Funny enough they seem to have very good basic progression, but honestly the entire and graphics is only a very small part of the game. It is easy to show those in a good playable state. Someone can whip up something like the basic gameplay videos in under a month with unity with just starting, but it won't have any depth to it. The hardest part is creating the massive amount of content you need. You have thousands of NPC's that need to be created and have scripting as well as adding any quests.. You also have all the different gameplay systems to add as well. You have to create a crafting system as well and balance all the crafts and how hard they are to harvest. At this point we don't really have anything to really see how far along they actually are because we only saw a basic gameplay video which is fairly easy stage to get to.

Yeah, I never understood why people think pole weapons are not dangerous once you get inside. There are numerous tactics they can use if someone tries to get inside, the main downside to pole weapons are the same as any of the large weapons like a long or greatsword or a shield is they are cumbersome. It would not be something you want to carry around in town for example. They are not like a buckler or shortsword/dueling sword or other sidearms where you can easily strap them to your body.

It would actually be interesting to see them have a sidearm and main arm style of weapon system. So you could be an archer but also carry a rapier and buckler as needed. It would be like a classic weapon swap system but the swap weapons are limited to things that can be worn on the body easily. It would be interesting to see certain areas that restricted the use of heavy weapons such water areas or dungeons.

The whole thing is actually quite interesting. I understand why unity revoked them and at least they are still supporting everyone that already had games in progress. It will be kinda interesting to see if they get it worked out though. SpatialOS while really cool technology does have issues with how it does it and licensing for pro. They are kinda fucking over unity because unity is royalty free and gets its revenue through the per seat pro sales aspect and SpacialOS kinda lets you skirt this with their tools.

I think rather than natural disasters it would be interesting to see magical disasters. They could easily have disasters where the natural plant and animal life goes through rapid changes and begins to attack the nearest towns in a rage and are in pain and need to be put down. It would especially give something for the PvE players in the PvE world that is similar to how the PvP events can happen in the other two worlds.

1. A good in depth healing/support system. Very few sandbox games get healing right and it ends up feeling terrible to heal in them. Part of the problem is healing tends to be too noticable and the healer gets zerged the second they cast a spell. The other problem is the fact that you can just run past the front lines into the back lines and then retreat. They need something like an attack of opportunity system that punished players for ignoring the tank/dps and zerging the healer.

2. A good update schedule. It seems like the ideal is about 3 months, if you make players wait too long for content though they get bored. You don't even need to add a lot of content, but you need to show you are putting the effort in even if your only adding a single dungeon each time.

3. A good crafting system while not being tedious. So many crafting systems try to make it engaging and they end up tedious busywork feeling or have some sort of DDR system where you have to hit certain abilities to react and they end up feeling horrible. WoW's click combine system is too simple though. I really want to see a system where you design the weapon. You choose the materials for the hilt, and blade for example as well as the designs. Let us design the gear and customize it so we can really make unique looking pieces.

I definitely like the idea of a plant person. I rarely see it done and it is always such an interesting concept. Funny enough every game I have seen do it has managed to pull it off insanely well. I think GW2 is probably the best example of a well done plant person, but I think Alraune similar to the 5e DnD would be amazing. Something like https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Alraune_(5e_Race) would be a good example of how it can be well done.

I would like to see a plant based race, I think it would have fit in perfectly with the beastman. The only thing I really don't care much for is how you tend to be locked to a roll for most of the races because of the stats, but that is such a minor issue for me I can really ignore it.

For me it comes down to the PvE sandbox options where you can go to certain places at certain times and look for PvP easily but if you want to PvE you are fairly safe as well. There have been a lot of sandbox games that focus purely on PvP and while I enjoy PvP I prefer it in a skill based environment where it is about skill such as battlegrounds and arena gameplay. Open world PvP in my experience ends up just being a gank fest, there is almost no skill involved, it mostly involves people either attacking with huge groups and rolling over everyone or they only attack people who are gathering or in combat. I used to only play on PvP servers at the launch of WoW, EQ2, and numerous other games. I think out of thousands of open world PvP fights under 100 of them have ever been fair fights where we both saw each other and decided to fight 1v1. They have been overwhelmingly gank fights, me ganking them or them ganking me. There is nothing fun about that for me on either side anymore, it just wastes time, If I want to PvP now I just join a skill based PvP aspect and have much more fun.

For me it is generally two aspects, a good story and good progression gameplay. I love crafting and gathering as well. I don't really like dailies as much but I actually enjoy weekly type goals. The thing is not everyone can really log in daily. I work 12 and a half hour shifts so on those days I generally can't game much at all so games with daily content is very annoying unless that content can be done in under an hour.

I kinda have mixed feeling about Open dungeons, while I do miss the open dungeons from everquest where you could farm all day I remember the BS that also occurred in those same dungeons. You had people who would just camp a single boss for hours and hours and sell the loot rights to it. There were groups/guilds that would keep content on lockdown making it almost impossible to get certain pieces of loot, it was very common for epic weapons. I know because we were one of the guilds who did it. We would kill certain bosses on spawn that were required for certain epics. Pretty much unless you paid us we would destroy the epic piece or give it to a guild alt to preserve the boss timer.

Funny enough your builds are not going to be as diverse as you think because of stats and synergies in a classless system. I have played quite a few of them on muds and other games and you notice something pretty quickly. You still end up with generic classes. What it means is you end up with a magic focused, fast squishy hit and run and stealthy physical melee, physical ranged, and high armor tanky melee for the most part. You still have a lot of freedom in those aspects though. Even then you still tend to focus in a single area because of synergies, you don't usually end up a general mage, you typically get some of all kinds of spells, but because of the nature of classless systems and how they level you typically focus in a single area. The same goes for melee or ranged character, you focus on a specific weapon and armor type because leveling them all is just not feasible.

Honestly, I think cosmetic armor and spell effects tend to take away from the game many times if done poorly. Often in the name of selling the cosmetics the designers will make the base items look just plain and boring. The problem comes where everyone looks boring except for the people who pay. It just detracts value of your hard work to craft something or kill a big boss if the item looks terrible. I love mount and pet cosmetics as options. Especially when they are utility items you always have out as long as you have the option for free ones. For example pets that pick up items for you are a great touch as long as they are not cash shop only. I actually think that cosmetic spell FX is often a good idea, you can do recolors but sometimes the more complex spell effects are annoying when playing with other players. If you do spell FX you can't go overboard on them or it just gets annoying, you still need to be able to recognize the base spell, I have seen some games do this amazingly well and others do it horribly. I think PoE is one of the ones that does a good job because while the spell effects are unique and change the spell, the base is still easily recognizable.