Goblin Squad Member
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One great flaw in sandboxes, and the major reason they lack mass appeal, is because of the relative difficulty to get into the game.
Any and all of the "Themepark" content should be centered at the first few levels of character development. There should be extensive NPC interaction introducing the players to every facet of the game. And most of all this has to be done in a fun way, it shouldn't feel like a lesson. Players should start the game classless, and be given a sneak preview of every option they have, since from what i have read this game will be geared at 1 character per subscription. The tutorial should be choosing your class, and the first few levels should be introducing you to what is available to do.
The goal is to never see: "A getting started guide to PFO" in your forums. In most games less than 10% of the population is active on the forums, the majority of knowledge needs to be readily available in the game.
If this game really wants to explode it needs mass appeal. The last game to try something similar to what is going on here was Earthrise, and it tanked hard. You can appeal to a niche market to start the game, but you need the mass appeal to grow the game so it can improve. Masthead proved that the market for high risk sandboxes are very low, and that market is no-longer prepared to deal with a buggy launch, they want a good game from the start and not have to help drag it along. The niche you should be targeting for launch is the builders and developers, not the full open PvP crowd.
The concept of losing everything you are carrying is a huge turnoff to a huge portion of the market, and they won't get into the game until they know they can travel safely through large sections of the game, only going out into hostile territory with groups for very high end crafting requirements, and when they go into that hostile territory, being able to keep all of their valuable goods safe in their faction's territory.
There needs to be some in-depth work between the player base and the developers to mold the base game, don't just give us a lump of clay to play with or expect us to come up with everything. For this game to be a big success it needs to get to a point where new players align them selves with a faction and that faction controls enough territory for the majority of it's followers to spend the vast majority of their time in game safe and only really endangering them selves when they are late in developing their character.
I would make it a goal, that a year after launch, he game will be ready to accept a more general audience. Developers and players should have split the map up and the major controlling factions should become integrated into the starting game. Players should come in, do the tutorial, play out the first few levels learning the game in a safe environment ending in selecting a faction. And from this point on, they should never have to stand around twiddling their thumbs trying to find something to do. There should always be faction/self improving missions to run, or player/faction created missions to get components/resources or take out a hostile camp.
Start the game with a high curve, then work with the players to make it shallow.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... since from what i have read this game will be geared at 1 character per subscription.
Ryan has been quite clear that you'll be able to have several characters on a single account, but you'll only be able to train one at a time, unless you pay for a second subscription.
As for the main point, I totally agree that there needs to be in-game information for players to learn how to play. At the same time, though, there will be a lot of content that results from the players interacting with each other. It will not be possible to have the developers create tutorials for that kind of content. There will definitely be "How to <something>" guides in the forums that explain how to do things that the developers really have no business spending time trying to create in-game tutorials for.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Almost completely disagree, For the most part you are talking about a very long amount of time on rails, in absolute safety, you might as well be talking about a theme park game at this point. There can possibly be an informative tutorial, and NPCs that explain mechanics, but the idea of.
1. Forced factions: So little freedom, my friends and enemies are already decided for me whether I like them or not? IMO factions should be diverse, player run and controlled, WoW's factions were horrible, he's orc so I hate him, he's human so I hate him. There is no depth, no times of peace, cease fires etc... I want a faction system where enemies and friends may vary, where if you do not fit the rules and goals of your faction you get booted, based on what the players think, not an arbitrary algorithm.
2. I think the 0 risk high reward crowd is more then catered to, there is a reason why eve is still one of the longest and strongest going MMO's besides WoW, and it's been said time and time again, WoW's massive player base, is more or less happy where they are, dozens if not hundreds of games have attempted to mimic it's success in the way it went, and none have come close.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... since from what i have read this game will be geared at 1 character per subscription.Ryan has been quite clear that you'll be able to have several characters on a single account, but you'll only be able to train one at a time, unless you pay for a second subscription.
As for the main point, I totally agree that there needs to be in-game information for players to learn how to play. At the same time, though, there will be a lot of content that results from the players interacting with each other. It will not be possible to have the developers create tutorials for that kind of content. There will definitely be "How to <something>" guides in the forums that explain how to do things that the developers really have no business spending time trying to create in-game tutorials for.
Yeah, i know we will have multiple characters, but on top of the 2+ year time to 'max level' will probably result in players running a few characters for a month or two, then focusing on one for the majority of their play time.
I'm fine with other how-to's for the more in-depth player run content. Ideally players should never have to go out of game to get any information. The tutorial should cover finding content created by other players. It would be nice if players could create in game brochures directing players to their settlements to run their missions. These brochures would then be scattered in other town-centers depending on how much the player is willing to pay for advertising their content. Every hotel in RL has a brochure shelf, why couldn't this copy into the game.
The major problem I had with Earthrise, outside of horrible optimization, was that after the tutorial it just dumps you in a town, no direction on where to go, just a handful of repeatable quests. I had to go on to the forums to figure out what there is to do, which turned into the coordinates for the highest reward grinding pattern for your first chunk of skillboxes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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1. Forced factions: So little freedom, my friends and enemies are already decided for me whether I like them or not?
I'm not sure I understand the problem here. Is it that all orces are Horde, that there is no neutral race, or that the state of war is static and permanent?
To me, NPC factions and the relations between them is an important part of the backdrop. The different religions, pathfinders, hellknights - I want to see them all in the game! Joining a faction implies choosing your enemies. If I join the local bandits, then Hellknights should absolutely hate me - and vice versa. NPC Hellknights would hunt me on sight, while a PC hellknight might have some incentive to do so too (although he could of course also my friend/party member/trading partner/secret lover/etc).
The faction system in Fallen Earth is an interesting model - relations between factions are set, you choose where and how deep to involve yourself, and you face the consequences of either choice in both pve and pvp. (There are faction-based pvp areas/events and faction-aligned mobs, but players from all factions can group, trade and cooperate in any way they want outside the contested areas).
I would absolutely want joinable NPC-led factions competing against each other (on a level from exclusive membership to faction-based pvp).
In my dreams there would be a 'civic diplomacy' (Vanguard term) system that let PC faction members over time affect the relations between factions (to the point where players -eventually- could make the Hellknights declare war on specific player-made guilds, or make the Pathfinders cooperate with the Aspis consortium).
However, characters should always start neutral and have the option of remaining so.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would absolutely want joinable NPC-led factions competing against each other (on a level from exclusive membership to faction-based pvp).
In my dreams there would be a 'civic diplomacy' (Vanguard term) system that let PC faction members over time affect the relations between factions (to the point where players -eventually- could make the Hellknights declare war on specific player-made guilds, or make the Pathfinders cooperate with the Aspis consortium).However, characters should always start neutral and have the option of remaining so.
Perhaps I was a bit misunderstood, but I think the way I would say the NPC factions should be the minority of players if they are join-able. I am greatly against from day 1, permanently being in kill on sight terms against 1/4th or 1/2 of the population. Even sworn enemies and tense relations, shouldn't be at war 100% of the time, and in fact should IMO still be apt to want mutually beneficial trade agreements etc...
Take the real world example of the united states and china, the 2 countries are in a constant state of disliking each-other, opposite views on how a country should be run, both regularly spying on each-other, yet also so economically tied together that war is almost impossible.
IMO every serious war, should reach towards a conclusion. IE 2 sides are arguing over a hex, eventually the ownership of the hex is decided by the outcome of the war, and eventually one side gives up. I greatly dislike the idea of a "well whenever you see a X anywhere, kill him". Now a "if you see an X on ___ hex where we agreed they cannot go after the last war", that is a different story.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The blog has been quite clear that there will be 3 major NPC factions: the Knights of Iomedae at Fort Riverwatch; the Hellknights at Fort Inevitable; and Thornkeep, a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I would be quite disappointed if I were forced to join any of those factions, or any of the myriad PC factions that arise during the game.
Tutorials should teach you how to interact with the game, and give you a basic introduction to the world around you. They should even get you started training skills, and point you to your first "dungeon". They most definitely should not put you on rails and send you off to enjoy the ride.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In terms of Factions, I actualy like the idea of fixed NPC factions with thier own motivations which the players can choose to ally with to various degrees.
I don't mind player made factions as well....but a game that relies soley on player made/run factions is (IMO) an indication that the Dev's don't understand what a GM's role in an RPG is about.
It also can be a bit hard to swallow depending on the setting. Players may like to think they are the center of the universe....but logicaly a guild of a few hundred swords would be at best a valuable but entirely disposable resource when dealing with politics on the scale of Kingdoms and Empires. They should have a decent amount of impact localy...but really they only nudge the movers and shakers of the world a bit.... they should not be THE power.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The process of bringing a new player into the sandbox is something I spent a massive amount of time studying at CCP. In EVE it's called the New Player Experience, and it has been evolving over time.
My opinion about the NPE is that it has to have a couple of key features:
1: You should always have something to be doing. These objectives need to be presented visually in a way that is nearly impossible to overlook or misinterpret.
2: You should always know where you are supposed to be going to do the things you are supposed to be doing. This should be visualized in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the new player to fail to know what that visualization means.
3: You should have stretch goals. You should have items that you can't use (yet) but know what has to happen for you to be able to use them. There should be PvE content that you can't access or complete, but you should know what you have to do to enable that content. (I call this "Diabloizing" the NPE)
4: You should be socialized. People need to be interacting with other people from early on in the game to avoid the syndrome of feeling the world is "empty". This can be accomplished by putting you into situations where cooperation with others is clearly the best option. Hooks from this can easily lead to formal social organizations.
5: The NPE should introduce the UI gradually. Only add a UI element when the character can actually use (or needs) that element. Keep the clutter to a minimum and let people focus on immersion and building control knowledge, not being distracted by all sorts of shiny screen objects.
6: It should be bypassable. If you're an experienced player with a new character, or you are a new player being hand-held by an experienced player, it should be possible to get out of the NPE without too much difficulty. Conversely, it should be possible to re-engage with the NPE if you thought you were too cool for skool but it turns out that you're a newb and you need the help.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
4: You should be socialized. People need to be interacting with other people from early on in the game to avoid the syndrome of feeling the world is "empty". This can be accomplished by putting you into situations where cooperation with others is clearly the best option. Hooks from this can easily lead to formal social organizations.
Along these lines I would like to see a robust mentoring system to connect veterans and newbies in meaningful ways.
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Goblin Squad Member
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4: You should be socialized. People need to be interacting with other people from early on in the game to avoid the syndrome of feeling the world is "empty". This can be accomplished by putting you into situations where cooperation with others is clearly the best option. Hooks from this can easily lead to formal social organizations.Along these lines I would like to see a robust mentoring system to connect veterans and newbies in meaningful ways.
+1 to that, Possibly even with reputation or vanity merit badge rewards. I for one would love a "see 10 people through adventurers college", with an option for the newbies to replace a mentor if he/she does not help them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Along these lines I would like to see a robust mentoring system to connect veterans and newbies in meaningful ways.
LOTRO has an "advice" channel that a lot of friendly veterans will stay in to answer newbie questions. Is that enough?
I know I've personally opened up a /who list and looked for a high-level character of my class to pester with class-specific questions. It seems like it would be really low-cost and simple to let players flag themselves as willing mentors so they can be easily identified in /who.
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Goblin Squad Member
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4: You should be socialized. People need to be interacting with other people from early on in the game to avoid the syndrome of feeling the world is "empty". This can be accomplished by putting you into situations where cooperation with others is clearly the best option. Hooks from this can easily lead to formal social organizations.
All great goals, and exactly what I'm looking for. But 4 is a slippery slope. I'll use SW:TOR as an example here.
I'm on one of the, now few, high population servers. There are group quests and they provide the best rewards. The problem is, once you get past lvl 30, the amount of other players on each planet falls off very quickly. You need 4 players to complete each mission, but the missions are divided into the 5 zones on the planet, so you need 4 people in your zone. and when 15 people are online this can take a long time to get together, then there are a further few zones that are "bonus areas" which are usually being done by 1-2 people and you rarely get a group for those mission. And the build of the game makes the higher level player lose time if they come and help you.
The point is, grouping cannot be specific to a level. If you want people to socialize you need incentives for players to bring along newer players for the majority of the group content. This could be accomplished with a 'Mentoring' xp, and there can be sets of badges that require this. The way it could be handled is you would get mentoring points for every few minutes you are actively grouped with lower 'level' characters, and the ticks become larger the higher sum of levels lower than you.
For example, a level 15 is grouped with 3 level 10's , he gets 15 ticks of mentoring xp every 5 minutes.
or
A 20 and a 15 are grouped with 2 10's, the 15 gets 10 ticks, and the 20 gets 25 ticks.
Bottom line: There is always a 'wave' of players, and if you aren't on the 'wave' you get left out of group content if it is not properly spread out. I would make it a goal to have the first 10 levels work well together for group content, and after that have a 4-7 level range for everything but the extreme difficulty super high reward stuff late in the game that would be for small ranges of levels or exclusive to 20's.
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Just to clarify my point on aligning with a faction from the start: Yes this should be an option, my wording wasn't very good. Whenever i hint to joining a faction, i mean aligning your self with one. This way you have the protection of their NPC's and access to certain shops/buildings. This should be separate from 'joining' where you represent the faction and are susceptible to a war. Aligning would give you no bonus outside of protection from the militia and some minor things. You would start with 1 faction aligned to you, that you earn the respect of in the tutorial, and you could then go run missions for another faction and you could be aligned to it also. You are still always faction-neutral when it comes to combat.
Even player created factions should have the option to turn this system on and off. They can set missions they want random people to run, and each one grants some faction influence. After a certain level of faction influence they set, you can gain protection, and if you move further you can even be granted the opportunity to join the faction.
You can be aligned with as many factions as you want, but once you join one you are disallowed from joining nemesis factions and are automatically aligned(at a basic level, those factions can require influence for further bonus') with all friendly factions to the one you just joined. All factions neutral to the faction you joined can still be aligned to, but you can only represent one faction at a time.
Once a faction becomes big enough, they could buy their way into the tutorial to be one of the factions new players can align with.
This of course could be optional, you could start the game with no faction and be a nomad. This of course would be highly discouraged, because you would have no inherent protection when you enter the game. The goal is to give players a safe environment to start their character, without forcing everyone to go to a few set locations(once the game has some steam).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Along these lines I would like to see a robust mentoring system to connect veterans and newbies in meaningful ways.LOTRO has an "advice" channel that a lot of friendly veterans will stay in to answer newbie questions. Is that enough?
I know I've personally opened up a /who list and looked for a high-level character of my class to pester with class-specific questions. It seems like it would be really low-cost and simple to let players flag themselves as willing mentors so they can be easily identified in /who.
I know a few games, dream of mirror online and a few others, actually had a mentor system, where characters over a certain level were permitted to take characters under a certain level and register them as students. Both parties recieve a reward after the student hits a certain level. If they have say a training zone or island, if you let vets go there and basically gather up newbies to be their students and help them through the tutorials (note these quests do need to be designed so that the vet can't just do them for the newbie and basically function as a skip by without learning anything result).
Turbine's advice channel was a nice touch, but shortly after they started going F2P, at least in DDO, they wound up with far to many newbies pretending to be veterans, taking guesses trying to look smart, and trolls intentionally giving bad advice, vets could see the obvious false information, but there was no way for a newbie to tell who the real experts were.
Possibly a combination, say after succesfully training 5-10 newbies, someone could earn a "Guide" title that goes next to their name in an advice channel. Something to inform the newbies that this person actually knows what he/she's talking about
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Goblin Squad Member
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The point is, grouping cannot be specific to a level.
This is extremely important. What developer created content there is will go a lot further if it can be consumed by a wide variety of "levels".
A lot of us are used to "mentoring" systems that were built to support XP-based games. I don't think those will work with PFO. But I think there's really a lot of room to make newbie players useful even to a group of veterans, and I hope PFO does this.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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The process of bringing a new player into the sandbox is something I spent a massive amount of time studying at CCP. In EVE it's called the New Player Experience, and it has been evolving over time.
My opinion about the NPE is that it has to have a couple of key features:
1: You should always have something to be doing. These objectives need to be presented visually in a way that is nearly impossible to overlook or misinterpret.
2: You should always know where you are supposed to be going to do the things you are supposed to be doing. This should be visualized in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the new player to fail to know what that visualization means.
Replace "are supposed to be doing" with "have indicated that you want to do"; the sandbox should tell you what the tools are, and indicate some way of how they were intended to be used. The sandbox should not indicate that the intended use of the tools is the only one. If I want to play as a naturalist observing creatures in their natural habitat (or some role which the designers didn't put in mechanics for), and just find and hide out around wild creatures, I should be able to turn off the 'tell me what to do' messages and play a different game than everyone else. Whether one has fun playing Jane Goodall is a different matter entirely than whether one is 'supposed to' play that way.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Replace "are supposed to be doing" with "have indicated that you want to do"
I would say "is available to do" And the interface has filters what is brought up.
So open the "what can i be doing" window. Check the "hunting" box, and you see the missions for hunting, starting withe the nearest/appropriate for your 'level'. Then you can further narrow down your search with types of animals, so you can select say: 'wolves' and you see the missions for hunting wolves.
You can do the same thing with gathering/crafting missions.
I would like this to be handled with a "Find nearest billboard" button. where the game creates a waypoint to the nearest billboard where the player can go through the above described menu to find something to do.
I say this because of player created missions, listing your missions shouldn't be free, there should be an advertising fee to list your missions on billboards, this system takes money out of the game and also provides a filter for player created missions, where only well made or 'good' missions will be more likely because you won't want to pay a fee to list a mission that is returning no profit. Also I don't like super easy access to everything with the click of a button, it makes the game to easy and turns things into a mission grind.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ok, but at some point the interface needs to take the gloves off. It should tell you where to hunt rats, but not where to hunt blink dogs. At least, not in the same manner.
The point of the interface is not to guide you through every part of the game. It is to make sure you always have something productive to do.
Yes, any high reward or rare activities would not be listed. At the same time those activities shouldn't be done in ways that are re-produceable. The moment you have "a guide to finding the super awesome ______" you start to lose immersion. Stuff like that should force the player to go out on their own, there might be a few hints, but nothing would be handed to them.
I like the faction system in Vanguard. You start out at a preset, and have to earn better, or worse, as the case may be. You may start out KOS simply due to racial choice, or allies. But player action should be capable of changing that. Do things your friends don't like, and you should end up becoming persona non grata.