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[Dev Journal] Chronicles of Elyria: Design Journal #1 Introduction to Souls
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Developing MMO, Chronicles of Elyria, has soul, err Souls to be exact. In this design journal learn more about why CoE chose to give characters Souls & how it ties into lore, the permadeath feature, and skill advancement.
Read more of Jeromy Walsh's Chronicles of Elyria: Design Journal #1 - Introduction to Souls.
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Figure 1- A soul during character creation
Comments
Souls sound like an excellent idea, especially being able to start with an older soul, very nice solution to the problem of power creep / gap that MMOs tend to have (way better than the level cap and 'reset' expansion model).
Talents I'm not so sure about... from a world / RP perspective they sound really cool, but this is the internet we are talking about. How long until there are lists of 'how to activate your talent' and you have waves of people rolling new souls and getting killed by wolves on a full moon, etc?
Maybe there should be a way to learn talents over time by (weighted) chance, or a master / apprentice system? Learned talents should take a lot of work, and a lot of repeated use to get good at, perhaps never being as powerful as latent talents, but at least it would be a way for people who really want to do X to do it without gaming the system.
Only read as far as this "That’s harder than it sounds. There are a lot of compelling systems in CoE; most of them never seen before in an MMO.", and i got to say...You Sir, knowingly or not, have just made one of the boldest, bravest and most dangerous statements (imho) that can be made by a game developer prior to any kind of release.
Kudo's and i really hope you can pull it off, coz that would be just awesome for everyone atm, but man...i can here the sharks cricling you on this statement. Good Luck bloke, will be watching, all the best and force be with you..
now back to the article...
Article fin,
hmm got to say...you gots my curiosity peaked. Well written and explained so far. The few questions that popped as i was reading, you answered within a paragraph onwards, nice.
Looking forward to more,
Peace
:P
You are incorrect on the statement you made. Phillip Blood was the first one to make an announcement of a game design that has never been done before and as of date he has followed through with it and kept his founder base completely up to date on it. Citadel of Sorcery was one of the first MMORPG games that the developers announced it would bring MMORPGs into the future with new technology, new game play, and new concepts.
That being said I am very interested in what Jeremy is announcing for his unique permadeath game. Soul information being the first log release is actually pretty intriguing
Played: UO, LotR, WoW, SWG, DDO, AoC, EVE, Warhammer, TF2, EQ2, SWTOR, TSW, CSS, KF, L4D, AoW, WoT
Playing: The Secret World until Citadel of Sorcery goes into Alpha testing.
Tired of: Linear quest games, dailies, and dumbed down games
Anticipating:Citadel of Sorcery
"You are incorrect on the statement you made. Phillip Blood was the first one to make an announcement of a game design that has never been done before and as of date he has followed through with it and kept his founder base completely up to date on it"
read carefully Akuma " You Sir, knowingly or not, have just made one of the boldest, bravest and most dangerous statements (imho) that can be made"
Not
You Sir, knowingly or not, have just made one of the boldest, bravest and most dangerous statements (imho) that HAS been made"
aslo refer to (imho) fkn everones a critic lulz
I do not believe you can force to have a talent, so in the end, those waves of people will have to try everything in the game just for one of the wave to be happy to activate his talent at a given task/event/situation.
If you have a talent and there is no guarantee that you will have one, I assume that it will be one form the really long list and there is a high chance that you will be the one of few just people currently in game to have it. So no waves at all.
On the other hand, there will be no waves of people creating new characters just for the sake of checking if I can be a werewolf.
Why? Because despite I am not sure how many lives you will have in your pool after you purchase the game, I do believe that you will not be able to freely create and delete your 'toon' just to check if you can become a said werewolf.
Of course you can purchase additional lives with $$, but we are not talking about that here, right?
If you were in the process of initial character creation and upon activation found that it did not have a Talent - or the specific Talent you wanted to start with........
.......What is to stop you from just deleting it and trying again and again until you got a Talent - or if you were prepared to persevere, the specific Talent you wanted?
Anyone knows me ,i am a very harsh critic but i have to say this game has me taking notice
Even if this game does not turn out to meet my high standards i will have to commend this team for some creative thinking and i like that.
It is one thing to think a bit outside the box or the norm but to have it make sense is when i like the ideas.I see so many silly ideas in games just for the sake of trying to add in some content.
I want to see the game ,any game show me the entire design every step of the way was well thought out and not just an idea tossed in every few months because we need to fill a void.Make no mistake,i can tell if a game was designed sloppy or rushed.
I really hope this game pans out ,i really do .i am dying to find a new game i can call home for many years to come.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Because:
1. there is no list of talents
2. because you have no idea what might activate your talent
3. because upon creating you have no idea even if you will have a talent, not to mention what talent - this can be discovered after some game time, or maybe never depending on your actions - example - you have a rare talent in blacksmithing, but not knowing that, you have chosen to spend your whole life as a herbalist hermit - there is a fair chance that you will not wander near the forge not even once in your whole life, thus not giving your talent a chance to be discovered.
So accounts that have characters with "valuable" talents unlocked will be selling on eBay for 100's of dollars then ?
I can see a whole new bot industry in the making, lol
http://www.chroniclesofelyria.com/guide/faq#Business
My oh my!!! I guess we only had this one left to be done....
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Good grief!
rng comes to character creation - never was very lucky with that.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
4. You need to buy another life once your character dies their perma death, which they said should cost about as much as a typical expansion.
Nice! I like the unfair advantage some people will get and the fact that some people will just compete with pure skill and effort. It shows that the 'permadeath' feature is actually necessary to a point and actually makes me rather excited for it. I could just imagine somebody complaining about not having a talent, and then they drown and discover a 'breathing underwater' talent or some such.
I am curious as to if we HAVE to have kids, or if our souls can just inhabit a new body all together, or if alternatively there were some perk to inhabiting the body of your child as opposed to just some new schmuck.
You only have one life. Are you living it the way you should?
I can already imagine the amount of anger a system like this will produce because it "isn't fair." That said, I like it. Its my first time seeing something like this in an MMO, and I want to see more. I still think it could be fleshed out a bit more, because the thought of continually grinding the same skills isn't enjoyable, but besides that ... 10/10.
Count me in.
Oops. Almost forgot.
Question. In the game, if I am out chopping trees or picking flowers, can someone kill me?
If not, then count me in.
@ Amenhoetep:
Many of these games have had Consequence for PVP, it's just a hard thing to pull off in a way that truly works, most systems end up in a way that either doesn't work (still pking everywhere), or works so much that those who want to PVP leave. There's little middle ground to be had that is truly effective.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Please name some current or on the horizon games as examples because I disagree 100%. Keep your "Many" games to open word PvP. The only game i can think of that has some form of consequences is Archage with its prisoner system.
-Darkfall UW - Chaos, no consequences
-Mortal Online- Chaos, no consequences
-Rust - no consequences
-Ark - no consequences
-Albion Online (not released yet but i just played closed beta) - No consequences
You're telling me you've never played games with criminal systems in place? AOC... AA, Wizardry, SWG NGE (bounties), Black Desert (will have such). I could go on, in the end they never really curb the issue, or they go to far, making the challenge dealing with the criminal system turning people away from PVP altogether.
It's not an easy thing to pull off.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Oh wow!!!! This has pay to win all over it.
Have to pay $$$ equal to a game expansion every time your character ages and dies to open a new character.
You can pay real world $$ to get in game gold.
Ugh......and they talk about everything other than the business model to get people hyped to play it. I was hooked a bit until this link. Thanks for slowing the hype train before it goes off the rails for me
I certainly have my reservations but I will say this about the business end of things:
1. You character does not perma-death on the first mishap, what would usually be a death, in say PoE Hardcore, will just shorten your maximum overall life expectancy so you'll age-out faster; if it drops your life-expectancy lower than your current age then you'll have to roll again. That being said, a character that never died, like a crafter, could live to be 100 (over the course of a year). If the game is buy to play, w/o a sub, I wouldn't mind buying a new character as often as every few months if necessary as long as the cost didn't exceed $10-15 a month.
2. Paying real life currency for gold seems like crap, however gold may actually do very little to make your character more powerful, depending on how much gear effects your character power, what kind of consumables are in game, and how much if any can be bought from NPCs. I know that when I played WoW, it got to a point where there was really nothing to spend gold on except fluff stuff. This may not be the case with CoE, if they are going for a crafting-centric player driven economy, where the best gear may very well be player made.
3. If there are no NPC gold-sinks to take currency out of the economy than you would have rapid inflation. Inflation would quickly make buying currency seem less attractive. On the other-hand the gold either has to flow to an NPC and back out of the game or to another player for a crafted or acquired good. I suppose if you were into crafting you wouldn't care where the money for your goods was coming from and would probably get rich very quickly, but for non-craters who have to earn currency through in-game means, they would suffer under high inflation.