Darth Fez that was a great description of TOR - It looked like an MMO but it really just felt like KOTOR 3 with co-op.
the only time I ever grouped with anyone was during beta when I was trying out the first instances. After I tried that out I didn't feel like I needed to do those quest lines.
I made it to max level without ever doing an elite quest, or doing a grouped instance.
It just wasn't necessary but once you made it to max level, it really simply felt like I had beat the game and it was time to do that next thing.

WoW and CoH were fully conceived worlds - it's a window to that place where I can take over a powerful inhabitant. TOR was/is a game I'd play on my PS3 or my Tablet.

Put TOR on my tablet and make it work like KOTOR does on the IPAD and I'd play the crap out of it.

Tamorand

One of the very likeable things about CoH was that when you got the breadcrumb "Larry from accounting told me he's got some problems. You should go pay him a visit." you had the option at some level to say "I think Larry needs to solve his own problems" and go do something else. You might later decide to help him out, or never.

Now to my eye that's the opposite of "playing the game", but at least you could make the decision and all you stood to lose for it were possibly a badge and temporary power. It didn't prevent you from getting on with whatever it was you wanted to be doing.

HarvesterOfEyes wrote:

One of the very likeable things about CoH was that when you got the breadcrumb "Larry from accounting told me he's got some problems. You should go pay him a visit." you had the option at some level to say "I think Larry needs to solve his own problems" and go do something else. You might later decide to help him out, or never.
Now to my eye that's the opposite of "playing the game", but at least you could make the decision and all you stood to lose for it were possibly a badge and temporary power. It didn't prevent you from getting on with whatever it was you wanted to be doing.

The same thought crossed my mind, although in a slightly different context. Every MMO gives me the opportunity to refuse a mission but, realistically, the only result of that is that I lose out on XP, loot/money, and, ultimately, content. Last but not least, thirty levels later that guy is still there to ask, "So... Wanna help Larry yet?"

Directly put, there's no reward (or consequence) for refusing a mission. If word got around that you refused to help Larry you might get +1 reputation with the janitors and the secretarial pool. Perhaps it'd result in a phone call or e-mail ("I've been trying to find someone trustworthy to help me with something and I heard you don't like Larry, so..."). It would be a Herculean task to implement with every mission, but it would be grand to have a solid core of them for each level range.

HarvesterOfEyes wrote:

To do that though would be to compel following the breadcrumb. If requiring it be followed is bad then being strongly compelled to do so is also bad. At some point I suggest it's better to let you write part of the storyline yourself. By that I mean having some reason why helping Bob was more important to you and acting upon it.

I don't follow (no pun intended) your argument. If turning down a mission results in an action, rather than in a lack of action, how do you equate that to following a breadcrumb? If you feel more comfortable about following breadcrumbs if you write the story yourself, you already have that option. As you said, you can ignore what's on the screen and create your own story for why your character decided to accept the mission. If continuity is so important to you then you're already doing that whenever you refuse a mission, since there's typically no in-game reason provided for turning down the mission.

In case I wasn't clear, I'm not against having breadcrumbs. In fact, I think they're essential to avoid annoying people by requiring them to run all over the map in the hopes of stumbling across someone who has a mission in their level range. My lack of enthusiasm is for NPCs blatantly stating, "Thank you for visiting Point B. Point B is now complete. Proceed to Point C." There are subtle methods for achieving the same result and they can make all the difference between guidance / linearity and railroading.

It does go against the value we place on individuality and uniqueness but that's in the nature of MMOs. When dealing with a small group of people (the classic example is a tabletop game) it's possible to tailor the experience to each individual. When the situation changes to dealing with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people it's necessary to begin painting with a broad brush. You will see dozens of others with the same attacks, the same travel powers, the same capes, and the same glows/auras.

The only answer is to focus on the many positive aspects.

Gangrel wrote:

Darth Fez wrote:
My lack of enthusiasm is for NPCs blatantly stating, "Thank you for visiting Point B. Point B is now complete. Proceed to Point C." There are subtle methods for achieving the same result and they can make all the difference between guidance / linearity and railroading.

So essentially, its how its put across that is a problem rather than anything else.

Yes.

The way I view it, presentation is everything. The medium (computer game) places limits on what can realistically be done. Hence linearity is inevitable (perhaps not entirely inevitable, but I'd argue that a degree of linearity is necessary for sake of player friendliness). I've no problem with some railroading and the use of standard story devices (such a message left by a kidnapped person), with the emphasis strictly on 'some'. SWTOR was quite blatant in its use of the "You're done with this area but I know this guy in the next area" method of moving people along.

I like quest lines. They give you the sense of being part of the story.

I also like having the freedom to skip them when you've finally had enough of rescuing lawyers.

Mob grinding I generally dislike, but prefer having the option to do it. There are exceptional situations, testing builds for example, but otherwise I prefer to have a story to play along with.

Grinding à la EQ: hateful.

HarvesterOfEyes wrote:

@Darth Fez,
I believe we agree that strict linearity is undesirable.
What I'm trying to say is two things:
1. Very strongly compelled linearity isn't really an improvement over the strict variety.
2. A standard MMO rep-system à la WoW or Rift leads to the worst kind of linearity: daily rep quest grinds.
What I like to see in any MMO is many options and no strong compulsion to pick any of them. At the point you'd get a "breadcrumb" from a linear game, I'd prefer to see you get two or three and in the end have the option of following all, some or none of them.
Some complain that CoH missions were pretty much all the same. There's a lot of merit in that complaint, but it's not just CoH missions, but rather tasks in MMO's generally. The bulk of them are going to necessarily fall in to a few very recognizable categories. People who rail against that I generally advise to avoid the genre completely.
One of the very likeable things about CoH is that you could completely skip the missions altogether. At the same time my big complaint against CoH players in the very earliest days (pre-I1), was that the ones who skipped all the missions complained of a lack of "content". There was plenty of content, they just chose to skip it. Even so I much prefer that the freedom to choose that be there.

Again, yes.

There is the added wrinkle that linearity is one of those elements that is going to be subjective. I've no doubt that one person's railroading is another's, "Woohoo, I'm a detective, yeah baby!"

Dailies should certainly only complement or supplement a means to an end, not be the sole means to advance toward a goal. Additionally, in WoW, I did not find it a particularly good idea that doing the round of dailies was one of the better ways to make money.

It was the mindless daily quests grinding that ultimately made me throw in the towel with WoW. At some point during Cataclysm they introduced a system of doing daily quests to earn currency to unlock more daily quests so you could earn more currency to unlock more daily quests. I stuck with it for maybe a week or two and then... I just stopped.

I have no problem with daily missions, per se. There are those people who love their dailies, so getting rid of them entirely is not the answer. I'm certain they're nice for developers, as well, since as a mechanic/system they're quite simple and straightforward. Again, I feel that execution and presentation is vital. The standard system of repeating the same missions over and over, and perhaps eventually unlocking additional missions to repeat ad nauseam, is dull. Having a pool of missions from which that set of daily missions are drawn from would add variety and create an illusion of liveliness.

As you say, those who cannot deal with sameness and repetition are best served playing some other style of game.

Ellis wrote:

*RADIO UPDATE* Fallen Earth had this, and just in the past year or so, Lord of the Rings Online added it. The original NPC sends you to an area. The "old" way was you did the quest, returned to the NPC and they sent you back to the same area. This happened so much, I called the style of questline "But I was JUST THERE." Fallen Earth had it where, as you went along, new quests automatically came up. CoX, of course, had the phone, once you did enough quests. LoTRo's mechanism needs work, as you sometimes needed to know the very exact X,Y,Z location of the quest to get it to trigger.

This part reminded me of the newspaper missions in CoH. (I know, I know. More dailies.) That was an awesome idea that was never developed to its potential. For example, give each reputation/faction a pool of daily missions. Depending on a player's standing (preferably both sufficiently positive or negative) they would have their choice of different missions. Other factors, such as character level, reputation level, and perhaps even zone/area, could factor in to which missions are available. ([i]I would market this strictly as a benefit or feature of the reputation system, not turn it into a means to gain or grind reputation.[/i])

Quote:

I wonder if there's a way to balance an MMO to have a sandbox worldfeel, while also having the ability to direct the player, when needed?

Good question, and it'd certainly be a heck of a balancing act. Not least because there appears to be quite some contention about what is required for a game to be considered a sandbox. As HarvesterOfEyes and I have discussed, above, I contend that one of the most important factors is very careful management of how linear the game feels. And, really, there's no reason a theme park game cannot have missions or even missions hubs off the beaten path. That comes with the caveat that such missions are entirely optional. If I have to complete those missions in order to hit the level cap I do not consider them optional.

Cinnder wrote:

I don't want to come across as some kind of Gangrel fanboy :-)

That'd already make two of us in the Gangrel fan club.

Cinnder wrote:

I don't want to come across as some kind of Gangrel fanboy :-) but once again I think he makes a good point. I think all the shortcuts to get to missions contributed greatly to emptying the world. There's a thread over on Titan asking whether the game got too user friendly towards the end, and lots of people have commented that they would not have stayed if not for the quick travel powers or even earlier access to standard travel powers, but all these cut down on the chances to see other players, which perhaps made the world seem emptier than it was.

The world seeming emptier that it is in fact is a good thing when the game is new and enjoying a surge in popularity. Even Protector had 2-3 instances of all the low and mid-level zones early on. Late in the game's life when you had perhaps 2 server's worth of population spread out over 10 servers and most people done with everything they ever wanted to do in a mid-level zone, the world is going to seem empty because relatively speaking it is.

Even at that point in the game's life though, was there ever a time on a server when there wasn't a crowd hanging out in AP? Not on any of the ones I visited.

Quote:

I can still remember in the old days coming out of a mission in Bricks and bumping into 2 other heroes with whom I'd occasionally team. They asked what I was doing next, and when I described the mission they said it was gonna be tough for me (a squishy blaster) to solo, and would I like help? We completed that mission, and in return I went and helped them with one of theirs. This sort of thing seemed to happen less and less as they added features to the game.

On the other hand, I strongly dislike a mostly non-instanced world, where you have to queue up to wait for the glowie to reset or the boss to respawn. Nothing breaks my suspension of disbelief quite like seeing mobs respawn on top of me. I loved that CoX avoided this almost entirely until the revamp of Atlas -- those respawning Hellions always bugged me.

The emphasis on instanced content was one of the best features of CoH IMO. This feature in particular put the player and his team in charge of their time. In open-world content you're dependent on the winds of fortune to permit you the privilege of having some objectives available to you. You're also dependent on the good graces of other players many of whom don't have any. [No more Evercamp for me, ever.]

There are people who will play this and any other MMO whose whole purpose is to go around barfing on your good time. If you did more than a couple Hami raids you must have met some of them. Instanced content puts an impenetrable wall between you and them. Hooray for instanced content!

Darth Fez wrote:

HarvesterOfEyes wrote:
It's not just MMO's either. For my money what's gone wrong with computer gaming is that nearly everything now is a console game with strict linearity.
Precisely.
As Total Biscuit says in the video, linearity is desirable (and inevitable) in video games but there's a significant difference between guiding players and pushing them down a hallway. One of the things that made WoW stand out in my mind is that the guys at Blizzard are masters at disguising many of the tricks that annoy me in other MMOs (as they did in WoW, as well, from time to time, though it wasn't nearly as blatant).
At this point I could really use a break from the blatant, "Hey, thanks man! You've solved all our problems! You know what? Larry from accounting told me he's got some problems. You should go pay him a visit." breadcrumbs.

Care to elaborate on which things tend to jar you, and what the successful tricks to mask it off are? I know plenty of the answers for myself, obviously, but we'll do rather better if we can avoid pulling back the curtain for as many players as we can…

Two techniques break up linearity and they can counter-balance each other:

1. Avoidance of gating quests, that is quests you absolutely must successfully complete before more stuff opens up to you. In anything like a CoH story arc each mission gates the next and that just fine by me. The thing to avoid is including a mission at hub A which if you didn't bother to complete it no one at hub B will talk to you. Even worse when hidden missions gate the hubs. "Oh no, I didn't pick up the magic bean at level 6, and now I'm too high level to get one."

2. Parallel quest lines. Suppose when I finish with hub A there are hubs B1 and B2 at the right level and no interdependence between them. I can do either, or if there's another way to progress past those levels I might do that and skip those entirely. CoH had a lot of that at the low and mid levels. Where you have a lot of parallel quest lines you can afford more gates.

It seems fairly reasonable to me to suppose that the cause of games having become so linear is that it is simply less work for the writers, thus cheaper to produce. The mistake the game publishers are making is in believing that cheap and easy is just as good. My experience with Pacific War games has made me very very skeptical about buying any more computer games of any kind.

Various fair points made. The big ones that jump out at me boil down to:

[list=1]
[*]Have enough content that there is not "an arc" you have to follow, but rather, multiple arcs to pick and choose from. In fairness, this one may take some time to achieve, simply because it does require a sufficient volume of content to give more than a core path and a few variations — but no small part of it probably *also* boils down to not setting up situations where pieces of even the 'main' storyline(s) are so tightly linked that you have to pick something early on and it railroads you down a particular quest chain.
[*]Have logical connections and progressions, so that there is an obvious reason for the character to *care* about going to see JoeBob the next contact, other than just "Hey, I know this guy JoeBob you should talk to".
[*]Avoidance of "you did not carry the magazines/garden ornament/whatever from , now you lose". Personally, I see a very simple solution to this one: discard CoX's "out-level a contact" mechanic in favor of "stop showing the contact on your list of folks who have stuff open *for your current level*". If you want to go back and talk to someone and take on a level 10 mission when you're level 50, then from my point of view, more power to you. Now, that said, it may end up involving a slightly different approach, but there has definitely been discussion around how to handle this.
[/list]

On the first two points, the main hope I can hold out is that the current plans (subject to change, yadda yadda, etc., and so on) involve the ability to key both the world presented and mission details based on not only past choices, but potentially also past outcomes (within a limited scope, anyway). Personally, I am generally not especially in favor of arcs that "close off" choices because you opted to help Bob before helping Joe, although they do have their place — I just think that that place is "few and far between, and only where there really is no other sensible way to do it", personally, because of the drawbacks. However, I am *plenty* in favor of "Maria will talk to you if you did Bob's mission arc, *or* if you did Cecil's arc, *or* if you are at least as awesome as Kevin… but what exactly she says and what missions are offered may vary depending on why she talks to you".

Once the technical ability is established, it then becomes pretty much a matter for the mission-creation folks, and I can't speak for them directly.

Similar to when you were flying around Steel Canyon and stumbled across the clockwork furiously building a paladin, you could be zipping around a zone and spot a bunch of thugs in the middle of suspicious activity, or the Circle of Thorns could actually complete one of their open air summonings, etc.

I mean over and above the various villain spawns you'd normally find in a zone. Say you catch a group of guys unloading mysterious crates from a boat, you beat them up, then find a clue to a vast smuggling ring going on.
Steve

There is nothing wrong with using npc contacts. It's in the writing of the story, your dialogue with the npc which can infer what your character represents. I have and will say with certainty that we don't want to reduce players to feeling like they're a lackey, messenger, and so on. And we have talked about not mainly relying on the familiar method of using npc contacts as mission / quest givers.

MMORPG's are necessarily written in the second person. Thus it's fundamental to the MMORPG concept that there must be NPC's for the player to interact with.

Take those away and how does the writer tell any part of the story? Pretty much have then to write it in the first person. In that case the story becomes more rather than less linear because the writer now has to make all the decisions about what that character is thinking. Once they do that, the player isn't the one role-playing, now it's all about what the writer brings to it.

Stick to second person. That leaves the player room to write his own half of the story, and that means you must have contacts.

Поскольку английский язык является такой проблемой для вас, есть другой язык, который вы способны понять более эффективно?

DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

Various fair points made. The big ones that jump out at me boil down to:
Have enough content that there is not "an arc" you have to follow, but rather, multiple arcs to pick and choose from. In fairness, this one may take some time to achieve, simply because it does require a sufficient volume of content to give more than a core path and a few variations — but no small part of it probably *also* boils down to not setting up situations where pieces of even the 'main' storyline(s) are so tightly linked that you have to pick something early on and it railroads you down a particular quest chain.

That's certainly completely understandable. I'd go so far as to say that this is a given. (I find it incredibly annoying and disingenuous when people complain that a newly launched MMO doesn't have as much content and features as that other MMO that's been live for four or five years.)

Quote:

Have logical connections and progressions, so that there is an obvious reason for the character to *care* about going to see JoeBob the next contact, other than just "Hey, I know this guy JoeBob you should talk to".
Avoidance of "you did not carry the magazines/garden ornament/whatever from , now you lose". Personally, I see a very simple solution to this one: discard CoX's "out-level a contact" mechanic in favor of "stop showing the contact on your list of folks who have stuff open *for your current level*". If you want to go back and talk to someone and take on a level 10 mission when you're level 50, then from my point of view, more power to you. Now, that said, it may end up involving a slightly different approach, but there has definitely been discussion around how to handle this.

On the first two points, the main hope I can hold out is that the current plans (subject to change, yadda yadda, etc., and so on) involve the ability to key both the world presented and mission details based on not only past choices, but potentially also past outcomes (within a limited scope, anyway). Personally, I am generally not especially in favor of arcs that "close off" choices because you opted to help Bob before helping Joe, although they do have their place — I just think that that place is "few and far between, and only where there really is no other sensible way to do it", personally, because of the drawbacks. However, I am *plenty* in favor of "Maria will talk to you if you did Bob's mission arc, *or* if you did Cecil's arc, *or* if you are at least as awesome as Kevin… but what exactly she says and what missions are offered may vary depending on why she talks to you".
Once the technical ability is established, it then becomes pretty much a matter for the mission-creation folks, and I can't speak for them directly.

Overall, <3. That would certainly address my concerns well enough to rate a "not perfect, but close enough".

P.S. Yes, a double post to avoid making a monster post. :P

I don't want to claim this with 100% certainty, in all likely hood, we will not have the open world, or instanced content scale to level. There may be a form of auto-leveling the character to the content level if you are over, or some other way to revisist out levelled content. It's something we are aware of and will explore (standard no guarantees disclaimer here).

Well one option could be to have the first 1 – 5 levels be you are a sidekick to a hero, who is teaching / training you the way the game is played. The hero could be doing the missions and you are along as a helper on those first few level. Then when you complete the tutorial, your first contact (or whatever they come up with) is that hero, send you out on solo missions, and this last till, some number between 10 -20 levels. After that you head out on your own as a full fledge super hero, or the reverse for a villain.

That would, in turn, screw up the Mentoring system.

Steve

Darth Fez wrote:

One of the elements SWTOR did well was their approach to early leveling. At level 10 each of the classes could choose their specialization, but the specs wouldn't truly come into their own until level 15+. Prior to that everyone was essentially DPS.
My main reason for mentioning this is that CoH had some ATs which started very, very slowly (the tankers and defenders are probably the poster boys for this). I think it's a good approach to place all classes/ATs on an even footing in those early levels. It would certainly have helped me to stick with a tanker if it hadn't made me feel like I was playing a lumbering ox who had to catch his breath after every punch.

Its an interesting idea, though in my experience it was more a matter of power sets than AT that effected the ease of the early levels. But the point does remain making sure everyone is on an even footing, or at least none are frustrating

As opposed to physically whipping out the radio or newspaper

Here's another idea along those lines, considering that the city will be lousy (if you'll pardon the expression) with superheroes. There may well be a unit or division, if not an entire department, dedicated to keeping track of various problems and their resolution. When the hero completes such an 'area mission' (I believe that is SWTOR's term for them) that department credits them with the recognition for that deed. Conversely, they may primarily exist for heroes to call in their 'problem solved' situations. The latter has the benefit of lacking a 'big brother' vibe.

One potential method I see for providing lower level characters with more flexibility is to provide them with a greater selection of powers. Although they are still limited to few power slots, at first, they can choose whether they prefer to take more attack, control, heal, or damage resistance powers. These early powers could reach higher tiers later on, achieving their full or real potential, so that they remain useful later on rather than merely taking up space.

ETA: While chatting, Sixteen brought up an option that I'd seen used in an online FPS game. There, healers can damage enemies with their heals or, in one other case, knock them back. For tankers, armor/defense powers could have some kind of damage reflection or PBAoE damage element (Sixteen's idea). Controllers could slow small groups of enemies, also damaging them in the process.

Cinnder wrote:

Darth Fez wrote:
One potential method I see for providing lower level characters with more flexibility is to provide them with a greater selection of powers. Although they are still limited to few power slots, at first, they can choose whether they prefer to take more attack, control, heal, or damage resistance powers. These early powers could reach higher tiers later on, achieving their full or real potential, so that they remain useful later on rather than merely taking up space.
ETA: While chatting, Sixteen brought up an option that I'd seen used in an online FPS game. There, healers can damage enemies with their heals or, in one other case, knock them back. For tankers, armor/defense powers could have some kind of damage reflection or PBAoE damage element (Sixteen's idea). Controllers could slow small groups of enemies, also damaging them in the process.

These each sound like good ideas to explore. The former puts the choice in the hands of the players. The latter is something CoX was not too far off already. For example, most of my troller holds/slows did some damage.

The part I mentioned about would be to get rid of the feeling in CoX that some archetypes were useless in the early game when soloing. Since so many people go through starting zones many times in games with that much customisation, people either did it solo, or went on sewers runs. For those soloing, they almost couldn't play as a tanker or controller.

The idea would be to give each set a few spells early on that speed up combat. The example I focused on in the IRC this morning was the reflective property of a damage reflection based armour set. But lets make up an example for something equivalent to an Ice Controller. The main idea that comes from Ice other than it's slipperiness is shattering. Therefore one of the early powers could be a mass debuff that causes enemies when hit by a damaging attack to shatter, dealing more damage, or causing defeated enemies to explode into shards dealing a small AoE damage effect.

It's that sort of early game advantage that will keep classes from feeling homogeneous, but allow them to be competitive in the early game before getting their big powerset defining powers.

Cinnder wrote:

I also loved the feeling of growing power as characters grew in levels (which I think CoX did better than any other MMO) so I wouldn't want to have too much sweeping power at lowbie levels for fear of dulling the advent of the bigger powers later.

I don't think anyone wants to imply that low level characters should be inordinately powerful. I can appreciate slower paced combat, at least so long as the player has something to do (constantly waiting on my two attacks to come off cooldown so my character could launch another anemic attack is among my least favorite memories from COH). Fast or slow, it should feel like combat and not leave me sitting there with time to draw parallels to, for example, trying to cut a tough steak with a butter knife.

The player should never be in a position where they can literally do nothing but wait for one of their powers/abilities to come off cooldown.

One of the things which irks me about the way certain games are structured is for the mission-giver to send me all the way to the northwestern corner of the world map to complete a mission, then return to him for a short chat, then be sent to the southeastern corner of the world map, then chat, then northeastern corner, then chat, then southwestern corner, then chat. How about having a cluster of missions in the *same* area and then letting me call things in on the Katt-phone in my utility cape? Fed-Ex missions are fine for when you're learning the game, but not when your character is maximum level and the player has been sitting at the keyboard since the 1st wave of Beta!