Continuing off from yesterday's post, here are more things I would have in my MMORPG if I could make one.
Player vs Environment (PvE)
Besides classes, one of the main things I look for in a MMORPG right off the bat is it's PvE, and usually for the most part the PvE experience is summed up within the first few minutes or at least in the very first zone, with only the first group PvE experience being left out, and that can be experienced within a few zones, preferably only 1 or 2 zones. So, with that said, the initial PvE experience is very important for the staying power of a MMORPG, and of course you have to usually do a great deal of PvE to ever get to the PvP (if that's your thing) to begin with, making PvE a very important part of any MMORPG. Here's a few things off the top of my head that I would include in my MMORPG.
-Adventure Style Questing : This means that the player moves with the quests rather than going out like a mercenary, doing something, then coming back to complete the quest by turning it in. Instead Adventure style would mean that in someway the player is moved with the quests either by having the quest giver's positions always moving to different places in the zone or to not stay in one area for every long before moving onto the next. While I personally don't mind the mercenary type of questing especially for grinding fast, having an adventure while questing makes questing in general so much more interesting.
-Scaling Areas : I think if some areas scaled to group size as in the amount of enemies that spawn or the enemy's strength, it would make group questing more appealing while still limiting and balancing the gains of grouping with more challenge. In order to prevent pure chaos with other group interference the areas would only be in instanced zones or in areas that a lot of players would be at, at any given time such as even a regular assault on a friendly town. With that said however, I still would keep regular spawns and areas unaffected by scaling in the game as that's a surefire way to make sure nothing becomes too imbalanced for a soloing player.
-Bosses : This section is a bit too long to have as a bullet point so instead I will be putting multiple points into this part about bosses. There are two main types of ideals that bosses I think should be designed by, either highly scripted and challenging, or having a random element in it, both of which have been done in the past but are few and far in between more standard bosses.
Highly scripted and challenging bosses not only are the most interesting to fight and beat the first time, they're often the most common for endbosses, however I don't believe they should be limited to be endboss fights either. Instead they should be more numerous through out the instance and always give players a run for their money even if they know the strategies for the boss (more on this later).
Another thing that has been done as often as highly scripted bosses are bosses with a few random abilities or some sort of random element thrown in with them. These bosses usually aren't as challenging as highly scripted ones however fighting them has a longer duration of surprise as it's rare to get repeated elements one after the other.
So with that said, I would like to have more of these boss fights around, and replacing the more standard “loot pinata” bosses with indepth ones. To also further increase the challenge of bosses, a system could be in place that scans the entire party for their registered boss kills of a boss and increase the difficulty based on that, maybe by a small margin. This would allow players to continuously have a challenge while getting better as players to defeat the said challenge, and as it is basically rinse and repeat, as long as the margin of challenge only increases by a small amount, there should rarely be any major problems.
-Different Difficulty Levels : I like the idea of a difficulty level adjuster for dungeons and raids as it lets people do pretty much whatever they want. If they want to do harder encounters they should have that choice. I would also have this aspect work in synch with the system of automatically difficulty increasing by having a normal difficulty which is what it would start out at, a recommended difficulty which is affected by automatic difficulty increases, and finally advanced difficulty which is the hardest it can get. The recommended difficulty is able to place players in situations that would be mostly in the middle between the two.
-Reward System : The main incentive for players is of course items, and I would like to have a form of direct item drops as well as various tokens and factional points that would also be on the same level as the item drops. The main difference between the two methods of acquisition would be the different types of items even if they have the same stats, and in general, acquiring a item through tokens or factional points should be much slower than getting it by a drop to encourage dungeon farming. The item drops would also be in multiple smaller pieces requiring more than one drop to make a single item, this would expand the lifetime of dungeons and give players more of an incentive to continue on their quest for items.
Finally, when a player has assembled a piece of their final tier armor (which would be split up into three tiers, the dungeon tier, the raiding tier, and lastly, the advanced raiding tier) they unlock a series of conditions that would allow it to power up into the next tier of armor once the conditions are met. These conditions would be akin to normal achievements such as kill 1000 beasts rather than spawn a bunch of adds even though you aren't suppose to in a normal boss fight then defeat them along with the boss, and these conditions would power up something like a dungeon tier to a raiding tier item, however it would not allow for further enhancing into an advanced raiding tier unless it started off as a raiding item. The conditions would also be unique to the origins of the item, for example a dungeon to raiding enhancement would always ask for something that could be done in a dungeon. This system would allow players who only did dungeons to gain a raid item for example but it would still keep raiders who raided in their own set of gear. The conditions should average at least 3 days of total playtime (72 hours) to fully upgrade.
Besides that there would be a standard achievement system which would reward noncombat items such as mounts, titles, and pets which seems fairly regular now.
Difficulty advancement would ideally be (or gear quality)
Solo Gear → Regular Dungeon → Regular Raid → Advanced Dungeon = Advanced Raid
The reason for advanced dungeons being higher than regular raids is that advanced dungeons should be extremely hard and should rival the challenge of any advanced raid but scaled down to a smaller amount of people. So to that end, it shouldn't be possible to complete an advanced dungeon without raid armor.
Advanced Dungeon rewards would consist of raid items as well as contributing towards raid and advanced raid item enhancement. Lastly at the end of both the advanced dungeons and advanced raids should be a boss that can only be defeated by having fully powered up items from the advanced raid.
I liked the idea of difficulty tuning that MMORPGs are starting to have, however a lot of them implement them oddly, although my way would also be odd as well, but mine would be primary built on player progression and dungeon replayability. Adding to those aspects, especially replayability would give players more things to do in general, adding up to a longer time before people start to get bored of things, and are ready to move onto the next expansion, which isn't always a bad thing, but with how long an average expansion takes to create, it's important to have players happy for as long as possible.
That concludes the PvE section, I'll finish up with PvP tomorrow, so again, look forward to that if you've enjoyed this section.
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