In designing a uniquely social MMORPG, I think it important to look at more than just combat in facilitating interaction between players. One of the strongest examples of this can be found in EQ, where almost every class had a meaningful ability outside of combat that helped facilitate social interaction. You needed a mage, enchanter, or wizard to bind, a druid or wizard to teleport, a bard or necromancer to find your corpse, a necromancer to summon it, an enchanter to enchant metal, a cleric to resurrect your party, or a ranger to track down a wondering named mob. By giving these uniquely social abilities to players, it threaded a world of interdependency. By giving these abilities to higher levels players, it also forced people of vastly divergent levels to interact. High levels seemed like heroes and mentors to lower levels. And when you finally became high level yourself, you felt the prestige and maybe responsibility of that position. While by no stretch was trolling obsolete, it also encourage players to have manners since they depended on each other. Someone trolling in zone chat would be hard pressed to find a rez when they died ten minutes later.
The point of my topic is to bring this issue to light and suggest how intertwined all the classic system are. If you take out corpses, you don't have corpse runs. And not only do you miss that adventure, but you don't have a need for bards and necromancers to find to find corpses, necromancers to summon corpses, or much reason for clerics to res fallen comrades. If you complete the system and go with graveyards, you do away with the need for binding, and pretty soon all the classic utility is gone.
Certainly an argument can be made for the inconvenience of all this interaction, but if convenience is what people want, there are many games out there that will undoubtedly meet their desires better. There are no games, at the moment, that do this kind of social interaction well. Even EQ has done away with almost all the necessity for this kind of interaction. They did because of dwindling numbers, because in a world of ten people where you need twenty to hold the web of interaction together everything falls apart. But the solution lies not in discarding the system, but in keeping those numbers high. We can do that with dedicated members, a single server, and a health stream of new low-level players. I imagine Pantheon will be much like Eve in its staying power. People will not flock it, but they will not quickly abandon it either. A small game with simpler graphics and less production can put out smaller, but more consistent patches that drive in new players and keep old players entertained for years and years. A good mentoring or ult system can give veterans the opportunity to return and help those new players get a similarly rich experience even years after launch.
Saphreal said:
A good mentoring or ult system can give veterans the opportunity to return and help those new players get a similarly rich experience even years after launch.
I agree with everything you said and want to add that the mentoring concept has been one that has been pretty hotly contested hear, along with easy travel. I tend to agree that mechanisms that cause interaction between different level grouping is important and I personally am very interest in how the team plans to keep slow levelers from being left behind. I think the mention of single server/lower number servers are an important contest. I know my biggest mistake in Vanguard was selecting a relatively sparsely populated server assuming it would fill and it never did and I got behind the server level curve and eventually quit from lack of being able to find a group.
I have confidence the team will do a good job with the extra utility for classes though. I am hoping in the round table we hear more about classes and then we will have a better idea of the type of utility they will offer each other.
Saphreal,
You're in the right spot. There's been many threads already related to class utility and discussing the need for class interdependence to promote community. Even in the first roundtable, Brad stressed that classes will be designed about what they can bring to a group versus solo play, so I'm sure in all due time we will see information on class utility.
The difficult aspect I would think is how to add more utility to pure melee classes such as a rogue/warrior. And, as information, you have to double space your lines here in order to create spacing between paragraphs - the one gigantic block of text makes it more difficult to read :).
As Cram said, in the upcoming Roundtables and/or releases we should be hearing more about the class design soon.
i am mostly for this, tho only as long as it doesnt cross spheres. and even to those who are in favor of class affecting crafting or diplomacy think about how crappy it will be for the classes whose OOC utility will be non-combat sphere related until the crafting/diplo is put in game.
I'd be ok with utility for all classes or almost all classes, is what I'm trying to convey. Having the choice to take a more group friendly or social class as apposed to a more solo class is also an interesting game design. For example, I think having a tank have limited or no out of combat utility is fine so long as the majority of the other classes have that sort of interplay. Tanks are already so essential to a group. If it came down to trying fit in utility that didn't match immersion or lore than I'd just as soon leave it out and find other, more reasonable ways to balance a class.
I think the idea is to not give every ability to every class, so when you hit dungeons and raids, every class plays a part. In WoW, most classes have similar moves or spells. So no one is reall unique. We just say, everyone with a CC , CC the mobs. Where in EQ, it was ok do we have a enchanter? yes ok mind control this guy or hey we need a monk so he can FD to pull this mob away from his friends or else we will wipe.
I think keeping classes unique will go a long way with Pantheon.