My favorite Biome would have to be dense forests that radiate magical energy because of the fantasy element they provide.
My favorite weather condition is a toss-up between snow and darkness (provided we are counting darkness as a weather condition). Frozen tundras and snowy areas are almost tied with magical forests as being my favorite type of biome which explains why I love seeing snow in games. As for darkness, I love exploring the unknown and darkness adds a sense of unknowing, dread, fear, and excitement when traversing areas.
Honestly, though any biome/ weather condition is my favorite provided I can get lost in them and they are well designed.
FatedEmperor said:My favorite Biome would have to be dense forests that radiate magical energy because of the fantasy element they provide.
My favorite weather condition is a toss-up between snow and darkness (provided we are counting darkness as a weather condition). Frozen tundras and snowy areas are almost tied with magical forests as being my favorite type of biome which explains why I love seeing snow in games. As for darkness, I love exploring the unknown and darkness adds a sense of unknowing, dread, fear, and excitement when traversing areas.
Honestly, though any biome/ weather condition is my favorite provided I can get lost in them and they are well designed.
Ditto. =)
An old favorite of mine comes from the book Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey. In this book she describes this thing known as "thread".
"Thread is the name given to a voracious, non-sentient organism that inhabited the Oort Cloud of the Rukbat system. Its appearance was as thin, silvery threads that periodically rained down on the planet (threadfall). Thread was a mycorrhizoidal spore that consumed any organic matter it could find, but was deterred by metal, plastic and rock, and killed by water, cold and fire."
Every time I go back and read this book, I can't help but graphically envision what I think this thread would look like devouring organic plant life, animals and humans alike, as it spread like a cancer.
It would be really interesting to see something like this implemented in Pantheon. The challenge of navigating during periods of threadfall and the impact that it would have on various biome types, the associated commerce, zone activity and who knows what else, would be quite dynamic.
Kilsin said:... what's your favourite weather condition or biome and why?
IMO:
Any biome or weather condition that permits the use of projected textures for optionally displaying footprints or tracks.
That is, specifically: sand, snow, mud, dirt, rain, hail, or similar.
And bonus points for designers that go the extra kilometer and add layers to the MMO reality, such that smell/scent, audio, dimensional nearness, rifts or tears in the veil, or similar can be perceived visually via optional overlays/views.
Personally, I've never seen actual dynamic (zone changes without reload) weather with any meaningful impact in an MMO since M59. And in M59 it wasn't visual, so if Pantheon actually permits snowstorms, sandstorms, rain->mud, minor flooding, damaging/seeking lightning, blunt damage AoE hail, and similar impactful weather in any biome? Such that it made tracking easier and had temporary Environmental consequences? That would be a precedent, in my experience.
I guess the Desert of Ro had increased thirst, but the swamps didn't have decreased thirst.. so.. meh. :)
My favorite - snowy conditions. Not meaning snowfall so heavy you cannot see 10 feet away - not in a game where death is painful. Meaning snow on the ground.
My unfavorite - large tree cities. Flets (elvish tree dwellings) are interesting but to me navigating a tree city and finding all the places I may need to go to (trainer, merchants, craft hall, important NPCs) is a nightmare.
Kilsin said:Community Debate: Weather Systems and Biomes, what's your favourite weather condition or biome and why? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
None of them are my favorite though desert is my least. So long as the biomes are visually interesting but not cluttered with stuff few people will even notice the Nth time through the area is all I care about.
As for weather? I like variety. Take rain, as an example. It doesn't always need lightning and thunder. I've always hated the black/white dichotomy of game weather systems where it's either a beautiful sunny day or it's raining buckets with thunder/lightning. I've love to see cloudless days, cloudy days, completely overcast days (but with no rain) just to mix things up a bit.
All that said, I will take the simple binary nature of weather if it means you can get this game to release sooner. Mess with tweaking the weather after release.
I like FFXIV's weather system. It has a lot of variety and mostly makes sense geographically (meaning, in a snowy area you get snowfall, not rain). Weather has no real effects on your character (other than the wind affecting your clothes), but it certainly does effect visibility. Try to move through a blizzard in Coerthas Western Highlands and you know what I mean :) There's also "unnatural" weather conditions such as "umbral storm" which covers the sky into a surreal green storm. My favorite weather condition is clear night sky.
I wonder, SHOULD weather have (more) impact on the character? In FFXIV you don't get "wet" in rain. This could be different for Pantheon which has a "wet" status, as far as we know!
For biomes, I have no real preference, although I love wide open areas with good visibility. Nothing against a dense forest, but I just like the open areas better :)
I like swimming, or underwater biomes. I have a salt-water fish tank that I am manitaining so I am partial to the inter-relatedness and symbiotic nature of different species. Like how gobies and shrimp make friends for mutual benefit, or clownfish and anemones, krill/brine shrimp (sea-monkeys!) and blue whales.
Plus the vibrant colors with the right lighting and the semi-bouancy, the effortlessness of drifting in a mild current or the silent danger of a rip-tide or sudden violence of a wave. You can find yourself in a calm space but then feel how things are changing with the pulse of the tide coming in or out. Time it wrong and get pushed up and shot out through a hole in the top of a small cave or time it right and tangentally sway to and fro with the other colorful dezinens flitting about.
I've always loved the massive, spanning forests be they temperate or jungle. Toxxulia Forest and Feralas, Ashenvale, Duskwood, and Stranglethorn from WoW all come to mind.
My other favorite would be swamps and bayous, Innothule and Swamp of Sorrows and Dustwallow from WoW both being very good examples of it done well.
What can I say, a witch needs her hidden, haunted home.
My favorite doesn't exist in any games I have seen, and that would be swaggy skies. During swaggy skies weather you can feel the swag in the air, enemies have style and their fades are tight, jumping during swaggy skies adds in flips or twists, combat looks more like a Michael Jackson video, loot drops become swag drops and you backpack is referred to as your swag bag. Swagful characters such as bards thrive during swaggy skies making their song effects stronger, but douche based classes like paladins are punished with being forced to wear their sunglasses at night and have their collars not only popped but also starched.
Community Debate: Weather Systems and Biomes, what's your favourite weather condition or biome and why?
My favorite weather condition is a covering of snow. Snow cover adds beauty to every type of landscape I know of, in games and in real life. It is much more impactful if the landscape only gets snow cover in 'real world' winter, rather than having some areas of Terminus always be snow covered and other areas never.
My favorite biome just for esthetic appearance is wide open plains/deserts with geographic features like mountains or ocean barely visible at the limit of viewing distance. I can wander around taking screen shots all day in that territory.
While such esthetics add enjoyment to anything I do ingame, my favorite biome to spend extended time in a group combat/grinding situation is a moderately dense, forested area with a variety of hills & hollows & unexpected landforms, full of lush vegetation similar to the Asiatic forests of Kojan in Vanguard. It offers scenic beauty while allowing for serious danger, unexpected encounters and startling discoveries.
Summerry forests complete with bodies of water and distant large old style buildings like castles, pyramids, or shrines.
As far as challenging content goes, the forest biome could be enchanted with something a bit dangerous while maintaining it's aesthetic beauty. Magical forests like others mention here.
I have to start with the lost forest from the Legend of Zelda…just the fact that I kept hitting the same screen over and over captured something a lot of mmos have missed…the feeling of being (at least a little) Lost..
Often the transitions are so continual from one spot to another, and the landscape is so intricately detailed, it makes every place very distinctive and easily identifiable. I love huge forests in MMOs and irl. I know capturing the feel of an old growth forest could be quite difficult…but for me, the closer to that the better…
In most you can become lost in mere minutes of walking. The magic comes just of being lost amongst the sounds and sights…the flit of half seen creatures imagined or real… and the thought of what could be hiding around every tree in the seemingly eternal twilight..
Add night time to that where real darkness closes in and it’s often safer to find a place off the ground to hide than to continue stumbling in random directions in the dark
Lothlorien, fangorn, Brocielande…these are the images of forests from my childhood..ancient and even sentient… massive trees with ambivalent dryads who may care to help a traveler or just as soon trick him into his death, elves hiding in the trees perhaps deciding my fate before I knew they were there, glimmering lakes shining silver with unfathomable depth whose twists and turns in ancient glacial canyons are hidden in the mist.
And a soft rain with deep thunder that seems to blend everything into the same location no matter where I walk
Baerr said:captured something a lot of mmos have missed…the feeling of being (at least a little) Lost..
Yup, too many NPC made landmarks and you just end up with another theme park mmo. I'll take getting lost in a natural undeveloped landscape over, "hey the next ride is just over there by the ______" any day.
The one that sticks out in my mind is The Grey in EQ from the Luclin expansion. It was the first one I remember that kind of forced you to take notice in a different way. Sure, Kedge Keep also required a way to breathe, but it felt more unique in The Grey for some reason. I also loved The Great Divide and several of the zones in Velious. The snow/ice was cool, but honestly it was the scale that I still remember. I remember my character feeling small and that's not something I've experienced in a lot of games. The Mobs were huge and the zones were built around that instead of huge mobs in regular sized zones that make it seem like they were squeezed in someway.
Hidden biomes with an untouched feel. Alien biomes (alien in the sense that it is not copy pasted biomes from the earth). Naturally beautiful biomes.
For weather systems, I enjoy a good rain. I also enjoy anything with scope and gravity.
I would love to see a new interaction with weather systems in pantheon. If there was a big storm raging across the lowlands, It would be neat to be able to see it from other zones, like standing on a mountain looking down at a tornado or something.
I would also love to see changing biomes too, like for example, a mangrove forest that switches from an underwater area at mid and high tide and a maze of muddy puddles up to waist high pools of murky water at low tide.
Gottbeard said:Hidden biomes with an untouched feel. Alien biomes (alien in the sense that it is not copy pasted biomes from the earth). Naturally beautiful biomes.
For weather systems, I enjoy a good rain. I also enjoy anything with scope and gravity.
I would love to see a new interaction with weather systems in pantheon. If there was a big storm raging across the lowlands, It would be neat to be able to see it from other zones, like standing on a mountain looking down at a tornado or something.
I would also love to see changing biomes too, like for example, a mangrove forest that switches from an underwater area at mid and high tide and a maze of muddy puddles up to waist high pools of murky water at low tide.
Inspiring thoughts, man. I would love to be able to see weather systems from a distance (and then could prepare for them).
The other side of that is weather systems could and should limit your vision when you're in them! Would be great to have to be more careful in heavy rain or snow because you might stumble over monsters much more easily!