I am curious if anything has been released showing how darkness, torches, campfires etc will look with the new art style. The recent QA screenshot makes me feel like there should be more out there.
Full of holiday spirit I will forgo my rant about the importance of darkness, difficulty, and good audio setting an important and dangerous tone.
I do like how dark the shadows can be in the below image. Players need to be pushed to use lights.
edit: fixed link
This post was edited by Jobeson at November 17, 2023 7:26 AM PST
IMO:
The embers ground torches would have been good if their duration was ten times longer, or they produced 10 per combine, and still only lasted a few minutes.
Why? Because of their design decision to force players to fight in the dark, otherwise.
So, on one hand, torch mechanic, cool, nothing surprising. On the other hand, you can't have a torch out and fight. Can't have a lantern on the belt. Can't have a light spell. Can't have a pet firefily. Can't have ANYTHING that provides a tangible, reasonable, or useful amount of light while fighting.
Their punitive design philosophy, followed by punitive implementation took a normal, very cool, possibly innovative mechanic and turned it into a reason (among many) that caused me to stop playing their game. It was that bad. They did it, that badly.
While darkness can be a challenge to overcome, and be a primary gameplay mechanic? It has no place being so in MMOs, in my opinion. Players need to see the game in order to play it. Forcing them to fight, travel, or otherwise suffer in darkness? Not fun. Does not drive customer retention. Does not expand the target demographic.
vjek said:
While darkness can be a challenge to overcome, and be a primary gameplay mechanic? It has no place being so in MMOs, in my opinion. Players need to see the game in order to play it. Forcing them to fight, travel, or otherwise suffer in darkness? Not fun. Does not drive customer retention. Does not expand the target demographic.
IMO:
There are many, many ways to engage the player to make darkness a challenge to overcome. EQ1 did it. You give the tools to the player, and they overcome the challenge. It comes down to one decision, from what I see:
Do you want your players to suffer and/or logout at night, or be able to continue playing?
To me, a reasonable and fun approach would be to continue to permit players to play, rather than suffer. Carrot, not stick.
I understand there is a less broad, more niche demographic that would prefer that night be instant death for everyone unless you're holding a portable 10k lumen light source. I get that. Totally on board and have non-MMO survival played games like that.
Yet, historically, the draw to MMOs is that you can play them any time with friends. Why make it any time with friends, except at night, in-game?
Even stress testing M&M on Nov 11, without Ultravision, testers stopped testing at night, because they could not see to travel, move, interact, retrieve their corpse, loot, or test -anything-. Was that better? Turns out, not so much.
chenzeme said:
Honestly, if players log off at night, then there will be more content for players that think like me and will make the most of it. Pantheon's vision is that it should be hard and not the same as all the other mmos out there. That is not a wrong choice for VR. VR also said there will be way around the darkness, so toughen up, I say!
Ziegfried said:This is in game, already.The best option for players who hate darkness is giving them a race/spell/item that at least partially negates that darkness. Pitch black should be reserved for caves and dungeons...the overworld should still have moonlight in most areas at least.