearing Brad talk about the possibility of different rule set servers. This approach I think could solve the whole problem with games today. The trick would be in creating a system that would allow for easy adjustment of such features in design. If they could somehow create a content management utility that would track the changes and themes of a given server and allow for them to implement variations without too much difficulty, it could be a practical solution and the benefit would be that people get the general focus of game they want (obviously there would have to be some concessions in a persons selection of a server). I think this would be the ultimate goal of MMO design. A tailored experience fitted to a given genre of play style.
It would also be interesting to see which types of servers are the most popular.
Same here. I'm already fantasizing in my head about the game, this and I'll probably take a weeks vacation.............Only a REAL MMO PLAYER could understand the feeling.
As I stated before, Pentheon will attract way more players than they even expect.
As far as " helping this move along ". I would like to see some public reaction on game play before I invest..............If the core game is good I plan on investing heavy, At least my level of heavy, I don't have millions !!!!
Their is a big difference between bugs and core mechanics. Bugs can be fixed.
I, for one, don't want another game that is always my way, right away. There are already plenty of lobby game MMOs that offer that. I want a world where things don't come easy and its up to the players to find ways to overcome those challenges.
Just to clarify, you can access and post on the boards by being a donor or a subscriber.
There are many ways to keep travel meaningful, one could be to have dynamic events that are triggered by player proximity and based on the level of the person or group running through the area. Random lost treasure chests spawns. Random chance for gathering nodes to produce high level ingredients in low level areas. Some parts of a high level quest or epic quest that spawn in lower level areas, encouraging cross level participation. The point being that there are many good reasons for disparate levels interacting with each other in older zones for both the social and game play aspects.
And now someone will say "I always have a group because Im in a good guild and we bring our own group". Thats nice for you. But what do you do when your healer has to leave and the only replacement is a half hour away? Do you and the other 4 people all wait?
This is exactly why vanguard added portals. At first they werent needed. But without a really good population they became needed. Thats all im saying.
Also, it depends upon level speed. If it takes you years to get to maxlevel, you'll be staying in the same area for many hours if not days, and traveling to the next location in 90 minutes is no big deal.
But if the travel to maxlevel only takes days, switching to new areas will happen very, very often. Traveling for 90 min to an area that you'll spend only 30 min in is pretty awful.
I'm hoping the leveling speed is very very slow where people won't be able to rush through the content or will burn out trying. My reasoning for this is due to my personal experience with slower leveling. Again from my experience or observations, when the leveling is slowed down the community seems to come together more and the focus shifts to playing the game instead of rushing to the end content.
Well, from the podcasts and forum discussions, leveling is likely to take a very long time. When I was talking about no mainstream fast travel, I was pretty much assuming that leveling would take a long long time as it is a component of the older style of play that Pantheon is bringing back. I am hoping it is early EQ level of time to level in the game where it took the average player 8-12 months to hit max level. It was not uncommon to have many people barely nearing max level by the time new content was being released.