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?
We will have to wait to find out - hopefully there will be racial starting areas with at least somewhat different story lines for the early levels. Many of us love to hate WoW but that was one thing WoW did well.
My experience is that most MMOs do not have starting areas for each race. LOTRO doesn't. EQ2 doesn't. Rift doesn't. SWTOR doesn't. I hope Pantheon does.
While a basic principle behind Pantheon is slow progress and even slower travel - this doesn't necessarily preclude rapid travel between one starting area and another. Such travel will facilitate mult-race grouping, not allow us to get to higher level content too rapidly, and in general may be beneficial.
Thus I see few downsides to having a dock at Gnomeland Security that gives rapid transport to Treehugger Estates if those were to be two starting areas.
Everquest is probably your best guide on this factor. You might have initial starting areas based on the race, but it is close proximity to other races. Short travel opens the world to new players and experiences, while larger trips expose you to different experiences, players, and locales.
Example:
1-5 your racial area.
5-10/15 your region area (think dwarves and elves in EQ)
15-25 wider world
Travel and exploration matters.
zendrel said: it starts us playing at level one with needing to group
Why do you think you will need to group at lvl 1?
Yeah gnomes in the same area as Ogres would fix that actually. I really would like to reiterate that I want to play this game so that I can play a game right off the bat from level 1. I want to have to group in my starter area and not wait till i get to area #3 before real grouping is even beneficial.
I disagree about WOW. Each race basically had its own starting area but you never group until cap level. Even at cap level the day to day stuff is solo and what little group stuff you do is very non-social.
I also don't feel like rapid travel is the answer. I dont know though maybe it is the only way to play. Maybe a better way would be to not have you start anywhere near your capital city and give you a quest to reach that city. It would be a long quest that might be up pantheons ally but I think since Terminus is such an odd place there could be a shipwrecked coast that you all hit for one starting area, a small village of lumberjacks who found you passed out in some woods as another, and a prison camp you break out of with many of the playable races in it as slaves as a final one. Just a thought.
For the first few levels, grouping probably isn't needed. And even a few levels in, a holy trinity will probably not be required to move along easily. That, plus as others mentioned, placing races with complimentary classes relatively close so that when they need it they can start working together should handle a lot of that.
One of the things that added a lot to the game was engaging in long travel, often as groups, to get where there would be friends or others to work with. Freeport/Qeynos trips are a good example.
philo said:zendrel said: it starts us playing at level one with needing to groupWhy do you think you will need to group at lvl 1?
Well I know you might not NEED to but I thought they said something like soloing is a slower, less rewarding, route to go. Also I thought some classes would just be really bad at it to the point it might not be a good idea.
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.
>I disagree about WOW. Each race basically had its own starting area but you never group until cap level. Even at cap level the day to day stuff is solo and what little group stuff you do is very non-social.<
Since the comment was that WoW did a good job at having separate racial starting areas and had nothing whatsoever to do with whether WoW was a good game in general or encouraged grouping I don't think you disagree at all.
Each race has their own starting area. I don't imagine it will be a long or necessarily dangerous journey for any of the races to get to at least one other nearby race's starting city. Groups probably won't have to be too balanced until somewhere in the teens so random group compositions will probably work fine, all the races except gnomes have at least one tank and healer class (if I recall correctly gnomes are very close to Archai though).
zendrel said:Well I know you might not NEED to but I thought they said something like it is a slower, less rewarding, route to go. Also I thought some classes would just be really bad at it to the point it might not be a good idea.
Generally speaking yeah it will be a much slower and less "rewarding" route to go when soloing, but for the most part that doesn't start at level 1. I'd figure soloing will be nearly equally efficient (if not faster) for the first 6ish levels before taking a hard turn toward grouping. The idea tends to be you give players a handful of levels to figure out the basics of their race/class and the world before putting them together.
I would like to see multiple starting areas for 1 race, so you can pick a main city starting place or smaller rural starting place for a given race. This could help spreadout the populations of each starting race/class, have minor variations in starting questing line/arcs (if they are relevant in Pantheon) if you go back and play the same race again.
You could go so far as to have main city starting areas be purely 1 race, and those perimeter villages having an obscure chance of mixing with other races a touch earlier than those who stay centrally located.
It also distributes Player Characters around the region more to avoid having to watch lines of people ahead of you hail that NPC and then kill it for one of the intro level quests. Realizing I'm apart of a quest factory ruins my experience!
zendrel said:philo said:zendrel said: it starts us playing at level one with needing to groupWhy do you think you will need to group at lvl 1?
Well I know you might not NEED to but I thought they said something like soloing is a slower, less rewarding, route to go. Also I thought some classes would just be really bad at it to the point it might not be a good idea.
I'm unsure. I don't expect to feel like I need to group for the first few lvls. There will be a learning curve. There have been comments made recently about not "throwing players to the wolves" like EQ did...which I kind of liked (even when I was an mmo noob) but /shrug.
Soloing will be slower...but they will ease the player into grouping. The emphasis has changed a lot in the last year or more it seems. It has gone from being touted as a very niche focus for gamers looking for oldschool challenges to being very helpful/hand holdy to players who have never played a game with harsh penalties/first gen mmo challenges. They seem to really want to ease players into it. My expectation is that lasts basically until lvl 10 (the free trial period).
Personally i hope there will be multiple starting areas for each race lets say one major city one smaller town and one village , that way people can play what ever race they want and get to group up pretty fast , i would hate to have to run from one side of the continents to the other just to group with my friends. Levling speed and travling speed are meant to be slow so better to make friends and guild mates able to start at roughly the same area, more fun that way for every one , then it can take for ever to level and travel =)
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=12303
I see the issue mentioned here as one of logistics for the starting player as far as newbie zones and once a certian level, then being drawn out to the broader world as lead by the game. I also hope the Devs are thinking seriously about this.
However my preffered opinion on this is strange and some may think harsh but what I see as a cultural behavior/identity as lead by the game (Deus ex Ludicrum).
Or, people do things different over there, how interesting. What would happen if our cultures collided in grouping how would we learn and more importantly how much stronger would we become for that learning.
The Ogre culture fights a certain way because class choices are limited. They must fight the way ogres fight (because they have no clerics) and have to learn to deal with the monsters in their newbie zones with what classes are available.
Likewise, gnomes: no tanks, no healers- hmm makes for challenging gameplay even if grouped gnome-to-gnome, making gnomes having to do things differently to slay the same newbie monster, creating a cultural style if you will that you need to play to succeed as a gnome as the game dictates.
So if and when Gnomes group with Ogres, they would have to learn from their cultural differences and build on their cultural strengths instead of how they are used to playing- as Gnomes do/as Ogres do. Dynamic.
Provided, when Gnomes do group with Ogres the group does not end up being just Ogres, heh (chomp).
I like the idea of a kind of cultural isolation for newbie players in newbie cities and starting areas. How else would one know what it is to be..Gnomish?
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.
LOL
Maybe ogres and gnomes can be friends in Pantheon rather than the predator / prey relationship they had in games of yesteryear.
Racial cities are a must! That being said there is no reason one or two of them might not have foriegn quarters thus friends who want to play together can start in the foreign quarter of such a city. Perhaps your restricted to that part of the city till you gain enough faction with a particular city.
I could see grouping being more efficient right from level 1 - but as hinted above, maybe you don't need all the roles, just people in your group in the starter areas. So you could solo 1-10 if you wanted to for example, but grouping 1-5 and more or less killing the same mobs might be faster. It would potentially be a happy compromise.
Then, if there is a starter dungeon nearby (like crushbone, etc... in EQ), that would be the first time you need to start putting roles together for groups (around level 10).
EDIT:
I actually see an extremely valid (probably desired by some players) reason for folks to solo a bit right at the start. It's a new game, new game world, new UI, new everything - and so they might want to get acclimated a bit. Also, you can't "require" group play at that level, because you could have people starting later - or starting alts later - or whatever, when the starting areas might be a little sparse player wise.
Vanguard comes to mind. While it made sense for a dying game with a huge world and a sparse population, The Isle of Dawn really watered down the world for me when it was released. Taking all races and starting them at one spot may make "sense", but it's just so dag gum ....depressing. It really detracts from the living and breathing game world, where there are supposed to be diverse cultures spread throughout the breadth of the world.
Everquest did this well, I think. When you start as a Dark Elf in Neriak, the adjoining zone to Nektulos was West Commons, a gathering place for a multitude of races with solo and groups options throughout. I can't imagine Pantheon will stray far from this.
Vanguard *may* have been a little more spread out than it needed to be - but I'd still prefer that to a central starting location. It just made the game seem more alive, and more real. The Isle of Dawn was actually good, quality content, it was just a shame that it had to come at the expense of starting cities.
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?
You don't need a freaking micro managed power group at low levels. In fact, in EQ< you didn't need one a high levels either, for the most part. That was part of the beauty of that game.
I mean I understand the desire to just cut to convienence so you can play with your best pal who may be a different race asap without working for it, but personally I don't want the world cut that way. 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.
Slippery slope maybe but first they let players pick any city to start in or a neutral area somewhere then players complain there is no trainer/vendor for their class near and ask why not just have all class vendors/trainers in or near all cities. Now they want neutral vendors near every town so even if they are KoS they can still off-load goods without having to take that factor into consideration before traveling. Then a bank. Then an AH. All these chipping away at the feel of the world in the name of convienence.
Iksar said:I mean I understand the desire to just cut to convienence so you can play with your best pal who may be a different race asap without working for it, but personally I don't want the world cut that way. 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.
Slippery slope maybe but first they let players pick any city to start in or a neutral area somewhere then players complain there is no trainer/vendor for their class near and ask why not just have all class vendors/trainers in or near all cities. Now they want neutral vendors near every town so even if they are KoS they can still off-load goods without having to take that factor into consideration before traveling. Then a bank. Then an AH. All these chipping away at the feel of the world in the name of convienence.
Agreed. Any game that I've played, EQ1 included moved in this direction over time and while it did make things more convienient, the price paid in feel of the world, I think, was too great. Perhaps there is a middle ground that can work, but you are right about the slippery slope.