EQ3/EQ Next ~ The Ideas Thread

Discussion in 'Expansions and Adventure Packs' started by ARCHIVED-Aurorum, Dec 14, 2007.

  1. ARCHIVED-agentsix Guest

    DreaddJester wrote:
    Thank you for being out there. I'm happy to know I"m not alone in wanting this type of character development in a MMO. No classes. No levels.
    I'd also change the way a player gets spells/abilities. Each spell or ability would be obtained via a long questline that helps the player to 'learn' that ability. The end result of the questline would be the character being able to do the spell. But the spell 'power' would be developed over time. In short, the more you use the spell the more powerful it becomes.
    I have a dream where my Ranger goes on this long epic questline to learn how to make it rain fire from the sky. He visits Lavastorm to learn from the wizards there then he's off to academy where he further studies the art of pyromancy. After killing 100s of creatures to practice this spell he has to prove his worth to the god of fire. After the trial Solusek Ro grants him Fire From The Sky.
    In this type of world getting a spell really means something. It doesn't just magically appear on your hot bar after you kill enough creatures to ding the next level.
  2. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    It would be nice to see an anatomical display of hunted and killed animals for "looting" -- instead of a crab dropping pants or coins, players (deliberately) select particular organs, and these would individually fill up the inventory spaces.
    A 3-D, in-world (projected into the world) interface for inventory management and character equipment, instead of the flat display seen in 99.9% of current MMOs of all genres.
    Uncluttered display, minimalism.
    Many MMORPGs feel like cluttered, hazy dreams, and are not to scale. Considering PlanetSide 2 footage, this is doable through ForgeLight:
    Dear Esther, Chapter 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oYFTwPCf6o&hd=1
    Dear Esther, Chapter 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHGRLAdsEKg&hd=1
    Dear Esther, Chapter 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8_zKPqA3Wc&hd=1
    ArcheAge, graphics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1M_wyiAzqM
    ArcheAge, "Hunting for treasure underwater": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuFk06Bitx8
    ArcheAge, "Escaping from jail": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcELOhjE0LM
  3. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    Regular requests:
    • Further options, detailed customization
    • Improved character models
    • Armor dye
    • Playing while at work is not important (Wow!)
    • "Less is more" in armor
    • "Escapism" is key
  4. ARCHIVED-Gargamel Guest

    Just tune in to "Planetside 2", SOE's big MMOFPS project that should be entering beta later this year. It is running on "Forgelight" which is the engine that will be running EQNext and there are videos out there of it running in-game.
    Now Planetside2 is a FPS designed to run 400x400x400 battles on a single map, in a FPS environment.
    So techincally EQNext is capable of precise things like 'headshots' from the engine perspective, along with all of the super twitch things that are needed in an FPS.
    The day/night, field of view and atmosphere (clouds/fog/smoke/explosions) are awesome, and it literally is designed to handle over a thousand players (NOT NPC's) in a small localized area, all fighting at once.
    It will be VERY intersting to see how they decide to use the FPS percision in EQNext, or weather they decide to spend the excess on model detail, animations or physics.

    Planetside 2 Alpha Gameplay (EQNext engine) @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIE42ZfdKbI
  5. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    TERA is a fun game. The beginning ("fetch-and-kill-and-report-back") was mind-numbingly repetitive. FKRB quests aside, it contains several elements which I hope are considered for EQ Next:

    • Dynamic clouds (illusion or not, beautiful)
    • Art reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus, Zelda, etc.
    • Surrealistic
    • A balanced combination of action (mouse-driven) and hotkey skills: combat feels and looks like twitch-combat, but fundamentally isn't
    • Also plays with a controller
    • Race-based cities
    • PvP and GuildVsGuild features support interaction greater than the two-dimensional Good vs Evil
    • Political system
    • Lots of small villages add to the sense of scale
    • The scale allows for features like GvsG, villages, and invasions to feel believable
    • Player:Environment scale and the dynamic range of environments
    • Environmental design, the variations of colors, ambient and natural sounds, and music in one location blends seamlessly into the next
    • The illusion of an almost-seamless world

    A worthy opponent for EQ Next. :)
    There are many world-enhancing features missing in TERA which happen to be mentioned in this thread.
  6. ARCHIVED-Thunndar316 Guest

    Elder Scrolls MMO has been confirmed. Sony better show us something at Fan Fair or whatever they are calling it now
  7. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    Thunndar316 wrote:
    Yes. The ES MMO uses the Hero Engine (like SWTOR), and is closer to Rift or WoW than the recent ES games. Forgelight engine > Hero Engine, graphically. If EQ N runs on the next Sony system, I'd like to see Forgelight; and (optional) very high-resolution textures.

    A forest: a large, sweeping forest that stretches for miles, to scale; populated by wildlife that can be captured, hunted, or collected. Animals ought rarely to have gold coins or suits of armor in their bellies, but a liver or heart taken for food or crafting is just realistic enough for a sandpark slathered with themes.
    Footprints in the sand and snow. (Not necessarily terrain displacement; the beauty of the details is in the illusion.)

    The recent test optimization solution (for making changes during testing), the in-house engine, and streamlining in most areas suggests that SOE is taking advantage of as many cutting-edge tools as it can. They've experimented and produced and succeeded and failed so much as a company that I trust them to continue producing games of ever-increasing quality in the coming years.
  8. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    I'd rather have interactive NPC dialogue and advanced AI pathing, function, behavior, and personality than excessive voice-acting. Limited, professional voice-acting is more immersive than excessive, redundant, mediocre voice-acting.
  9. ARCHIVED-Iad Guest

    ES doesn't seem like it will be great at all, from the list of features made public. Graphics are generic as well.
  10. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

  11. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    38 Studios is dead. Buy the assets?
    I'd love to see a giant, open, seamless world that blends fantastical environments and truly feels huge and natural (recursively) and at least to scale. However, for reasons of events and trade, cities, farmlands, housing, arenas, trade-hubs, the sea, and the three layers of the world (underground, ground, and sky) ought to each be instanced separately. In fact, with this system, a "mega-server" is possible.
  12. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

  13. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

  14. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    Project Copernicus looks great... it should be purchased.
  15. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

  16. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    I'd like to see the base game include ground, sea, and sky layers, and a few underground regions. I'd then like to see the first expansion or "GU" expand the explorable underground regions.
  17. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    Updated pink text (click here for the updated first post):
    Characters
    • Heavily stylized realism (like the released concept art)
    • Fluid animations
    • Allow players and NPCs to use furniture and tools (hammers, shovels)
    • Limited physics enabled on certain objects (see "Amnesia" or "Morrowind"), including interaction with furniture and clothing, (limited) collision detection in vibrant cities (see "Assassin's Creed"), and interaction with the environment (simple to complex puzzles involving rocks and digging)
    • Begin with 200 (accelerated) character-levels instead of 50 or 100 (the players feel they are advancing more quickly, even if the content is the same)
    • NPCs always look busy


    Cities
    • Guild-controlled outposts or cities set in places ordered by the nobility
    • City, village, and outpost-specific items and bonuses
    • Avoid monotony
    • Locations for player and guild-maintained buildings than can be upgraded, with options allowing for the slight editing of the designs: useful for guarding trade-routes between cities (the next big MMO thing, esp. when involving Facebook and mobile applications); also useable in battle-arena-type zones (think "Age of Empires Online" (in instances, not gameplay), but non-mandatory, and between guilds) -- the more mini-games that take time to master, inside of a dynamic world, the longer players pay
    • Specific items and bonuses for and from specific areas (see "Myst" or "Zelda": keys for certain doors, items useful against certain bosses, and bonuses against local adversaries)
    • Randomized elements in "mobs" (animations and appearances), to avoid monotony. Assign "personalities" (1-16 types) to all AI, at random in spawning, displayed as a variety of NPC ally/enemy reactions to player actions


    Housing & Neighborhoods
    I'd like to see in EQ 3 neighborhood zones that expand as players purchase property. There could be a dozen streets in each city leading to uniquely-designed neighborhood layouts. This way:----
    • Neighborhoods always feel full
    • Neighborhoods have elements of customizability without infringing on the property of other players
    • A player's physical house is their house only
    The solution: the housing systems of Vanguard or SWG contained within housing zones.

    Terrain expands and resets as necessary (as players introduce new properties and customized layouts, or wish to build on hills), reloading the zone every 15 minutes following the inclusion of an additional property. Players could sell the procedurally-generated properties and player-customized houses through the world market.

    New Player Tutorial and Experience
    Send new players on a dangerous journey of exploration at the end of tutorial quests, between the city-state in which they start and one of the city-states with which the chosen starting city-state is allied. New players meet other new players along the way.

    UI
    • (See earlier posts)
    • Clutter-free

    Menu
    • (See earlier posts)
    • Projected in the world: to invite another player to group, click on the player, not the username

    Combat
    • (See earlier posts)

    Dungeons

    • Abstract dungeons: mirrors, haunted houses
    • Puzzle-centric dungeons
    • Varieties of dungeons, rewarding players with appropriate achievements:
    • Puzzle dungeons
    • Crafting dungeons
    • Mob dungeons
    • Resource dungeons
    • Diplomacy dungeons
    • Exploration dungeons (along the lines of yore lore)
    • Mix-type (hybrid) dunegons
    • Each dungeon being randomized within appropriate sets, and locateable in random locations around the world (like in caves, or behind water-falls, or under the sea); these are based around larger, primary, established dungeons
    • Keep things unique


    Mini-Games
    • Introduce mini-games and area-specific mini-games:
    + Small fighting contests, including bar fights (miniature battlegrounds, or duels)

    + "Chess"
    + Racing on foot, horse, and ship (in arenas and in the world)
    • Winner rewards

    Social Professions
    • Players may select up to three "social professions"
    • Examples: Writer, Artist, Musician, Dancer
    More examples:
    • Astronomer/Astrologer (useful for applying "celestial"/"astrological" upgrades)
    • Biologist (catalogues local ecology, improves accuracy and quality of animal and organ harvesting, medicinal spells)
    • Cartographer (can "record" those randomized miniature dungeons, including the simple rewards at the end -- perhaps numerous but valuable tokens likely to be gained only from these sorts of dungeons, tokens redeemable for special items or quests -- and then the cartographer may sell the "map"/map of that dungeon. The more the cartopgrapher cartographs dungeons, the better he becomes, as with all these fields)
    • Geologist (good at finding rare minerals, caves, and elemental upgrades)
    • Meteorologist (helpful in resources, trade routes, and druid spells)


    Water Vehicles
    • Ships
    • A few profession-specific skills on ships and mounts
    • Wind in the sails, from a pre-set or random pattern, or from player-controlled "magic"
    • High quality textures, impressive appearance of the terrain (textures via cameras and photoshop are inexpensive)


    World
    • Dynamic weather and waves
    • Pursue player-environment synergy
    • Detail is a must: Player ships chained to docks, rotting cheese
    • A giant, open, seemingly seamless world that blends fantastical environments and truly feels huge and natural (recursively) and at least to scale
    • 12 hour day and night cycle
    • Scary things come out at night in the untamed places
    • Really fast travel through a gigantic world (teleportation is only allowed after reaching a ruin or portal and activating it with a scroll or book or tool)


    Miscellaneous
    • Culture-oriented cities competing with others for land (guild or NPC-run outposts in and out of the battle-arena), sea (hiring pirates to harass NPC traders from opposing cities), and air (most trading is accomplished by air)
    • Crop growth percentages determined by the weather
    • Economics, primitive stock-market between major city hubs
    • Do not shy from "grit", especially stylised "grit"
    • Minutiae: Giant doors should not squeak like little doors -- hire someone who notices the minutiae
    • Cannons
  18. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    Here is a quick sketch from years ago, including additional, non-canon continents representing environments which are currently missing, and also including EQ's "unknown" continents. There is probably a great deal of inaccuracy (e.g., sizing, the small N to S length of Karan, the too-southerly and too-northerly positions of Kunark and Faydwer (respectively), etc.). You can imagine the player-affected sky-ground-sea trade-route system extending from city to city, with guild-operated defenses lying throughout the territories of each major city-hub. As players travel from city to city, many of the "mobs" present near the roads will be weak (yet not merely beetles or deer); but farther from city territories, toward the middle of the continents, away from the coasts and far out into the seas, deep underground and high above, are the much more difficult opponents.

    [IMG]

    As an example of layered PvP: "Game of Thrones" is immensely popular; people enjoy this danger and positive uncertainty.
    "Caelia" represents an "Atlantis" of impenetrable fjords, set along its rings with cities inhabited by grayscale erudites (solid black to liquid white); "Balthar" represents the city of an avian race set on cliffs and badlands, reminiscent of the Grand Canyon; "Krios" represents the organized and labyrinthine woodland home of satyrs and centaurs; "Dorr Luclif", tropical islands; "K'tng", the Philippines and Thailand; "Groh", (ancient) China; "Trostye", pirate coves; "Fla" represents tall, thin, icy islands filled with bioluminescent creatures, secret stores, and appropriate characters (smugglers, mischievous wizards).

    Exploring (includes puzzles), adventuring (includes combat), social maintenance (includes guilds), harvesting, crafting, and more. Then...
    Resources
    Every region specializes in resources (type and production), resulting in "behaviors": slight increases in costs and bonuses to allied city-states and vendors; mild increases in costs and zero bonuses to neutrally-aligned city-states and vendors; and costs for opposing city-states as a function of distance and time, often resulting in severe cost-increases. City-states cannot use the trade-route system to trade with opposing city-states. Regimes without any neutral connections, like the pirates of "Trostyte", must rely entirely on smuggled or pirated (raided) materials.
    Sold resources are transferred into various points ("currencies"; and the rarer a resource is to a region, the more "local coinage" is generated), which may then be redeemed for global wealth (gold) through standard selling, or used for the region-specific guilds' defensive structures and outposts, ships and ship items, armor, city building dyes, and so forth; this further maintains resource applicability beyond crafting.
    These resource cost values may shift (only between preset/fixed quantities*, as this system is best automated (to play itself), always returning up or down to baselines), according to guild input, player input, or -- in a dictatorship or theocracy (as opposed to a republic or democracy) -- according to the whims of the tyrant or some piddling haruspicy of domineering priests. Political affiliations between city-states ought to be fixed for the sake of PvPvPvPvPvPvP and just-stable-enough economies (resource trade).
    City O, in the market for "golden barley", and only able to get it from opposing City Q, must rely on the multi-partisan City F to facilitate the acquisition. What this looks like for the player is purchasing "golden barley" at a higher cost in their native City O than City F (they cannot easily enter City Q), so that:

    • depending on location, some items are more expensive to craft than others
    • goods cost different prices in different regions ("Teir'dal Blood Wine is how much less?!")
    • "status symbols" vary, for mid-cost items, by region
    • if a shortage of "golden barley" develops due to drought (teams of druids may slightly affect weather), City Q (and the players of City Q) will be the first to use the "golden barley", ballooning the price and sometimes running its supply too low for any (surplus) to reach City O from City F (there is a short delay in the purchasing of resources from opposing cities by way of multi-partisan cities)
    • the only solution for the citizens of City O, then, is to raid aerial, terrestrial, and natatorial supply-lines for a percentage of the total resources being traded
    • in retaliation, players then may fight and ally (with promises made upon future resource value goals), conscripting NPCs (sky-fighters, pirates, and rough mercenaries) in raids against region-specific guild structures and outposts
    • some structures will need to be rebuilt or repaired, and this is the recursive nature of the system at work
    • the final element is a dynamic one involving coordinated NPC attacks, with or without the assistance of GMs, and in-line with content updates, GUs, expansions, and lore

    *First locally for that particular resource in a player's resource instance -- and then "globally" via the average of players' resource-instance costs (for that particular resource) * variable automated percentage of the city-state/region: so if it's 43cp per 1 unit of "golden barley" in player A's resource-instance and 45cp for player B's, the global trade-route cost of that resource from that city is the player's price plus 44cp * a percentage dependent on raid frequency (how often is the resource protected?), taxes (on housing upkeep / city operating costs with the ratio determining the default subsidies for increased trade or defense, where the nature of the regulation of extras is determined by the political system), and drought. Player A can sell "golden barley" for 43cp in his home city through a vendor. Competition between Player A and Player B will keep prices low.

    Alternatively, players could be allowed to charge any price for resources sold by way of the trade-route to allied or neutral city-states, while paying a flat, resource-specific export percentage (tax) to the home city-state and a flat, resource-specific import percentage to allied and neutral city-states (after sales (again, mostly automated (x sales of resource per day, where x varies by city-state))); and 15% of each trader's resources lost to a successful band of raiders, with raids on the same caravan possible up to five times along an entire trade-route; NPC resource guards can be purchased; weather and resource prevalence are still included.

    Since the system operates from unique baselines in each city, some (locally rarer) resources are valued more in City O than in City F or Q, and can be traded for more "local coinage" with which to buy upgrades, etc.

    Smaller quantities of resources can be sold directly to other players (crafters) through the global "grey market" bazaar without hurting the macro-management of special items, structures, and PvPvPvPvPvPvP.

    Multiple resources can be grown in a resource-instance.
  19. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

  20. ARCHIVED-ProteinPlus3 Guest

    Obviously: Most players would like more flexibility with player-edited content; and they would like player-edited content to connect with the established stories and settings of the game-world. These could be called "dreams", "visions", "hidden realms", etc. They could be guild-halls-as-dungeons during the raids of opposing guilds. These features are achievable, especially through the use of the aforementioned "cartography" system, in addition to the other concepts.