Difficult question. I think the thing I would most like to see isn't really a game feature at all but more a community thing. I'd love to see a guide program that keen members of the community can join to help people out. I'd also like a vibrant community of server forums where people on the same server can go and discuss issues relating to their own server and the people who are on it. I also loved reading what was going on in my server in EverQuest. It make the game seem so much more fun knowing people both in-game and out of game. It made it much easier to make friends with people.
Laughing Skeletons.
More serious, would like to see AA in the game from the start. This can help alleviate a lull in progression due to lack of content or allow for continued progression even if a play session is short.
I find talent trees like in The elder scrolls online or Rift etc. very nice. It makes the chars much more flexible and you do not have a clone army feeling. Yes, i know it is a hell to balance and it would weaken the "one class-one role"-concept.
Here are some talent planers if you do not know what it is.
http://www.esohead.com/calculator/skills
http://rift.magelo.com/en/soultree#Ag/
Greetings
That the player character models actually resemble the concept art from the races section on this site. They are just too good to be true but hey, you asked.
Equipment degradation system based on taking hits and giving hits to armor and weapons (not based on death penalty). EQOA did it really well as a designed downtime and money sink and it was a nice social interaction. Groups would give the stackable loot from grinds to the tank to cover armor repair costs. It made it so outposts with a repair smith npc were prime gathering locations for forming groups and hanging out. It also gave you reason to keep multiple sets of armor and weapons on you. Some think it annoying, I think it added a lot. You could go a step further and allow some tradeskillers to specialize in repairs and give bonus repairs to like 120% or so from forges in cities and outposts. For raids and long grinds patch kits could be a thing but lets say they only do 50% the first time, 25% the next and 0% after that.
EQ emulation. Juuuuuust kidding.
I want Pantheon to be a deep, layered virtual world that continues to offer exploration and discovery. Is that one thing?
BARDS! (how did I forget?! Thanks Amsai)
FV type server.
Larirawiel said:I find talent trees like in The elder scrolls online or Rift etc. very nice. It makes the chars much more flexible and you do not have a clone army feeling. Yes, i know it is a hell to balance and it would weaken the "one class-one role"-concept.
I too would like to see a talent tree type option. Where the tree is specific to the class, but allows those of the class to seperate slightly as they grow. So, as you say, we don't just have clone armies in each class.
FFXI's Sky style endgame content!
Its basically (to me) the perfect meeting of contested and non contested. Multiple Named in a large zone so no uberguild can be all places at once. Open world competition for trigger or pop items that drop from Named. Then using the trigger items to summon the Gods. All open world. All despawn on wipe (which means collecting pops again), unless another Guild grabs it. All have rare drop rates for loot should you beat them. No instancing, 50/50 ratio of competitive and triggered Named. Back in the day when competiton was fierce (4 to 6 guilds on any given night) and the Gods were relevent. My guild could expect to spend 2 of 3 nights just trying to get the pop items (3-5 hours a night) needed to trigger a Named by day three.... roughly. So it was almost like having a 72 hour lock out with the addition of rare loot tables (it wasnt unheard of to have 3 God runs in a row drop jack ****). It was also a dangerous zone and wasnt uncommon to come around a bend and find an entire guild of dead people lol.
This in my opinion would offer both contested content and something in place of instanced but still be open world and also be a dangerous and challenging place. It could be tweaked to fit Pantheon as well.
Two reasons I want this: 1. Some of the most fun experience in large group/raid style activity I have ever had (there were several types including instanced in FFXI, but I always liked this one best). 2. I would hope this might provide a good middle ground solution for contested vs instanced content.
I know some people might not like some things that this system puts forth. Like I know some hate first hit claims type mechaincs, but thats not really the point of this system thats just a small detail that could be changed if needed. The bigger picture in my mind is a fun and challenging expereince for both fans of contested and instanced content without actually resorting to instancing.
And if for some reason this isnt acceptable..............................wait for it.......................................................................
BARD!!!!
Kilsin said:If you could pick 1 and only 1 thing that you would like to see in Pantheon, what would it be and why? :)
Interdependance on a scale like original EQ / Phinigel Server.
The reason is pretty damn easy: Grouping everywhere. People are NICE and dumb people get ignored and have a hard time finding groups. I just love grouping and playing with other peoples. And even as an unwanted class like a necro i have never been LFG for more then 20min on Phinigel. With my enchanter i usually get invites before i put the LFG flag on. All about your PERSONAL reputation with PLAYERS and not NPCs.
I would like to see a server like old FV where you can 1 toon per person so RP and Reputation is key , you can still Progeny a toon keep your same name and use roman numerals to show what generation you where, also by only haveing 1 toon per server you have to rely on other people cant just make alts as banks or multi toon crafters ect , you would need to work on that 1 toon and so time spent on the toon would actualy mean something
Appearance tabs.
... because I like to make nostalgic EQ traditionalists eye twitch. ;)
Honestly, no idea. Talent trees with different viable roles are good I guess. Havent seen one of those in a while. No on-the-fly switching though. Make it so players will have to think about wether they really want to respec to a different role or just create a new character.
Seconding the AA/Talent trees. I'd personally like AA's to be done in such a way that there are many viable options for building your character. What I mean by that is, I don't want just ONE AA build to be the "go to" build, otherwise it defeats the purpose of customization to me.
If there is a way to accomplish this while also keeping class interdependency, that'd be great.
-Tralyan
X
Id have to agree with posters above and say AA's. Its vitally important to feel you are advancing your character in some way when you cant get a popular camp for items you need or its not a raid night etc, just go farm some AA somewhere else.
It also gives people something to work towards other than gear and promotes helping other people as even if you dont need anything from a particular zone/camp you can still help someone who does and get some AA while you do it.
The problem with talent trees is that a "meta" will be figured out and then we really will get into situations where people are "less than". Instead of how well a player plays the class being what differentiates the best from good from average and poor, it becomes whether or not you hit the skill tree jackpot.
Krixus said:The problem with talent trees is that a "meta" will be figured out and then we really will get into situations where people are "less than". Instead of how well a player plays the class being what differentiates the best from good from average and poor, it becomes whether or not you hit the skill tree jackpot.
Expansive Talent trees eventually lead to cookie cutter builds that want to maximize that extra .5% healing/dps/mitigation. Well, I guess the trees don't do that, the min-max playerbase does that.
As to what I'd like to see:
Class specific Epic quests that require an epic JOURNEY. You will be collecting pieces for the quest in multiple zones across multiple continents... And you start them very early on in the game.
Well it was brought up in previous interviews between Brad and Chris, but I really want to see “Dumpster Diving / Merchant Mining”. This was basically a game in a game for me and many others in EQ. A good article from TTH that discusses Dumpster Diving better than I can convey it (Copied from TTH…)
One thing that was common in EverQuest and is no longer the norm in games today was the ability to go dumpster diving.
Let me explain what I mean. Imagine you want to make yourself a suit of leather armor and you need some hides to do it. Now imagine that you and 10 other players are hunting in the same area. The thing is, you’re the only one who actually needs the hides. The other 9 players are just there hunting for experience points or a quest. In most games, once they sell their piles of hides to a merchant (because they had the luck of the drops and you didn’t find squat), those hides are gone. Poof. Presto. Buh-bye! In EverQuest, you could look through the wares of local merchants and find those other players discarded hides for sale pretty cheap. The merchants price was generated by some magic and uber secret formula hidden in a vault and locked away tighter than the original Coca-Cola formula. Sometimes that formula worked in favor of the player, especially when it came to crafting materials. It was an amazing system.
EverQuest literally had (and has) thousands of items that can be used in crafting. Hunting them for yourself was often a very time consuming process and involved more than a little luck. Fortunately there were plenty of players who not only didn’t need item X for their own crafting needs, there were plenty of players who had no intention of trying to sell them in the East Commons Tunnel (the defacto trading bazaar of the early years). This meant they would sell them to the merchant most conveniently located to their position. Although there were hundreds of merchants scattered over the world, there were 20 to 30 or so that were regularly used by everyone, depending on which popular spot they had just been hunting.
By taking the time to scout out the various merchants, players could often find an extraordinary variety of items, everything from weapons to armor, spells, words of power, crafting materials, spell components and more. A lot of players (including myself) knew the general value of certain items to the open market and would often scour merchants for them trying to make a quick profit. While it wasn’t always a fruitful search, just the fact that those sold materials stayed in the world was awesome.
Along with letting players buy previously sold merchant goods, the game also let you get the weapons you saw in the hands of mobs. In today’s MMO world, you kill an enemy and simply hope that you get some random loot drop. In EverQuest, each specific mob was alike (a plain skeleton was a skeleton, just with various levels). This meant that if you were fighting in an area and a skeleton spawned with a weapon in its hand, guess what you were going to get that weapon if you beat it in battle. Sure praying for loot is fun, but it’s not remotely as satisfying as prying a weapon you were just getting beat with from the dead hand of your recent foe.
I can hear it now. You’re like, So freaking what? Oh, you got a sword. Was it magic? Not always, and in fact, rarely, but there are a couple things to keep in mind. Back then, it could be over a month before you got a magic weapon. So they were rare. Money was also extremely hard to come by, so if you saw a mob with a weapon, you would do whatever it took to get to it because merchants paid top coin for those very weapons. This added yet another layer of gameplay in an already intricately balanced game. You couldn’t just plow through a group of mobs like you could today. It took planning and timing to get a specific mob out of a group, or to fight your way through them in order to get to your real target.
Dumpster diving was not only a great pastime, but also an efficient way to make some money. Getting weapons from your foes was also a thrill. If you had spent the time to level up high enough and were ready for a real challenge though, you went for your individual class weapon. Think taking down the hardest raid in any modern game is difficult? Wait until you hear the extreme steps it took to get an epic weapon back in the day.
The very most important aspect for me would be strong class identity. I've grown tired of the new MMORPG's allowing every class to act in every capacity with similar effectiveness. Sure, multiple classes should be able to heal, but one class should be the premier healer in exchange for not being quite so good in other areas - less utility for example. Same with tanking, crowd control, DPS, etc. I always thought EQ got that right, until they started blurring the lines between classes in recent expansions.