antonismar2

Ripe
OG 2020
Sep 19, 2020
49
28
18
i haven't seen many people talk about this, and i find it interesting to see what other sort of ideas other people have. Of course there should be stuff like human wizards, clerics and paladins, mounted enemies? Different types of demons maybe?
 
I think the types of enemies will definitely need to scale with power level.

Things like vampire hunters are likely to be threats up front, and work up to mid game with various special abilities they acquire on cooldowns, but ultimately as players reach upper echelons of power stuff like other undead and sorcerers are likely to be the only sort of reasonable threat just speaking as traditional RPG progression where you acquire power over time.

This is especially true with games as a service where it's impossible to balance new and old players properly unless you go the TF2 route and remove all traditional concepts of progression.

I think however, that a faction of the humans probably should go full blown heretic and utilize the creation of undead from their own ranks to battle the undead in a nasty Faustian bargain, or perhaps that some of them learn to bind certain undead to their will and such (ie summoners and such).

Consider at first a summoner might not even been in the spawn pool, then when they do they start with a couple of shades, and eventually at later levels command a squad of full blown wraiths, etc.

We also presumably have external threats like demons, angels, werewolves, dragons and stuff to consider.

Plus we can't discount the fact that undead always have some various weakness humans can exploit, though relying on that over the course of 7k+ hours of play is likely to grow very tedious.

I don't know exactly what is planned but I think the way to pace it out is to make upper level abilities available to characters that transcend ages, ie, you can get X, Y and Z power set and expand and grow them, but only to A, B and C level, while more potent disciplines become available over ages. Given that the notion of branching narratives and social media integration/feedback is promised in some shape, the game should be replayable so vets can experience the new age with a new character along side their friends just joining up, and also swap to a character that is more potent from a prior age when they want to chase vet content.

Then once that is established over a couple of ages, newer players can have the option to enter at the stage they would like. This also lets apocolypse balance each stage of the game rather than the whole game at once. It's still a tremendous job, but having a finish line for maximum potential of a character per season is likely the best route and then keep people playing with events, PVP and timed exclusive cosmetics tied to various achievements for that age.

This is all just speculation though. I have no idea what the intent is.

Overall it really comes down to how expansive the narative is for the player, what the upper echelons of power look like early on in the game, and of course their personal vision.

One thing I really do want to see more than anything though, is enemies growing in power, getting more cooldown abilities and tactics to use as we grow in strength. While I can say warframe is a great game in many respects, it has taught me a lot about game design in so much as you can't just jack the numbers to make things more spongey and expect that to hold player focus and engagement because there is a finite end to the learning curve, yes jacking up the numbers needs to happen, but it can't be the only thing. The best stories have great antagonists that grow and change, and seeing enemies grow over time as we grow in power and become a bigger threat to the living I think is ultra important.

Enemies need to be more than melee attack, range attack and grenade on a loop, they need special talents that make them worthy foes of the undead, otherwise the game quickly turns to grind and gets monotonous.

That said I have a good degree of faith in Denis' vision. If we go all the way back to LoK we can see he's smart enough to implement drawbacks to player gains, a fantastic example being the different weapons Kain acquires in blood omen. For example, the flame sword was super powerful but also killed your blood sources, this same sort of trade off needs to happen with abilities. other examples exist too, where certain abilities are niche while others are general use, while some attacks are ineffective against certain enemies and potent against others.

Combine that with decent enemy AI with enough tactics to counter us, throw in a mix of diverse enemy types and you have something that is likely going to need to be more than just button mashing.

Additionally I'd like to see a mode adjust button for players where they can decrease or increase the difficulty from standard for more and less potent/quantity drops. This would affect them individually rather than the group, since each player will likely get their own loot pool from a chest or enemy drop. This would be more where the numbers cranking would be easy to affect, ie, players in easy mode get -50% damage taken and cost to abilities but see a 75% drop in item quantity/quality, and the flip side, an increase of 25% in quantity/quality for players that take 50% more damage and ability cost and similar.

In this way players can tailor the game to their personal needs rather than fighting the forever uphill and never ending struggle of casual VS hardcore and all while still allowing anyone to play together. This is easy enough to configure and you can just make a slider that the player can only scale in a hub (ie, not mid mission).
 
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We have our Van Helsing in the inquisitors; but the dead's biggest weakness outside of holy stuff has usually been the element of fire. I'd want to fight a fire worshipping cult of people that became mad fanatics after listening to the voice in the flames and mutilated themselves with extensive burns throughout their body as part of their worship; and were rewarded with the power to control or project their own fire, spreading their gospel to the world by trying to set it ablaze.
 
Additionally I'd like to see a mode adjust button for players where they can decrease or increase the difficulty from standard for more and less potent/quantity drops. This would affect them individually rather than the group, since each player will likely get their own loot pool from a chest or enemy drop. This would be more where the numbers cranking would be easy to affect, ie, players in easy mode get -50% damage taken and cost to abilities but see a 75% drop in item quantity/quality, and the flip side, an increase of 25% in quantity/quality for players that take 50% more damage and ability cost and similar.
The problem I see here is say we get a party of 4 players....
Player 1 has it set to easy
Player 2,3,4 has it set to the hardest....

Scenario #1 "the loot exploit / XP carry"
Player 1 goes around slaughtering everything....
Players 2,3,4 hang back and pick up all the extra loot / EXP from the enemies.

you would get 3 people power leveling and getting extra loot while one player does 99% of the work on easy mode without having much trouble at all.

Scenario #2 " if it depended on last hit or a % of damage done to enemies for loot drop"
Player 1 would get more loot drops and have an easier time.
Players 2,3,4 would struggle to keep up with player 1s advantage.

the better scenario would be a per instance difficulty like PoEs maps, or diablos 3 torment difficulty settings.
this puts everyone in the group on the same page rather than exploiting XP/Loot or fighting over drops.
difficulties.png
 
I'm gonna be pretty happy as long as the enemy types are pretty diverse. I've played a lot of Warframe, which from what I've seen has at least some play similarities with this, and while I love that game enemies in it tend to be either generic or annoying.

Though that's at least partly because of the prevalence of tools for killing huge numbers of enemies at once, invalidating small differences between enemy types, so making that rarer should allow for more enemy types to be relevant, without having to resort to things like "Surrounded by a giant shield that takes a set number of shots to destroy" or other frustrating mechanics.
 
Scenario #2 " if it depended on last hit or a % of damage done to enemies for loot drop"

This is pretty easy to fix, you manage that players get their own drop pool based on their own percentages.

That said, PoE... that has a lot of loot problems in general.

My feeling overall is if you need a custom loot filter your loot system is wrong.

In this manner you can make resources the bulk of drops and then use them to fund crafting options. Loot-splosion feels cool at first, but quickly becomes a massive chore that slows the pacing and makes you spend less time playing the game part of the game and more time comparing stats and gold values. In general that is more of a chore than a fun activity. Yeah, it's cool to find a perfect thinger in a pile of trash, but that happens rarely enough where you can just minimize that by subbing more resources (gold/crafting materials) in place of trash drops.

I don't disagree with D3's system since it's less of a monster slog of a chore than sifting through PoE drops, but even still, you can just give everyone their own loot pool and experience is based on last hit plus affinity range (ie, portion of the experience goes to all in the area).

That said, in a narative driven game, power leveling becomes far less appealing because you're not advancing your own narative. You're just doing a chore to get more points, and your own private content is going to scale to that anyway.

Does this mean people will power level? Yes. However... please show me an example of when this wasn't a thing in any game ever that had MMO and progression. It's always a problem and players will always find the most efficient route to do stuff, and there will ALWAYS be a loot cave. The only way to remove that is to remove the concept of player progression at which point you lose the entire genre of ARPG.

The job of the developer isn't to eliminate the loot cave, it's to set the loot cave to a level that is good for player investment and then scale everything else down from that. Ideally you set up multiple loot caves where X loot cave is best for Y reward (xp, gold, item drop, component farm, etc.) to allow more diversity in play through. Yes, this does mean there is a "correct" way to do stuff if you want to be most efficient, but that only negatively effects casuals and they specifically don't want to be efficient and just play the game as they naturally enjoy it (ie, they already opted out so it's not really negatively affecting them directly).
 
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