Goblin Squad Member
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Are there any plans to add any extra UI tools into the game. When I first played Eve I was amazed that they had the foresight to add the simplest tools into the game, that were so useful. The ability to use a calculator, and keep notes inside of a game, or use a spreadsheet was so awesome. I think that more MMO's should do this.
You could even have an animation of a character pulling out an abacus, or writing in a book as optional, though I imagine that would be a social emote that a character should start instead of just doing it every time they started using these tools automatically.
I also like the idea of maps not being static. In pretty much every MMO you can pull out your map, and you have the map of the world automatically... your character didn't purchase it anywhere. The map fills in when you go places automatically. But you haven't actively told your character to add anything to the map, and your characters doesn't have the appropriate skills automatically to do this. And everyone's maps are all magic and show where they are instantly. I'd think that would be a pretty expensive magic item, a magic map that shows where you are and automatically maps any location that you've been to? wtf...
Players should have to purchase maps and figure out where they are on the map.
Maybe that's just me missing the old days without instant travel everywhere in a game, and having everything spoon fed to you. People appreciate things when they have to work for them. I have epic stories from back in the day of oldschool everquest of trying to meet my buddy who started in freeport when I started in Qeynos. There weren't maps in the game or instant travel. It was an adventure just to meet up with each other, and figure out how to get to each other. And it was fun. At some point we realized that we could find maps of places online, but we printed them out, and the paper we were holding didn't have a magic dot telling us where we were. There could be map merchants in the game, or characters with cartography skills that made maps and sold them.
With other UI tools you could add all sorts of things to maps too, you could hyperlink information from a document or spreadsheet onto them. I'm curious what everyone else thinks about these ideas.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The UI requests I would make, that are probably not real obvious or not going to be asked for by everyone else, are:
1. Don't force me to use the mouse as a pointing device, and don't force me to click with it. I should be able to do anything I need to do by pointing the center of my screen at an object and using Key Bindings to activate that object. If there are special Key Bindings for things like selecting the nearest (inside Line-of-Sight!) object of a particular kind, that's even better.
2. When I do click in the world, anticipate that it might just be because I'm trying to activate Mouse-Look or Mouse-Move, and don't force me to find a spot on the screen with no objects behind it in order to activate those. It's a real frustration in LOTRO that, if I try to Mouse-Look or Mouse-Move with an object under the mouse, it fails.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Oh, and a thought that might appease some of the anti-target-lock folks: Perhaps you should drop your target if they get out of line-of-sight. That might require too much processing, though. Maybe you could provide a simple command that a character can activate in order to force anyone who's targeting him to drop target if they don't have LOS.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Oh, and a thought that might appease some of the anti-target-lock folks: Perhaps you should drop your target if they get out of line-of-sight. That might require too much processing, though. Maybe you could provide a simple command that a character can activate in order to force anyone who's targeting him to drop target if they don't have LOS.
You mean make smoke and other FOW actually effect the ability to shoot accurately? Awesome...and tactical.
Maybe as a compromise allow both a target (effected by LOS) and a WoW-type Focus which is not, but can still only be targeted when in LOS.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I also like the idea of maps not being static. In pretty much every MMO you can pull out your map, and you have the map of the world automatically... your character didn't purchase it anywhere. The map fills in when you go places automatically. But you haven't actively told your character to add anything to the map, and your characters doesn't have the appropriate skills automatically to do this. And everyone's maps are all magic and show where they are instantly. I'd think that would be a pretty expensive magic item, a magic map that shows where you are and automatically maps any location that you've been to? wtf...
Players should have to purchase maps and figure out where they are on the map....
I have epic stories from back in the day of oldschool everquest of trying to meet my buddy who started in freeport when I started in Qeynos. There weren't maps in the game or instant travel. At some point we realized that we could find maps of places online, but we printed them out, and the paper we were holding didn't have a magic dot telling us where we were. There could be map merchants in the game, or characters with cartography skills...
I remember those days. I started in Rivervale, and I set out on the trek to Qeynos a few levels too early. I didn't even realize that I had strayed into a mid-level zone until the first gnoll I met pounded me flat.
Hopefully the dynamic nature of humanoid camps and other adventure locations will make the online maps a little less comprehensive.
This is a good topic with good ideas! But it looks like Mark Kalmes already realized that ;)