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Alpha Testing Info
time007
Member UncommonPosts: 1,062
For those Alpha Testers OR people who have researched this game up and down/heard rumors etc:
Long time retired DAOC player since est. 2001 asking, How close is CU to DAOC? Where on the spectrum does it sit? Is it more similar to ESO or Warhammer or Aion than DAOC?
Please hehe don't flame me that this game isn't DAOC, as I realize that, I was just asking how close is it to DAOC on the spectrum of MMORPGs. The closest things we have had to DAOC since, have been Warhammer and ESO and Aion. So if anyone could give their opinion about how CU game compares in their mind to DAOC, and if its leaning more toward Warhammer or ESO or some other game (even Aion or a indie or Asian MMO) and why, would give me a better idea of if I should be a backer)
I get we can rave or rant about how this game isn't DAOC or tell me to research it for myself (which I have done, but am looking for alpha tester insight) but i'm more interested where on the MMO spectrum does this game sit. Feel free to rant or rave your opinion though as you like. Thanks!
Comments
In some respects it will be more DAoC than DAoC was. It is entirely RvR focused with no pve grind. That said pve is part of the game as the world is to be fleshed out like any Fantasy world with mobs and pve mechanics that exist for the sake of RvR (without pve an RvR game is just pvp as lore is what creates it).
You've got all the realm pride with being locked to a realm on real servers (no mega-server phasing) with unique classes for every realm. The world is fractured and you must reclaim lands and literally bind them to your own realm forcing other realms to cross oceans to get to them and try steal them for themselves. The Depths will be like DAoC contested dungeon but expanded upon in many ways. Major differences include it being a sandbox where everything other than your main city is created by players (not voxel but more of a brick system).
Major game play changes include full server side physics, spell interaction with other spells and environment and the ability to create your own spells, melee abilities, stances and combos.
More info:
http://camelotunchained.com/v2/
http://camelot.gamepedia.com/Camelot_Unchained_Wiki
You stay sassy!
Originally posted by laokoko
"if you want to be a game designer, you should sell your house and fund your game. Since if you won't even fund your own game, no one will".
This sentiment is almost universally not held by the game's backers.
Take opinions with a grain of salt. The game is too early in development to judge any game play as the only testing is currently in what is effectively tech alpha with zero testing on actual classes and RvR mechanics.
I hold no opinion on this game's potential for success for failure. I only know the facts and concepts that have been revealed. I personally feel that people making crystal ball projections are usually those scared of being let down so they start the hate train early. CU simply hasn't reached a point in development to even call existing testing CU. It is tech and mechanical testing only at this point but near release assets are slowly being added to the Alpha stages. Beta later this year (if on sticking to current schedule) may reveal enough for valid opinions).
Criticism may be placed upon the 6 or so months behind schedule the game currently stands but CSE has been very open about every single hiccup they have endured. Recent good news is they have officially hired a very senior and experience programmer to assist the custom engine build. One more senior developer (more art and graphics) is in the works. These were stretch goals so salary is already funded. Their team keeps growing but slowly as I personally believe Mark is building the company not only for this game but for the future so the right fit is paramount.
Time will tell but I see few road blocks that many other indie developers have suffered lately ... at least for now.
You stay sassy!
Well, I've played lots of MMOs, in closed beta to release etc. I feel like, Alpha is the "fantasy" stage where the game seems like nirvana. In closed beta, open beta the game comes back to reality and you start to see people dropping off as they are upset because doesn't have XYZ aspects that were described previously.
One more point is even IF you can get the game exactly described as stated, games like this with heavy RVR, have their RVR/PVP rewards system "gamed" by the other players i.e. gaming the system. Like for example non stop keep/checkpoint flipping that takes 5-20 seconds, people avoiding each other just to flip bases, or like in ESO, different realms working together to flip the emperor in order for everyone to get the emperor title.
So even if CU does everything it asks I hope they can keep the aspect that DAOC had. Which was, you couldn't "game the system" to rack up RPS, you literally had to fight your @ss off to rack up RPS. So I hope it isn't a flip fest like Warhammer, ESO, GW2. I know they want action to be fast paced, but it just gets flip happy. I like the days of it taking an hour to take a keep or 2 hours to take an RK.
EDIT: further question, will be there be mounts? I hate mounts, as if you get killed in RVR you should pay the price and have it take 15-20 minutes for you to run, boat, or have wizards port you back.
I've played so many games under the sun, and you can stomp a zerg and they can be back in your face, the same zerg, in 2 minutes, because dying means nothing. they can just throw themselves at you repeatedly with no wait time.
I do not believe there will be mounts but unsure about long term. There will never be flying mounts that is fact. The game will use Nvidia waveworks and Mark has already voiced great interest in adding ship to ship combat perhaps later as an expansion. For now simple ship transit will exist (all transportation will take time ... there will be no instant travel that affects RvR).
I doubt mounts will be considered because Mark has stated time and time again that nothing will ever enter the game that will allow players to simply bypass each other as it will hurt RvR. Mounts fall into the overarching concept that everything ever developed for the game will only be to enhance and contribute to the 3 pillars of game play: RvR, crafting and housing. Nothing is to be added that hurts or simply does not fit in with this design.
I should stress that development does not reveal near release looking progression because it is built upon a custom engine designed to support open battles of 500 to 1000+ players. I see that many do not grasp this concept. Projectiles use physics and are not 30m ranged themepark spells. You will see spells launched from hundreds of meters away. Battles are far more realistic in scale with real life and expected to host many times more on screen with real building destruction (they are build with blocks and fall apart as blocks). Massive open warfare is the goal and the engine must support it.
CU simply attempts to remove the developer built pve world of DAoC and expand the RvR concept of the frontier lands over the entire concept of the game with greater control offered to the players. It is a cool concept independent on whether or not it succeeds at accomplishing it.
You stay sassy!
1. Will there be mins speed?
2. I created a thread like a year about untimed stealth vs. limited stealth and the thread went like a gazillion pages and Mark Jacobs even replied to it like 3-5 times. Last I checked stealth was like you are in a separate dimension type thing where you over time could attacked by that dimensions beings and lose stam or health or sth. Is stealth still handled the same way?
I found the below text on the wiki site, wonder how much truth there is to it:
"Stealth: There is a proposed but unconfirmed set of additional classes: the veilwalker and veilstalker. these are proposed to be an implementation of a form of Veil-based stealth, and were introduced in kickstarter update #28. This concept is also covered in a video update"
So, thoughts anybody on if this is going down or not?
Next stretch goal will reveal a great deal more about camouflage (everyone gets it but archers are far superior at it), stealth (no ambush, front load damage or vanish play style though) and even soul walking (akin to astral projection).
Mark needs time to create the design documents which is why the last relatively easy stretch goal was thrown in prior.
You stay sassy!
I wouldn't worry about people gaming the system and keep trading, etc. Even in these early stages, Mark has touched on issues like this and stated that they are designing it in such a way to prevent it from happening.
....did you just say no "ambush"....dude that's a WoW term! The proper term is PA (perforate artery) which is what infs, sbs, and nbs had in Daoc. Don't sully our game with those WoW stealther terms!
LOL Extremely important sidenote: WoW lamely created the "i need a skill to warp me on top of you invisibly cuz I can't hit you otherwise" skill. That skill is sooo lame. In DAOC we had to line ourselves up and really plan attacks instead of "oh hey, there's a guy 20 feet a way, let me port on top of him and whack him with 1 button"
But anyways, so no PA type attack and no backstab?
I'm guessing stealth will be like ESO's crouch where you have a crouch zerg walking around? or a ESO full plate dragon knight crouched pwning people everywhere?
I made the huge mistake of rolling a thief in ESO for better stealth not realizing the difference between a thief's crouch/stealth is only like 1 meter in-game of visibility vs. a full plated dragon knight tank in ESO. Provided very very minimal help. Might as well roll a camo'd tank......gonna be zergs of em.
Further Edit: I remember now why I didn't back early on. They really tweak stealthers to the point where they are watered down tricksters flinging fairy dust on people with limited stealth capability. DAOC stealthers were really unique originally, and eventually over time became buff botted killing machines and zerg infested. Our biggest weapon was stealth, and a crit shot and now those both seem likely to be gimped......
It is going to be alot like daoc and yet also very different at the same time. The RVR extremely similar. But the world some very different mechanics. Enough of the old to make you like it with enough new to give it it's own new flavor
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
It's hard to say how and where it will end up....
Is it going to be the better than DAOC? Prolly not, but only because that game's greatness has more to do with golden memory than actual great gameplay. Your first love will always be your first love.
Is it going to be the best game EVER???!?!?!? Prolly not.
However consider this... Take ANY game on the market with WvW style PvP....
Think about EVERYTHING that's wrong with that PvP... The balance issues, the poor mechanics, that badley designed maps, performance issues... All of it.
Now consider a game where the entire engine, has been built from the ground up for PVP. The crafting and economy are for PVP. Even the PVE mobs and NPCs are for PVP. And every SINGLE change, on EVERY SINGLE patch, was for PVP.....
What would those games look like?
The answer is pretty simple.... WAY better and WAY more fun than they are now.
That's why CU is going to be a good game. Not because it's going to be crazy revolutionary, or because the programmers they have are just way smarter than any others. It's because all the stupid crap that's broken about WvW isn't going to be fixed 1 tiny patch note at a time. We arn't going to go 6 months without a mechanics update.
In short we arn't going to be the Red-headed step children anymore, who only get updates once they've finished adding more pointless quests, in more zones no-one goes to anyway.
i followed and played alot of marc's games.
that man has ideas.
the prob he had with warhammer was obvious: EA. they told em that they have to release the game in like 2 months once they took over, and so the dev team had to cut out a huge ammount of the content (other cities for the realms, systems and whatnot, not gonna go into deatil here).
this time, marc went the solo way, he asked his fans for backup, and he got it - because we believe in himas our "last and only hope for pvp"
so, if you ask a fan if this game will workout. we will loudly scream YES!
if you ask some more reasonable persons, they will most likely tell you they hope it will, but only time can tell.
the ideas i see so far and the engagement they put into that game seem to be a good thing.
ps: if a pveler would ask the question, the answer would most likely be "why do you care?"
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
well my major issues with all WvW type games is that they all have easily flippable targets that take like 30 seconds to 2 minutes to burn down (keeps, checkpoints, towers, etc). They just get burned down by the zerg so fast its pointless and has no meaning (I mean imho has no meaning of course in the game you get like 20 pts or 1 token if you take something etc). But I liked how early-DAOC was like, ok the main thing everyone was after was relics, that gave major bonuses to your realm After that, you could take a keep with your guild just for bragging rights.
Nowadays, again as I mentioned before, each target you can take in the WvW is worth some token or points so people love to endlessly flip these things as fast as possible in huge circle jerk in order to get as many points/tokens/currency as possible. LAME. We have seen it in Warhammer, ESO, GW2, etc etc. I truly hope this games RVR is set up like DAOC where RVR can't have its points system gamed.
2nd major issue, but not a deal breaker, is stealth (which I want).
Are you referring to the list with ESO in it? If yes, what particularly do you think DAoC fans didn’t like about ESO? (I played ESO, but not DAoC)
Key Differences are below between DAOC and ESO. FYI, I played DAOC for about 8 years or so and played ESO for maybe 3-6 months.
-DAOC had realm ranks, which after you amassed a certain number of realm points (RPS) you would move up in rank and get a +1 to all skills. you could mainly get all your realm points for killing people and a very very marginable amount from taking a keep or tower. so you had people ranging from +1 to all skills with the extremely high end ranks being +19 to skills. ESO does not have this. If you kill people you just get loot or sth if I remember. In daoc if you kill people you eventually gain realm ranks that make you incrementally stronger BUT not based on gear, but on +1 each time so skills
-DAOC gave you roughly 700-1100 RPS (think of it as WvW points) per solo kill depending on your target's realm rank. ESO had some ranks, but they were titles and again, if I remember correctly they drop gear, like basic gear, occasionaly just ok stuff
-In ESO, 2-3 people can take a scroll, but in DAOC, moreso when the game first came out, it took about 100-300 people at least to take a relic (equivalent of a scroll)
-Keeps in ESO can be taken by a small number of people, keeps in DAOC originally took more time to take 30 minutes or so at least. as DAOC progressed they had more siege warfare so keeps took less time to take down.
-ESO allows you to game the system by each side being able to flip keeps to get emperor status and rewarded for avoiding each other, in DAOC you won't get much benefit from avoiding other players except if your ultimate goal is to take a relic (like a scroll)
-ESO, everyone can stealth (not sure if this makes people unhappy but its a big difference)
-ESO has all the same classes on all sides, DAOC has 3 sides, each with their own unique classes.
-ESO has servers fight each other, but DAOC has each server with 3 unique factions and no changing who you are against. you are permanently against those other factions in that server, unless you re-roll on another server
Note: I don't have all day to be super detailed but that was the jist of the differences. You can get pedantic with my description (such as "I used to farm towers nonstop and get tons of rps from towers in DAOC", but again, mainly the majority of RPS came from player killing.), also no time to go into BP's, too long hehe.
You get the most xp(ap) in ESO for downing players. Thats why there are those zerg trains. Do you and other DAoC fans think its better to get more xp from downing players than taking objectives?
Personally I think objectives should give the most xp.
However I think its an exciting idea to get xp in PvP that you can use for skills.
I guess it can debated how many players it take a scroll or a Keep. But yes, I think it requires way to little effort to take a Keep in ESO and it doesnt feel like the achivement it should. And it became easy come, easy go.
Yea, letting everyone have stealth is not a mistake in itself if you ask me. I think it worked very well i AoC. But for some reason I cant explain it doest seem to be big success in ESO.
Another thing that is a little strange about ESO too, is the class ability system. Just 4 classes and all classes can choose all weapon abilities. The idea was to give a lot of flexibility and diversity. But in the end with only 4 classes one (nightblade) seemed UP and all if you didnt have healing abilities you were UP. But even more so didnt realy bring any role to a group.
Yea the choice Zenimax made to have an account play on all factions didnt feel like a good choice from the start. And with the VR zones (ability to play other factions PvE quests) why would you need it?
Did DAoC do any thing to counter the 2 following problems I see with RvR (team effort/rivalry and anonymous gameplay)?
What do I mean with those two? In AoC (GvG) the guilds/teams means something. If you are in a good guild, you can conquer/build and defend a Keep. Its a strong we. We fought the other guild that is in our league, we won, we conquered, we buildt the new keep together, we gathered all the resources to build it, we gathered all the resources to upgrade it to the highest level. We defended it againt againt our rival guilds attack. We gathered materials and crafted gear for our guild mates to get PvP gear to be better when we fight. Like you notices in this paragragh i typed the word we a lot. It gave a sense of feeling of being on a team like in team sports. ESO had very little of this. You are in a big group that pretty much is different each time you attack and a defend a keep. And what you do for the faction/realm feels like a drop in the ocean, Wether in AoC it felt like it mattered wether you played good or bad in a siege or wether the guilds mates geared up.
So to anonymous gameplay. in ESO (RvR) you hardly met people on the battlefield that you played with before. And only themost active group leaders and most active in global chat are known on the servers. You are just one amongst many. Wether people outside your guild is good or not you do not really known. I didnt have this feeling in AoC or WoW (until slightly when the cross-realm bgs started).