I’ve been on about evaluating old gameplay mechanics and trying to understand really what they mean lately (see also the discussion on currency denominations). Along the same lines, what are the actual gameplay implications for languages?
In original EQ, there were few reasons to lean languages beyond common (as far as I remember?). Am I missing something? Other ideas for P:RoF?
xrotzak said:I’ve been on about evaluating old gameplay mechanics and trying to understand really what they mean lately (see also the discussion on currency denominations). Along the same lines, what are the actual gameplay implications for languages?
In original EQ, there were few reasons to lean languages beyond common (as far as I remember?). Am I missing something? Other ideas for P:RoF?
For what it's worth, on EQ's roleplay server (Firiona vie), you didn't have the language of the other races neither a common tongue. Thus, you had to learn other people's language or teach them yours to be able to communicate.
But that was solely restricted to this realm.
"Terminus is a world of countless languages. For every one that finds common use, there are thousands that do not.Yet there are single words which may become universal, stepping beyond their native tongue and into the parlance of peoples living thousands of miles away. Words that find meaning beyond their definition, like a helm meant for battle that finds fashionable use in a noble’s court."
I like the idea of values varying from culture to culture yes. Could bring many refreshing game world dynamics to the table.Curious to find out more about the role languages will play
Using language barriers as a requirement to communicate with other players means you either have to make langauges trivially easy to learn or you are making playing with other players arbitrarily difficult with no benefit.
I think having langauges you can learn is neat and fun from a roleplay perspective, but I don't see it being a gameplay benefit as a core mechanic required to be able to communicate with others.
Chanus said:I think having langauges you can learn is neat and fun from a roleplay perspective, but I don't see it being a gameplay benefit as a core mechanic required to be able to communicate with others.
would depend entirely on mechanics and the coding behind learning said language.
Maybe there could be so much a character can learn in a day & they would have to meditate/sleep over it
to actually progress the language/process what they've learned that day.Just spamming a language all time might have diminishing returns or even a negative effect
like how sleep deprivation could have negative effect on learning a language..And since other factors would also be taken
into account for character fatigue.It would be impossible to create a macro to suck the life out of this socially benificial
mechanic of the game.It spices up the game and adds extra flavour to questing.Maybe even having to put in some extra effort to discover certain quests you didn't even know were quests before. Overall i think it would make the world much more alive &
players can keep on discovering new things they didn't notice/know before.
Fluffy said:Chanus said:I think having langauges you can learn is neat and fun from a roleplay perspective, but I don't see it being a gameplay benefit as a core mechanic required to be able to communicate with others.
would depend entirely on mechanics and the coding behind learning said language.
Maybe there could be so much a character can learn in a day & they would have to meditate/sleep over it
to actually progress the language/process what they've learned that day.Just spamming a language all time might have diminishing returns or even a negative effect
like how sleep deprivation could have negative effect on learning a language..And since other factors would also be taken
into account for character fatigue.It would be impossible to create a macro to suck the life out of this socially benificial
mechanic of the game.It spices up the game and adds extra flavour to questing.Maybe even having to put in some extra effort to discover certain quests you didn't even know were quests before. Overall i think it would make the world much more alive &
players can keep on discovering new things they didn't notice/know before.
This would all be fine as long as it is not the case that I can't talk to most other players until I learn the language they speak.
Using language as a way to add depth to NPC interaction and open up adverturing possibilities I think would be a fun thing.
Ideally languages will impact player/NPC communication but not player/player communication.
Ideally they will not be trivially easy to learn or what is the point?
We are used to endless grinds for gear and currency and the like in MMOs. I for one would welcome a language grind as a change of pace from these. As long as the language was purely optional, rather than required to open up any significant amount of content.
Knowing a language well should take months. For example you need to do things to learn the language but you couldn't progress more than 2% in any given day. Not the EQ2 approach where you buy or find a book and instantly know another language.
Knowing a language might give a small but nice benefit to dealing with merchants in that race's core territory.
Knowing a language might open up additional quests or open up additional rewards from the regular quests.
Knowing a language might be necessary to deal with certain NPCs particularly in the race's home areas where non-traveling NPCs might not be expected to know any alien languages unless the area is very cosmopolitan indeed.
I would make sense that races that are friendly to each other would have, over time, learned each other's languages. Say the humans, elves, halfings as an example. They live close enough, have similar alignments, etc. It might not stand to reason that the Skar would have bothered to learn the language of the Dwarves or Gnomes to any great extent, perhaps a few phrases (insults most likely). I don't see races like the Skar and Ogres being on literal speaking terms with the Elves.
I'm also not a fan of 'common' tongue either, its lazy design and completely negates nearly every reason to even have other languages. The Firiona Vie server in EQ1 that had no common tongue was such an interesting take on this, but that divide between the races was too quickly done away with because a player could, in just a very short period of time (<2 hours), learn every language out there to perfect fluency.
There should be a limit on the number of languages you can learn to fluency and each subsequent language you try has an ever lower fluency cap.