Just... What the fuck man... How do you DO that?! I think that DLP needs to band together and somehow get this man the job he deserves, if only so that such an amazing, industry-changing game might have the possibility of coming into existence. Does anyone know anyone with ties to Bethesda? I know a guy who lives in the same town and might have a cousin working in the company. Gonna talk to him. Can we try and find the CEO's email address? The Lead Designer's? Someone's?! Get Raine to put that shit in an email, sign that motherfucker with a fat John Hancock and send it to as many people as necessary as many times as necessary that they understand that there is a decent number of people who WANT this shit to happen. I want to see this game exist before I die.

 

I'm with you guys. I didn't really properly read that until just now... but wow. You actually covered pretty much all of my points. I wish there was something I could do to get you a job. Because as all of the others said... I'd play the shit out of that.

The only concern that I'd have in this respect is... balance. But then, does a game like that even need to be inherently balanced for 1 on 1 combat?

 

1v1 probably wouldn't be terribly fair, at least in the sense that, after a point, I imagine you'd get builds that would dominate that particular circuit because they're optimized to take down one "elite" opponent as quickly as possible.

That being said, though, I'd be a lot more interested in the possibility of things like team battles. 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, ect. Maybe even have arenas for group battles, where multiple teams get tagged Red or Blue, and go up against each other in a complex terrain area, like two castles staring at each other from across a river, or a capture the flag map that is a series of ravines with narrow ledges that act as choke points, and rope bridges that can be used as a quick way to travel around the level, but are also destructible, so the short cuts carry risk. 2 groups on each side, which would be 8v8. Maybe even go bigger. All out war simulation is a possibility that's in the cards.

My one concern, now that I've had time to think about it, is stat progression. You can't gain points into your core stats at every level up, or even every other level up. The numbers would just be too huge.

Think about it this way. You get somebody that's leveled up to, I don't know, say 200. That probably wouldn't take that terribly long. And lets say that every time you level up, the game automatically invests four, just four points across your core stats.

That would mean that, by the time you got to level 200, eight hundred points would have been put into your stats.

There needs to be something in place to slow down stat progression. It if worked with the same numbers that Oblivion ran with, where you could get upwards of ten points into your stats every level up if you played your cards right, people would end up with absolutely ridiculous stuff, like 5,000 strength.

I'd have to play with the math a bit to be sure, but I think it might be more reasonable to track which skills get used, and then distribute a flat amount of skill points across the relevant skills every fifth level or so. That would be a much more reasonable stat progression, and it would make gear that boosts core stats actually relevant and powerful. A warrior that finds a pair of enchanted bracelets that offer almost no armor protection but +4 Strength might seriously consider taking the hit to his armor rating to wear them. That sort of thing.

I have not, actually. Is it any good? What does Secret World have that I'm inadvertently describing?

Do what? I'm not sure what it is you're talking about.

 

It's good, for an MMO. I haven't touched it in a few weeks (or maybe months by now, actually) due to school and other stuff, but once summer break starts I'll start playing it again.

I think the similarity to The Secret World comes from the lack of classes. Every character can learn every ability eventually, so as long as you have the gear, any character can fill any role. Teamwork comes in because you can't do everything at once. That sounds like what you described to me.

 

Why would someone so creative want to work at a game company when he could start his own? Kickstarter is all the rage these days and you could get a heck of a lot of money if people like your ideas. Just post them onto the website, tweak a few names to avoid copyright, and see where it takes you. Worst case scenario you get nothing and you're no worse off than you were before. Best case scenario you become a multi-millionaire in a few weeks and we get to see a life-changing game come into existence since you could hire people to make your ideas reality.

 

Raine: What I mean is how do you pull such awesome out of your ass just like that.

As to stat points, make it non-linear. Perhaps an exponential curve that balances at higher levels. Maybe for the first 100 levels you get 2-4 pts per lvl (the amount could be based on a metric that is determined by cooperative play or something, the more you play together the more efficiently you gain attribute pts) that are distributed in a decimal manner based on skill usage and applicable attributes. Then for every, say 75 lvls, the pt gain goes down by 0.1. So 100-175 is 1.9-3.9, 175-250 is 1.8-3.8 etc. There might be a hard floor of 1 pt per lvl spread over 6-9 base attributes which would come into effect after about lvl 800 or it could be that by lvl 800 you no longer gain stat pts from solo play, i.e. the spread is 0-2 now.
Of course all these numbers need to be tweaked something fierce with a lot of play testing.

Example:
So with a middle amount of coop play you get 3 attribute pts per lvl till lvl 100. That means that in that amount of time you gain 300 pts that are spread over 6-9 attributes in a weighted manner governed by your play style. If you play a rogue/thief/assassin then the pts spread would be more heavily weighted toward Dexterity, Int., Agility etc. then strength, will/wisdom, or endurance.

Under an even spread, equal weighted condition with mid level coop play at level 800 you would have 339.6-226.4 points in each attribute based on a 6-9 attribute list. After 800 levels that's pretty balanced. At level 100 after the period of max gain, this is 49.5-33 per attribute which might actually be a little on the low side.


Sorry for all the abbreviations.

 

Okay, I figured someone else would have posted this already but.

Here

is another video released by Zenimax. This one showing off just how many things you can interact with and other things.

 

That actually looks pretty cool, I'm not exactly sure how it would work though. Like runescape where things spawn every now and then? I'd imagine that the locked chests would be instanced to players, but for regular items in the world, an apple on a table for example... I guess it could be just all sub-instanced for each player/party individually.

 

So that was (most) of the ideas that I came up with which were spontaneously contrived. I say most, because some of them I did not put down, because holy christ look at how long that post is already. I mean goddamn, there are shorter stories archived on this site.

Now here are some that are the result of me mulling the idea over for a few days. In for a penny, and all that.

The first is that there needs to be a Challenge or Achievement system of some sort put into the game. A lot of games do that now, and give some passive bonuses or decorative awards for doing so, and some of it is just pure 'gamer score,' which is just an e-penis measurement.

That's not what I'm proposing, though.

See, there are things that 'should' be in the game that still aren't covered. Things that aren't quite central enough to be skills on their own, but which nonetheless 'should' be in the game, to some extent or another. Most people, for instance, would probably use armor of some sort or another. But what if someone wants to run around with no armor, or wear outfits (most probably mage outfits) that provide no actual armor protection? Sure, you could just accept being fragile and getting your ass handed to you as a thing that will happen now, but that's no fun. Likewise, what if someone wants to use unarmed combat? It's not quite worthy of being a skill unto itself, but it could still be fun for people to try, and it would lend itself well to a number of perks, both hybrid and normal. What if someone wants to run an actual martial arts character?

That's where the challenge system comes in.

Imagine, for a moment, if you will, that the whole of the entire Perk Tree is laid out in front of you. Visually, you're looking at a dozen or so 'towers' of perks, but they're all snarled and interconnected after getting a little bit off the ground, because of the Synergy Perks. There may or may not be more perk trees "above" the actual trees, representing DLC or expansions or Prestige Skill Trees or whatever.

But everything is all interconnected with lines. You can trace a line up from One-Handed through the One-Handed Destruction and One-Handed Sneak trees, all the way to the top. It's a series of branching, unbroken lines.

Now start filling in the gaps and open spaces with perks. These are stand-alone perks. Some of them are only one or two perks that connect to each other. Others are little micro-trees in their own right. How do you gain access to these trees?

You complete challenges. These are the miscellaneous perks, the things that don't quite merit being skills but also aren't worth excluding from the equation entirely, either.

Unarmed isn't a Skill. But Unarmed is a Challenge. You kill, let's say, 50 things with your empty hands, and you open up the Novice Unarmed Challenge Perk Tree, which is a stand alone tree that's not connected to any skill, and only has five or so perks. Let's say the tree looks like an open hand, so that's six perks (five fingers, one central perk for the palm). Now, this tree isn't governed by skill level, so you can't raise a skill rank to open up more of it. The new perks aren't locked by skill level, but by Challenges. Let's say that the central perk in the branch, the "palm" perk, is a five-rank Perk. You can invest in it up to 5 times. That will be the one that increases unarmed attack damage. The other five perks, and the ability to invest further in the central perk, are unlocked not by advancing a skill (because this tree is governed by no skill) but by completing Unarmed Challenges. So progress in the central perk might be tied to the original challenge of killing enemies with unarmed attacks (kill 50/kill 150/kill 450 ect), while the other five perks might be connected to completely different challenges, like stealth kills with unarmed attacks or killing Elite enemies with Unarmed attacks. Each of those perks would give you something associated with the Challenge needed to unlock it (like the ability to instantly kill NonElite and NonBoss enemies from stealth with your bare hands, or the ability to apply elemental damage to your fists), and since these are Challenge Perks, and thus difficult to unlock, they'll probably give you more than one thing. So let's go ahead and say that each of the other perks also increases your Unarmed damage while also giving you a new ability or power to use with your Unarmed attacks.

I'm using Unarmed as an example here, but it could apply to a lot of things that you could have or acquire perks for, but which aren't actually skills. Some possible examples of Challenge Perk Trees include, but are not limited to:

Unarmored, where you gain defenses and elemental resistances when not wearing something that provides armor protection (and losing those perks when you don something that does). The challenge could involve taking various types of attacks without wearing armor, and the perks unlocked could involve granting yourself increasing 'Unarmored Armor' ratings, along with resistances to various types of elemental, magical, and physical attacks.

Riding, where you could potentially acquire a wide variety of perks that could grant bonuses or new abilities when on a mount. Riding Perks could, among other things, give your mount additional durability when you are riding it, give you the ability to wield a broader range of weapons or give you access to more attacks while riding, increase your mount's speed by a percentage of their normal speed, and so forth, and so on.

Throwing. Certain weapons, items, and tools can be thrown, like darts, throwing knives, shuriken, or alchemical weapons like explosive or elemental potions, poisons, and debuffs. Throwing itself almost certainly wouldn't be a skill, but it would be a great candidate for a Challenge Perk tree. Throwing Challenge Perks could involve racking up kills and dealing damage with thrown weapons, and could grant bonuses like increasing your throwing range and throw damage, increasing the splash size and duration of Alchemical bombs, or allowing you to throw multiple thrown weapons simultaneously as an activatable attack power at the cost of stamina.

And I'm sure I could come up with other examples of possible Challenge Perks, if given more time to think. In fact, some of you probably have suggestions on that front. And that's good. The whole point of the Challenge Perks is that they fill in the cracks and niches that the main Perk Trees and Hybrid Trees don't really touch on. It would be bloating the skill pool unnecessarily if there were skills to expressly govern mounted combat, not wearing armor, or throwing things at people, because those are much smaller facets of the game that don't truly deserve their own skill, because they aren't big enough or 'main' enough for that, but they still deserve some ability to be progressed or evolved. Hence the Challenge Perk trees.

Also, some other miscellaneous thoughts I've had now that I either neglected to bring up earlier, or which I've had now that I pondered the idea:

- All mounts should be summonable, period, end of discussion. You're in Oblivion, you're exploiting the Waters of Oblivion already for respawning, transferring items, and it would presumably be the driving force behind any fast travel system, so you might as well go all the way, and just let people call their mounts to them whenever they want. To keep it from getting out of control, players can have a kind of 'stable' where they keep all of the various mounts they've bought, collected, or found, but they can only 'equip' one mount at a time. That mount is summonable by a general universal "Summon Mount" power. You cannot summon more than one mount at a time, you can only have one mount "slot," and just like weapons, you cannot swap around mounts in a dungeon or instance. You can summon your mount as many times as you like for no cost to magicka or stamina, but the power would probably have a cooldown time on it.

- The Pits. I envision the Pits as being a sort of callback to the Divine Comedy's depiction of Hell, i.e. Dante's Inferno, only in reverse. You start at the very bottom "layer" of the Pits, and work your way up, layer by layer. This is different from starting at the top and working your way down, because again, this is Peryite. Going down is gravity assisted. This is supposed to be a challenge. You're starting at the bottom, and fighting your way up to the top. You aren't going down a hole. You're already in a hole. You're trying to get out. So the goal is to go higher.

Each 'layer' of the Pits should be approximately the size of a map of a full Elder Scrolls game, give or take a bit. So if you want to imagine the initial size of the game, imagine, let's say, five full sized overworld maps, only instead of that being five maps tacked together with tape, it's more like five individual maps, and you can move between them at certain points.

This allows us to play right into the idea of memorable landscapes and epic visuals. You look up when you're in one layer, and the sky is the underside of the layer above. Imagine, for instance, that the layer second from the top is a shallow sea dotted with islands and partially submerged ruins. And now imagine that each of the layers has massive waterfalls coming down from their ceilings forming lakes and rivers, and when you finally get to the third layer from the top and look up, you see that the ceiling is a giant plane of dark water, rippling and waving like the surface of the ocean in fantastical defiance of gravity, and the source of the waterfalls is that ceiling, with great shafts of water plummeting down and hitting the layers below. Imagine a tree, a real world tree, large enough to stretch across multiple layers, with gnarled roots forming valleys, canyons, and ravines filled with slithering slimes and fungoid monsters, another layer dominated by it's central trunk, with the major city of the layer being carved into and hanging off the sides of the trunk, and yet another layer where the start of the canopy is nearly level with the ground, creating a massive forest that swells up like a dark bubble reaching for the ceiling of the layer above, and is full of bird monsters, monkey trolls, giant spiders, and other arboreal creatures.

Imagine a boss fight that takes place at the bottom of the sea on that ocean island layer. Imagine fighting a giant aquatic monster at the end of a sunken ruin dungeon. Now imagine looking down, and seeing the water just stop a few dozen yards below you, and it's several thousand feet of open sky straight down to the dome forest and surrounding plains and mountains.

This isn't just a place where the top of the world tree is a forest in another layer, and the ocean can be the sky. This is a game, a world, a place, where the ocean floor doesn't exist, and it's just empty air all the way down to the snowy peaks of the mountains far, far below.

These are the sorts of visuals that gamers would remember even years after they stopped playing the game. Memorable scenes of fantasy and wonder, not always beautiful, but never dull or generic. If someone ever showed you a picture of a swelling dome forest of dense, dark trees reaching towards a sky that is also an ocean, you know where you are. There's no need to elaborate further.

Additionally, the very nature of Peryite's realm lends itself amazingly well to an MMO. Why? Because it's not the Pit. It's the Pits. Plural. As in "there's more than one." As in "we can totally spend five years developing an expansion that literally adds an entirely new shaft of composite layers just as large as the one in the core game, if not larger, literally doubling-or-more the size of the gameworld."

Any MMO worth its salt leaves elbow room to expand. WoW keeps adding new continents, Defiance left open a lot of the map that you can't visit, TOR and Destiny both take place in space, and thus can't really ever run out of room. This game should be no different. And it is not. There is no reason you couldn't keep adding on new areas of the game forever if you wanted to. There is no stated limit to the size of the Pits. Most realms ruled by Daedric Princes are like that. Not all are infinite, but most can be if their lord and master wills it to be so. And I'm sure that if Peryite wanted to add more space to the playground for his beloved and beautiful Champions, he would so so with relish.

- Enemy migration. This is something of a novel concept, and I've never actually witnessed it before, though I'm not prepared to say it doesn't exist at all, because I know of a few games that it would make sense to have it in (like the Monster Hunter franchise). In essence, the idea here is that enemies don't always stay in the same locations waiting for you all the time. Goblin and giant warbands might move from encampment to encampment on a kind of sporadic rotation. Bestial enemies might have migration patterns where they occasionally flock together en-mass and 'move' from one location to another, which causes them to stop appearing almost altogether in the previous location, but suddenly become a dense presence in another. Boss monsters might occasionally move from one dungeon instance to another, trading places like a vast game of musical chairs, or moving to a dungeon that had not held no end boss before, thereby giving a nasty surprise to unwary parties of adventurers who do not pay attention or read the lay of the land to realize that a new master has taken up residence in the place. This could even be used to vary up the boss battles themselves; some final dungeon areas might be much more suited to fighting certain types of bosses, which could put the players at a tactical advantage or disadvantage depending on the circumstances. "Where" and "when" both become factors in victory, along with skill and tactics.

Other games do this to a degree, such as the recent generations of Pokemon and their Pokemon "swarms," but I've never actually seen a game where enemies will, on a semiregular basis, just pack up and move, literally setting up camp in a different location and vanishing from the previous one. And if such a thing exists (and again, I can think of a few games where it would make sense for it to exist, so it might), I've certainly never heard of the idea that you could potentially run into those enemies while they are in the process of moving from one location to another.

Goblin war bands might move, but I've never seen or heard of a game where a savvy group of players that know the lay of the land can intercept them as they're crossing through a bottleneck ravine, and farm them for drops and levels using the terrain to their advantage.

- Fast Travel. It should probably exist. However, and this is a big however, it should exist only in an extremely limited capacity. Players can fast travel between a few major locations on any given layer of the Pit, but beyond the major city for each layer and possibly a few other significant major locations in each individual layer, everywhere else you have to walk, run, or ride to. This is a game that should, by all rights, have hundreds upon hundreds of different sites that could be visited and explored, but the total number of actual fast travel locations you can move to should probably not be larger than twenty.

This encourages party exploration and discovery, usage of the mount system to cover ground, and makes the scenery and background an ever-present part of the game, as opposed to something that the player doesn't notice because they're too busy teleporting around to care.

There were few moments I enjoyed more in the generation of gaming past than sailing my boat full-tilt into the mouth of a coming thunderstorm in Wind Waker. I like the fact that Dragon's Dogma and Dark Souls severely limit your ability to just teleport to places, and practically force you to explore and fight enemies as a matter of course if you want to travel anywhere. There's no reason both of those experiences could not be rolled together into one.

Allow me to pain a scene for you, if you will.

You and your friends have picked a dungeon that has a lot of enemies that drop materials that you collectively need to upgrade your equipment and use in some rituals. You fast traveled to the nearest major location, you saddle up on your mounds, and you roll on out. As you ride, the server's weather changes. There's a thunder storm brewing, and it'll be here in just a few minutes. Then you see it. Off in the distance, a massive moving shadow is taking long, slow strides across an immense open plane of grass and shallow water.

It's a boss. The Iron Titan, a gigantic boss monster that is usually found in a coliseum dungeon beneath the mountain range of this layer, has chosen today to migrate to a new location. He is a dangerous opponent in his natural habitat due to the close quarters in which you have to fight him. But here, he's out in the open, exposed, and two of your group have flight-capable mounts in their mount slots.

You make the call. As a group, you decide to postpone the dungeon raid and grab for this unique opportunity. Two of your party take to the air, one with Destruction-Archery and the other with pure magic, while the two of you on the ground ready your own weapons. One of you has enough perks to always have a spear on hand when mounted regardless of what he has in his weapon loadout, and he readies that, while the final member of the group ques up his best alchemical bombs to try and stagger the Titan, and flips through his selection of Conjuration spells to choose some things that can move fast enough to keep up with the moving battle that's about to take place.

As your party pulls level with the Iron Titan and starts to attack it, the storm hits. The sky grows dark, rain starts pouring down in sheets, obscuring visibility and disturbing the pools of water on the plain, and lightning rumbles through the sky, occasionally flashing down and casting light through the stifling dimness.

This can happen. This is a thing that could happen, when you and your friends get together to go on a dungeon raid. The game world is alive. It is natural, spontaneous, and moves according to its own cycles and patterns. It rains, it snows, it storms and howls, monsters migrate, bosses move from dungeon to dungeon, and you can find them out in the open if you catch them at the right time.

Fighting a moving battle against something out of Shadow of the Colossus with your friends in the heart of a thunderstorm is just one of many possible things that could happen under such a setup. Maybe you decide to ambush those previous goblins from above in the ravine, but the game chooses that time to drop a whiteout on you. Snow falls thick and fast, covering the ground in mere moments (dynamic weather effects), dropping visibility to near zero, and turning your planned turkey shoot into a potential massacre, because you can no longer see where the goblins have gone, and you've just aggro'd the whole band. What do you do, hero? Do you stand and fight against long odds in the face of a plan that did not survive contact with the enemy and mother nature, or do your cut your losses and run?

- The leveling system should be mostly linear, as opposed to being an upwards curve, at least in terms of how much you have to keep putting in to level up. This system is extremely intensive in terms of Perks, and while as an MMO it should have the kind of staying power that lasts for years, if not decades, it would also be excessively punishing and cruel if the amount of experience or skill increases necessary to level up increased geometrically as you leveled (I'm still not sure if it should be skills that level you up or if you go with a more traditional RPG method of XP and the skill increases just govern your stat-ups when you do level up). This is a setup where someone could conceivably need upwards of one hundred and fifty to two hundred perks to make a given build, which would in turn equate to actually being level 150 or 200. So not only is a lack of a level cap almost required (or at least something that should be set absurdly high, like 9999), but the leveling needs to occur in a fairly consistent manner. By no means should it be easy, nor should it happen frequently, but it should not happen infrequently, either. Some games have the experience necessary to gain levels increase by enormous multiples from given level to given level. I'm not entirely sure that's such a great idea here, simply because of the vast quantity of perks players would need.

One argument in favor of the idea of leveling being connected to skills, and not experience points (which wouldn't exist at all in this setup, another unique thing for an MMO) is the idea that when you prestige a skill, it actually behaves like a low level skill, in that it's actually pretty easy to level it up from 15 to 30 or so. This would allow players to use the prestige mechanic to gain perks faster if they chose to do so, by focusing on skills that had been recently prestiged. But that's just one possibility.

Another to consider is that Challenge Perks might automatically be granted when you complete the challenge tier associated with it. Or in other words, instead of killing 50 enemies with your bare hands to open up the ability to invest a perk in increasing your Unarmed damage, you're just granted the first rank in that automatically, that challenge progresses to Rank 2 (Kill 150 Enemies), and you can now see five more Unarmed challenges that correspond with the fingers of the hand, which you can now start progressing in because you've completed the first Rank of the core unarmed challenge and opened them up. That way, players don't actually have to spend Perks in Challenge Perk Trees; those get filled in automatically when you complete challenges. You kill enough people with your bare hands, and you just get better at killing people with your bare hands automatically.

The graphics are somewhat improved over the last time we saw what was hesitantly called game footage. It is no longer a direct, horrible ripoff of the cartoonism of World of Warcraft.

It is still extremely cartoony, though, and I don't like that. I don't like that my hair looks like a solid piece of plastic that was shaped to look like hair, as opposed to hair. That's not artistic choice; that's them being lazy.

I'm not inspired by their multiple references to fishing in this demonstration video, like we should be impressed that Random Object:Fishing Pole finally has a use now. I don't give a rat's ass. I tolerate it in LoZ because it's kind of a tradition at this point, but here it just comes across as some kind of Fable knockoff, and I just don't give a damn. I want Elder Scrolls, only more MMO-ey, not the fine line between Fable and WoW.

 

Hey Raine, have my babies. :awesome

Greatly imaginative, intriguing stuff. Have you considered handing in a CV to a development studio? Because I want to play this game.

The moving enemies and moments of opportunities sounds like the dynamic events of Guild Wars 2 to a point, although they follow a more rigid script.

The Pits though.... :awesome.

 

I have. I'm just having trouble figuring out a positive way to spin wasting thousands of hours on the internet and posting what-ifs on fanfiction sites.

That's kind of why I've started focusing most of my energy into my original writing. If I can at least get a successful fantasy or sci-fi book published, I'll have something to build off of. "Look, I did this! This is what I can do." That sort of thing.

The thing I'm working on now is a psychological story involving a large group of people who wake up one day to find themselves stranded in an alien landscape. They know their names, but have no memory of their pasts or how they got here. They know about society, about the modern world, but they cannot remember anything about themselves or the place that they had in it.

They also all have a watch on their hand, which cheerfully informs them that they are participating in "The Game," and in order to leave, they have to reach the Nexus, which is a giant tower structure in the far, far distance.

The watches also grant superpowers. However, the catch is that the abilities and powers they give all cost points to use. Points are earned through various activities like killing monsters, surviving hazards, saving other people, and committing murder.

The Game does not discriminate between good and evil acts. It awards both equally. But the problem is, the closer you get to the Nexus, the stricter the Game is about awarding points. Simply hurting someone or giving someone food might have been enough before, but now the actions necessary to earn points become more extreme, like saving someone from certain death, protecting a large number of people from monsters, or committing acts of rape, torture, and engaging in serial killer activity.

And all the while, they're struggling with their own missing memories, and the true nature of the Game itself and where they are.

I've also stepped back up to the plate for my poetry and prose. I've got awards, but they're years old. All they show is that I maybe got lucky once upon a time. I need to submit more things, and have more recent accomplishments to cite.

 

I wish I had millions of dollars to throw at Lord Raine so that that game could be developed. Even if it took 8 years.

 

Raine the major issue with what you're saying come down to one thing, balance, especially since ZOS wants PvE and PVP to be as seamless as possible, balance is going to be a really big issue. I'll probably type up a wall of text later to respond to each point, but your skill/talent/loadout system sounds incredibly broken, almost as broken as SWTOR's PvP. A lot of what you described would be awesome in a single player game but simply can't work in an MMO. A few of those features that you mentioned remind me of GW2, such as the loot cloud, though GW2 was just for crafting mats, and GW2's salvage kit system is a great example of what your were talking about with Kingdom of Amalur.
Also don't take the graphics as anything near final, this is all early beta footage and there will be a lot of improvement throughout beta.
Like I said I'll type up a wall of text later when I'm at my computer.
Also have you considered posting this on an Elder Scrolls forum, such as Tamriel Foundry.

 

I don't see PvP as being the main draw of the game, though. The main draw is to play together with your friends. I'm interested in maximizing the classic dungeon crawl. This is co-op Dark Souls and Bitterblack Isle with a splash of Monster Hunter and D&D, not Everyone vs Everyone: The Game.

Again, the idea is to be something that hasn't already been done before. I'm not going to try to out-WoW WoW. I can show you the carrion pile of games that already attempted that particular strategy. Let's D-D-D-Duel takes a major back seat to exploring a new area with your friends. And PvP is in part as popular as it is in most MMOs because there's nothing you can actually do to entertain yourself beyond a certain point. That wouldn't necessarily be true in a game like this, because while an "endgame" does exist, it would probably take a decade or more of casually playing the game to get there. Randomized dungeon instance maps and repeatable PvE arenas alone would give the game a massive shelf life.

And I don't particularly care what Zenimax thinks is a good or a bad idea as far as making an Elder Scrolls game is concerned. They're the ones who came up with the trailers and the Molag Bal steals your soul [Please Ignore All The Other Chosen Ones] plot. I'm not of the opinion that they're something to be emulated.

Think of it this way. What is a teaser trailer supposed to do?

It's supposed to show the things you want the players to know you're working on. It's a teaser, a message that this is the general direction we are taking the game. These are the things we think are important.

So going by that, then, what does Zenimax think is important?

Stealing things, fishing, crafting, fishing, emoting and talking to people, and fishing. And that's only partially hyperbole, because that's only one instance more of fishing than what actually existed in the video.

That's what Zenimax decided to show off. Not "this is how we're building the dungeons." Not "these are some ideas we have for some new enemy types." Not "this is how you're going to be able to get together and play the game with your friends and clans." They didn't even show off a fighting sequence, let alone their beloved PvP. For having a design philosophy that will supposedly revolve around seamless PvE and PvP combat, you'd think they might have maybe wanted to show a little, you know. Combat.

They literally, literally, you can count the words, spent more time talking about the fishing mechanic than they did about playing the game the way most of us think of it; i.e. fighting monsters and finding treasure. Dungeon designs and enemies weren't even mentioned.

Here are the things that I want to know. And I think these things are probably what most of us care about.

- How is this game going to look on release? Your trailers and demos are giving off mixed messages. What is the artistic goal here?
- How am I going to be able to play with my friends, and what features will be in place to help with that?
- How does the game play?
- How is the game going to adhere to the rich history and setting of the Elder Scrolls mythos?

They have thus far answered none of these questions. At all. They haven't made any statement, not even in passing, about the end goal for their graphics, not even a passing "yeah, they look simplistic now, but that's just beta, it won't be a cartoon when it ships." They have made no mention whatsoever about how the game will matchmake, how dungeons or buildings will be run, how loot will get divided up, or how you might be able to work together with friends to solve puzzles or defeat enemies. They have shown zero footage to my knowledge of any type of in-game combat whatsoever taking place for any length of time. And the only reference they've made to the lore have been a horrific retcon of both the Oblivion Crisis and Coldharbour in the main plot, the initial trailer which didn't use any recognizably Elder Scrolls aesthetics for anything, and this most recent trailer where they assure us there will be a great many books to read, and prove it by showing one about cheese.

You need to keep in mind that Lord Raine is one person, sitting at a computer, that pulled approximately 90% of this idea completely out their ass in roughly a week, purely for shits and giggles, in the spare time between working a completely unrelated job. Zenimax, on the other hand, has had over a year, a budget larger than anything I will probably make in the next twenty years of my life even in the best case scenario for me, and a large staff of artists and writers working on this, and being paid to do so.

So either I'm a genius, or they're all idiots. And I appreciate the flattery some of you guys have thrown at me, I really do, but honestly? I really don't think it's me being a genius.

I just think Zenimax has no idea what the hell they're doing. And that makes sense to me, because nobody that has set out to make an MMO in a great long while has seemed to have any idea what the hell it was they were doing. I don't see why Zenimax would be any different.

And if you disagree with me, that's perfectly fine. To each their own. I probably won't ever buy this game, nor will my hypothetical asspull ever likely be made into one, and you can certainly feel free to play this game and enjoy it for years. But all I ask is that you riddle me this one question:

What has Zenimax shown in any trailer containing actual game footage that you could not do in a standard Elder Scrolls game from generations past? What have they shown us that we did not already know, or expect to see?

Here's my count:

-The plot is about Molag Bal stealing your soul because it is special somehow (acceptable premise for a single player game, absurd and flimsy in an MMO setting, where everyone is inexplicably The-Boy-Who-Lived, which cheapens the entire concept)

-Molag Bal's goal is to fuse his Daedric realm with Mundus (which is a blatant canon violation, because this takes place in the past, not the future, and the Oblivion Crisis was the first event of it's kind to EVER take place in history)

-You will be able to visit Coldharbour, and will do so frequently (Coldharbour looks absolutely nothing like what it's supposed to, is rated PG-13 at the harshest, and there isn't a single brutal rape, sex torture chamber, or human slaughter pen in sight. Also, you aren't immediately raped, tortured, and slaughtered upon entering)

-You will be able to use a fishing rod to go fishing, catch fish, and compare fish sizes with your friends.

So by my count, we've seen a fair number of things that we weren't expecting to see in this MMO. . . and all of them are negative.

That doesn't bode well to me.

---------- Post automerged at 03:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:14 AM ----------

And you can catch fish with your bare hands in Skyrim, so even the actual act of fishing itself doesn't count as "a new thing none of us were expecting to see." Just the usable fishing rod.

 

Raine, your whole system sounds incredibly exploitative because developers almost always fuck up making trees balanced. The number of beta hours you would need alone make marketing a nightmare, and that is forgetting about the number of patches you will need to keep everything flowing. The biggest problem I can see with that idea is a large volume of highly specific interconnected trees leads to huge opportunities for someone who is level 81 to crush someone who is level 80 in PVP. It will be fucking insane to keep track of all the "perfect kill combos" that can arise when you go that route.

 

Why does the game need balanced PVP when PVP is not the focus?

I've always been curious about this part of players. If PVP is not the main goal in the game at all, only a side novelty epeen contest at best, why do players always focus around it?

I mean, it's Elder Scrolls. The entire point of the game is exploring, creating, and adventuring. PVP has very little to do with that yet people seem focused on it.

EDIT: This is in reference to Raine's idea, not the actual TES:O.

 

Because players will whine and moan if PVP is not balanced, if there is decent build which gives somebody an advantage over others then the forums will be filled with rants.

 

So yeah, some basic info about The Secret world, although I'll try to stay vague about plot stuff :
Game starts off with of course, character creation, you decide how you're going to look, what your name is, and then what secret society you'll join. After that, you'll get a cutscene of you gaining your powers, followed by you fucking around with them at home. Cue a representative of the society that you picked rocking up to your house and telling you that they've noticed that you've suddenly gained these powers, and that it would a really good idea that instead of going solo and being taken in by some small group, you decide to go with them where they can train and protect you.

Cue you rocking up in whichever of the 3 main cities is the one for your society, where you then have to track down where their base is using clues given to you. After that you get the combat tutorial as well as some more backstory. At which point you then finally get to start choosing your own skills and abilities which is the best part.

The way it works in TSW, is that you have 9 different main weapons in the game, 3 magic ones (elemental, blood and chaos), 3 gun ones (shotgun, pistols and assault rifle) and 3 melee ones (fist, hammer and sword), you can have 2 different main weapons equipped at once. At the same time, you have 7 active abilities and 7 passive abilities, but your active abilities are limited to those from the weapons that you have equipped, but you can have any passive that you want equipped. You also have auxiliary weapons but those are a late game thing.

All of the weapons can be used as dps, most of them have some time of heal or support skills and most of them have abilities that are good for tanking. As such, you have a large amount of combinations of weapons available to be able to do the different roles, or even multiple roles. The best part is that as far as I'm aware, there's no best build for any of the three roles, sure there are some optimised ones, but well, what works well in a dungeon where you have a group supporting you as well as only one target, may not work out so well in solo fights where it's you vs a group of mobs.

There are 4 types of missions in the game, the story mission which lasts for a while and there's one per section, dungeon missions which are basically instructions for what to do in the dungeon, side missions which are just normally just small distractions (until you have to decode morse code D and main missions. There are 3 types of main missions, combat (which is self explanatory), sabotage (where you have to sneak past enemies, explosives and cameras and you normally can't fight) and investigation missions which are ones where you have to sit down and think for a while.

The best part though is how levels work, basically, there are none. At all. The way it works, is that the exp bar is divided into 3rds, when you fill up a section, you get an ability point which can be used to buy abilities, and when you fill up the entire bar you get a skill point, which you use to upgrade your weapon/equipment skills. The amount of exp needed to get another AP or SP is always the same, and there's no limit the amount you can get so you can unlock every single ability and max out all the weapons and equipment skills in the game.

On to the best part, the ability/skill system. I could explain it myself, but Funcom did a pretty good job of it here, What's really awesome though, is that just because a skill is further out in the wheel, doesn't meen it's automatically better (unless it's an elite skills, but you can only have one of those equipped at a time), in fact, one of the best DPS skills in the game is the first assault rifle skill.

For the skill system, basically, every tier in a weapons skill costs 1 more than the previous, and allows you to use a quality level item one above it. This means that you can use all of the basic QL1 weapons at the start, but you'll need to invest 45 skill points into a weapon to be able to use the QL10 ones (and then another 10 to be able to use the QL10.1-5 ones). There are two lines that you can invest in for each weapon, both of them increase the QL of the weapon you can equip, but one increases the passive for that weapon that makes you do more damage, and the other makes you tankier/heal better.

As for stats, you yourself don't have any, they all come from the talismans that you have equipped. You have 7 slots: 1 head, 3 major and 3 minor. With head talismans giving the most stats and minor talismans the least. You can get them from loot, quest rewards, or from just crafting your own. To put it simply for crafting, you make weapons out of metal, attack talismans out of fire, health talismans out of earth and healing talismans out of water. They way in which you get the different materials is from well, disassembling other talismans/weapons which give the appropriate materials for what they are, you also need the right kind of toolkit, and in all honesty that can be the hardest part to get sometimes.

Higher grade items require a higher grade of material, and you get better materials by combing a stack of 5 of the same type. There's other stuff involved in crafting such as runes, glyphs and signets, but that's not really important right now.

That's basically everything that I can think of off the top of my head, there's probably other stuff but I'll add that later.

 

Because if PVP exists at all it shouldn't seem so extremely lopsided in the first 10 seconds of its explanation. I get that it is not the main point, but it is a weak point in Raine's idea and I felt that it should be said. The thing is, the rest of what was talked about seemed fucking awesome and I figure if Raine can figure something out for this it would be as near as perfect as an MMO can get.

I do not get where you have "players always focus on it" but I only focused on it because it is the only thing Raine did not hit out the ballpark.

 

With Raine's system, I think the easiest way to handle PvP would be to do something similar to Guild Wars 2: no PvP in the normal game world, but create a separate PvP realm. Within this realm, everyone would be on equal footing in terms of abilities (and possibly equipment as well, depending on how much equipment scales vs natural abilities). This might be a bit difficult with the ability leveling system that Raine has, but you could just give everyone maxed out skill trees in everything and their choice of basic max-tier weapons and armor

This works with the game concept as well: within the PvP portion of the Pits, you are testing your skills against the other players, not the qualities of the equipment you have picked up or the amount of time you have spent in the Pits.

Open-world PvP could also fit into this storyline, but game-wise, it would be a lot more difficult to balance, so I think the separate PvP realm is the best way to handle it.