(Edited to clarify a couple of things):
One point raised by VR about instancing that resonated with me is this; in a truly open world, where raid and premier bosses are open to all, do you really want an external group influencing your chances of taking them down? If your group is able to take on a really difficult mob with multiple mechanics and stages, the last thing you need is a second group turning up and "influencing" that attempt in an adverse manner even if it is inadvertent.
I totally get the instancing for these kinds of bosses. If not instanced, raid encounters could end up being almost impossible to complete successfully because of factors outside of the raid's control. I am a bit amazed anyone is advocating that this is desirable. Instancing itself is not evil, the question is how it is employed that is of concern. VR are using it to ensure that the attempts on some (most/few/who knows) premier+ bosses are "protected" from outside influences. I think this is reasonable.
Even though VR didn't go into specifics regarding lock outs, they did say that you could not take out a premier boss and immediately go back in for another try. They will employ multiple types of mechanics to stop this from happening.
With these two mechanics in place (ensuring a "safe" environment for an attempt on a premier boss and various lock out measures), it allows players to test themselves against the hardest content where they can concentrate solely on the enemy at hand and allows VR to stop rewards from these encounters from flooding the market.
In my opinion (or confirmational bias) all in all, I feel this is a sensible direction to go in. (not preaching and do not take anything I say as gospel or evangelism, I simply say how I feel about a topic)
Yes! there will be all types of raiding and tough bosses in open world and instanced. This is great! This means players will experience lots of different types of encounter. However, at this point, I cannot see an open world raid boss employ all of the mechanics that an instanced raid boss can. IMO they will not be anywhere near as complex or unforgiving (and yes, I am guessing and spitting in the wind). If I am proved wrong - great! But if open world encounters are as tough and complex as instanced, then there little need for instances at all.
@Chenzeme I can agree with this take. I like how instancing is only going to be used in very perticular and uncommon situations/encounters. Like Joppa said, it allows the dev team to create and balance very fun challenging encounters for particular boss fights. Something tells me these particular boss fights aren't going to have a revolving door of adventures strutting out of them whistling, while holding a bag with a $ over their shoulders. Quite frankly, I really like the direction the team is taking this game after watching the latest Parting the Veil. They're coming up with ideas that mixes old world and new, not This OR That, but This AND That.
Brutenga said:Something tells me these particular boss fights aren't going to have a revolving door of adventures strutting out of them whistling, while holding a bag with a $ over their shoulders.
The event unlock instances sound exactly like that to me. Message goes out in the zone and 10-20 groups drop their camp spots or redirect their roaming to converge for the best loot of the dungeon. Everyone killing it at the same time and walking out with their bag of money over their shoulders. The open door instance zone wall as well as the event door instance zone wall both run counter to most of the promises from the majority of Pantheon's development. You really expect the always open instance zone wall will not be a revolving door?
I can understand and get behind the single use keys moving a fight into an instance as long as they are not some easy to obtain item with a weekly lockout timer making them just like every other MMO with raid farm timers. If Keys are as rare as the boss spawns would be there is no real real issue with the system.
Folks should keep in mind that instancing is ONLY FOR SOME BOSSES. Not every 'premier' boss will be instanced, only some of them. You will still have some bosses(with highly sought after loot) be non-instanced and in the world to be contested. It will be a mixture so that everyone can get the experience they desire in Pantheon. There will still be encouragement to fight non-instanced bosses becasue there will be an intentional effort to evenly distribute the best gear between both mehtods and not one method will have all of the best gear or all of the most desirable gear.
Just because one things exists does not mean the other thing is completely negated.
This is the challenge. VR says something and folks create their own interpretation of it and then others respond to that new interpretation like it's gospel and it spreads creating a false narrative of what Pantheon is. While a lot of what Pantheon is will be familar, a lot of what Pantheon is will be new and/or a very different way of playing than what we are used to. We should always keep that in mind and not just place it within the box of our choosing or the box of our confirmation bias.
Jobeson: ... Secondly there are endless ways to stop that. Such as enemy train breaks at the boss room...
But surely a true open world should not stop any such activity? You are in effect ring-fencing the boss in some manner. In effect you are protecting the fight and thus causing a soft instance? If you stop open world activity from influencing a fight, it may as well be instanced?
I believe there is room for instancing in the game as long as it is done with great care. I believe that open world premier and raid bosses are possible, but they will not be as complex or unforgiving as instanced ones.
Anyway, thats what I feel and time will tell.
Jobeson said:Brutenga said:Something tells me these particular boss fights aren't going to have a revolving door of adventures strutting out of them whistling, while holding a bag with a $ over their shoulders.
The event unlock instances sound exactly like that to me. Message goes out in the zone and 10-20 groups drop their camp spots or redirect their roaming to converge for the best loot of the dungeon. Everyone killing it at the same time and walking out with their bag of money over their shoulders. The open door instance zone wall as well as the event door instance zone wall both run counter to most of the promises from the majority of Pantheon's development. You really expect the always open instance zone wall will not be a revolving door?
I can understand and get behind the single use keys moving a fight into an instance as long as they are not some easy to obtain item with a weekly lockout timer making them just like every other MMO with raid farm timers. If Keys are as rare as the boss spawns would be there is no real real issue with the system.
I was moreso referring to the particular (almost limited sounding) instanced encounters being designed to be extremely difficult. I'm fine with keys and lockouts, but those aside even if a group manages to get in, doesn't mean they're leaving with loot. We're assuming the encounter will have a high success rate just because it's able to be entered into via instance. Unless it's low level instanced content, but then I don't see much of a purpose for that. Maybe if it's used to tell heavily ladent lore content? Even still, kinda meh. I imagine it will be used to create "bleeding edge" content that a portion if not a good portion of the player base would have a lot of trouble completing or not being able to complete.
All conjecture on my part. There's things I'm really loving about this game and some things im not particularly crazy about, but it doesn't deter my interest in the game as a whole. I trust the decisions the devs are making and will make based on player feedback. I'm defintiely willing to give certain systems that I'm not crazy about (the idea of) a chance before I render full judgment.
Jobeson said: Joppa confirmed in an interview recently Pantheon was going to use instances for raids and dungeon bosses. Anyone able to say if will we fall into the standard weekly raid and daily dungeon format or will it be purely the key system limiting access? As in if you farm the key twice a day you could kill the boss twice day.
Instanced raids and dungeons sounds exactly like the opposite of what Brad would've wanted. Pantheon sounds more like the sequel to WoW now than a sequel to EQ.
Brad did more or less take the view that instances were a bad idea under almost any circumstances. I am not certain about the "almost" either.
Pantheon has moved a bit closer to mainstream - the death penalty as more recently discussed seems less ...draconian ... than Brad may have talked about.
But the people at VR knew Brad's mind far better than any of us do and either the changes are not so much of a change as they seem from our perspective or else they felt they had excellent reasons for them.
About one thing I totally disagree - a bit of movement away from some of the more extreme positions taken 3-5 years ago and earlier does not in any slightest way make Pantheon look like a WoW sequel. All I see tells me that the spirit of EQ and Vanguard still lives and has strength in Pantheon. The farce is not with us.
gamexilor1 said:Jobeson said: Joppa confirmed in an interview recently Pantheon was going to use instances for raids and dungeon bosses. Anyone able to say if will we fall into the standard weekly raid and daily dungeon format or will it be purely the key system limiting access? As in if you farm the key twice a day you could kill the boss twice day.Instanced raids and dungeons sounds exactly like the opposite of what Brad would've wanted. Pantheon sounds more like the sequel to WoW now than a sequel to EQ.
It's more like if EQ, vanilla wow, and breath of the wild had a baby at this point. This isn't necessarily bad, it is interesting watching things get fleshed out and I have high hopes for it.
As for what Brad wanted? We don't know what he would want at this point unfortunately, but he trusted the people who are here finishing the game and I am pretty sure they added another person from the original EQ team as well. This whole direction could have been a conversation when he was alive, but we don't know and we shouldn't assume. One thing I am certain of though, this is not even close to a WoW sequel. Ashes of creation on the other hand ...totally a wow sequel.
I ... knew this, that it would happen. :) And i think it is a good decision making some instanced raid bosses. It may hurt a open world feeling a little bit. But it is better for the game in the long run. There are reasons why almost all new games have instanced content.
Maybe some people do not know it. But the earlier alpha versions WoW did not have instanced content and it was also not planned. They made it after some EQ1 hardcore players joined the game designer team. They were in a guild, which locked other players away from non instanced content with batphone calls at 3:00 am etc. They have done it and they saw which effects it has to the game. And they decided, that it is a bad idea. Because if you give the players the opportunity to troll other players then they will do it without an exception.
In WoW Classic there are also six non instanced raid bosses. And only some players had the opportunity to kill them. And if they respawn at 2:00 am then either you have a very disciplined guild and you have short after this 30+ players ready. Or an other guild kills them. And this is not healthy for a game, IMHO, when players have to wake up on 2:00 am to get the chance to kill raid bosses when all are not instanced.
Cheers
Though dated, there were quite a few interviews and even one essay by McQuaid where he wrote at length about the topic, for those curious. Excuse the formatting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081201142351/http://thesafehouse.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-21705.html
A hub-and-instances world, which he calls a hybrid of the pen-and-paper game and the MMO. This is, to my mind, what Guild Wars is, and it’s a popular meme these days. I tend to think of these as being very like Diablo, because the amount of gameplay in the “lobby” is limited. It’s like Quake if the server selection screen looked like a Quake map. They are, fundamentally, session-based games with a degree of persistence slapped on top.
To my mind, these games lie at the edge of what might be considered a virtual world in the first place. A lot depends on what degree of persistence is offered. HoloMUD, which I have cited before, was rather of this model in many ways, and the way in which I tended to regard it was to evaluate the lobby alone by my criteria of whether it was a virtual world.Brad states that the folks who want to make this sort of game are
…mostly people who got into online gaming very early, in the old pay by the hour days, working on commercial games (not MUDs) and what attracts them to online isn’t necessarily what attracts the conventional or modern MMOG player. There’s not necessarily a yearning for a vast, shared, persistent virtual world, a complex economy, or any other cool or esoteric Kosterian theory or mechanic. No, that’s not necessarily what they’re looking for; rather, they just want to play with some people, a smaller group, and to have fun, likely in a more linear or scripted manner… they want to play D&D or an old school single player RPG, but with their friends. And they want it to last. (And then there are those who claim to want it all, to have their cake and eat it too – not sure what to say to that crowd). And there’s nothing wrong with all of this, outside of, IMHO, three things:
1. They keep calling themselves, marketing themselves, as Massively Multiplayer Games, which I think is misleading to the consumer.
2. They have some very serious design hurdles to overcome in order to create the amount of varied and interesting and preferably not-repeatable content I think they’re looking for.
3. And lastly, and this is a small subset of them, but it seems like the more vocal proponents of this sort of online game often times actively resent traditional MMOGs and their players – ‘catasses’ is what they call us.. I’ve seen things said like ‘we were first to make money online’ and ‘MMOG developers are just MUD kids lucky enough to actually be paid’. I’ve also seen things posted and said about how it’s only masochistic people who play traditional MMOGs because of their tendency to grind at times, to incorporate ‘ground hog day’, and the fact that MMOG players are willing to put up with griefers of any sort, to any degree. I say we call a truce as soon as their marketing folk stop calling their games MMOGs – call ‘em whatever you want, but something not MMOG. Then this catass will be cool with you all.
...
An MMO that dabbles with instancing is the last type Brad cites — essentially, working within the mud tradition, but making use of instancing as a tool. Brad advocates doing this with fully in-context pocket worlds, such as a holodeck or an X-Men-style “Danger Room.” He also cynically points out that the more common reasons are because there wasn’t enough time or budget to develop sufficient content to keep spawn points from being contested or overcrowded.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/4y7sd0/i_am_brad_aradune_mcquaid_cco_for_pantheon_rise/
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Avastz
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7 yr. ago
Do you plan on those raids to be instanced? Whats to stop a max level character (or group, if necessary) farming those lower level raids? We see these problems on the TLP EQ1 servers that aren't instanced as well as Project 1999.User avatar
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AraduneMithara
OP
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7 yr. ago
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
No, nothing instanced, although it is possible specific encounters would be locked to the guild doing that content such that others could not interfere. Its still too early to talk about how many people would be in a raid at any given level.
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level 1
Havesh
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7 yr. ago
How are you going to encourage strangers to start talking to each other and play together in the game? Especially when it comes to people with already established connections within the game? How are you going to keep the new-player-experience good after the game has been out for 6 months?
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AraduneMithara
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7 yr. ago
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
As per my reply just before this, there will be an entire System of features, policies, etc. to help people find new friends and others to group with -- there is no one special solution to such a challenge -- it has to be a priority and addressed from many angles. Some quick and easy examples, of course, would be to reward people who don't know each other to group together, to help them stay in contact, to allow them if they want to share personal information, to allow searching for new friends, assuming that person chooses to participate in matchmaking. The main point is that we'll be doing all sorts of things to proactively bring people together and KEEP them together. This is the complete opposite of something like a dungeon finder that randomly brings in people you need to do an instance, you do the instance likely not even speaking a word, and then once the instance is over, the group disperses. This is what destroys communities and true social interaction.
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Im_Fancy
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7 yr. ago
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edited 7 yr. ago
Will crafting gear be useful at all? And are you planning to have more than one instance or area to get the best possible gear for each class?Most MMOs now a days have a BiS for each class and people use all their time and farm one single instance hoping for that gear to drop; which tends to cause people to get bored of a game fast.
Will there be more variety so this doesn't happen?
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AraduneMithara
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7 yr. ago
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen
Crafted gear will be just as important as dropped gear, but will likely perform a slightly different precise purpose. Pantheon will have virtually no Instanced zones -- certainly not combat zones. The best loot will be spread out over a vast, epic world of planar high fantasy -- you better go get it because it's not coming to you :)
I personally do not want a completely open world. In my experience that approach leads to frustration and disappointment for many players, while only a lucky few can enjoy all the game has to offer. And in most of these cases, it's not that the "losers" have to "git gud": Most probably could take on those difficult encounters and win, if only they got a chance to try.
IMO (and I think it was said already somewhere above): In today's world, people expect to be able to plan their playtime. If the game demands however that you have to be online and ready at a moments notice or lose out on any interesting encounter, because everything is open world and contested, then many potential players will not play Pantheon. I think it is as simple as that. So yes, please use instancing, especially for raids and other content that takes more preparation.
I agree with Sarim with a single caveat. I still hope that Pantheon will break the current MMO fixation on raids as being more "special" than single group content and note that single group content is almost invariably more difficult than raid content except for the organizers and leaders. A challenging group encounter requires every single player to do a good job - even a challenging raid allows success with one or more characters weakly geared, poorly played or outright afk. I do not, of course, overlook the challenge of getting everyone organized and to the boss encounters and familiar with the mechanics, if any. But the actual fight is quite likely to challenge the individual players less rather than more in a raid.
Thus I suggest that if instances are used to allow more players to get to important encounters and avoid blocking by aggressive or outright nasty guilds that this be done without regard for whether the encounter is designed for a raid or a single group.
I also suggest (as many have already said) that instances be used sparingly and the great bulk of the world be open - though with sharding as necessary especially to avoid overcrowding after release when everyone will be in the starter zones and many people that will not necessarily stay will be checking the game out.
Sarim said:In today's world, people expect to be able to plan their playtime.
People will always plan their playtime. Meet up with their friends, their guild, etc. You want people to plan their adventures. Instances like this make playing 5 hours a week nearly equivilent to playing 25. These sorts of mechanics are what makes the world feel hollow. It creates a clearly artifical reward system. As soon as we have a ~weekly raid farm and ~daily dungeon boss farm rotation the easy path of efficiency will be clear.
This describes every single MMO on the market. These people have their expectations met everywhere and currently have a dozen flavors of it. The logic of making it easy and convienient for the players bleeds into every problematic MMO trope. The 30 MMOs each made with hundreds of millions of proper funding, many with established and polished IPs, all feel the same. They all have the same problems. An underfunded MMO that aims for a generic MMO world and meta will not have an audience. The problem with ESO is not the lack of climbing.
Iksar said:Jobeson said:Instances like this make playing 5 hours a week nearly equivilent to playing 25. These sorts of mechanics are what makes the world feel hollow.
In what way?
It happens when lockout timers and easy access instanced loot are the core of most of the top end gear. It streamlines the world into a path of high reward ~5 hours a week giving the vast majority of chances at top end loot as playing 25 hours a week. It's the same logic as dailies to keep people coming back to the game for the short efficient period of repetitive play.
jobeson - I am not sure I agree. Then again, I am not sure I do not agree. The point I am thinking of is not the value or cost of lockout timers and dailies - but rather how relevant to the use of same instancing is.
Manifestly one can have lockout timers with instancing but equally so one can have lockout timers without instancing. Suppose a best-in-slot item drops from a boss - open world or bottom of a dungeon doesn't matter - named - and here I will be clever - Fred. With instancing one controls access to Fred very easily - players cannot enter the instance while on lockout. Alternatively players cannot loot Fred's dead but still twitching corpse while on lockout. Yet with no instancing whatsoever one can do exactly the same thing by making Fred immune to attack by anyone on lockout or preventing anyone on lockout from looting the corpse. Slightly varying mechanism - same result.
Similarly with dailies. Suppose the daily is to do 5 quests - one of which is to kill Fred. Very normal for a daily. If Fred is instanced you simply enter the instance and kill Fred. Or, if you are having a bad day - Fred kills you and the server gets a broadcast message "Woot - finished my deed of killing 500 players by killing (player name) /signed Fred". Yet without instancing you go to where Fred spawns or lairs - fight him - same ending. With added complexities relating to respawn timing.
So I certainly see the difference between Fred being instanced or open world. Instanced - guaranteed access, no worries about respawn timing, no competition no griefing. Also more isolated from the world, totally apart from the rest of the community, arguably far more hollow.
It is the relevance of dailies or lockout timers that I am wrestling with.
We are remembering things much differently. I remember big guilds camping alts near bosses and either casually grinding out AAs, sitting in a city crafting/chatting/buffing etc, working on mats for crafting, or A LOT of the time just not being online at all until needed. It was actually pretty similar to the way things are now, except instead of planning your raid you were "on call" like a job. The same type of people who would just log on for a raid, do some dungeons(xping) and log off afterwards in a modern MMO.
I don't see it becoming hollow if they stick to their current description, at least no more hollow than big guilds doing random stuff or just sitting with their alts on buff hill until the camped scout of the hour screams "BOSS UP LETS GO!" All without the stress of main players(tanks/heals) being at work, going out, sleeping, or just missing a call and the guilt associated with not being able to make it due to short instantaneous notice.
It is not like they are talking about permanant portals everywhere just waiting for you to enter, you have to participate in the open world for the opportunity to spawn a boss and get your attempt in.
For me, the most hollow an MMO has felt was when I would sit in stormwind and just do battlegrounds all day. I had no reason to leave town and the rest of the zones were effectively pointless. It was just a lobby game. VR's iteration doesn't sound even close to this.
Jobeson said:It happens when lockout timers and easy access instanced loot are the core of most of the top end gear. It streamlines the world into a path of high reward ~5 hours a week giving the vast majority of chances at top end loot as playing 25 hours a week. It's the same logic as dailies to keep people coming back to the game for the short efficient period of repetitive play.
But what is wrong with this "streamline" or rather accessibility for players approaching the apex of their character progression of having reasonable means to engage these top tier challenges without having to be at the mercy of player gating by a servers top guild(s) or other players? Players who are already hundreds of hours deep, have done plenty of hard work gearing to this point, and honing on on their skill with the class.
Figure the incredible difficulty/complexity of modern challenging content design and the months it can take to learn single encounters with 24/7 access. Now imagine you have to wait extended periods of time between attempts (with open world player gating issues) all while keeping everyone ready and fully focused while others might attempt the boss etc. You might even end up getting one or no attempts in a session. All of this with the immense issue that is scheduling to get these people together to begin with.
Now if they had a week or two lockout on these instanced/force spawned/whatever form it takes verions and perhaps there was a competitive version that spawned every x hours or days open world that possibly dropped more things at a time, what is the real harm?
I think the idea behind the original WoW raid design was good even if the application to the wider world and instanced everything was less than good:
I think that when you look at EQ, the high-end guild game and the raiding, you realize: Wow, if you could be in a cooperative game, you get to know people, build up these bonds and teamwork, as you're presented with challenge after challenge? It's a very positive thing. - Rob Pardo
Leevolen said:Though dated, there were quite a few interviews and even one essay by McQuaid where he wrote at length about the topic, for those curious. Excuse the formatting.
This is the most recent post I found him make about instancing.
The problem with accessibility IS accessibility. Economies are built on accessibility. If everything is accessible to everyone as soon as they are ready for it then there really is no need for a market. My personal issue with this is that I was hoping for a game with a market. What feels inconsistent to me is the idea that specfiic raids or encounters should be instanced so that players can access them without worrying about other players or their personal schedule. This is incosistent with the rest of the world and feels off to me. It implies to me that there is a value assigned to these specific encounters that isn't assigned to other parts of the world.
Is crafting going to have value? Are the components required for crafting certain items going to be instanced so that I can access them when I'm ready?
Either these specific encounters are so valuable that VR feels that all players should have an opportunity at them, or they have very little value so it doesn't hurt to give all players an opportunity at them. Either way it feels off to me.
All I'm saying is that I just don't "get it" yet. Maybe I'll understand when I'm all grown up.