June 15th, 2012 - This article by Kotaku addresses the "Is this a WOW clone?" question:
Quote:
" Making an MMO is making an MMO. I worked in the industry before World of Warcraft, so I can tell you that World of Warcraft had a lot of influences from a lot of games. Our priority is to make a great game and not to make a clone of anything.
June 6th 2012 - MMOPRG.com article with an overview of the game mechanics
Quote:
An example of PVE content we saw was really promising. Matt's tank character charged a group of three mobs, one frost mage, a necromancer, and a rogue-like mob as well. The mage raised a wall of ice to deflect incoming ranged attacks, and laid down a sheet of ice to immobilize Matt. Meanwhile the rogue got in close to try and take down Matt's HP. Matt dropped him quickly, but the necromancer raised the corpse into a skeleton. Meanwhile Matt's focus turned to the frost mage, as he used a jumping charge skill to leap over the wall of ice and take out the ranged damage dealer. The whole time he was blocking attacks, dodging swings, and slamming his shield into enemies in real time. It's halfway between TERA and GW2 in terms of pacing and "action", if I had to put it to a comparison. It's not as twitch-based as En Masse's game, but it's certainly not just another tab-target affair.
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
Last edited by GreenLantern; 11-06-2012 at 11:53 AM.
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From what I can see so far about this game is that it is going to bring back a lot of classic aspects of successful MMO's. First off, they are heavily targeting the social aspect of it. WOW is a single player game set in a MMO, unless you want to do the heavy raid content. I like the idea that I can log in and play at any time, I hate the fact that I don't have any friends because I am not FORCED to make friends. I can just randomly join a Bg to get honour and randomly group with someone to get my arena points for the week.
Elder Scrolls wants to force people to play together, something as simple as a Public Dungeon, like we saw in EQ, UO, AC, DAoC, is a huge step in that direction.
The three realm PvP has got me excited as well, I found this to be a very fun aspect in DAoC, you always had to watch your back and it made sure that action was always going down.
I like the fact they are bringing in a stamina bar as well, the sprint feature in DAoC was a great tool, and now they bring in the ability to block, dodge etc.. really adds to the diversity of the game. Auto aim ftl, time those swings UO style.
They aren't forcing you into classes either, it isn't going to be Guildwars where it is just mayhem, DODGE DOGE DOGE DOGE, but at the same time you aren't going to be just a tank or just a healer like in WOW. Similar to UO, I can throw fireballs and then pull out a heavy crossbow and shoot at you.. I like that, the more you use abilities the better you get at them. That is a great system, I like structure but I don't like conformity.
The most interesting tidbit for me out of this interview:
Quote:
BW: Yeah, there is an AA system for PvP, we call them “alliance points”. You accumulate a lifetime alliance point tally. There are ranks, we are looking at about 23 ranks at launch. Each rank gets you a new title and a new icon for your character. We are working on different ways to spend your alliance points, but the system is still in progress.
The thing I hated the most about WOW's PVP is that there is no long term gain. Every 6 months it gets wiped you start with new gear, all that hard work for nothing unless you reached Glad. Realm ranks were a great asset in DAoC and I am glad to see they made their way into this game.
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
Last edited by GreenLantern; 11-06-2012 at 12:25 PM.
I've always wanted to see a MMO where you can build not only a character, but his environment or standing. In a real way. Like buying property or building a business (not just buying and selling).
I know it would be difficult to implement but it would make the character seem more real, and give people more things to do than just hack and slash all the time. Heck you could have characters that do very little of that, merchants, traders, politicians even. A real 'world'.
BUt given the awesomeness of Skyrim I think I wold love to get on this from the start. Any idea how to get in on the beta yet? (I usually don't get the option for those thing cause I'm not a huge gamer.)
I've always wanted to see a MMO where you can build not only a character, but his environment or standing. In a real way. Like buying property or building a business (not just buying and selling).
I know it would be difficult to implement but it would make the character seem more real, and give people more things to do than just hack and slash all the time. Heck you could have characters that do very little of that, merchants, traders, politicians even. A real 'world'.
Just play Minecraft multiplayer. Tons of the servers run jobs and other MMO-inspired extensions. There are ones for buying and selling land, being involved in your nation's politics, etc.
__________________
"An adherent of homeopathy has no brain. They have skull water with the memory of a brain."
Beta will be sometime in 2013, that is all the details we have. When I see a post I will put it in this thread for you Daradon.
From your description of an ideal game I really wish you were around for UO, that game had total freedom. I was hoping ESO would follow that mold, if any game was made to host this kind of freedom of choice it was ES.. but I understand that mold isn't supremely popular anymore and doesn't work that well with the masses. Perhaps they will think of making a free for all server, but with this "mega server" idea they have that might be doubtful.
They did talk about noteriety being in the game though, so there might be some freedom of choice in that sense.
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
at this point my feelings are any MMO not made by Blizzard will be a failure. maybe Elder Scrolls will finally be the one to buck this trend, but many more games before it thought that way too
I like the idea of actual differentiation between people, hopefully they hold true and I can be an elf that summons tank pets and heals, or maybe a human that wears light armor using 2 magical daggers. Hopefully it an evolve into a community based game and not a gear grinding game
From what I can understand of it, say you pick Templar, similar to a Paladin from DAoC, a tank that uses spells to buff themselves and their group while fighting. You can wear cloth armor that will have stats to boost your magicka, which means your group/self buffs will be very powerful. However, your stam will be low and as a result you won't be a great tank. Now if you switched to heavy armor you would have very high stam and be great at tanking, but low magicka so your buffs aren't as effective.
I think this is the kind of trade off they are going for, and I find it to be a great concept.
The reason I am letting myself get excited for this game is Matt Firor. He was a visionary for DAoC and was responsible for the games great success. The game started down hill as soon as he left, could be partly due to age, but I think his genius had something to do with it. He gets what a game is supposed to be about, but isn't a fan of gear treadmill like WOW. You can have content without having to get new items every 5 months. In DAoC crafting wasn't just a huge part of the economy, it was a play style, and I believe it will be in ESO as well. To me this is something that WOW misses out on, crafting is more of a gold sink than an actual play style.
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
Last edited by GreenLantern; 11-08-2012 at 10:54 AM.
Just play Minecraft multiplayer. Tons of the servers run jobs and other MMO-inspired extensions. There are ones for buying and selling land, being involved in your nation's politics, etc.
But it's Minecraft... :/ Cool game, but not really what I'm thinking about as far as exploring lands and having adventures.
And sorry for not knowing, but DAoC? What game is that?
And sorry for not knowing, but DAoC? What game is that?
Dark Age of Camelot. Slightly newer than Everquest. I never gave it a shot because of what I suspect was their underhanded attempt to market their game. Months before its release, new users started appearing on EQ forums bad mouthing EQ and promoting DAoC. It turned a lot of people off.
__________________ FU, Jim Benning
Quote:
GMs around the campfire tell a story that if you say Sbisa 5 times in the mirror, he appears on your team with a 3.6 million cap hit.
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Ya I can say with confidence that was not a ploy by Mythic, but more than likely just some fans that were trying to promote the game. Myself and an RL friend were closely involved in the DAoC beta, Matt Firor is a class act. Ended up getting a free for life account, which was a nice gesture of gratitude from the Mythic team.
DAoC's claim to fame was RvR, or Realm vs. Realm. Basically there were three realms, Hibernia Midgard and Albion, they were pitted against each other in the Frontiers. The object of the game was to take over central keeps which would then open up a gate to a relic, which boosted your realms melee or magic damage depending on which one you stole. So there would be epic 100+ vs. 100+ vs. 100+ battles that would rage for weeks over these relics (not sure about relics, but there will be a fight over a central keep for all three realms with these huge battles in ESO).
DAOC was also great at developing open world dungeons, they had large dragon raids and huge expansive zones to travel around in (it didn't involve loading a new zone to transition, this was seamless unlike EQ, these expansive high level zones will be in ESO). Exploring dungeons in DAoC was a lot of fun, it wasn't a set course you take with encounter A B and C. There were a lot of different levels to the dungeons, different bosses and difficult areas, and on top of it all the dungeons were full of other people so it gave a fun social aspect to it. (Open dungeons will be in ESO)
The game was incredibly complex with lots of different classes, no two classes were the same on each realm like you find in WOW, every class was unique with its own abilities. Fighting in RvR gave you realm points, which were originally awarded for killing enemy players. Realm points allowed you to gain realm ranks, say 1,000,000 realm points gave you 6 realm ranks. Each rank had 10 points, so at lvl 6 you would have 60 realm points to spend on realm abilities, which enhanced stats or other game play mechanics (there will be a similar system to this in ESO, but they haven't elaborated on how in depth it will be, but in DAOC having RR's was a huge benefit to PvE as your guy wa stronger, so it helped get people out in the frontiers).
On top of all of that you had the crafting, imbueing items with spellcrafting would add stats to a limited number of slots. However, you couldn't go over a magic number of imbue points, and the higher you went the greater the risk of destroying the piece of gear. Gear was also crafted by players, quality was something that made it a bit tricky as the higher quality (scale of 1-100) the more imbue points the piece could afford. There was weaponcrafting, armor crafting, spell crafting, alchemy, tailoring and later siege crafting (there will be a social based crafting system in ESO).
Anyway, I could go on for hours about the game, and this is an ESO thread so I don't want to, but there were a lot of great and original in game mechanics in DAoC that the director of ESO was directly responsible for. This is why I am actually excited about a MMO for the first time since... DAoC... 10 years ago. I don't expect this to be a DAoC clone, what I do expect is for Matt to improve on some of the basic mechanics from a successful game and create something entirely original. Which is exactly what DAoC was, a great game that was great because it was so original. Sorry for the long post..
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
Last edited by GreenLantern; 11-09-2012 at 10:40 AM.
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I wonder what sort of character view they plan on using for this game?
Two of my favorite MMOs - Shadowbane and UO would probably be categorized differently in terms of character view. IIRC, I think you could zoom out at least 2x farther than you could in SB than WoW or SWTOR.
It wasn't the classic lock or almost completely limited 3D camera view of your character. I actually feel this limits a lot of the game play options, especially if you are grouping with people en masse.
I do like the idea of public dungeons - and from the notoriety system, it sounds very similar to UO's reputation system. BTW when they gutted this system out for Age of Shadows, it was completely terrible. It gave UO a backyard brawl type of feeling with little risk (you now lose a couple gold out of your bank when you die), instead of the high risk / high reward gameplay which characterized UO from the beginning (you lose all your items, but there was a penalty to the player who killed you - risk he could be attacked by anyone AND if he killed more than a couple players during a short amount of time, he had to burn off his murder counts for 8-40 hours per kill, or he couldn't revive his character).
As far as realism goes, I much prefer the 1st person view. I've always felt zooming out in games like that (or racing games) is a bit of a cheat. It's not how we experience the world and takes out possibilities for danger and surprise. Like messing with ones gamma settings for dark games.
It is a game and it is supposed to be fun though, so I guess to each his own. I just know how I would design it if I was building a world where stealth and silence and surprise and realism were important.
Different viewpoints and camera angles could be good for some points in the game. Like if you had built your character up to a baron or something and were waging a battle. There could be a camera angle for troop deployment or something. Though if this were in real time, it might go back to the cheat kinda feel. Unless you weren't in the battle yourself, maybe watching from a hill or keep.
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I really really hope it's not just another gear grindfest. There's so much potential for group questing and exploration if they do it right, I'm all about overcoming unique obstacles as a group and not at all for focusing on pvp and pve armor sets. If that's what it is I won't get it, if I can be a tank that plays in such a way that his tanking makes him good at fighting as opposed to just getting hit a lot then I'll get it.
I played LOTR war in the north and what I found unique and amazing about it was that each class actually felt worthwhile, when you were a tank you could run headlong into battle and your attacks had weight to them. You felt like an actual tank that was slow but deadly, the dps elf was slick and deadly but could get battered around so you had to work as a team.
MMO's need to progress to that sense of actual teamwork as opposed to tanks spamming aggro, dps spamming their max damage and healers standing in the back not moving. I want it where stats and armor mean way less than teamwork and strategy, healers have abilities that aren't just stat based but they influence gameplay. Like a healing sphere that heals and deflects ranged attacks. Or tanks that when they aggro become much stronger and tougher to knockdown so they aren't just a meat shield. Or DPS guys that actually seem like warriors that are elite swordsman with acrobatic abilities as opposed to dps guys swinging their sword while standing in the same spot. Make the battles seem like a real battle and not graphical stat calculators.
I think after playing the Elder Scrolls games it is pretty safe to say that this combat system won't be a WOW clone.
I know they are putting endurance in the game, so dodging/blocking/sprinting will be a big part of PvE/PvP I imagine.
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
I still feel like UO had the best system for skill points. You didn't have to choose a class, or be limited in what you could do. If you wanted to split your 700 skill points between 14 things, you could be a mediocre jack of all trades. If you wanted to max out Alchemy, Lumberjacking, Archery, Cooking, Tinkering and Animal Training you could, even if none of the skills really "went together." I hate that some of the newer MMORPGs are like, "No, you're this class, don't even think about learning a non-related skill."
The Elder Scrolls Online
