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[Niveras]

That's actually what I kind of hoped Rift would be. But instead the invasions just kind of killed the NPCs in an area for a little while and then up and disappear on their own. I would've preferred that all the quests that were once available in an area that was taken over by an elemental force would instead just moved a little bit and they would all offer quests to take back the location. And the locations would become more meaningful, like taking over actual defensible locations (like the faerie fort in silverwood or undead castle in freemarch).

[LeoLeonardoIII]

As for grind, I remember playing the hell out of BF1942 and Wolf: Enemy Territory. Very repetitive because you're doing the same set of objectives but it's still fun because the players you fight against are different every time. Maybe when you get to the bridge there'll be a tank there, but maybe you got there in between waves and there isn't. Or there's an APC. Or two snipers. Or four tanks (unlucky!). In BF1942, because the resources are finite in terms of available players and equipment, things you do at one side of the map have an impact on what's going on at the other side. Stealing a tank not only gives your side an extra tank, but it also deprives the enemy of a tank. Different gear loadouts are useful in different situations, but all are worthwhile on every map.

Of course, there was no reward involved beyond enjoying the gameplay.

When I talk about Skinner Box game design, I mean things like making early levels and gear very easy to get and then suddenly making later levels take a very long time. Making results unpredictable - for example, a rat pulling a lever and sometimes a pellet drops out, he will pull that lever all the time even if he's not hungry right now, but if the lever drops a pellet every time he will only do it when he's hungry. Casinos and restaurants do things to encourage certain behavior - for example, if you're in a restaurant where they want you to eat fast and leave your table, they will have brighter lights and faster music.

That kind of stuff may result in some fun gameplay moments, but only incidentally. I want the game design to be focused on enjoyable gameplay first, and if addictive gameplay results then that's tolerable. It would be like making a sandwich that's as cheap as possible, and healthfulness and flavor are secondary concerns. I want whoever makes my sandwich to care about it being good for me, not just good for them.

I want a player to say, "Hey guys, we want to go to the volcano, but not all of us have fire-resistant gear. We can gear everyone up by skinning red dragons (which exist in a few different places and also sometimes as wandering monsters in their hunting range), collecting rubies (which drop from several monster types and also can be mined in several mines around the world), using long-duration fire resistance scrolls or ointments (which require the alchemist to mix the ointment or ink on-site where the ingredients are), or generally just scrounging around for Fire Resistance magic item drops which kinda happen randomly and you can't count on it.

That gives you a player-created goal (we want to adventure in X) and dozens of different places the group can go to help each other gear up for the goal (getting fire resistance for everyone).

Secondly, getting that fire resistance should be a trade-off in opportunity cost. You spend resources on the consumable, or you take up a gear slot which could be used for something else, or you crafted a thing that has a couple different options and you picked one over the other. Which means nobody -nobody- has an ultimate set of gear for all situations, but everyone can kinda hack it regardless of gear, but if you have a good spread of different sets of gear you can have an easier time in whatever specific situation you adventure in.

I want players who enter a dungeon to know "I'm gonna need to swim and breathe water, I'm gonna probably fight underdark creatures, I'll need a light source" etc. but they shouldn't know "the boss will be resistant to electricity but vulnerable to fire and his STR was set too low so a debuff will neutralize him and end the fight". I want surprises. I want to stymie the wiki culture.

[Mephansteras]

Which is another thing a living world should help with. If you don't have a set story to run through you don't need to have a wiki guiding you through everything. The player made content there helps, although I'd prefer to have a more modular procedural system in place so you literally never know what to expect. Although...I guess with a large enough library of player made content you can get effectively the same thing.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

So here's a point I hadn't thought about. Why is this an MMO? If the MMO experience involves mostly people interacting in small groups, maybe group v. group, plus an auction house, why not do it this way:

Austere lobby, pick a dungeon or check out the auction house.

Dungeon: there are multiple instances of each open, a timer shows how long they've been open, whether they're still accepting new players.

Player client connects to other player clients. Maybe distributed processing among them, or maybe one is the host. The dungeon is probably one that was player-made, but is vetted by the game company. You can also play non-vetted dungeons that can be anything.

You play, complete the dungeon, say thanks guys, leave. Join another dungeon.

Don't see anyone playing the dungeon you want to run? Start a new group and it shows up in the lobby.

You can restrict people from displaying if they're in your blocklist. If you are on the blocklist of anyone in a dungeon you can't join that dungeon. You can also have a friendlist, join a guild, etc. For example your guild could create an instanced dungeon that is their guild house, and label it a guildhouse, in so doing making the instance persistent. This allows for crafting stations, guild storage, meetings, dance parties, drunken revels, etc. Guild level determines the size of the guild hall they can maintain.

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Auction house has stuff put up by players. Each account gets a limited amount of concurrent auctions. Auction house takes a cut.

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How do you combat cheating? By letting people cheat, but labeling them. Someone who has contact with non-vetted content, whether entering a non-vetted dungeon, or entering any dungeon with a non-vetted character, or buying or selling to a non-vetted character on the auction house, immediately makes you labeled non-vetted. You're poisoned.

You can set your character to only display vetted characters and dungeons and auctions - which is what most people will want to do because otherwise you might click the wrong thing by accident and get un-vetted.

Only vetted characters appear on the leaderboards. That's the big penalty for using the "cheat code" of playing in non-vetted environments.

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What does the game company do to maintain the game? Vet the dungeons people create, steadily increasing the content available to "honest" players. It also needs to maintain a lobby server with leaderboards and auction house, and a character server, which saves your character to make sure you didn't hack it and add goodies offline.

You could totally just play the game with a LAN option, or a "connect directly to my mini lobby server" like Minecraft, although these characters would be automatically non-vetted if uploaded to the official lobby server.

Because the development and maintenance is almost nothing, they could get away with not charging a monthly subscription.

If you can have a crummy server handle a 64-man BF1942 match, I'm pretty sure it can handle the couple dozen players who would want to band together.

[Mephansteras]

Well, I think the point here is to get beyond the standard MMO model and do something that means more. If they do everything they're saying they will, then you have a world where everyone's actions matter. You log in and find out that the major bridge across the river near your home base was destroyed overnight. That's huge! It takes the game from being small-scale interactions (with a bunch of people around that pretty much never directly effect you) to one where even the people you'd never normally meet have an influence on your experience.

It's like being on a giant minecraft server with hundreds of people. Even if you never personally interact with many of the people their influence on the world is profound and you can certainly see the effects of what they do.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Well, I think the point here is to get beyond the standard MMO model and do something that means more. If they do everything they're saying they will, then you have a world where everyone's actions matter. You log in and find out that the major bridge across the river near your home base was destroyed overnight. That's huge! It takes the game from being small-scale interactions (with a bunch of people around that pretty much never directly effect you) to one where even the people you'd never normally meet have an influence on your experience.

It's like being on a giant minecraft server with hundreds of people. Even if you never personally interact with many of the people their influence on the world is profound and you can certainly see the effects of what they do.

The only problem with this model is that large amounts of bullshit have a potential happen all the time! Not that im bashing it, but that IS a big concern I think.

[Mephansteras]

It is. I'm rather curious to see how they're going to handle it.

[bucket]

I just got my invitation to the Landmark closed beta. I haven't actually built anything yet, as I only installed it an hour ago. This game crawls on my i5 laptop with Intel HD 4000 graphics - but at least I'm getting a pretty consistent 15fps no matter what kind of crazy architecture/scenery I happen across, so there's something to be said for that. Unfortunately the graphics settings are limited. This will probably change close to release. There are also no controls settings, so using my trackball mouse is a hassle.

You spawn in a common area with a stone pick and a stone axe. These are upgradeable by crafting stations near the base. Some players' houses have their own crafting area - I imagine they take substantial resources to build. From what I've heard about Minecraft, the digging/collecting materials/constructing new objects through blueprints and recipes are exactly the same. It's Minecraft in an Everquest art style, I suppose. When you start you're instructed to craft a flag, to claim land with. I traveled a while and found a spot by the sea. The game gives you a wide berth, making a chunk of land around your building area off-limits. A bounding box appears in the middle. You can't dig inside the box and you can't build outside the box. Anyone who's worked in 3D modeling will be familiar with the building tools. Choose a brush size, choose a material, scale, rotate, extrude and so on. From a technological standpoint, what they're doing with voxels is damned impressive. If they managed to pair this technology with rigid body physics, well... that would be one hell of a sight.

I'm probably not saying anything anyone doesn't already know by watching trailers and streams...

[Duuvian]

I apparently was invited for 7 days earlier in the month. I only found the email within the past few days. Apparently the seven days does not start after your first login or upon entering a code, but instead starts after the email sent.

Alas I will thus not be able to join you bucket; ignore my earlier PM.

If anyone else has trouble finding where to download the Landmark Launcher there is one on reddit I found after a quick google search. It was posted by a reddit account thought to belong to an SOE employee, so it seems legal to use.

Oddly my SOE account says it still has access to Landmark but sadly the launcher tells me I don't have access with it when I login.

[Lithare]

If anyone is playing, my IGN is also Lithare.  I have 2 claims in the Adventure server, though you can quite easily jump around between servers and islands.  I do have 1 more closed beta key which I could share.  It's still very early beta, though, so plenty left to be added to the game.

[hemmingjay]

Is anyone interested in closed beta access? Unfortunately it's the SOE Launchpad version and not the Steam version.

[dennislp3]

I would like access to that

[hemmingjay]

I gave them to Astral for his Mini Giveaway thread. Send him a PM and if he doesn't respond in 24 hrs I will give you one(I sent him a PM this morning but he didn't reply, so after another day I will just give them out myself).

[Astral]

Yeah, sorry. Morning for me is 2pm Eastern time, and I don't really check the forums much before work, or while at it because the bastards blocked B12games and the associated forums.

I'll put them into my drawing thread as a separate thing that anyone can sign up for, and winning one of the main drawings won't impact your chances at nabbing a key.

[genmac]

Wow! The performance on this is horrible, even with 12GB RAM and a 2GB video card.  Video stuttering from the get go that doesn't seem to improve over time.