Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?
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I've tried plenty of mmos and kept hitting the same barrier over and over again. I like a good story where my choices matter. The problem with questing in mmos is that everyone has done the quest and if you put choice into it, my choice was different then yours yet we both live in exactly the same world. Even though we never met before, we have both killed the same bosses. All of this is immersion braking. Could we think of a solution?
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Only if everybody's actions impact the world, which would mean the quest itself would have to be procedural. There's another SpatialOS game in development tending for that approach, but I'm not sure which way Fractured is heading for currently.
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@logain Not necessarily. How about unique relics that are truly unique (only 1/server) and grant unique slightly more powerful abilities. the owner will drop the relic on death, thus becoming a target for relic hunters. if the relic is inactive for a certain period... lets say 1 month IRL, a quest would become available for thieves to steal the relic. This would dynamically give importance to actions and generate content.
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@darian so it will be a massive battle royale for the relic. i like the idea, since i'm a SOS tester
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@lehuan5062 Several, actually, since there could be an indefinite number of different relics, each with it's own unique powers and twists on gameplay, like the unique abilities of MOBA champions. In addition, devs could also make Super relics that would require the collective effort of an entire guild to obtain for the first time. And provide a very expensive super powerful ability that could easily turn the tide of an invasion battle. I'm thinking of something like a tome that allows daemons to summon their god for a limited time, provided they can sacrifice enough enemy souls to gain his attention. The opposing faction would either be forced to interrupt the summoning ritual, stall the fight until the god gets bored and leaves, or kill enough daemons to prove they are unworthy of their god's attention and have him turn against his summoners. Or a massive war-machine that requires large quantities of materials to build and fuel to power, and a collective effort to man. Such relics would create unique interactions in g v g wars, as well as a sense of achievement to those who helped acquire such power for their guild/faction. Defeating such threats would also be the feat of legends. Imagine how with such mechanics, the players would actually write the history of Fractured. Engage in truly strategic fights and build meaningful community.
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@darian said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:
@logain Not necessarily. How about unique relics that are truly unique (only 1/server)
AFAIK the current plan is that there will only be one server.
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@darian said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:
@lehuan5062 Several, actually, since there could be an indefinite number of different relics, each with it's own unique powers and twists on gameplay, like the unique abilities of MOBA champions. In addition, devs could also make Super relics that would require the collective effort of an entire guild to obtain for the first time. And provide a very expensive super powerful ability that could easily turn the tide of an invasion battle. I'm thinking of something like a tome that allows daemons to summon their god for a limited time, provided they can sacrifice enough enemy souls to gain his attention. The opposing faction would either be forced to interrupt the summoning ritual, stall the fight until the god gets bored and leaves, or kill enough daemons to prove they are unworthy of their god's attention and have him turn against his summoners. Or a massive war-machine that requires large quantities of materials to build and fuel to power, and a collective effort to man. Such relics would create unique interactions in g v g wars, as well as a sense of achievement to those who helped acquire such power for their guild/faction. Defeating such threats would also be the feat of legends. Imagine how with such mechanics, the players would actually write the history of Fractured. Engage in truly strategic fights and build meaningful community.
That sounds like a balancing nightmare from a power-creep perspective.
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@kairosval true, but does it really have to be balanced? Since i'm referring to massive economy effort in order to use the super relics, it would not be a common sight. Consider it the epic final battle in a single player game. But you just might loose and live with the consequences. It would also force factions to prepare for possible threats and develop strategies fit to deal with the specific situation, rather than jut have a standard siege/defense strategy employed over and over again.
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@darian i'm also bored with the old concept that the character die during quest then respawn to redo it. new concept of "Deathstranding" transfer dead character to another place which have something to do with the real world. thing you do in that place may help you finish the quest/story later. during the time you traveling the "void", the real world is continue to change as usual. so when you come back, thing are different.
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@lehuan5062 Yes, I've heard of this concept and it seems interesting. I haven't yet played any games that have implemented it though. Still, it may bring an interesting dimension to mmos.
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@darian said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:
I haven't yet played any games that have implemented it though
sure, it's the first game which has that thing
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@darian said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:
@kairosval true, but does it really have to be balanced? Since i'm referring to massive economy effort in order to use the super relics, it would not be a common sight. Consider it the epic final battle in a single player game. But you just might loose and live with the consequences. It would also force factions to prepare for possible threats and develop strategies fit to deal with the specific situation, rather than jut have a standard siege/defense strategy employed over and over again.
As I see it, we wind up with essentially two different scenarios.
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The effort required to generate these items is high, but once a single guild has one, everyone else has to have one too. So everyone straps in for a collective arms race. Obsessive completionist gamer culture kicks in. Within a year, these items start to become common simply by virtue of how many gamers are willing to essentially work 80 hours per week for free to find optimum grinding pathways to unlock the top-tier content. Because gamers be gamers.
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The effort required to generate these items is so high that not even the completionist-gamer mindset is enough to generate them in a reasonable amount of time... Which means any development effort applied to this task will not get to be experienced by the vast majority of the playerbase. That's not the best investment of developer time no matter how you look at it.
Then we need to decide if the legendary items decay or not.
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If they do not decay, that will eventually make player crafting obsolete as eventually all top-tier players will aim for and acquire legendary gear, at which point they will stop having to buy more gear.
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If they do decay, that may keep player crafting relevant. But it will feel bad to the players and guilds that possess the weapon to have so much of their effort waste away.
No matter what way you cut it, this idea of extra-mega-legendary-super-saiyan-doomsday equipment just doesn't cut it for me. It makes sense why a gamer would want to have such an item, but I see it kind of sucking for everyone else. I just don't see that it would be a good use of developer time when you consider it from a impact-to-gamers-per-developer-hour perspective.
I think it would be better to have the best items just come from the top-tier crafting characters building items from the the rarest raw materials gathered from all three worlds. And preferably in a situation where no single crafter will be able to master EVERY aspect of crafting, so that more than one crafter will be needed to build all the intermediary components at the highest level - creating a market for high-quality intermediary components.
I think this would be better in the long run from a game economy perspective because it doesn't require anything additional on top of the already planned player-driven crafting economy. If things need to be rebalanced, the devs can tweak spawn/drop rates on raw materials, the number of materials needed for each component, the decay rate of the items, or as a last resort the stats of the items in question. The items created follow the same decay and drop-on-death rules as all other items, so it feels fair to everyone even if not everyone is happy with it.
I understand the thirst for the power-fantasy of being the player or the guild that owns the god-item and can smash everyone else in the face... But given Fractured's design-goal of players being competitively relevant from day one, I don't think that the god-item concept is a good fit, as it represents a level of end-game progression that would break that design goal. I see too many problems, and I don't think the payoff is worth the design and development effort that would be required to identify and address those problems.
Just my 2c though.
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@darian said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:
I like a good story where my choices matter. The problem with questing in mmos is that everyone has done the quest and if you put choice into it, my choice was different then yours yet we both live in exactly the same world. Even though we never met before, we have both killed the same bosses. All of this is immersion braking. Could we think of a solution?
As of today, we're not planning to use a conventional questing system in Fractured. The game already has a large scope, and we really don't see questing in general as a key feature for a sandbox MMO - where it's players who make the story. Plus, even with the development speed that the Unity + SpatialOS combo grants us, a good questing system would just take away too much time from other things we deem more important - we want to get Alpha 1 live late this year, not claim so then deliver it in 2020
That being said...- The way you learn abilities through the Knowledge System has a questing-like element to it.
- A lot of the lore of the game will be delivered through the Knowledge System too - specifically when it comes to learning Arcane and Divine abilities, which are not covered in the Spotlight. Collecting lore is a thing! :slight_smile:
As for relics, you've mentioned a mechanic we have already planned - they're explained in brief in the article I've linked above! I quote:
Relics are rare pieces of the lost knowledge of Elysium that have survived the Fracture and can be recovered from the most remote locations and dangerous circumstances. When consumed, they can trigger the discovery of a new spell or raise the strength of one you know above its maximum theoretical level – a power we’re sure the most competitive of you will crave to master. And oh, they give Knowledge Points too, of course.
The trick with this type of feature is to make it so the very competitive player craves it, but the "average" player can ignore it and still be effective (so it's definitely not an extra-mega-legendary-super-saiyan-doomsday boost, @KairosVal). Plus, where and how you find it should be unpredictable, so you can't purposefully "grind" it. We believe this will do, but anyway, in the grand scheme of the Knowledge System relics are a relatively secondary feature :slight_smile:
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@prometheus I assume Divination has nothing to do with those divine schools then?
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@kairosval Fair points friend. You just missed a key aspect. They are supposed to be unique. There's only one of a kind. So other guilds may find a different one, in a different way, but they cannot "grind" for it. If they don't have it, they still have options in combat by achieving certain objectives.
As for the ones that are available to individual players, they don't decay, but they can be stolen from you if you are defeated or inactive. One cannot reliably build a character around a relic alone, because he or she may simply loose that relic. These relics would not be outright more powerful than anything else, they would just add a signature ability only available to the character who has the relic. @Prometheus Reading your article is what inspired me to think of it.
Anyway, thank you both for sharing your thoughts on the matter!
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Well, we need some actual content to determine whether the game is "typical".
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@vengu said in Can you think of truly immersive and meaningful quests in the Fractured world?:
@prometheus I assume Divination has nothing to do with those divine schools then?
It's not divine schools but divine spells :slight_smile: And yeah, they're not related to Divination.
