The Ossiranth Chronicles

Been a while since I posted. Sorry, just been in a fog.

I wanted to weigh in on the optimization issue that so many others are talking about.

Optimization, shmoptimization.

If there is an optimal path, then the game is doing it wrong.

Games are supposed to be about meaningful choices. Should I take talent A over talent B? Should I go left or right? These choices are not inherently meaningful of one if them is wrong! In an ideal game, choice A and choice B should be equally valid choices that only affect the actual play style of the game. If choice A makes the game more fun, take it. If choice B makes the game more fun as opposed to A, then take that. Both of the paths that these choices lead to have an equal chance of allowing you to succeed, but how that is done is different. If you choose to dual wield over single wield, then combat is faster and lighter feeling. If you choose to single wield, combat is slower but harder hitting.

This is probably incredibly hard to do for an MMO, and would require self adjusting talents which change as you take other talents, but I think it's doable. The question is why hasn't it been done yet?

I like the concept of Soulbinding items. It introduces a system of decay into a game which otherwise would have none. You find an upgrade to your equipment, the old one must be discarded or otherwise salvaged (disenchanted, sold for vendor coin, etc.). This keeps crafters in business crafting new items and it keeps farmers in business farming materials for the crafters.

However, it also seems like a massive waste. It also raises the question of what vendors do with all this vendored gear they buy that they most certainly can't sell or even wear themselves. Are they all enchanters? What do they do with those enchanting mats anyways, since they never have any for sale?

I had an idea for recycling old stuff. When gear is created, it is created as a white quality item every single time, regardless of the design. Enchanters can then enchant the gear to make it more powerful, up to a certain point. Until it is enchanted, it doesn't bind. The enchanter's magic, as a natural consequence of the magic itself, will automatically bind the item to the soul of the next person who wears or wields it in combat. If a player no longer has use of an item, they have some options. First, they can have an enchanter strip the enchantments off an item for a fee and sell the item enchantless (at which point they could use the materials, which would of course be reduced, to enchant something else). Second, they could have a Salvager deconstruct the item into its base components (minus some "waste") and sell the materials or make something else. Third, they could have the Enchanter unbind the item from their soul. This would cause the item to lose some of the potency of its enchants and become a second hand item and then sold.

I haven't decided if multiple characters per account would be a good idea, but if it were used, a second (or possibly third or fourth)hand item could be taken and have a special enchantment placed on it to turn it into an heirloom. The enchants would be set at a certain level and maybe given an heirloom only perk or two and be allowed to be left to another character on the account, or possibly given to guild members or something.

It's good to have a system which encourages trade and gathering, but second hand items could also have their own market in their own right and I think it may be worth exploring.

My next post will be about professions. I think I have a good preliminary system started that I'm working on.

I've been thinking about something I posted about a while ago. I like the idea of characters being able to ascend to Godhood.

The lore of the world I am building is as follows: There is a cosmic war going on between the races that the Gods belong to and the demons they are fighting. The worlds belonging to the gods serve a number of purposes for this end. Some are breeding grounds for soldiers. Some are training grounds for those soldiers. Some are schools for tacticians. Some are staging grounds for troop movements and assaults. Some are headquarters for the brass.

The world this game is set on is a recharge world for the goddess who has created it. For each world created, the one who creates it must expend a portion of their own essence for use as the raw material to construct it. They can also lose bits of themselves fighting and creating new troops for the war. This necessitates recharging ones self so as to not fade away to nothing. The mortal races of the world live, they die, and then their souls fuse with their creator, invigorating them with new strength.

The players of course belong to a separate group, the Chosen. They are exempt from being required to fuse with their world's god as they have shown potential for being able to have a much more positive impact on the cosmic situation as free beings. Their efforts can keep the world going, or possibly more. So when they die, they are allowed to be returned to life and continue on with their struggles.

As players play, try, and occasionally fail and resurrect, they become stronger. As they become stronger, they get closer and closer to Godhood as they learn new abilities and come to a greater understanding of the true underlying nature of existence.

So when they get powerful enough, I like the idea of letting players become gods, at which point they can leave the original world and go off to explore other worlds. Or if they wish, they can create their own worlds to rule over, creating their own races of mortals or immortals (or both). They could choose which side of the conflict they wish to be a part of or if they wish, they can choose their own side as new factions in the war with their own agendas.

It starts out as Everquest and slowly evolves into a sort of Spore/Civilization/Minecraft style game.

I think it could be beautiful if executed properly.

Getting reeeeal tired of posting comments on peoples' blogs, The Goog tells me the comment is too long, and then the post just evaporates into nothing.

Yep. That's gettin' super old.

I mentioned about Knowledges in an earlier post, but I thought I would go into detail about something I've cooked up for it.

Each Knowledge represents what a character knows about a particular academic or practical subject. How much a character knows will affect how successful they are in various tradeskills and can improve their various combat and other abilities as well. Metallurgy would improve a character's blacksmithing, engineering, and mechanic professions and might give the character a chance to identify weaknesses in a target's metal armor (in PvP, if the armor isn't fully repaired), allowing extra armor pen or crit or something.

Players can increase their Knowledges with practical experience. Anytime a player does something relating to a Knowledge, there is a chance they will learn something. A player can also read books in game to temporarily learn a piece of knowledge, which will greatly increase the chance of learning that piece of knowledge through practical experience (a player's intellect will determine how long, in game time, a piece of knowledge will stay remembered if they do not go and acquire it with practical experience).

In the game, players would have a Knowledge Compendium, representing the sum total of their character's knowledge. In it, each subject would have each of its topics denoted with each piece of information (such as "A Dragon has a weak point just under it's jaw where the scales are as soft as they are on the belly" in Anatomy). As more information is gathered, the connected bits will arrange themselves into a narrative almost like a wikipedia entry on the subject. Each bit will also list the particular bonus the piece of information gives the player.

The game would also have a Knowledge Helper. While playing, if your character knows something relevant about an enemy or something in the world, an icon would pop up next to it to alert the player. In the mentioned example when fighting a dragon, if the dragon were to lunge at you to try and bite you, an icon would come up indicating a weak point and glowing when you should strike.

I'm considering having a maximum level of knowledge which could be linked to a wisdom stat. Knowledge which is gained beyond that stat will be learned, but older piece of information will become depreciated, losing some of their bonus, and then eventually being forgotten. Perhaps any time the player uses that piece of knowledge to their advantage, that bit would gain a point of XP or two, and then after so many, the knowledge becomes ingrained and doesn't count against the maximum.

I think this would make the game much more enjoyable for players who enjoy learning everything they can about their favorite games while not being annoying to anyone who doesn't, and it would provide another method of character advancement beyond just class levels.

I find myself constantly redesigning the class structure of my game. Originally, I had the classes able to multiclass into anything they wanted, granting a massive number of choices of secondary and tertiary classes.

To trim that down, I decided to change the design to one where each class could advance to their secondary form, or multiclass into one of two other for one of two other specializations. This resulted in 33 classes with a good deal of redundancy (3 flavors of paladins, 2 flavors of monks), it left out many classes I wanted to include, and forced me to introduce several I felt were craptastic just so each class would have enough that wanted to take it as a multiclass option.

I think my new design will be based on abilities. If you want to be an Assassin, you have to have a certain amount of skill in stealth, melee combat, and various forms of information gathering abilities. If you are skilled enough, you may even be able to pass these tests without much skill or even without learning any of the abilities at all (though the tests are specifically designed for these abilities and only the most crafty players will be able to do so).

This would provide a good balance between the two. Players would never feel limited by their character build because their class couldn't move into many specializations. It also gives me the freedom to include some of the redundancy if the feel of the classes is different enough.

If you want to be a Paladin, you only need knowledge of some Priest skills and melee medium or large size weapons. There can be several specializations of the class which would depend on what else you took, but you can do any of them if you wish.

This system also allows me to go with my other idea in which a player's tradeskills can be used to unlock additional classes. A Mage who is an enchanter can become a Sorcerer. A Specialist who is a mechanic can become a Machinist. And so on.

Ok, I feel like I'm rambling now. I'm going to go work on a talent system that makes sense in a classless context.

(I also feel like I've made this post before. >_> I need a better filing system.)

For the last 6 years, Azeroth has been basically the same. Same NPCs, same quests, same rewards, same instances, same progression towards endgame. Even the expansion areas follow this same pattern. Even though in lore, players have fought off the Burning Legion and defeated Kil'jaeden's plans at the Sunwell, when you go to Outland all of the storylines about helping defend Honor Hold and killing massive amounts of creatures for Nessingwary and assisting the nether dragons in defeating the Dragonmaw clan are still there. All of these stories have played out as far as the game is concerned, yet there they still are.

Now they are wiping the old world slate clean and starting it over with a fresh 1-60 batch of everything. This is only a temporary solution though. In two more years, all of the new questing experience is going to be old too, and the same inconsistencies are going to pop up.

They have all these neat phasing technologies which they use to great effect in the new race starting zones (and the new old race starting zones). Why didn't they do that with all of the other races' starting zones? Hell, why don't they do that with ALL of the zones?

Imagine it this way: each zone has six states. The first state is the default state for players at or below the appropriate level. I'm going to use Westfall as an example. In Westfall, the default state is that of first walking in at level 8-10. There's Old Blanchy and Farmer Mr. and Mrs Whatstheirfaces. There are Defias problems everywhere. The crops are in a perpetual state of total crap famine. Players can play through these quests all the way through to the end of the massive quest chains helping destroy broken Harvest Reapers, save peoples' farms, and foil the Defias plots. Players will stay in this game state until either they finish the quest chains or they level to a point that those quest chains no longer grant experience.

This puts the game into state 2 in which all of the major problems are solved. The local inhabitants are happy and getting back to their lives. There are repeatable or daily quests from almost all of them which don't give XP as a reward (to encourage players to GTFO and go level somewhere else), but do give money and possibly other items, such as mats needed to level crafting professions. Once a player has reached a certain level, say a bracket above the Stage 2 trigger point (this point would be level 30, and the next bracket would start at level 40), then the game advances to state 3.

State 3 is basically State 1, only with an entirely new set of problems that are updated for the new level range. Maybe after the Defias were driven out, Murlocs could swarm the shores. Players could then complete these quest chains to solve the new problems, or get to the next point (level 60 in this case) to take the game to State 4, which is State 2 for the higher level range.

State 5 begins at 85, and would probably be patched into the game zone by zone according to different tiers. Some would be available right at Cataclysm launch, others such as our Westfall example would become available at a later time (the release of Heroic Deadmines in this case, if that's not happening at launch) such as after a player completes a certain raid tier.

This updates those Zones to be relevant to the Deathwing destroying the world storyline. While the Cataclysm happens to the entire world for all players, player interaction with Deathwing starts out very low and ramps up as they advance through the zones culminating in these stage 5 zones where he is literally doing fly bys at 5 feet over your head trying to barbecue and/or eat you. Completing all of the quests in the stage 5 zones unlocks a large number of dailies similar to how Icecrown has tons of dailies all over after playing through the storylines.

There are a lot of other things which could play in here too, like reputation gear for lower level characters based on stages, but those are a different story. The main idea here is that as you go through the world, the story of the world actually changes around you as your character has his or her adventure. Things that happened are in the past where they belong. Players also get a much wider choice of where they can go for each level range to level in. Instead of having 3 or 4 level 40 appropriate zones, there become 8.

I guess I'm just kind of disappointed that they didn't take a golden opportunity to put some realism and immersion back into the game that doesn't affect game play ability.

(and before anyone says it, they haven't announced any CoT plans yet, so if players want to go back and do quests from old states they might have missed or get quest rewards they missed out on, perhaps our Bronze dragonpals could allow us to do that.)