Hey Folks, wanted to propose this idea to the general discussion. I was recently chatting with some friends about Instance vs Open World raids and the benefits and drawbacks of each. I came to one conclusion, which lead me to an idea. Now, I understand this may be not even possible within the realm of the Unity engine but I think this could very well be an awesome addition to the MMO Genre, that I have only seen in games like SC2, Heroes of the Storm etc, and Counter-Strike.
The Idea:
Imagine this, you as well as your Raid team enter an instance to face off against your biggest foe. You have wiped time and time again but this is the last time. You finally after weeks of working on this boss are able to down him, and all of a sudden your Raid Lead gets a notification:
"Save Replay" , "Save and Promote" or "Delete Replay".
To my knowledge, there has never been a replay system implemented into the MMO Genre but here's where it could get fun. Have you ever wanted to share a link to an encounter with your friend or guild mates? Or maybe you have a new recruit that wants to learn your guild specific strat of downing a boss. Well now with a replay system you could have them actually jump into the raid action themselves and have a "Spectating" ability to watch what you and your team were doing to actually down the boss.
Now you could do a number of things with this system but my basic ideas were
1. Save the replay
This could just be a simple save, and review for later. If during progression, may be you don't necessarily want to promote this to other guilds to see how you downed this great Dragon, or the Reckless Magician. Maybe you want to keep your strategy a secret. With this feature you could do exactly that, review your mistakes later and still have the ability to share it to friends in the guild if you'd like.
2. Share and Promote
Possibly this is the final raid boss of the tier and you get server first! Let everyone on the server experieince the Raid with you, now they can fly above you and watch the raid in combat while still in game and feeling like they were apart of it. Not only would this build up competition amongst several guilds, but also make the rest of the server feel like they were apart of it and make them want to cheer for you as your drudging through your next dungeon or raid. Some thoughts are you could have something like this tool promoted or advertised on the game launcher "Experience The Divine Council as they get the World 1st Kill on ..." I think you get the idea.
3. Delete ... obviously would be deleting the encounter lol
I know this would be a coding nightmare, but this could be used for much more purposes then just sharing a kill with your friend. You could be helping people work on getting better at the game. Watching for mistakes that you made in your raid last night. Really experiencing the raid in a new way then ever before. While still allowing the community to feel like they were apart of it, even if they don't have the ability to do it themselves. I think it would be both exciting and a great learning tool.
Let me know your thoughts and feedback!
As interesting as it could be, I think the other options out there to capture your own raids will always reign supreme. If it were server side they would have to then be paying to store all these videos on top of the additional stressing that recording would put on servers.
I took ages for a game like League of Legends to figure out replays and even now Blizzard is trying to figure out how to handle letting players save personal "Play of the Game" clips for Overwatch. Just makes me imagine this is something very challenging and costly to implement.
Agreed, but maybe they're at a point in development where creating the system wouldn't be as much of a hindrance ?
if development of the system wouldn't take away much of the time spent on the rest of the game, would it be a feature that you think would be worthwhile?
Well, it's more the money factor. It would be incredibly expensive to set up and store the videos, it couldn't be done client side due to the limited information they want the client side to have access to.
I could see people using it sure, I wouldn't personally as I have never much enjoyed watching people play games aside from competitive tournaments like EVO or the League of Legends finals back when I played that. More of a read up about a fight quick and learn it that way kind of person. I'm the wrong audience for this kind of feature.
Actually storing and replaying isn't as hard as people think. You don't have to record an actual video. You simply store the server side information like player and mob locations, movement, and abilities. That generates the video to watch later.
However, I'm against this. If people want to record something, it should be up to them. The game itself should not offer a feature which may trivialize an encounter for players down the road.
It would be awesome to have completelty fleshed out capture/replay capability; able to switch player's perspectives, see what they cast / do and when they do it, pause, fast forward, rewind, free roam camera, etc. But holy god, I have a slightly below average understanding of programming, and this sort of feature and the required hardware to support it I think would be completely unfeasable for a game the size and scope that Pantheon currently is, perhaps even for mega-funded AAA titles too in an MMO setting. The reason they've probably come to exist in other certain games is the limited (in comparison) number of variables to account for when doing so. A 5v5 finite game is different than an open world, persistant, 200? player capable open area to have to potentially record, store, upload/download, etc.
Cool idea, but a pipe dream to say the least.
Doesn't Windows 10 now have the ability to "auto-record" so you can save video gameplay after it happens? Plus I believe video cards are now having this built into their software as well. Not sure why the game would need to do what is already on a lot of people's computers.
Win10 Game bar allows recording, theres Nvidia shadowplay, theres fraps, and a whole host of other screen recording software out there. Lots of ways to do this for free, heck even twitch or youtube live will let you record it to their servers for free. Lets not reinvent a well rounded wheelhouse of wheels.
For a PC game, I really think this is not needed. As stated there are so many different ways to record now. Hell all you need to do is install either the Nvidea or ATI software suites that come with your video card. They both have built in recording functionality now. They both also work pretty well. If Pantheon was being developed for consoles maybe I could see that as something they'd want to build in, but PC has had this covered for the better of a decade.
