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A changeable world.. persistent mobs?
Markusan
Member Posts: 92
Everything I have heard so far about AI, changeable world, etc sounds good. However, what is the take on persistent mobs?
If players are to feel that they can affect the game world, what happens when players group together and kills Nagafen? Will nagafen forever be dead or will he automagically respawn? Has anything been said on the subject?
Comments
I could see bosses come from procedural quests, or, the world itself. They mentioned earthquakes and having monsters branch out of the underground realm to roam around the surface ... sounds cool to me. I'm just expecting new mechanics. They said mobs wont be sitting in one place for a long period of time, waiting for you to kill them. So, Nagafen if in the game, might be hard to find, and then, more prestigious.
A lot of what they say would kind of imply if you killed a particular thing (as opposed to generic Orc) it would not be able to come back.. or the idea of permanent change flies out the window. During one of the world changing events is likely when something *big* would show up.... but I mean they can always come up with a way for it to come back or potentially come back...
LIke having an event that in one way or another revolves around a ritual that the players may or may not stop (depending on events). If you stop the thing isn't brought back into the world... if you don't it comes back.. maybe as a Draco Lich or w/e
So dead doesn't always have to mean forever... but farming the same boss over and over really doesn't fall into my idea of permanent change.
Yes, but they did say that a lot of events would be procedural. Perhaps scripted events in the world? Based on what quests you've found?
They said they had something special to announce for raiding. And I'm assuming that epic named mobs would be considered to be with the raiding. So no concrete info yet, but stay tuned.
As far as regular mobs go, if they clear an area out, they'll either be gone, or move else where in the world.
I can see the problem of repopulating the world as a very difficult issue. I'm still sifting through the SOELive videos, but I haven't seen this issue addressed at all.
On one hand, it could be an amazing experience if Nagafen was a one-time server event, especially if you are in the group that kills Nagafen. On the other hand, the alt you create after that point will forever live in a world without Nagafen. Or at least, that Nagafen.
Even at the common mob level, this is a major issue. If the world only contains 25,000 rats, what happens when rush of newbie players kill all 25,000 rats? Do more appear? If so, where and how? This is an MMO, and even though it appears to break from many older MMO conventions. Someone will find out where the next batch of 25,000 appear in the game world and 'camp' them all.
I suspect the next batch of 25,000 rats will appear in the world in a newly generated, but undiscovered 'tier' under the world. A newb in the remnants of Qeynos will smack a gnoll, bust a hole in the earth, and there are 25,000 brand new rats spawned into this area at one time. With procedural generation, it could be simple.
On the other hand, a badly implemented procedural generation scheme can be predictable -- as predictable as a static spawn linked to a randomized timer. We've already seen guilds develop mechanisms to 'know' when a target raid mob spawns, even if the timer is (example) 200 + 1-60 hours. Mob spawns, 20 minutes later, a guild is online, organized, and the mob dies. The same could happen with procedural generation, only at a tier level, if the code isn't clever enough. I'm certain that SOE could do that, and do it well.
My question is 'will they?'. It will take discipline, time and skill. Skill, they have. Time, well, we don't know exactly when they plan to roll out EQ:N. Discipline, I don't know. All their previous games have suffered from Mud-Flation, where bigger, newer, shinier items make every older idem obsolete. Occasionally, mud-flation changes other elements of the game beyond items. Skills. Spells. Tactics. Balance. The counter to mud-flation is two-fold, a durable system up front, and developer discipline to avoid adding that new armor line that makes older armor seem weak and adding new content that requires the new armor. The game grows, but it nearly invalidates everything previous.
I really hope that SOE does have a new-found discipline to keep EQ:N as viable as they suggest, and invest the effort into making their initial systems as bullet-proof as possible. There appear to be many hurdles they haven't crossed yet, but I'm very curious to see how they progress.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.