Gahn
Resident Freddy
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2004
- Messages
- 5,056
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=72343
Edit: mmorpg.com coverage also:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/features/loadFeature/1096/gameID/239
Scenarios
"These instanced sections prove another extremely distinctive ingredient. You enter the queue for a game, then carry on about your business until enough players are entered (balanced out by the game's NPC characters known as Dogs of War, who will leap in if too few players sign up on one side). Then it's into the instance, and off to battle. One game we played had us attempting to gain control of a gated wall dividing two territories, achieved by gaining possession of three stationary flags, and the deaths of the enemy. Another required finding and keeping an artefact, much like capturing a flag. These simple FPS motifs are given new life by a screen full of elaborate attacks and spells, letting the complexity of an RPG enjoy the visceral fun of a shooter."
Public Quests
"Another important feature to mention are the Public Quests (PQs). As you explore a zone, entering a certain area will alert you to a quest that all who happen to be present can participate in. These are in stages, letting you join in at any point. Perhaps players need to kill a certain number of enemies in the surrounding area. Once complete, this might mean you can all start recruiting the locals to help out. Get enough and it will trigger the finale, hopefully the arrival of something exceptionally big and dangerous like an angry giant. All around can then begin attacking this uber-tough bad, until communal victory. The amount you participate defines the reward you'll receive at the end, the game noticing how great your contribution to the group effort was. It's a splendid idea, and a cunning way to remove ghastly spawn queues that plague so many MMOs. And having played one, it really works. There's no seams, no instancing, you just turn up and pitch in."
Rewards
"Say you kill your first chaos warrior, you get a new unlock which is a scribbled old picture of his face that you hand-drew in there. The second thing when you kill one hundred of them is you get a little bit more detail. The third thing when you kill five hundred is you get, 'Chaos Killer' above your head as a new title. At level four when you've killed five thousand of them, you get the Chaos Killer Ability, which gives you a new icon to put on your hotbar, which gives you a five percent damage increase against Chaos Warriors..."
Griefing and kindergarden management xD
"And in a world so stuffed with PvP, griefing would be the most obvious one. Jeff leaps in.
"The RvR system is very carefully constructed to prevent such problems, from simple ideas to complex devices. Simple things like bad guys can't talk to good guys to prevent smack-talking. (Can I dance on your corpse? Absolutely. But there's a bit of fun to that. See, when you die, your gravestone might be left there. Your gravestone could have funny things on it about who killed you and how)."
And on the more complicated level? "Well, for instance, we're not letting high-level characters come down and gank low-level characters. We're in fact pushing back against things like that. Say a fortieth level character comes into a fifth level zone, and he wants to run into an RvR area and kill the fifth level guys? Well, not only can he not attack them, but he doesn't even get flagged for RvR. He can't attack the low level guys at all. But that guy who comes down has a debuff placed upon him that makes him vulnerable to the low level guys. This is the kind of disincentive against griefing we're using."
Edit: mmorpg.com coverage also:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/features/loadFeature/1096/gameID/239
Scenarios
"These instanced sections prove another extremely distinctive ingredient. You enter the queue for a game, then carry on about your business until enough players are entered (balanced out by the game's NPC characters known as Dogs of War, who will leap in if too few players sign up on one side). Then it's into the instance, and off to battle. One game we played had us attempting to gain control of a gated wall dividing two territories, achieved by gaining possession of three stationary flags, and the deaths of the enemy. Another required finding and keeping an artefact, much like capturing a flag. These simple FPS motifs are given new life by a screen full of elaborate attacks and spells, letting the complexity of an RPG enjoy the visceral fun of a shooter."
Public Quests
"Another important feature to mention are the Public Quests (PQs). As you explore a zone, entering a certain area will alert you to a quest that all who happen to be present can participate in. These are in stages, letting you join in at any point. Perhaps players need to kill a certain number of enemies in the surrounding area. Once complete, this might mean you can all start recruiting the locals to help out. Get enough and it will trigger the finale, hopefully the arrival of something exceptionally big and dangerous like an angry giant. All around can then begin attacking this uber-tough bad, until communal victory. The amount you participate defines the reward you'll receive at the end, the game noticing how great your contribution to the group effort was. It's a splendid idea, and a cunning way to remove ghastly spawn queues that plague so many MMOs. And having played one, it really works. There's no seams, no instancing, you just turn up and pitch in."
Rewards
"Say you kill your first chaos warrior, you get a new unlock which is a scribbled old picture of his face that you hand-drew in there. The second thing when you kill one hundred of them is you get a little bit more detail. The third thing when you kill five hundred is you get, 'Chaos Killer' above your head as a new title. At level four when you've killed five thousand of them, you get the Chaos Killer Ability, which gives you a new icon to put on your hotbar, which gives you a five percent damage increase against Chaos Warriors..."
Griefing and kindergarden management xD
"And in a world so stuffed with PvP, griefing would be the most obvious one. Jeff leaps in.
"The RvR system is very carefully constructed to prevent such problems, from simple ideas to complex devices. Simple things like bad guys can't talk to good guys to prevent smack-talking. (Can I dance on your corpse? Absolutely. But there's a bit of fun to that. See, when you die, your gravestone might be left there. Your gravestone could have funny things on it about who killed you and how)."
And on the more complicated level? "Well, for instance, we're not letting high-level characters come down and gank low-level characters. We're in fact pushing back against things like that. Say a fortieth level character comes into a fifth level zone, and he wants to run into an RvR area and kill the fifth level guys? Well, not only can he not attack them, but he doesn't even get flagged for RvR. He can't attack the low level guys at all. But that guy who comes down has a debuff placed upon him that makes him vulnerable to the low level guys. This is the kind of disincentive against griefing we're using."