zendrel said:How many starting areas will there be? In most games it is 1 area for each race at a minimum. With Pantheon being a group oriented game that starts us playing at level one with needing to group how will certain races make effective groups? Gnomes come to mind as the biggest issue. How will gnomes group in their starting area? There are no tank or healer gnomes in the class/race charts and Ogres have a distinct lack of DPS. Other races have them just not much variety sometimes but it looks like gnomes are going to have to wait for grouping up. How is this going to work?
I'm guessing the first 5-10 levels will be easier to kind of solo if need be. But after that I expect the need for a group will pick up. It was like that with Vanguard and EverQuest to some extent. About that time in EQ you'd be prepping to hit Crushbone, Blackburrow, or some fun little dervish camps. :) I expect that in Pantheon we'll be funneled towards some areas where the different races and classes will intersect by those levels.
In Pantheon, looking at things as they appear for now, I'm gussing there will likely be 1 area for each race, though there may be a couple of shared areas. Humans in EQ for example could spawn at Freeport or Qeynos. ~sigh~ I'm gonna miss barbarians and the snowy town of Halas. Maybe we'll get some Pantheon equivelent at some point.
In EQ it was about level 8 where you started needing groups. Because darn if those areas outside Crushbone/Blackburrow/Befallen/etc weren't full of mean monsters :)
I'd prefer to see the same sort of curve in Pantheon, roughly. Everyone is going to need a few levels to just sort of figure out what they're doing with a class, before being pushed into a group. But it should be happening pretty quickly. Assuming a standard 50-level progression, by level 10 I'd hope that we're in full-on group mode in terms of the game's content. And then I'd like to see raid targets popping up by level 20ish, but I digress :)
From an immersion perspective I absolutely want separate racial starting areas as much as it makes sense. I mean if two races would (by lore) come from the same place, ok that's cool. But don't cram us all into a single starter area based on whether we're a good/evil race or whatever. That's dumb. If my race has a hometown, I should be able to start there. If there's a place that's a melting pot, I should have the option, if I so choose.
From a class balance perspective the ogre/gnome question troubles me a little bit. Looking at the published map it seems clear that humans, elves, and halflings all start on the eastern continent, and skar, myr, and presumably ogres on the western. But Skyhold and Khadassa aren't on the map (that I can spot). The lore page for the dwarves says that Khadassa is in the "southern tundra" which almost makes it seem like there's a third continent we can't see?
So, I guess my questions (from a lore perspective):
- Are we splitting races into good/evil/light/dark? If so, where do gnomes fall? Is there a neutral category?
- Are some races wanderers, meaning we won't have access to their hometowns at launch? If so, I could see them starting in the cities of other races.
Whatever happens, I really hope we don't try to cram races into a single starting area when they have a hometown that's accessible in game.
Nephele said:So, I guess my questions (from a lore perspective):
- Are we splitting races into good/evil/light/dark? If so, where do gnomes fall? Is there a neutral category?
- Are some races wanderers, meaning we won't have access to their hometowns at launch? If so, I could see them starting in the cities of other races.
Whatever happens, I really hope we don't try to cram races into a single starting area when they have a hometown that's accessible in game.
I believe Kilsin said right now its:
Good: Human, Elf, Dwarf
Evil: Myr, Ogre, Skar
Neutral: Gnome, Halfling, Archai
sorn said:I object to gnomes and ogres sharing newbie space. Childhood nutrition is important and too many gnomes would cause some serious vitamin gnome overdose syndrome among the young ogres.
EQ newbie areas were usually solo-fests, by the way. It was only in the newbie dungeons/baby dungeons that grouping started taking place. EX: the mino caves in Steamfont for gnomes, orc hill and CB for elves, the various camps in BB for dwarves (though they were pushed more towards CB than the other two because their newbie dungeon involved running all the way across Dagnor's Cauldron). I've always thought they were set up in an interesting way compared to other MMOs, which make everything very neat and tidy.
Actually considering gnomes have no physical body, and are just the spirits/souls tied to their masks/wrappings, I'd say they're probably the ONLY race that would make them safe to live close to a horde of Ogres!
Glorfendill said:Actually considering gnomes have no physical body, and are just the spirits/souls tied to their masks/wrappings, I'd say they're probably the ONLY race that would make them safe to live close to a horde of Ogres!
I'm convinced that gnomes, despite being incorporeal, will still somehow drop gnome meat.
zendrel said: I don't see why it's not several starting areas far from the capitol cities. Like I said you start in a slaver mining area and you break out to start. Later you get a quest to go to your main city whenever you get around to it.
I think part of it is contrived systems like that take a little bit away from the player by forcing them into a certain backstory and making that backstory shared with everyone else who starts there.
Player A: "I was knocked out and woke up in a slaver's strip mine. It was at that moment I realized I wanted to find a wizards college in Thronefast to start training in the arcane."
Player B: "Oh woah that's crazy, me too! Only when I awoke I got this strong feeling that all I really want to do in this life is play some mean bongos and toot a flute while people battle around me. I know, pretty wild right? So I am going to try to find someone to teach me and something tells me I should go to Wild's End."
Iksar said:If you really want to be a Dark Myr and play with your Human friend then one of you should have to take up the adventure to make it to one another if you want to spend all your time leveling together and can't compromise being apart for the first 5 or 10 levels. You should have to work out the logistics of it before hand, take into account where the nearest spell vendors for your class might be and if you are KoS maybe get your friend to buy them for you while you wait behind a tree outside town.
I think that sums it up perfectly, and for this big undertaking of travelling from one side of the continent to the other you will (if you choose) get to the other side with a bag full of information and be the champion for everyone else, able to tell them all about what the big wide world is like. You might even be one of the early people to spy where the giants hang out (hopefully they didnt squish you on the way). Its that kind on huge journey as a young player that instills you with so much wonder, excitement and knowledge to level up and get back out into that badass zone you had to cross through full of massive roaming mobs that almost found you dead if you werent travelling with your wits about you!
I look forward to this journey :)
sorn said:I object to gnomes and ogres sharing newbie space. Childhood nutrition is important and too many gnomes would cause some serious vitamin gnome overdose syndrome among the young ogres.
EQ newbie areas were usually solo-fests, by the way. It was only in the newbie dungeons/baby dungeons that grouping started taking place. EX: the mino caves in Steamfont for gnomes, orc hill and CB for elves, the various camps in BB for dwarves (though they were pushed more towards CB than the other two because their newbie dungeon involved running all the way across Dagnor's Cauldron). I've always thought they were set up in an interesting way compared to other MMOs, which make everything very neat and tidy.
To be fair, the magical distortion of the gnomish figure might be quite deadly to ogres if ingested. An ogre could eat one, go back home, and during the night go nuclear and wipe out the whole ogre population. It be the worst case of passing gas and indigestion in the history of all the fantasy worlds combined.
I'm not saying you should have only 1 starting area of a slave camp but it is a good option. Have a variety of backstories for sure. The issue with starting in your home city will not be much of an issue when the game releases but after a little while all those starting areas will discourage new players from coming to Pantheon. 1 year after release someone new will come to a game designed for group content only to find choosing a dwarf made it impossible to find someone to group with. When you narrow down the starter areas and give new players more of a chance to see other players their level things will go better.
WoW is the biggest game out there and uses a cross-realm system. But if I decide to start an alt and level up a little in the Hinterlands do you know how many other people I run into? NONE. And that's the biggest mmo to date with a world that feels empty. Whatever is done a world that feels empty is a bad thing.
Rydan said:
I dont think gnomes drop meat... There IS no meat to drop...
zendrel said:I'm not saying you should have only 1 starting area of a slave camp but it is a good option. Have a variety of backstories for sure. The issue with starting in your home city will not be much of an issue when the game releases but after a little while all those starting areas will discourage new players from coming to Pantheon. 1 year after release someone new will come to a game designed for group content only to find choosing a dwarf made it impossible to find someone to group with. When you narrow down the starter areas and give new players more of a chance to see other players their level things will go better.
WoW is the biggest game out there and uses a cross-realm system. But if I decide to start an alt and level up a little in the Hinterlands do you know how many other people I run into? NONE. And that's the biggest mmo to date with a world that feels empty. Whatever is done a world that feels empty is a bad thing.
I don't think this is going to be the case, as long as there are reasons for higher-level players to come back to, and spend time in, their starting cities. Cities were never ghost towns in EQ until the Plane of Knowledge happened, as an example. The real problem with starting areas feeling empty happens when games are designed in such a way that all the high level people are sequestered off in their own quest hubs - and admittedly, a LOT of games have suffered from that design flaw, including WoW, EQ2, Vanguard, and many others.
I don't think this is going to be the case, as long as there are reasons for higher-level players to come back to, and spend time in, their starting cities. Cities were never ghost towns in EQ until the Plane of Knowledge happened, as an example. The real problem with starting areas feeling empty happens when games are designed in such a way that all the high level people are sequestered off in their own quest hubs - and admittedly, a LOT of games have suffered from that design flaw, including WoW, EQ2, Vanguard, and many others.
Some starting areas had less to offer in EQ but I see your point. I suppose you are right, those 1 city hub for everything places really ruin the experience. I know expansions are so far down the road they are an afterthought but hopefully it's better than a new island that is discovered pulling everyone out of the mainlands for good. With the lore of Terminus isn't it a weird planet where new pieces of other worlds basically crash into it anyway? Maybe they could use that to change the main continents rather than funneling people away to some new island.