I'm seeing a lot of naysayers here. Even after many have said that you haven't seen a final version, even after many have said, this is pre-pre alpha, even after many have said that is is not gear/item/potion based, even after many have said that there are several tiers, there are still some who think this is going to be easy.
time sink? how did you come to that conclusion? Key system? Same. Do you gave to be fully acclimated body to get to wherever you want to go? Let's say you have a cleric who's more acclimated to the area than you, as you walk,, you can get healed till you get to the area you need to be. Doesnt seem like a key to me.
This has so many possibilities and there's so much room for future upgrades and levels/tiers.
To the naysayers: you're saying no to something you don't know anything about. Best thing is to have an open mind. By all means make constructive comments But also understand that people are different and enjoy games differently. you opinion is as valid as theirs and vice versa.
corpserunner said:Of course it seems like keying! But rather than calling this lazy, think of keying as the lazy out! This at least attempts to "explain" why someone isn't ready for an area or zone yet, rather than just "oh, you didn't kill mob X, so you can't go here".well spoken! it also seems to be alot more flexible by allowing you to be "partially keyed" in a sense that you can still enter the zone but with penalties.
I'm really looking forward to having this in the game. I think it is going to be fun figuring it out and as always trying to push a bit further than I'm actually ready for, risking my life for the chance to see whats around the corner.
I also feel there's so much potential in this system. All kind of combinations. Being able to add new climates down the road.
All in all, looking very much forward to seeing how it develops.
-sorte.
Kilsin: Folks, please keep in mind what you are seeing is a very early implementation of our systems, they are by no means final nor have you seen the entire system, at least not enough to base an opinion or judgement on, when you get into testing, we will welcome feedback on first-hand experiences in-game
Fair point, but we can only comment on what we see and what we would like to see. My base opinion, climate effects, great, just more indepth and realistic, please (in a fantasy kind of way). :-)
I really like the idea of the acclimation system. For me it adds a level of immersion and I'm all for that. I also hope it adds a level of strategy as well, certain spells and abilities being more or less effective depending on the climate you are in. In regards to getting acclimated to a climate, as others have stated, I do hope there are multiple paths to achieving it. I do like that once you are fully acclimated to a specific tier that it is permanent. I also really like the idea that others have put forward that until you are fully acclimated to an area spending time in that area builds your acclimitazation for that tier and once fully acclimated to one tier time spent builds towards the next tier. I hope things like gear, both dropped and crafted can help, that different classes will have skills or abilities that will help. I hope different races acclimate quicker to some climates and slower to others. I like the idea of quests helping to build acclimation. For example, you help some tribe out and they teach you a secret for staying warm in their cold environment. I also hope there are consumables that will boost your acclimation for a short period if you need it until you are fully acclimated to a tier, some examples, hot soups for a cold environment or a potion that makes you more aerodynamic in a windy environment. (Just a few silly examples). As always, with things so early in development we will just have to see how things actually feel while playing and then can suggest further thoughts and ideas.
Azraell said:My question is will there be a point were in you can max out all of them??
Sogotp said:Thank you for the response Joppa! I feel I should state that I am greatly impressed with the climate acclimation idea/concept but I thought it needed more refining to get into a more important role/system in the game. I am a strong supporter of the belief that choices and being properly prepared matter greatly and since it matters greatly it should take up valuable space.
The one comment I noted in the stream replay I watched was about how the acclimations were permanent and a character would be able to click the one that they needed. I don't like that idea. I would rather have the tier/strength/power of the acclimation cover a larger area of the body. For instance a tier 1 covers the core organ areas of the chest and head, tier 2 takes the coverage area out to the arms and legs, tier 3 takes it to the full body basically. That way the first tier would allow a person to tolerate the environment but not function at full capacity per say. In essence in a cold environment you would not freeze but you would have less strength would get tired faster and your limbs and such would feel the full effects and you would have to find a place to rest/recover for a while after being exposed because of the numbness and frostbite to the limbs.
I do not like the idea of the acclimations being like a keyring or pouch wihtout taking up inventory space. If you are able to get above the basic tier of acclimation then that should take up an inventory space because that is a VERY important item to a player. This style of acclimation would allow for multiple acclimations like was described in the stream.. If you need freezing acclimation as well as pressure/anaerobic you would need a tier 1 for the windshear/pressure/anaerobic but a tier 2 for the freezing because of it affecting the limbs more than the windshear. This kind of stacking if you will would allow the master crafter to create a truly powerful acclimation item for 2 or 3 or even all of the climates in Terminus but the more powerful/multiple climates the item is the more difficult it is to make/gather ingredients/find.
I am curious to know what y'all think of these ideas I am putting forth? I will admit I have not read all of the posts but I don't think I saw something like what I am describing being discussed. If I am wrong I apologize.
Bolding mine.
I like this idea. See, when I first saw the stream, I thought that perhaps it was like immunization in a way...you would get a "vaccine" of sorts to prevent climate damage etc. I don't really like that idea...as others have said it feels too much like keying/gating areas.
This idea of having the T1 "infusion" cover only a small part of the body is brilliant. Let the acclimatization/gear/buffs/etc take care of the rest for the moment! Then you get a T2 version of that "immunization"....and it gives you a bit stronger protection. So instead of just a small area...like the hands, it would cover both hands AND feet now. Again, the rest would need to be taken care of by racial abilities, buffs, gear and so on.
Now, I know that there is an issue with damage to hands etc in game... it just isnt able to be done. So this could be written in as a part of the whole. Say, out of the 100% coverage? Have the T1 give you like 15% coverage, and the buffs/gear/etc make up the rest. T2 would be like maybe 25% and so on. Just a thought....
Anyway, I think the idea of partial coverage is a much better idea! By the time you get to be able to loot AND equip a T5 item, that could take care of most of the body, but you would still need that bit of gear etc to completely keep you safe.
I think others have mentioned, and I tend to think the same way about the environment/acclimation system (as it's displayed in the current stream), is that simply applying an injection and instantly providing permanent resist(s) appears to be too passive and unexciting. But I also understand where the development schedule is and I realize there's still so much work to be done! I also fully understand that what I have seen in the streams is not the full scope or process of that system. Thankfully, we have a space to discuss what were seeing and extrapolate both positive and negative opinions and ideas.
At this point, I'm hoping that VR's envisioned environment and acclimation system becomes more dynamic, engaging and responsive as the development moves ahead. A couple of thoughts I had are:
Acclimation should be achieved and/or acquired through a range methods.
1) Injection method: Permanent, tiered injections that provide for a small percentage increase of a characters acclimation STAT. (We can say 1 through 5% or 2, 4, 6, 8, 10%, whatever works).
2) Tradeskill: Potions, food, drink, wearable gear, trinkets, etc. should provide for STAT point increases. The more rare the item the more STAT increase provided.
3) Passive Acclimation: Acclimation should be a natural, adapting, and passive skill process players may work to change via engagement of the gameplay.
4) Player Characters: This is fairly self-explanatory.
This is more what I'm seeing it pan out to be. Or something more elaborate and meaningful than what we see in the Streams. I am looking forward to getting my hands dirty and checking it all out!
Edit: Sorry for the awful editting and grammar. Please forgive.
I like the basics of the system so far because form a game perspective it is easy to learn and then develop strategy. Being easy to learn is a key concept in gaming - rather obvious I know but games like Go, or checkers have easy concept that can develop into complex strategies that vary on circumstance. This might also be the definition of emergent game play (as opposed to social game play, i.e. E. commons tunnel)
So to make acclimation easy to undertsand and at the same time complex in execution I think also needs to include some intuitive experiences that can be applied from RL into the game. heat acclimation for instance can be similar to getting a sun-tan. Once you have the tan, you are acclimated to a point that prevents sunburn. Some people wont need to be acclimated since they already have a "tan" per se which could be a racial benefit(Like Archons). Being away from the area for a period of time makes you lose the tan and need to go back to get the tan. (this may also encourage returning to home cities or climates) Likewise the thickening of blood in exposure to cold climates and the need to have the blood thinned when going to warmer climates.
Hearty and fatty meals in cold climates are crucial to survive in periods of low activity whereas smaller and more freqent meals are better for warmer climates. The nice thing about issues like this is it also creates a backdrop for social interaction: the Ogre complaining that they dont have grilled whale-blubber steaks in the gnome area- and in game the character is sufffering- somehow- untill theya re acclimated.
Just think if Velketor's Labyrinth had the acclimantion system. I believe it would of been pretty awesome fo many reasons. For 1. it makes pure and perfect sense because it looked very cold there. The floors were slick the mobs were white and icy. Cold resist should have mattered more there in my oppion. So it should sting and hurt you if it is very cold. The monsters should have a cold damage bonus to you if you do not meet or have the required preporations of the zone and have not obtained the acclimating things to be there. I dont think someone with no or low cold resistance or acclimation for a zone like this should get to live in it very long or even at all. 2. It was truly a dangous place and it should be respected as so. 3. It is away for keying to make sense on another level of emersion that works very well with character devlopment.
Could you imagine a dark jungle or forest that was so corrupted that the vegetation there released poisonous fumes so that the very air you breathed was vile and deadly toxin?! There are so many awesome implication for this system. I hope to test and support this cool feature!
letsdance said:corpserunner said:Of course it seems like keying! But rather than calling this lazy, think of keying as the lazy out! This at least attempts to "explain" why someone isn't ready for an area or zone yet, rather than just "oh, you didn't kill mob X, so you can't go here".well spoken! it also seems to be alot more flexible by allowing you to be "partially keyed" in a sense that you can still enter the zone but with penalties.
That's fair, but not my point. Do you think there should be an entire game system, one to which they are devoting a lot of time and resources, just for keying? Couldn't something else better be done with that time? Didn't we all hate the bottlenecks to get into Seb/Howling Stones/Veeshan's Peak?
Leowna said:Just think if Velketor's Labyrinth had the acclimantion system. I believe it would of been pretty awesome fo many reasons. For 1. it makes pure and perfect sense because it looked very cold there. The floors were slick the mobs were white and icy. Cold resist should have mattered more there in my oppion. So it should sting and hurt you if it is very cold. The monsters should have a cold damage bonus to you if you do not meet or have the required preporations of the zone and have not obtained the acclimating things to be there. I dont think someone with no or low cold resistance or acclimation for a zone like this should get to live in it very long or even at all. 2. It was truly a dangous place and it should be respected as so. 3. It is away for keying to make sense on another level of emersion that works very well with character devlopment.
Could you imagine a dark jungle or forest that was so corrupted that the vegetation there released poisonous fumes so that the very air you breathed was vile and deadly toxin?! There are so many awesome implication for this system. I hope to test and support this cool feature!
Um, spiders there did have a pretty nasty cold DOT. Why do we need acclimation to make the zone punish you for not having enough cold resist? Why can't it just be cold resist? Blocking people from reaching game content as an expansive game system seems like a very dangerous idea. We rant here all the time about overpopulation and bottlenecks. Keying was done in rare situations early in EQ, and people either avoided those zones, or had to stand in line at massive a bottleneck. While I agree that arbitrary "you can't enter vex thal" keying hurts from a RP/immersion perspective that this system could help address, I worry that there's a whole game system being designed from stopping people from going places all over the world.
There has been environmental hazards all the way back like in EQ1 if you stood in the lava you got burned and if you spent too long in Kedge or The Grey you would suffocate.
These areas add flavor and danger to the world and I think that's a good thing.
That's why I'd prefer a softer system of how far can we get while tolerating this climate instead of just heres a barrier we cant pass til we get something.
Thanks,
Kiz~
I personally did not like to see that the stuff is permanent. Personally, I was originally hoping there would be varying levels and components to being climatized. I would expect a system where there are crafted or dropped potions or components that are single use and have a duration...it makes sense that there is a robust continuing market for crafted or dropped pieces that gives a certain amount of protection. Then, on top of that, there should be a component of protection from gear, ranging up to super rare drops that could possibly impart very high level protection, or immunity or even absorption. Finally, I was figuring a piece would come from exposure over time as well. So, basically, something like you can get any of the following to get say Tier 1 out of 5 protection:
- basic gear that gives tier 1 level protection
- use potions that are time based
- if you can handle it long enough, exposure.
- spells
- racial/class perks
Any of these could give say Tier 1 protection and you can stack them to get higher ranks, and some stuff would eventually give better Tiers. So theoretically, eventually you might have gear that gives Tier 2/3 protection from X, and use a spell that adds 1 more Tier and use crafted potions to get one more tier to have say, Tier 5 out of 5 protection. That way as you get better gear, better crafting, etc you might be able to start with a higher minimum protection without having to use as many things to stack up to a certain protection level.
I'm not particularly passionate about the system, though I think it's a good one!
I just wanted to add in my two cents, even though most of the ideas I might have had have been brought up by others.
Long story short, I love the idea of the system, but thinks it needs more work. I like the concept, but feel as though it's a bit flat right now. Just based off of what I saw in the latest stream/s, it kind of goes against the grain with this game to get the infusion and use it and then just have it in your collection. A big part of what this game is promoting is strategy and pre-planning, knowing what you're going into. If it's as simple as opening a menu and clicking one button to change your infusion, then that seems a little flat.
I personally would like to see a system wherein (as others have mentioned, so not going to go into huge depth) acclimation comes from many sources such as simply being in the climate, gear (breathable clothing should give you some tolerance for hot environs), food (a big mug of mead could bolster you against cold biomes), magic spell buffs, and perhaps a talent tree (ideally one you can't spec out of, to give a bit of customization per character).
As far as infusions go, I think I'd prefer to see those applied literally to your armor, not just the "slot". Since we won't be upgrading gear every ten minutes, this likely wouldn't be unmanageable, and would create a better cash sink, and since infusions are related to crafting, a better crafting market for them.
I rather they just slapped resists onto normal gear if how they showed it off is how its gonna be. Its pretty much open world gear resist instead of raid resist checks.
Or change it to a leveling system so that when you kill stuff in a desert you get more attuned to fire and if you fight stuff in a snowy zone, you get XP towards frost.
I think this system is a great way to make crafters useful for raiders and high end group players. Joppa already mentioned that infusions could be crafted. If they were temporary then players would have a need to use crafters to keep them supplied with the infusions. I'm not saying they should expire in a short period of time but if you needed a new infusion once a day or something I think that would add to the realism. My main desire in this game is making sure that crafters are required in all tiers of the game from the lowest level all the way up to the highest raiders. Things like infusions help with that goal.
How many games have you played where guilds specifically recruit a person for their crafting skills? Not many I bet. I'd love to see the difficulty of crafting making it rare while also rewarding those who take up a profession with a job at all levels of the game.
Perhaps crafters could use the experimentation system to add extra acclimation buffs to already existing items giving the player who wears those armour pieces a boost in certain climates. There are all sorts of ways I can see crafters helping out with the acclimation system and I'd love to explore them all at some point.
Some have said they dont like how you can manupilate your collection for Acclimation. I guess, when I first saw it, it felt like an "environmental" spell book. In EQ1 you have many spells, and you switch them out based on the immediate situation...or you prepare ahead of time if you know that battle wont afford the flexibility of swaping spells. This seems to me in a similiar idea. I like the basics, and recognize the need for polishing it to a final product. The polishing should happen during pre-alph and alpha (i would guess).
Salute
It seems understandable to me. I dont see the problem. You will need to find 6 different potions for 6 different climates for 5 or 6 different tiers. This in no way seems easy .... in fact it will most likely become an endgame questing/raiding situation in and of itself. And if this is as difficult as i imagine it will be to aquire they simply want it attuned to yourself and not your gear or you could never upgrade your gear. Therefore i imagine it more like gaining a buff of a certain environment for a certain slot at a certain tier that i can permanantly use for that specific slot/environment/tier. Then you add the need and dynamic effects that can be changed by using multiple environments and most likely multiple tiers (since they will be slow and difficult to upgrade) and the possibilities are endless.
Seems cool to me.
corpserunner said:Of course it seems like keying! But rather than calling this lazy, think of keying as the lazy out! This at least attempts to "explain" why someone isn't ready for an area or zone yet, rather than just "oh, you didn't kill mob X, so you can't go here".
So it needs to be an entire cross cutting gameplay mechanic? Hard gear checks are lame, create bottlenecks and are nothing new in the MMO genre. I wish they would spend the time working on something else.
Joppa said:Just popping in to say thanks for the great discussion going on here.
The Extreme Climate & Acclimation systems are still being conceptualized with much yet to be implemented. But for the stream, I wanted to get a visual demonstration set up to show the very foundation of both systems.
I like the idea of gaining natural acclimation the more time you spend in a Climate - I want to explore that more.
I also want to emphasize that these infusions (name is subject to change, btw) will be very difficult to come by. As I said in the stream, the most basic ones, which would provide enough Acclimation for a player to survive unhampered in a Tier 1 climate, would be easier to come by and more accesible for players on the whole. The higher tier infusions (Tier 2-5) will be extremely difficult to obtain (through raiding, epic quests) and will likely be non-tradeable.
As far as the role gear will play, it is very likely that resistances from gear will contribute to your Acclimation score. In other words, if my gear has a high amount of Cold resistance, it is likely that some percentage of that overall resistance will contribute to your Frigid Acclimation score while you are wearing those items. Some classes will have abilities that will either improve your Acclimation score for certain Climates, or alter the Climates themselves to make them more accessible.
Keep up the great discussion - we'll be rolling out more details on these systems when they are ready!
Based on what I have seen and then what Joppa has added here I'm pleased with where this system is going.
I wanted to point out one thing though that I think is pretty important and I'm glad Joppa has said " (name is subject to change, btw)" I think this should be done ASAP...
Sure we have Ale, we got Dwarves, gotta gave Ale.
And we have Hobbits, per Tolkien that justifies Pipe Weed (not to mention I live in Washington State and certain. . "Herbs" are legal for recreational use.)
But infusions (ie. Injection, intravenous)? Seriously do you want Pantheon associated with that? Seems a bit crossing the line to me.
