Is there any plans fore something like this in the game?
Say you are fighting your way through an enemy camp and you know some of these enemies have a chance to drop a rare flaming sword. On your way through the camp you notice in one of the tents that you were going to bypass you can see one of the mobs carying a flaming sword! Your group moves in and kills that mob and that flaming sword drops.
I never understood why MMOs didnt do this.
One of the reasons is the timing for when loot is generated. For the mob to be holding its rare loot then the loot needs to be determined when the mob spawns and not when it is killed. That means there can be no adaptive logic to the loot generation based on who kills it other than code that takes things away. If you are modifying the loot after the fact then is seeing the mob with the rare item equipped really a guarantee?
Maybe it could be that if the mob is showing the item then there is an increased chance it will drop. That way you could have a little of both worlds.
I seem to recall many streams they stated that if the mob is wearing plate, you can expect a piece of plate to drop. If they are wearing leather, leather will drop. Monks drop monk weapons, etc... With that in mind, I don't see why it couldn't apply to rare gear as well.
Bweefk said:
I dont think i have ever seen a game that drops loot based on who kills the mob. do you have any examples of this? It seems like i always get leather gear dropping when im on my clothie lol.
Any game where there is a %increase chance for x to drop would be a game where who kills the mob effects what is dropped. That is more common in ARPGs than it is in first person RPGs but I am sure it does happen. Any game that only has quest items drop if you are on the quest has loot spawned on kill as well so that would include WoW. Any game that has trivial loot code or diminishing returns loot code modifies the loot when dropped though the loot itself could be generated at spawn or at kill without the player knowing unless there was a pre kill visual cue.
I don't know if there is any game that does have true logic checks when a kill is made other than perhaps a class based filter if there is personal loot. For that matter any game with personal loot spawns the loot on death. I have seen ideas kicked around though how loot could be distributed dynamically in order to increase or decrease bottlenecks in content consumption and to mitigate the risk of exploiters abusing something.
Bweefk said:Is there any plans fore something like this in the game?
Say you are fighting your way through an enemy camp and you know some of these enemies have a chance to drop a rare flaming sword. On your way through the camp you notice in one of the tents that you were going to bypass you can see one of the mobs carying a flaming sword! Your group moves in and kills that mob and that flaming sword drops.
I never understood why MMOs didnt do this.
Waaaay back in 2014, this very question about NPCs dropping items/weapons/gear they were wearing was brought up and Brad had said the intent is that if you see an item held by an NPC (in this case a sword), it would drop it. But, as with so many other things that were one touted as being part of this game, I'm sure by now that too has been thrown away.
Early EQ1 had the drops for an NPC determined when the mob spawned and that data was included in the stream to the client (incredibly stupid decision, yes) which allowed pack sniffers like ShowEQ to tell you what every mob in the zone had on them for drops.
Yep, and while later that data detail was adjusted, what showed in their hands was retained and led to knowing, to a degree, ahead of time what particular creatures had, zone wide. The client had to show it, so it was displayed to the client.
It lead to.. being able to enter a zone and know exactly how much fine steel was available, at a minimum, knowing what was wielded after a certain level range. (I think FS was guaranteed 25 or 35+, but i could be wrong)
Similarly, for things like the Sceptre of Destruction or similar wielded weapons (by mobs) you could zone in and know if Hraashna was holding 'a mace model' or not, greatly increasing the confidence that it was going to drop, once the loot tables were mapped.
For mobs where it makes sense (humanoids) I very much prefer the EQ approach of mobs showing if they are at the very least wielding a weapon, and also that they would have any special bonuses from armor/items they spawn with added to their stats (even if not showing on the model) so that X mob that spawns with a haste belt is hasted.
Ruinar said:I seem to recall many streams they stated that if the mob is wearing plate, you can expect a piece of plate to drop. If they are wearing leather, leather will drop. Monks drop monk weapons, etc... With that in mind, I don't see why it couldn't apply to rare gear as well.
I think there is a big difference between those two applications of loot.
Lets say there is a caster mob with a staff that is visibly wearing cloth and a dual weilding sword mob wearing leather. In most MMOs, all of those caster mobs would be wielding the same weapon / armor (having the same graphical model), and the same for the dual wielding mobs. It's not hard to give all of those caster mobs a loot table that consists of chance to drop a staff and cloth armor, while giving a slightly different loot table to the other that drops swords and leather.
BUT... to sometimes have a caster mob spawn with a staff that glows with a green shard on top that is 'rare', to then have a %chance to drop that staff means you have to add a separte loot table and model for that mob - basically a rare spawn. But now to actually give the world some diversity, you would have to add hundreds and/or thousands of "trival" rare spawn mobs, or else all players would eventually just learn when/where rare spawns pop. Those rare spawns would basically be thousands of variations of "normal mobs", but with a different weapon there or helm here... it seems like a lot of work.
Maybe if loot tables and mob models were modular, they could feasibly implement this universially accross Terminus.
By the way, please ignore everything I just said... I'm talking out my butt and have no idea if any of that is remotely true.
While you're correct, Kass, that the appearance of the Mob/Enemy and what they drop (if anything) for loot don't have to be connected, in at least one MMO, they are, to a degree.
Spawning a creature in the world and then applying visual distinction is trivial. The models can be 'dressed' or equipped with arbitrary gear, items, and effects either prior to spawn in, or shortly thereafter. Modifications to every aspect of their appearance have long since been built-in features of almost any engine.
In some games, effects from worn gear are persistent on the creature. An example some may be familiar with is the first big Quest in Pathfinder:Kingmaker and the fight with The Stag Lord. He uses the ranged weapon he drops, and it makes him pretty formidable if you're not prepared.
In other games, the actual corpse of the creature disappears almost instantly, and an interactable object appears where they where killed, instead. In some games, loot from creatures is personalized. Each participant gets their own loot. Similarly, some games have smart loot, whereby that personalized loot is specific to the role, class, race, alignment, etc of the player. Any and all of those options are available when developing a game using Unity, as Pantheon is.
There's no need to make thousands of variations of mobs. You just make one and then apply static, dynamic, derived, procedural or random appearance variations to them. That way, you can set up rules like.. if the creature spawning here has the heavy armor skill, give them the appearance of heavy armor, within a range of possible styles, based on his race, class and level. They don't actually even have to HAVE heavy armor equipped, as far as the combat checks & rules are concerned. You can if you want, but you don't have to. Appearance doesn't have to match equipment, inventory, or loot. It can or can't; it's entirely up to the designer.
Then, it's just design goals that determine what loot they create when they die, or are spawned with in their inventory, if that (very old, very restrictive, objectively flawed) implementation is going to be used.
If salvaged raws/mats have no sellback value and all dropped equipment is broken, there's not really any problem dropping armor from every creature, provided other trivial economic mitigations are in place. Yet, most MMOs haven't done it and/or don't do it, because it's simpler to ignore.
I brought this up in the thread about PantheonPlus's Pre-Alpha phase 5 video he was allowed to show. The NPCs they were killing had weapons and shields but did not drop weapons or shields as loot when they were killed.
But back on Aug 2018 Joppa was asked about this exactly and he said: "If you can see it you can get it."
So at least in this Pre-Alpha phase they have totally forgotten about this and now have imaginary swords that NPC's use against you while alive that fade into mist when they die. Which is quite disappointing as this was one of the features from the old days that I was really looking forward to again. I remember back in the very first few hours of EQ when killing the newbie mobs and seeing a Decaying Skeleton from a distance weilding a cracked staff and be-lining for him since those things sold for 1p which was huge at that level.
I hope that this is just an oversight and they will add this back into the game, but as PantheonPlus's video shows us, they are already hard coding weapon graphics into NPC avatars that are not indicators of them actually having said weapons. Sad really :-(
I'm against it for a couple of reasons. Firstly if the rarest weapons/armour in the game are visible on the mob before they drop it is going to lead to awful griefing/kill stealing scenarios. People will just scavenge regions looking for the mob with the shiny piece of loot attached to them.
My second reason is it takes away the element of surprise when you go to loot a corpse of finding something rare. If they just look standard you know you're only ever going to get a mundane drop.
Just my two cents (I have nothing against mobs dropping appropiate equipment based on their race/class)
Adrenicus said:I'm against it for a couple of reasons. Firstly if the rarest weapons/armour in the game are visible on the mob before they drop it is going to lead to awful griefing/kill stealing scenarios. People will just scavenge regions looking for the mob with the shiny piece of loot attached to them.
My second reason is it takes away the element of surprise when you go to loot a corpse of finding something rare. If they just look standard you know you're only ever going to get a mundane drop.
Just my two cents (I have nothing against mobs dropping appropiate equipment based on their race/class)
Agree on both points. But I suppose that we could still get 'visible rare drops' and 'random rare drops' at the same time. They don't have to be mutally exclusive... but then what would be the point.
Idk personally I would prefer it if rare items were hidden and out of view. I'm ok with standard or iconic drops being shown on a mob, but I would prefer rare drops to be hidden and feel like a surprise when they actually drop. I think there are some things that a player shouldn't be able to know upfront for various reasons, and this is one of those things because knowing takes away a lot of the excitement when it does drop, and knowing can lead to a lot of toxicity if the group knows that there is a rare item but fails to kill the mob.
Good points in this thread. Joppa has said we'll see the items NPC's have in loot but the items in loot are not generated until death.
Again, assumptions are being made about how the game is coded and we do not know the loot creation routines. However, it is quite logical to work out, if mobs show equipment they will drop upon death, then the loot is decided when the mob is spawned. It cannot be any other way. There is no contradiction here.
Personally, I think it is way more realistic for a mob to "wear" the equipment they use and drop and it makes total sense to me. There is something in the surprise argument, but that surprise could come with non-worn equipment, like a rare recipe or quest item or valuable, etc. I would be more worried about this when they get to the "loot testing phases" and not the general "systems working checks" phases we are currently in.
I would like to see the equipment that will drop, but it is not a deal breaker for me.
Adrenicus said:I'm against it for a couple of reasons. Firstly if the rarest weapons/armour in the game are visible on the mob before they drop it is going to lead to awful griefing/kill stealing scenarios. People will just scavenge regions looking for the mob with the shiny piece of loot attached to them.
My second reason is it takes away the element of surprise when you go to loot a corpse of finding something rare. If they just look standard you know you're only ever going to get a mundane drop.
I agree nostly. If a mob has a sword then a sword should drop. You can't tell what sort of sword until it is killed, be it rusty, shiny, magical, rare etc.
If it hits me with a sword I would like to loot it, but then again it could just drop a broken sword as well since you destroyed it while in battle. vendor trash.
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Chenzeme said: "I would be more worried about this when they get to the "loot testing phases" and not the general "systems working checks" phases we are currently in."
The problem with this is the fact that this plays a very important role in the 'systems' part of the game. They will need to make all NPC's models work like PC models where they have an unequipped (naked) visual and then add the Armor, weapons, held items, etc... that would be visible in the same way as it would work if a Player put those items on.
If they don't create NPC Models to work this way right from the start, but instead they 'Hard Code' those NPC models to either have or not have weapons and/or armor all the time, then they can't retroactively decide for NPCs to wield or not wield weapons/armor based on if they spawn with that loot, since those NPC Avatars are hard coded to look a specific way. They would need to re-do all the NPC models across the board.
So this needs to be decided at the beginning before they go through all the work creating all the NPC models in the game that could potentially wear/wield armor/weapons.
My point was that since we have seen in this Pre-Alpha Phase 5 NPC's that wield weapons that do not drop as loot... my fear is that they have already hard coded those NPC models to always have weapons or shields regardless of their loot. This would suggest that they have already made the decision and it's not to have visible items drop as loot.
100% Yes! This is one of those things EQ abandoned but it was such a thrill. There's something really cool about wielding something used by the mob you just killed. Spoils of war, baby.
One of the best parts of showing rare items this way is the tantalizing encouragement to engage in battle, even if it may seem difficult. There's a visible reward, like seeing the dragon's horde. It's not something where you have to hop off to go look at Allakazam to check loot tables it's more organic "Wow, look at that. Let's try to kill it and take that!"
GoofyWarriorGuy: The problem with this is the fact that this plays a very important role in the 'systems' part of the game. They will need to make all NPC's models work like PC models where they have an unequipped (naked) visual and then add the Armor, weapons, held items, etc... that would be visible in the same way as it would work if a Player put those items on.
I totally agree that it is important, but it makes no difference to the render engine to display a place holder weapon over one actually used by the npc. The engine just needs to be informed which it is to display.
My point is that until VR specifically says that the mechanic for displaying NPC utilised equipment is in game, then specifically testing for it seems a bit of a waste of time to me. The fact that the render engine is displaying a weapon (place holder or otherwise) is the important thing. If they are not being shown, then it should just be mentioned in the testing feedback pages. To me, it is not a big issue at this time. So far I have only seen that VR have said that the armour and weapons used will be shown, not that they are currently shown.