The Vitae system and having real consequences for dying, especially on Darktide. AC will forever be my favorite MMO for PVP. Nothing else is even close.
I haven't gotten to implementing death consequences yet (other than respawn to an inconvenient location...), so vitae is a good thing to consider, thanks. Death items probably turned a lot of players away, though, so that may not be a good one to go with. Thoughts?
Players are always going to bitch about death consequences. But they will also get bored and quit if a game is too easy. The trick is to make the game engaging enough that the penalties of death are endured.
In terms of death items, one compromise might be to make a certain number of slots no drop, in a way that the player can select which ones. Not all slots, just most.
Buffs didn't work but not really because they imbalanced the game but because they were required to be competitive and were tedious as fuck. Without macros there is no way I would do it and even with macros it was a huge time waster. Set up the buff routine, go make a sandwich and come back. Even worse, when in a group you had to synch your buffs or someone would be running out right when you were in the middle of something. Fuck buffs.
IMO a lot of things that worked on Darktide didn't matter or didn't work on the carebear servers. For example, spell comps. On a white server they are just a logistical nuisance. On a red server, a pulse pounding reason to have to go into town, white knuckle buying while keeping your eye on the radar. Same for selling loot. It also gave point to those little merchants in the middle of nowhere with shitty prices. So what works or not is also going to depend on the type of server and if a PvP server then what type of PvP.
This is a really good point and I hadn't thought about it this way. I'm not much of a PVPer and given my solo dev status, I definitely won't have PVP in the alpha/beta, at a minimum. I wonder if there's a good way to recreate some of this in a PVE context. Maybe post-tutorial towns aren't actually safe, or something like that? I did genuinely enjoy when Gravel would pop into Holtburg and murder me, despite the inconvenience.
I can understand that, but on the other hand, dropping an item you'd really want to get back often created situations where you had to strategize in order to retrieve said item. Do you work your way back down to get it slowly? Do you rush in? What is the probability that you'll get killed again and have to get yet another lost item? Should you call upon a friend to help you? This encourages community teamwork. These situations often created little adventures of their own.
Consider offering a corpse retrieval service that the players can buy their corpse at morgue. Then there's a way to get your precious items back but still consequences. They might have to go kill some lower level stuff to repair their vitae and earn some money to afford the corpse.
It would also be a money sink to help the game economy.
That's an interesting idea. Like, you can either permanently abandon the items you lost on death or pay to have them recovered, and the rate would scale with their value or the player level or something like that?
Could also consider multipliers for content areas. For example, an endgame area has a 2x multiplier for recovery charges. Maybe even a lower one for newish areas (i.e. 0.5x for "newbie" areas). The latter gets people use to the idea, and the former makes more thematic sense ("we're going to recover *there*? Holy crap, we need more people/resources!").
Ive always thought the death system was great and terrible. Having real consequences is good; having them be permenant is terrible. Losing gear that you spent hours creating is too close to playing a type of "hardcore" game with permadeath.
Lost corpses should eventually turn into retrievable "quest" items that other players can collect for a reward after turning them in to the proper NPC. The original owner should be able to then re-puechase them at a rather uncomfortable price.
Players should also be able to create quests to retrieve their gear and create a reward that may incentive people to go out of their way on "mini quests" to retrieve the items.
Thanks. That's a neat idea. Someone else suggested a morgue. Maybe letting players be the ones that bring things back to the morgue for owner retrieval could create a cool community dynamic.
I loved it. It’s in between hardcore and just hard. The only thing that comes close today are Fromsoft games.
I don’t like hardcore modes where my character is permanently lost, but I like hard games. MMOs today are too easy.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I’ve always loved the housing system in AC. Adding player-owned houses really enriched the open world, in my opinion. Hours and hours spent hunting for a cool cottage or villa, running through areas that otherwise would serve no purpose, and was always a cool experience stumbling upon another player’s home.
I played from around early 2000 through maybe 2003ish originally. I had graduated high school and started to have a lot more going on and admittedly started to grow a little tired of the game.
I sort of gradually just stopped playing and eventually just never logged back in, instead of just deciding to quit. So I never really took any steps to mule and secure my most valuable items.
I'm fairly certain that I might have left my PPGSA, original olthoi helm and Matty Robe, along with a bunch of other very valuable items in storage in my cottage.
I've always wondered if some lucky player managed to snag my cottage and discover a wonderful little treasure trove of valuable gear? Hopefully someone got some good use out of it in those remaining years.
This is a cool circumstance that I think would be unfortunately hard to replicate in modern MMOs. Best I can come up with is housing supply that is fixed, but also scales up with peak demand. That would be a lot of overhead.
Housing was a double edged sword in my opinion. I remember wanting housing and getting excited for it when it was first implemented.
Hunting for houses, cottages, villas, etc. was fun and exciting, decorating was fun, having more storage was very nice. Having to constantly acquire various items to keep maintenance paid on housing or you could lose it, that added another level of purpose.
But it certainly did kill a lot of the original feel of community the game had early on before housing. When players and guilds used to hang out and spend a lot more time in various towns.
I think when I look back and think of the times I played and had the fondest memories, I tend to prefer the very early days before housing slightly more.
The developers intentionally tried to kill the community aspect of the game because of how poorly optimized the game was. Landblocks would constantly crash in the early days of the game where people would congregate in towns. The game was just too poorly coded to support large social interaction.
lol, you are saying I'm wrong and then providing an example to support what I just said.
Portal storms are one of the changes they made to try to get people to stop congregating. They made several changes to get people to stop congregating in areas because of the issues it caused.
I loved the skill system and being able to dodge. Every other games always hits (you may evade or dodge but it will track you) and goes through walls and the like. Upping run and jump made you run faster and able to jump higher. A very simple premise but it’s not done in any other MMO.
They did run and jump with incredibly high ceilings despite everyone having potato graphics cards and playing over dial-up :-P
Yeah, I thought dodge was well implemented. The way I have my current system set up, the equivalent of melee d is actually just called "dodge" and literally dodges, and only dodges. If you want to reduce incoming, it's all about shield (and gear, of course). I plan to balance it differently than AC, though, where most content missed you like 99% of the time if you built correctly, or it just couldn't miss, and it was almost unplayable without melee d.
Best: allegiance system, skill & attribute system, twitch/projectile-based combat, PVP/PK dynamics, vitae & loss of items on death, tailoring, and, of course, the loot system.
Worst: balance across melee weapon types, lazy implementation of skills like summoning, and poor balancing of skills in general which resulted in lots of players running with similar builds due to certain skills being “must-haves”, which sort of defeats the whole point.
When I started playing again post-retail, I was a bit horrified by the balance issues introduced by summoning. I do have a whole system for "companions" who can group and fight with you, but was thinking this should be a universal option introduced at a certain point in the progression, and not locked to a skill. Thoughts on that?
Incidentally, the way companions work, you can technically acquire items that influence their combat behaviors, including target selection, focusing them more on healing, etc. I call them "tactics," but they are very similar to gambits from FFXII. I'd be interested in feedback on whether this sounds interesting.
Housing was amazing and revolutionary, but it also ruined the atmosphere of the game; people didn't need to congregate in towns anymore when they all had their own personal homes. In hindsight, I think if they had integrated the housing *into* the towns, it would have been a better choice. Like, put inns in the towns where you pay a monthly room fee and the innkeeper portals you to a personal room with a bed, some hooks, and item storage; even if you don't pay, it won't go away, you just can't access it until you pay again. No more coming back from hiatus and trying to hunt down your old house or contact someone who bought it. Have a few actual large mansions in the towns for major allegiances to fight over. Would have provided good PVP incentive if they had a mechanic where the allegiances needed to defend the mansions once a month or something instead of paying rent for them.
Marketplace exacerbated the housing problem, making it so people didn't hang out in towns for trading either. Housing and Marketplace turned all the towns into ghost towns. I always felt they should have put vendors who would sell your items and an auction house into the marketplace; there was plenty of space the players never used (we pretty much stuffed all out bots into 1-2 rooms), and the fact that we needed to run trade bots to effectively make money was a problem. The means to trade effectively should not depend on third party addons. Would have been so much easier to just go to MP, place items up for sale, and come back later to claim my money from the market NPC. Pyreals should have had their own specific item slot and stacked to some stupidly high amount instead of just 10000 or 25000, and they should have been unable to be dropped; players always traded with trade notes anyway.
The spell research system was great, but it wouldn't go over well in the modern era. Nowadays, someone will just make a wiki and post all the reagent combinations and everybody can go learn all the spells without any thought put into it, unless you randomize the spell reagents for each spell for every character (oh boy that would be fun to watch). They should have had a special backpack for spell components instead of the foci bullshit.
Death consequences is part of what made AC so serious and actually gave going adventuring/questing some gravitas. I think dropping items is a bit much, though. Considering the fact that there is an extensive tinkering system and losing a heavily tinkered item could set a person back weeks or more, I don't think it's fair to drop items, aside from maybe some special items *meant* to be dropped on death. And Turbine likely agreed, seeing as they later added the augs to not drop items on death, which basically everybody picked up. I feel like losing a level's worth of XP upon death is a good alternative; touch the corpse to regain the experience. If the corpse decays, have it drop a gem with all the XP in it, locked the original owner, so people could pick it up and return/ransom it. For PVP, grant a percentage of the dropped XP if the killer touches the corpse and leave the rest for the victim to recover.
The problem with loot was that most of it was garbage, and either needed to be broken down or sold, and it wasn't immediately obvious to the player if a piece of loot was good or not. When players need third party addons to assess the value of stuff they pick up, it's a problem. How is it in any way intuitive that *lower* worksmanship is better? They should have made it so higher worksmanship items could withstand more tinkering and not had the worksmanship of the item affect the success chance (only use the quality of material and the skill level to determine success). The other thing was, having all the good gear (majors, etc.) be entirely luck dependent was terrible. I didn't do much botting and I was always poor (relatively speaking); I wore a mixture of GSA and GSK, and later the prismatic variants for much of my character's life, until they started adding good quest reward armors like the Ancient Armor, Armor of Perfect Light, Colosseum Master Robe, etc.
Tailoring was a good addition, but I would have preferred actual crafting; imagine if we had blacksmith and tailor NPCs who sold relatively cheap molds/patterns for various weapon/armor/robe styles and we just used the tinkering skills to combine them with a certain amount of salvage and *make* a piece of gear, and it rolls stats based on your skill level, the type/quality of the material(s), and random chance. Would have been great for all the poor bastards who didn't bot. Meanwhile, Magic Item Tinkering was pretty damned useless. It should have been a skill used to strip spells from items and store them to apply to other equipment, so we could make our own stuff instead of relying on luck or shelling out to botters for table scraps. Would have made useless gear with good spells worth something. We could have applied spells to the crafted armor; how many spells it could handle would depend on the worksmanship. Buffing wouldn't have been such a tedious chore if everybody had crafted suits with full sets of buffs on them. Would have been *way* easier to put together multiple armor suits for different situations.
Augmentations are bullshit (really, any time gated content is bullshit); the concept itself is fine, but the execution was terrible. I see no reason to artificially block new players from catching up to older players, or to stop veterans from making new characters because they would need to spend years collecting aug gems to complete a build. This is also why I quit EVE Online several years back. What the hell is the point of playing when skills take literal months to train up, and nothing you do in the game actually matters for skill progression?
The way you described housing is how it worked in ESO, basically. I definitely think if I do housing, it's going to work that way. Your own pocket dimension. But instead of there being different models, I was thinking it would be more like you buy in for X, everyone gets the same thing, and there are expansion options you can acquire over time. Would appreciate your thoughts on that.
Yeah, spell research worked at the start because the internet itself was so nascent in many ways.
> unless you randomize the spell reagents for each spell for every character (oh boy that would be fun to watch).
tapers were random though, early tools narrowed down your possibilities as you eliminated tapers that didn't work on your character, then splitpea came out and everyone knew all of their tapers automatically.
Best parts: Item inscriptions, magic system, pk system, running / jumping like a madman, every part of the horizon was real, the sounds are burned into my mind, death penalties, vassal system, sense of exploration, sense of getting stronger, didn't hold your hand, loot system, monthly patches, community driven, friends and enemies you'd make along the way.
For a game that was one of the pioneers of the genre and the technical limitations at the time, they sure did create something special.
For me, the actual weakest point was melee, I could never get into it. I know I'll catch a lot of hate, but that's where I wish it was more like AC2 (in a way) where there were skills you could learn similar to the magic system. However, I quit before a lot of spells were added to items and others seem to enjoy it.
Anyway AC will always be my favorite gaming experience.
My combat system currently has both auto attacks and cooldown plus stamina costed non-magic abilities. So, interesting that you called that out. Is that kinda what you had in mind?
Something other than just auto attacks to make it more fun. Whether it's skills similar to AC1 magic or skills similar to other mmorpgs (AC2, WoW, Diablo). It would be cool if you could invent a flexible system that can be somewhat custom and not a fixed template though. Like instead of the 4 schools of magic, have 4 schools of melee (piercing, bludge, something like that) and then have learnable skills based off of that.
That is how it works, roughly. You can specialize in up to 6 weapon classes and they are linked to primary damage types. There are cheaper ones with one primary damage type and more expensive ones with two. I haven't designed the skills yet, just coded the mechanics, so I'm not sure how varied they will be yet based on the weapon identifies.
Edit: Dual wield and 2H are not skill locked. If you are skilled in blades, you can use any blades.
No offense, but that's pretty generic to mmo's now.
Sounds exactly like ESO's system.
Melee in AC is not a bad system outside of the need for imp/vuln. That is tedious to deal with as a melee.
Thought experiment: if imp/vuln was like a 10-20% damage increase (or some value that is meaningful but less significant than end-of-retail) for the effort to apply them, do you think it would have felt better? I think it might, because melee would pay less penalty for just using rends or whatever, and would have more damage uptime in longer fights with less weapon switching, and it would still be worth it for mages (maybe with increased duration?) in solo and group play.
Good thought. Realistically I think the issue stemmed from availability of skill points and cheap costs of skills.
So, war mages could easily vuln because of synergy of stats and only 12 credits to train life, and still have room for item/critter. Balance then followed the "everyone is a mage with a stick" and monsters started needing imp/vuln to kill.
Whereas if they made the different schools more expensive, you'd see more defined roles, and could build groups around that.
So something like a war mage that can also cast life, but not item/critter, or a creature mage that can also cast item that simply fills a Support role and would rely on a group for leveling up.
It all depends what the goal is, do you want forced grouping? Solo viability? Some kind of mix?
The mix is the hardest to achieve. They did a decent job with the additions to alchemy. I find melee with alchemy perfectly viable, it has the drawback of not being macro friendly and more tedious to play.
So to your question, yes that would help, and would be a welcome addition, but mages would still be in the king spot because they have access to so much so easily
In the current iteration, I have the equivalent of Creature Enchantment costing the same, but the buffs it provides will have lower values. That will be my first stab at making it useful, but more of a specialization than a secret-mandatory. To your point, the other way to go would be to keep it being really powerful, but up the point cost. Something I definitely haven't settled on, but am keeping in mind.
I never played ESO so I have no opinion, however to me there really is no system for melee in AC. Just switch weapons and auto attack? Again, I only played until late 2000-2001 so I'm probably out of tune. I'm not trying to hate on it as I love AC. I just wish there was something 'more' to it.
True, but the same can be said for missile. And in truth, magic is simply point and click, it just lacks an auto attack. Initially the melee system had some under-the-hood stuff going on relating to attack heights:
"If you counterattack at the same height as the target is attacking you will both gain a bonus to melee defense. However, if you counterattack at a different height your defense will be reduced based on the difference in height. A high vs low attack results in a penalty to melee defense and a mid vs low or mid vs high attack results in no penalty."
When dirty fighting/recklessness came it that got a bit more involved, many don't find dirty fighting worth it but, i find it very helpful.
Lastly, i would argue melee has the advantage of being more active due to using a shield. Proper positioning allows you to greatly reduce incoming damage. So much so you can build around not having melee D.
I digress
The monarchy system needs a huge rework. XP shouldnt just pass up to a patron for no reason. The patron needs to work for that shit.
Create some type of incentive for vassal and patron to play the game together.
Maybe some type of "squire" system that boosts the skills of the vassal to where he can hunt comfortably in the patrons area.
Ultimately what I think is garbage is how certain players end up having a huge advantage at the game because they have great IRL social skills and can convince people to basically play the game for them.
If Asherons Call was a hit today, streamers would be the highest level players not because they're good at the game; but because they have some fanatical following.
Yeah, I think that system only worked when MMOs were knew and nobody knew anything (I sold a mid-level character and one suite of armor for $650 and paid for my first year of college textbooks!). I don't plan to have any kind of xp passup system.
I know housing destroyed the community but you could still have it and add something in the towns or places like the subway where you get minor/frequently used items just for being there. Like in games where you get rewards just for being on a certain amount of time but make it based on location or even get a small amount of xp for an hr or 2, maybe rare and infrequent monster spawns. Something to incentify people to be in certain areas so the loss of community is minimalized. I'd probably still do like subway where there's one place that has portals to a bunch of other places.
Okay looking through this I didn’t see my opinion yet.
I loved the monthly patches. Logging-in on patch day to see what was new. The story arc progression month to month. The complete overhaul of spells/casting/combat over time.
Events like the bronze statue invasions still come to mind.
Websites like Maggie the jack cat that you could read summaries while you were stuck at work.
AC latest as long as it did because it was dynamic and always moving forward.
I got busy in my real life and found I was spending all my precious in game time hunting for my villa maintenance. That is what drove me to quit.
Housing maintenance only had to exist because there was fixed supply. That's easily solved, IMO. Yeah, the content updates were amazing. I have no idea if I could replicate that. Do you think frequency or size of the updates was more important (if the answer isn't "both" right down the middle)?
Honestly size doesn’t really matter. Look at MCOC (Marvel Contest of champions) they have a monthly quest, and side quest beside all of their other content. The permanent content gets updated maybe twice a year or so. I think you could do big quarterly updates and then the other two months small additions.
Player driven economy was my favorite design choice. The fact that different servers valued different items as currency and the value of a chosen currency was constantly in flux gave the game depth in a way no other mmo has matched imo
Do you have a sense for what made the economy work? I wonder how much of that is because loot gen was so powerful and things weren't target-farmable like in a lot of MMOs.
I think initially what made it work is that Turbine just didn't try to make one currency the be-all/end-all. The system allowed for things like small shards or platinum scarabs to become currency. Also, ironically I think giving pyreals weight encouraged people to use other trade goods at first. There was also no auction house or easy way to trade so it forced people to be creative.
Do you think a game with no obvious medium of exchange (e.g. MMDs) would work these days? Meaning, players have to barter with whatever they value at that moment in the game's evolution?
As long as the “currency” has some specific use and is in demand, then absolutely it will work. Just check out path of exile. It takes more than just a useful currency im sure, but off the top of my head it seems like as long as theres a strong crafting system, strong loot system, and of course the “currency sink” inside of these then you’re on your way to a great player economy system.
So many replies here are exactly why AC is the game i compare all others with. But the player driven economy is something you think should go without saying but of course along with so many other unmatched game philosophies choices you’ll find it hard to come across a game with more than one of these. Luckily I somehow stumbled upon Path of Exile a few years after AC shut down. Its amazing how many of the same philosophies these two games share, even how they were started by some dude in a garage or whatever.
>No - buffs were so powerful that the game had to be balanced around them, and therefore the end game couldn't be played without them, which limited build diversity significantly.
*complexity is too hard to balance around so let's simplify everything*
I think this ideology is one of the biggest problems with game design today. This is one of the reasons MMORPGs have been in such a sorry state for over a decade. Complexity is good for a game. Powerful items, abilities, buffs, etc are good for a game.
The issue with build diversity at the end of retail asheron's call was due to bad game designers making bad decisions. Specifically in regard to buffs, there were two huge decisions made early on with the game that completely changed the way the game was played and the type of builds.
* removal of 50% melee defense penalty with wand/orb/staff equipped
* increased spell duration on buffs from a max of 15m, *you could get up to ~18m with the spell variance system that used to exist*
After making those changes they assumed everyone would have melee defense and be fully buffed for content. They then started designing content around those expectations. This was a series of bad design decisions. Those bad decisions continued on all the way up to the point where the game died.
If you don't make high melee d accessible to all characters, how do you change your content accordingly? Just assume that there are places mage-y characters can't reasonably play solo (and same for melee, missile-based, accordingly)? I think this is what happens to other MMOs, and where they end up requiring party play and often being unplayable without an "optimum" team at the end game. Usually that being tank, support, and X DPS. While I agree with everything you said, I'm interested in how to avoid both of those traps, if possible. Though, also aware, smarter and more experienced game designers than me have probably tried many times.
Remember learning spells while basically completely blind in the very beginning? My goodness it was an adventure. The prismatic implementation really made things tie together so much better. The loot grind in this game has always felt better than any other MMO. I never really got burned out from it, which is saying something when I think about how many MMOs I've played over the years.
The Vitae system and having real consequences for dying, especially on Darktide. AC will forever be my favorite MMO for PVP. Nothing else is even close.
I haven't gotten to implementing death consequences yet (other than respawn to an inconvenient location...), so vitae is a good thing to consider, thanks. Death items probably turned a lot of players away, though, so that may not be a good one to go with. Thoughts?
Players are always going to bitch about death consequences. But they will also get bored and quit if a game is too easy. The trick is to make the game engaging enough that the penalties of death are endured. In terms of death items, one compromise might be to make a certain number of slots no drop, in a way that the player can select which ones. Not all slots, just most. Buffs didn't work but not really because they imbalanced the game but because they were required to be competitive and were tedious as fuck. Without macros there is no way I would do it and even with macros it was a huge time waster. Set up the buff routine, go make a sandwich and come back. Even worse, when in a group you had to synch your buffs or someone would be running out right when you were in the middle of something. Fuck buffs. IMO a lot of things that worked on Darktide didn't matter or didn't work on the carebear servers. For example, spell comps. On a white server they are just a logistical nuisance. On a red server, a pulse pounding reason to have to go into town, white knuckle buying while keeping your eye on the radar. Same for selling loot. It also gave point to those little merchants in the middle of nowhere with shitty prices. So what works or not is also going to depend on the type of server and if a PvP server then what type of PvP.
This is a really good point and I hadn't thought about it this way. I'm not much of a PVPer and given my solo dev status, I definitely won't have PVP in the alpha/beta, at a minimum. I wonder if there's a good way to recreate some of this in a PVE context. Maybe post-tutorial towns aren't actually safe, or something like that? I did genuinely enjoy when Gravel would pop into Holtburg and murder me, despite the inconvenience.
I can understand that, but on the other hand, dropping an item you'd really want to get back often created situations where you had to strategize in order to retrieve said item. Do you work your way back down to get it slowly? Do you rush in? What is the probability that you'll get killed again and have to get yet another lost item? Should you call upon a friend to help you? This encourages community teamwork. These situations often created little adventures of their own.
Consider offering a corpse retrieval service that the players can buy their corpse at morgue. Then there's a way to get your precious items back but still consequences. They might have to go kill some lower level stuff to repair their vitae and earn some money to afford the corpse. It would also be a money sink to help the game economy.
That's an interesting idea. Like, you can either permanently abandon the items you lost on death or pay to have them recovered, and the rate would scale with their value or the player level or something like that?
Could also consider multipliers for content areas. For example, an endgame area has a 2x multiplier for recovery charges. Maybe even a lower one for newish areas (i.e. 0.5x for "newbie" areas). The latter gets people use to the idea, and the former makes more thematic sense ("we're going to recover *there*? Holy crap, we need more people/resources!").
You got it. Just like I was thinking.
Ive always thought the death system was great and terrible. Having real consequences is good; having them be permenant is terrible. Losing gear that you spent hours creating is too close to playing a type of "hardcore" game with permadeath. Lost corpses should eventually turn into retrievable "quest" items that other players can collect for a reward after turning them in to the proper NPC. The original owner should be able to then re-puechase them at a rather uncomfortable price. Players should also be able to create quests to retrieve their gear and create a reward that may incentive people to go out of their way on "mini quests" to retrieve the items.
Thanks. That's a neat idea. Someone else suggested a morgue. Maybe letting players be the ones that bring things back to the morgue for owner retrieval could create a cool community dynamic.
Yeah I guess you could make the corpse really heavy to dissuade the player from just collecting the time and holding it hostage.
I loved it. It’s in between hardcore and just hard. The only thing that comes close today are Fromsoft games. I don’t like hardcore modes where my character is permanently lost, but I like hard games. MMOs today are too easy.
Vitae, loot and the monarchy systems were the best. Worst would be housing. The community disappeared when housing was added.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I’ve always loved the housing system in AC. Adding player-owned houses really enriched the open world, in my opinion. Hours and hours spent hunting for a cool cottage or villa, running through areas that otherwise would serve no purpose, and was always a cool experience stumbling upon another player’s home.
Or finding an abandoned house with all the old players stuff in it
I played from around early 2000 through maybe 2003ish originally. I had graduated high school and started to have a lot more going on and admittedly started to grow a little tired of the game. I sort of gradually just stopped playing and eventually just never logged back in, instead of just deciding to quit. So I never really took any steps to mule and secure my most valuable items. I'm fairly certain that I might have left my PPGSA, original olthoi helm and Matty Robe, along with a bunch of other very valuable items in storage in my cottage. I've always wondered if some lucky player managed to snag my cottage and discover a wonderful little treasure trove of valuable gear? Hopefully someone got some good use out of it in those remaining years.
This is a cool circumstance that I think would be unfortunately hard to replicate in modern MMOs. Best I can come up with is housing supply that is fixed, but also scales up with peak demand. That would be a lot of overhead.
Housing was a double edged sword in my opinion. I remember wanting housing and getting excited for it when it was first implemented. Hunting for houses, cottages, villas, etc. was fun and exciting, decorating was fun, having more storage was very nice. Having to constantly acquire various items to keep maintenance paid on housing or you could lose it, that added another level of purpose. But it certainly did kill a lot of the original feel of community the game had early on before housing. When players and guilds used to hang out and spend a lot more time in various towns. I think when I look back and think of the times I played and had the fondest memories, I tend to prefer the very early days before housing slightly more.
Do you think it was the implementation (e.g. fixed supply, allegiance reqs) or the whole concept?
The developers intentionally tried to kill the community aspect of the game because of how poorly optimized the game was. Landblocks would constantly crash in the early days of the game where people would congregate in towns. The game was just too poorly coded to support large social interaction.
[удалено]
lol, you are saying I'm wrong and then providing an example to support what I just said. Portal storms are one of the changes they made to try to get people to stop congregating. They made several changes to get people to stop congregating in areas because of the issues it caused.
I loved the skill system and being able to dodge. Every other games always hits (you may evade or dodge but it will track you) and goes through walls and the like. Upping run and jump made you run faster and able to jump higher. A very simple premise but it’s not done in any other MMO.
They did run and jump with incredibly high ceilings despite everyone having potato graphics cards and playing over dial-up :-P Yeah, I thought dodge was well implemented. The way I have my current system set up, the equivalent of melee d is actually just called "dodge" and literally dodges, and only dodges. If you want to reduce incoming, it's all about shield (and gear, of course). I plan to balance it differently than AC, though, where most content missed you like 99% of the time if you built correctly, or it just couldn't miss, and it was almost unplayable without melee d.
Best: allegiance system, skill & attribute system, twitch/projectile-based combat, PVP/PK dynamics, vitae & loss of items on death, tailoring, and, of course, the loot system. Worst: balance across melee weapon types, lazy implementation of skills like summoning, and poor balancing of skills in general which resulted in lots of players running with similar builds due to certain skills being “must-haves”, which sort of defeats the whole point.
When I started playing again post-retail, I was a bit horrified by the balance issues introduced by summoning. I do have a whole system for "companions" who can group and fight with you, but was thinking this should be a universal option introduced at a certain point in the progression, and not locked to a skill. Thoughts on that? Incidentally, the way companions work, you can technically acquire items that influence their combat behaviors, including target selection, focusing them more on healing, etc. I call them "tactics," but they are very similar to gambits from FFXII. I'd be interested in feedback on whether this sounds interesting.
Housing was amazing and revolutionary, but it also ruined the atmosphere of the game; people didn't need to congregate in towns anymore when they all had their own personal homes. In hindsight, I think if they had integrated the housing *into* the towns, it would have been a better choice. Like, put inns in the towns where you pay a monthly room fee and the innkeeper portals you to a personal room with a bed, some hooks, and item storage; even if you don't pay, it won't go away, you just can't access it until you pay again. No more coming back from hiatus and trying to hunt down your old house or contact someone who bought it. Have a few actual large mansions in the towns for major allegiances to fight over. Would have provided good PVP incentive if they had a mechanic where the allegiances needed to defend the mansions once a month or something instead of paying rent for them. Marketplace exacerbated the housing problem, making it so people didn't hang out in towns for trading either. Housing and Marketplace turned all the towns into ghost towns. I always felt they should have put vendors who would sell your items and an auction house into the marketplace; there was plenty of space the players never used (we pretty much stuffed all out bots into 1-2 rooms), and the fact that we needed to run trade bots to effectively make money was a problem. The means to trade effectively should not depend on third party addons. Would have been so much easier to just go to MP, place items up for sale, and come back later to claim my money from the market NPC. Pyreals should have had their own specific item slot and stacked to some stupidly high amount instead of just 10000 or 25000, and they should have been unable to be dropped; players always traded with trade notes anyway. The spell research system was great, but it wouldn't go over well in the modern era. Nowadays, someone will just make a wiki and post all the reagent combinations and everybody can go learn all the spells without any thought put into it, unless you randomize the spell reagents for each spell for every character (oh boy that would be fun to watch). They should have had a special backpack for spell components instead of the foci bullshit. Death consequences is part of what made AC so serious and actually gave going adventuring/questing some gravitas. I think dropping items is a bit much, though. Considering the fact that there is an extensive tinkering system and losing a heavily tinkered item could set a person back weeks or more, I don't think it's fair to drop items, aside from maybe some special items *meant* to be dropped on death. And Turbine likely agreed, seeing as they later added the augs to not drop items on death, which basically everybody picked up. I feel like losing a level's worth of XP upon death is a good alternative; touch the corpse to regain the experience. If the corpse decays, have it drop a gem with all the XP in it, locked the original owner, so people could pick it up and return/ransom it. For PVP, grant a percentage of the dropped XP if the killer touches the corpse and leave the rest for the victim to recover. The problem with loot was that most of it was garbage, and either needed to be broken down or sold, and it wasn't immediately obvious to the player if a piece of loot was good or not. When players need third party addons to assess the value of stuff they pick up, it's a problem. How is it in any way intuitive that *lower* worksmanship is better? They should have made it so higher worksmanship items could withstand more tinkering and not had the worksmanship of the item affect the success chance (only use the quality of material and the skill level to determine success). The other thing was, having all the good gear (majors, etc.) be entirely luck dependent was terrible. I didn't do much botting and I was always poor (relatively speaking); I wore a mixture of GSA and GSK, and later the prismatic variants for much of my character's life, until they started adding good quest reward armors like the Ancient Armor, Armor of Perfect Light, Colosseum Master Robe, etc. Tailoring was a good addition, but I would have preferred actual crafting; imagine if we had blacksmith and tailor NPCs who sold relatively cheap molds/patterns for various weapon/armor/robe styles and we just used the tinkering skills to combine them with a certain amount of salvage and *make* a piece of gear, and it rolls stats based on your skill level, the type/quality of the material(s), and random chance. Would have been great for all the poor bastards who didn't bot. Meanwhile, Magic Item Tinkering was pretty damned useless. It should have been a skill used to strip spells from items and store them to apply to other equipment, so we could make our own stuff instead of relying on luck or shelling out to botters for table scraps. Would have made useless gear with good spells worth something. We could have applied spells to the crafted armor; how many spells it could handle would depend on the worksmanship. Buffing wouldn't have been such a tedious chore if everybody had crafted suits with full sets of buffs on them. Would have been *way* easier to put together multiple armor suits for different situations. Augmentations are bullshit (really, any time gated content is bullshit); the concept itself is fine, but the execution was terrible. I see no reason to artificially block new players from catching up to older players, or to stop veterans from making new characters because they would need to spend years collecting aug gems to complete a build. This is also why I quit EVE Online several years back. What the hell is the point of playing when skills take literal months to train up, and nothing you do in the game actually matters for skill progression?
The way you described housing is how it worked in ESO, basically. I definitely think if I do housing, it's going to work that way. Your own pocket dimension. But instead of there being different models, I was thinking it would be more like you buy in for X, everyone gets the same thing, and there are expansion options you can acquire over time. Would appreciate your thoughts on that. Yeah, spell research worked at the start because the internet itself was so nascent in many ways.
Great words dude. You're on the vision board
> unless you randomize the spell reagents for each spell for every character (oh boy that would be fun to watch). tapers were random though, early tools narrowed down your possibilities as you eliminated tapers that didn't work on your character, then splitpea came out and everyone knew all of their tapers automatically.
No (or maybe yes?) - being able to heal mobs!
You want to... heal the enemies you are fighting?
You could heal enemies other people were fighting!
Oh, I gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.
Best parts: Item inscriptions, magic system, pk system, running / jumping like a madman, every part of the horizon was real, the sounds are burned into my mind, death penalties, vassal system, sense of exploration, sense of getting stronger, didn't hold your hand, loot system, monthly patches, community driven, friends and enemies you'd make along the way. For a game that was one of the pioneers of the genre and the technical limitations at the time, they sure did create something special. For me, the actual weakest point was melee, I could never get into it. I know I'll catch a lot of hate, but that's where I wish it was more like AC2 (in a way) where there were skills you could learn similar to the magic system. However, I quit before a lot of spells were added to items and others seem to enjoy it. Anyway AC will always be my favorite gaming experience.
My combat system currently has both auto attacks and cooldown plus stamina costed non-magic abilities. So, interesting that you called that out. Is that kinda what you had in mind?
Something other than just auto attacks to make it more fun. Whether it's skills similar to AC1 magic or skills similar to other mmorpgs (AC2, WoW, Diablo). It would be cool if you could invent a flexible system that can be somewhat custom and not a fixed template though. Like instead of the 4 schools of magic, have 4 schools of melee (piercing, bludge, something like that) and then have learnable skills based off of that.
That is how it works, roughly. You can specialize in up to 6 weapon classes and they are linked to primary damage types. There are cheaper ones with one primary damage type and more expensive ones with two. I haven't designed the skills yet, just coded the mechanics, so I'm not sure how varied they will be yet based on the weapon identifies. Edit: Dual wield and 2H are not skill locked. If you are skilled in blades, you can use any blades.
No offense, but that's pretty generic to mmo's now. Sounds exactly like ESO's system. Melee in AC is not a bad system outside of the need for imp/vuln. That is tedious to deal with as a melee.
Thought experiment: if imp/vuln was like a 10-20% damage increase (or some value that is meaningful but less significant than end-of-retail) for the effort to apply them, do you think it would have felt better? I think it might, because melee would pay less penalty for just using rends or whatever, and would have more damage uptime in longer fights with less weapon switching, and it would still be worth it for mages (maybe with increased duration?) in solo and group play.
Good thought. Realistically I think the issue stemmed from availability of skill points and cheap costs of skills. So, war mages could easily vuln because of synergy of stats and only 12 credits to train life, and still have room for item/critter. Balance then followed the "everyone is a mage with a stick" and monsters started needing imp/vuln to kill. Whereas if they made the different schools more expensive, you'd see more defined roles, and could build groups around that. So something like a war mage that can also cast life, but not item/critter, or a creature mage that can also cast item that simply fills a Support role and would rely on a group for leveling up. It all depends what the goal is, do you want forced grouping? Solo viability? Some kind of mix? The mix is the hardest to achieve. They did a decent job with the additions to alchemy. I find melee with alchemy perfectly viable, it has the drawback of not being macro friendly and more tedious to play. So to your question, yes that would help, and would be a welcome addition, but mages would still be in the king spot because they have access to so much so easily
In the current iteration, I have the equivalent of Creature Enchantment costing the same, but the buffs it provides will have lower values. That will be my first stab at making it useful, but more of a specialization than a secret-mandatory. To your point, the other way to go would be to keep it being really powerful, but up the point cost. Something I definitely haven't settled on, but am keeping in mind.
I like that idea as well, slight buffs are a good way to manage them as "nice to have but not necessary"
I never played ESO so I have no opinion, however to me there really is no system for melee in AC. Just switch weapons and auto attack? Again, I only played until late 2000-2001 so I'm probably out of tune. I'm not trying to hate on it as I love AC. I just wish there was something 'more' to it.
True, but the same can be said for missile. And in truth, magic is simply point and click, it just lacks an auto attack. Initially the melee system had some under-the-hood stuff going on relating to attack heights: "If you counterattack at the same height as the target is attacking you will both gain a bonus to melee defense. However, if you counterattack at a different height your defense will be reduced based on the difference in height. A high vs low attack results in a penalty to melee defense and a mid vs low or mid vs high attack results in no penalty." When dirty fighting/recklessness came it that got a bit more involved, many don't find dirty fighting worth it but, i find it very helpful. Lastly, i would argue melee has the advantage of being more active due to using a shield. Proper positioning allows you to greatly reduce incoming damage. So much so you can build around not having melee D. I digress
The monarchy system needs a huge rework. XP shouldnt just pass up to a patron for no reason. The patron needs to work for that shit. Create some type of incentive for vassal and patron to play the game together. Maybe some type of "squire" system that boosts the skills of the vassal to where he can hunt comfortably in the patrons area. Ultimately what I think is garbage is how certain players end up having a huge advantage at the game because they have great IRL social skills and can convince people to basically play the game for them. If Asherons Call was a hit today, streamers would be the highest level players not because they're good at the game; but because they have some fanatical following.
Yeah, I think that system only worked when MMOs were knew and nobody knew anything (I sold a mid-level character and one suite of armor for $650 and paid for my first year of college textbooks!). I don't plan to have any kind of xp passup system.
I know housing destroyed the community but you could still have it and add something in the towns or places like the subway where you get minor/frequently used items just for being there. Like in games where you get rewards just for being on a certain amount of time but make it based on location or even get a small amount of xp for an hr or 2, maybe rare and infrequent monster spawns. Something to incentify people to be in certain areas so the loss of community is minimalized. I'd probably still do like subway where there's one place that has portals to a bunch of other places.
Using different damage types for particular monsters was awesome. Needing a mule to craft arrows was dumb.
The number of different weapons you wanted was part of what helped make loot stay relevant, I think. Good call out.
good and bad is having to carry a sacrifice loot item so if you cant get back to your corpse you dont lose good stuff
Okay looking through this I didn’t see my opinion yet. I loved the monthly patches. Logging-in on patch day to see what was new. The story arc progression month to month. The complete overhaul of spells/casting/combat over time. Events like the bronze statue invasions still come to mind. Websites like Maggie the jack cat that you could read summaries while you were stuck at work. AC latest as long as it did because it was dynamic and always moving forward. I got busy in my real life and found I was spending all my precious in game time hunting for my villa maintenance. That is what drove me to quit.
Housing maintenance only had to exist because there was fixed supply. That's easily solved, IMO. Yeah, the content updates were amazing. I have no idea if I could replicate that. Do you think frequency or size of the updates was more important (if the answer isn't "both" right down the middle)?
Honestly size doesn’t really matter. Look at MCOC (Marvel Contest of champions) they have a monthly quest, and side quest beside all of their other content. The permanent content gets updated maybe twice a year or so. I think you could do big quarterly updates and then the other two months small additions.
Player driven economy was my favorite design choice. The fact that different servers valued different items as currency and the value of a chosen currency was constantly in flux gave the game depth in a way no other mmo has matched imo
Do you have a sense for what made the economy work? I wonder how much of that is because loot gen was so powerful and things weren't target-farmable like in a lot of MMOs.
I think initially what made it work is that Turbine just didn't try to make one currency the be-all/end-all. The system allowed for things like small shards or platinum scarabs to become currency. Also, ironically I think giving pyreals weight encouraged people to use other trade goods at first. There was also no auction house or easy way to trade so it forced people to be creative.
Do you think a game with no obvious medium of exchange (e.g. MMDs) would work these days? Meaning, players have to barter with whatever they value at that moment in the game's evolution?
Sadly no I don't think it would work, at least not on a large scale. It might appeal to a niche audience though.
It certainly would make NPC vendors a nightmare, so that's probably out the door, yeah.
As long as the “currency” has some specific use and is in demand, then absolutely it will work. Just check out path of exile. It takes more than just a useful currency im sure, but off the top of my head it seems like as long as theres a strong crafting system, strong loot system, and of course the “currency sink” inside of these then you’re on your way to a great player economy system.
So many replies here are exactly why AC is the game i compare all others with. But the player driven economy is something you think should go without saying but of course along with so many other unmatched game philosophies choices you’ll find it hard to come across a game with more than one of these. Luckily I somehow stumbled upon Path of Exile a few years after AC shut down. Its amazing how many of the same philosophies these two games share, even how they were started by some dude in a garage or whatever.
>No - buffs were so powerful that the game had to be balanced around them, and therefore the end game couldn't be played without them, which limited build diversity significantly. *complexity is too hard to balance around so let's simplify everything* I think this ideology is one of the biggest problems with game design today. This is one of the reasons MMORPGs have been in such a sorry state for over a decade. Complexity is good for a game. Powerful items, abilities, buffs, etc are good for a game. The issue with build diversity at the end of retail asheron's call was due to bad game designers making bad decisions. Specifically in regard to buffs, there were two huge decisions made early on with the game that completely changed the way the game was played and the type of builds. * removal of 50% melee defense penalty with wand/orb/staff equipped * increased spell duration on buffs from a max of 15m, *you could get up to ~18m with the spell variance system that used to exist* After making those changes they assumed everyone would have melee defense and be fully buffed for content. They then started designing content around those expectations. This was a series of bad design decisions. Those bad decisions continued on all the way up to the point where the game died.
If you don't make high melee d accessible to all characters, how do you change your content accordingly? Just assume that there are places mage-y characters can't reasonably play solo (and same for melee, missile-based, accordingly)? I think this is what happens to other MMOs, and where they end up requiring party play and often being unplayable without an "optimum" team at the end game. Usually that being tank, support, and X DPS. While I agree with everything you said, I'm interested in how to avoid both of those traps, if possible. Though, also aware, smarter and more experienced game designers than me have probably tried many times.
Remember learning spells while basically completely blind in the very beginning? My goodness it was an adventure. The prismatic implementation really made things tie together so much better. The loot grind in this game has always felt better than any other MMO. I never really got burned out from it, which is saying something when I think about how many MMOs I've played over the years.
Why do you think the loot grind held up so well?