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Features and Feasibility: a constructive discussion about EQN.
Speely
Member CommonPosts: 861
Let's have a thread for people who like what they are seeing from EQN and Landmark and would like to discuss features. This is not a thread for talking about how evil SOE is, payment models, beta testing, ect... just game features and their possibilities. Criticism of said features is welcome if substantiated and relevant to what is known about the developmental direction of EQN and Landmark.
I will start: movement. I like the idea of being able to have diverse ways of navigating fully-interactive environments, and the parkour elements are promising. I do, however, have both hopes and concerns about it.
Hopes: That the freedom of movement can be combined with the Voxelized (yeah I made up a word) terrain over which one moves to create possibilities for combined effects. For example, running along a wall and using your weapon to dislodge rocks that hamper pursuit (i.e. affect the movement rate of enemy pursuers.) Using trees to perform acrobatic attacks, and other combinations of skills and environment.
Concerns: the above seems silly to me if everyone can do it. My question is this: shouldn't parkour and generally acrobatic movement be a skill? I am not stoked about the idea of every mage and heavily-armored tank being able to be ninjas (unless they devote themselves to training for it.) If it is a skill that someone has to train in and thus sacrifice training in something else, then it becomes at once less ubiquitous and able to be expanded upon to diversify combat strategies, strategies that involve the environment and take advantage of the Voxel tech. I think that the freedom of movement afforded by these abilities would have more impact if they required a choice between having them or having something else in their place. -edit: I should also ask if you think armor should affect said movement types as well.
So what say you? Should everyone get to be ninjas, or should it be a trained skill? OR, has SOE already addressed this and I just missed it and am now a giant stupid-face?
Comments
I think we've seen very little when it comes to movement. They are going for "heroic" movement and I don't translate that into everyone being ninjas or parkour masters, but I understand why many see it that way.
I believe the Kerran's long leap was a Warrior ability (sure they named it somewhere) and it looked very Warriorish. He also had a nice sprint that was a racial animation.
Humans appear to have two flips, a somersault that seems to trigger when jumping from a higher point to a lower and a awkward looking twist that looks to be triggered by double jumping. They could both be completely random as well, no real idea.
They've shown gliding from a pair of boots which looks natural and is gear dependent and a caster ability to teleport through the air which again looks like it fits and is class/skill dependent.
I highly doubt (and hope) that we don't see twisty flipping Ogres, but you never know how far they will take "heroic" movement.
For the most part, I hope any special movement abilities are tied to gear, skills, or a limited resource (sprint/stamina). Any other regular movement animations (like the flipping) should hopefully have no impact on gameplay, just for visual entertainment.
Hopefully class/gear impact movement to some degree as a human wearing heavy armor wielding a huge sword would look silly flipping like we've seen, but I have a feeling it will be that way.
I think the idea of using the terrain to perform special abilities may be asking a bit too much, but would be fun. Just seems like it would be way too situational to spend a lot of time coding for a rogue to be able to jump off a tree to do an extra attack or something like that.
Parkour seems to just be another hype/buzz word and in reality doesn't have much impact on gameplay. You can run up to a ledge and automatically lift yourself up, slide down a hill, or do some visually extreme flips while running in a straight line, beyond that I don't see anything that hasn't been in every Lara Craft game for years. I don't see us being able to jump back and forth in a small alleyway to reach the top or swinging off of poles to flip across a space.
I don't really see how the destructible terrain could possibly be as unrestricted as they suggested in their preview video-- unless the world is instanced to hell, which would sort of outweigh the benefits, IMHO.
I mean, thousands of people running around a single space, with the ability to smash up the environment... the place would look like Afghanistan in no time.
Either the world is going to 'heal' back really quickly, or destructible areas are going to be very tightly restricted, or it's going to be instanced like a mf'er, or... something. I just can't buy the hype on that point-- doesn't seem feasible.
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/PerfArt
Was indeed a warriors skill called leap.
They were from an item called boots of zerphers or somthing along those line of memory serves me correctly
Was the wizard movement based skill
Quick explanation of skills while im at it, you get 8 skills the first 4 come from what weapons ur using and the other 4 are broken up into 4 catagorys, Offence, Defence, Movment and utility. Depending on what your class is depend on what ones you get for example a defence tyope warrior may get 3 defence and 1 movement slots for there (5-8) keys while a mobile charater like a thief might get 2 movment and 2 offencive ones to choose. The 5-8 keys can be spell/skills from any class i beleive that you have unlocked but you can only use a utility skill if you have a utility slot for ur class ur using and so on. So a theif might be able to use a offensive wizard spell in there offensive slot so they become a theif that can use some magic and so on.
One thing i would like to point on on this on the terms of destuctabity. During the dev videos they showed they said they turned it up to the extream to show off the feature it most likly wont be as destrucive as they been shown in the videos. We know the terrain heals over time however they havant stated how quickly im assuming after 4-12 hours or more dmg area regenerate faster than a little dmg area but thats my assumption here.
I think Georgeson mentioned somewhere that the current "heal" timer for terrain is set to 5 minutes.
Was indeed a warriors skill called leap.
They were from an item called boots of zerphers or somthing along those line of memory serves me correctly
Was the wizard movement based skill
Quick explanation of skills while im at it, you get 8 skills the first 4 come from what weapons ur using and the other 4 are broken up into 4 catagorys, Offence, Defence, Movment and utility. Depending on what your class is depend on what ones you get for example a defence tyope warrior may get 3 defence and 1 movement slots for there (5-8) keys while a mobile charater like a thief might get 2 movment and 2 offencive ones to choose. The 5-8 keys can be spell/skills from any class i beleive that you have unlocked but you can only use a utility skill if you have a utility slot for ur class ur using and so on. So a theif might be able to use a offensive wizard spell in there offensive slot so they become a theif that can use some magic and so on.
Awesome. So taking up a slot for movement could potentially be a slot used for something else. That sounds cool. Will be interesting to see how, if at all, these movement skills progress. Thanks for the clarification, sanshihttp://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/PerfArt
How do people feel about the rallying calls taking 3-4 months to complete (I think that was Georgesons example)?
For me, when I heard him say that my ears perked up and I was filled with a warm feeling of fuzzyness for the first time in a long time. To think that a game might be created in this day and age that has some long term commitment value that I could contribute to.
rally calls.
I'm on the fence on this.
one side. Long events that actually change the world permanently(until an evil dragon destroys it again)
But the other side...is boring brown. What is it? Grinding 100Million Wood, Stone,Iron? Defeating the raiding orcs every hour.
If they really implement this long events, they also have to add many available things to do, that don't get boring after 5,6 or 8 weeks.
That was the most interesting part to me as well. I liked the whole idea of the process being able to grow or branch out along different paths.
Yea, I was also very interested in how he explained that as the call progressed it could change (or not) depending on things we do as players in the area of this rally call. I paid special attention to the part about "you wont know at what point in your progress will trigger the next part".
If the rally calls are one time things then I feel this would be a huge win ... because one of the things I hate most about quests and other repeating world events is that you can look them up and find out what is going to happen or you just know from experience what to expect and eventually it just becomes a XYZ progression to succeed in the event.
The voxel tech and parkour movement I think I have a good idea in my mind on how it is going to play out. The parkour should have been in games by now but MMO conventions on design created a mental barrier. In most MMOs you feel as though you were gliding across the field, your character has no weight or inertia, so I welcome this change. Even if done poorly it will be an improvement.
The fundamental change that needs to happen is how the quest system works and the emergent AI might be the key. Currently games that use the WoW quest hub template I run up to the quest giver, skip all the "blah blah my dog ate my homework", head out to area on the minimap and kill or click the thing and then run back for the reward. The whole process requires hardly any thinking this in turn breaks immersion due to the dissociation. Plus your actions in doing these quests don't have an impact on the game world which leads to more immersion breaking.
So I have a few questions I like to be answered concerning the quest system: