Something I really enjoy is freedom to choose the areas I level and quest in. Typically MMO’s all follow the same format of having areas based on level. Level 1-10 fight in an area with rats and snakes. At level 11-20 you move to another area and fight bats and bears… and so on. This systems works, don’t change. Some games have tried, it never works.
What I am hoping is to have multiple areas/zones for each level block as I just explained. Obviously this increases replay value as it becomes more fun to make alts and discover new areas. Also, (and most important to me) it gives freedom of choice and movement throughout the leveling process. I want to log in and decide… Do I feel like fighting/questing in a jungle or on the beach today? Additionally, I hope we can choose from multiple starting areas and have very different experience with alts, for years of fun.
When a player is not given this type of choice you start to feel like you are on rails. Fight here .. go to the next quest hub, fight here go to the next quest hub, and so on. I know it’s been discussed and Pantheon won’t be a game on rails. But I don’t know the plan for creating content that runs in parallel from a level standpoint. I sure hope there is more content then I could ever see with 1 character. To be clear, while I did mention alts in this post, that's not the motivation for me at all. It’s about freedom of choice with a single character.
Also on this topic, I love ridiculously vast and large zones. If I smash the W key down a walk away from my keyboard, I better not hit the end of the zone in 5 minutes (assuming I have an open path). Anyone remember doing that back in 1999 (EQ1)?
Sweety said:Something I really enjoy is freedom to choose the areas I level and quest in. Typically MMO’s all follow the same format of having areas based on level. Level 1-10 fight in an area with rats and snakes. At level 11-20 you move to another area and fight bats and bears… and so on. This systems works, don’t change. Some games have tried, it never works.
What I am hoping is to have multiple areas/zones for each level block as I just explained. Obviously this increases replay value as it becomes more fun to make alts and discover new areas. Also, (and most important to me) it gives freedom of choice and movement throughout the leveling process. I want to log in and decide… Do I feel like fighting/questing in a jungle or on the beach today? Additionally, I hope we can choose from multiple starting areas and have very different experience with alts, for years of fun.
When a player is not given this type of choice you start to feel like you are on rails. Fight here .. go to the next quest hub, fight here go to the next quest hub, and so on. I know it’s been discussed and Pantheon won’t be a game on rails. But I don’t know the plan for creating content that runs in parallel from a level standpoint. I sure hope there is more content then I could ever see with 1 character. To be clear, while I did mention alts in this post, that's not the motivation for me at all. It’s about freedom of choice with a single character.
Also on this topic, I love ridiculously vast and large zones. If I smash the W key down a walk away from my keyboard, I better not hit the end of the zone in 5 minutes (assuming I have an open path). Anyone remember doing that back in 1999 (EQ1)?
All of this is pretty much the plan for Pantheon based on the info that we have.
I think from a story perspective you can just make areas around starting cities to be 'noobie' type areas and the further you get away from civilization the hard the enemies become.
If you apply this logic to your design while populating npc’s in the game world it would give players a lot of options.
At least two fairly large MMOs have zones adjust to your level so you can have a wide choice of where to go. This has advantages but also reduces the importance of leveling dramatically except for the content only available at maximum level. For a game that focuses on more than just the "endgame" - maybe not such a good idea.
Many MMOs fo give a choice of differing leveling areas. In fact I would guess that most do, earlier in the game. But by mid-level there are typically few or no choices. Developers do not go to the effort of having five different zones each of which works well at level 40. Other than the games that make level mostly irrelevant. I suspect Pantheon will follow this pattern, as a matter of proper use of limited resources.
I share the same sentiment. I really hope there will be at least 3-4 places to level for each 'level bracket'. I enjoy making alts of every race and having each experience a different journey. I do like the idea of having tiered content in each zone and reasons to go back but I imagine every zone will generally be aimed at a certain level bracket.
I'm not a huge fan of zones 'adjusting' to your level. Like many others have pointed out before one of the enjoyable aspects of leveling is watching your power grow which is noticible when returning to lower level zones. But its not a deal breaker for me either.
This gives me an opportunity to add something I've observed in EQ Tlp servers.
It's more than just levels. EQ has individual starting zones, but it quickly moves to most logical choice from there, there are lots of options but with easy travel there are better places than others.
Crocks on the shoreline of southern row... non agro, (except for the rare Lockjaw) non social... people all flock here through there teens even though there's lots of other teen level mobs in the world.
Castle Mistmoor comes next, up to your 30's the lure here I believe to be a huge experience bonus as well as nearly non stop mobs.
Next we all move to Lower Guk, again I think high spawn rates and experience bonus.
My point being even with multiple options in levels there's a lot more to consider.
I'm not big on "ballance" but I think through beta areas will need looked at for ballance, the non-social, non-agro of the crock's in SRo seems a big mistake to me, if this was used to lure players to out of the way places then I could almost understand, but this in the area of the human city as well as EC tunnel, the most heavily populated area in the game.... seems wrong.
