Landmark & Keynote: First Response

Some quick notes about the Keynotes. I will be going into more later, but this is just my immediate reactions.

The first half of the landmark keynote was quite excellent, clearing up exactly what I've said before about what Landmark is going to be. 

PvP Combat is coming on the 27th with three basic weapons. Staff, Sword, and Bow.  The combat is very heavily based on what weapon you are using and what armor you are wearing. Your attacks are all on the weapon, and the armor will provide not only protection, but also various mobility or weapon assists. 

The PvP will be Claim based, activated by using various 'game' items like the Game Table, Respawn Points, Control Points, and such. We will also have moving platforms, teleporters, and flingers which are quite easy to place and manipulate to help create the battle field of your dreams. 

New stats coming with PvP are Mana/Energy to use abilities, Armor, and HP. Run out of Armor and you start to lose HP. Run out of HP and you die. Armor restores on its own if you don't take damage for a while.

A variety of mobs will be put into the world as well, but they will be coming after more feedback is in from the PvP testing of the combat. Many of them seem to be explosion based.

Like always, these are all very much important for EQ:N as well, despite EQ:N combat being class based.

What classes?

Wizard: Classic glass cannon, heavy ranged damage, stuns, and teleports. Upheaval really digs a hole under your enemies.

Warrior: Determine where, when, and how the fight will progress with this powerful, mobile, killer. Be careful with Whirlwind, it chews up the terrain.

(Battle) Cleric: Heavy Armor, Armor Restoring abilities, revives, all while fighting at the front lines. It looks like you also restore armor on any allies who are on the other side of the enemy from you.

Elementalist: Close combat caster, high risk, high reward. Flash Freeze will make the ground extremely brittle and easy to break.

Tempest: High mobility 'druid assassin' with a focus on single target damage, but enemies in a straight line are also easy pickings.

Obviously, that's not all, there will be over 40 classes at launch.

They also revealed the Dark Elf models and showed off a fair bit of combat in a Dark Elf city built from some of the contest entrants from the Dark Elf workshop. 

EQ:N (& Landmark) Lore Meets Mechanics

The EverQuest franchise has a long history of very deep and meaningful lore in its games. This is one of the major draws of EverQuest. One of the unique things about it that has helped them keep both games running side by side so long is that they are very similar, but are not the same. Dave Georgeson, Director of the EverQuest franchise, has explained that each game takes places in their own parallel universe, and at some points, they are connected.

I want to focus on EQN here, but I will point out that the very light lore they intend for Landmark apparently includes traveling through these dimensional boundaries which is why you will find Sci-Fi, Steampunk, and Fantasy all side by side in Landmark. And this is actually the first example of what I'm writing about. The story and the mechanics are intended to work together in EQN.

Several eBooks have been released since last year which contain almost all of the lore for EQN that we have been given so far. These books are rather short, but are packed full of wonderful information and despite players clamoring for 'more lore' few of those players have actually read the books. I highly encourage you to do so. Even if you aren't a player who is into the lore there are some interesting details to be found.

After hearing Dave hint a few times that the books are more than just lore I finally got it when one of the authors let slip that many of the mechanics are presented in the books. So I started wondering what mechanics they might be sharing with us. I'm only about half way through the books, and they just put out another one, but I'd like to share a few things I've noticed so far that we should expect to see in the game.

Meaningful Relationships
While they've talked about this before in Storybricks discussions there is a huge emphasis on meaningful relationships in the stories. I know literature is typically quite heavy on interpersonal interactions, but this takes it to a whole new level. Even the most twisted of backstabbers relies upon others and their current relationships with them. No one wantonly kills others for a small slight (even if they might think about it) because it would destroy their relationships, and relationships are an important resource that takes time and work to cultivate. They must be harvested at just the right time. The only time we see such wanton slaughter is from a character who's very purpose in existence is to bring death to the world, expect that to matter.

This goes right in line with what many have taken from the dev's statements. Who you kill will matter. There are consequences for everything you do, who sees it, and who learns of it. These won't just be simple 'faction' ratings either, these work on every level from kingdom, faction, down to groups and individuals.

Mentoring
Every story I've read so far has highly experienced and inexperienced characters working side by side, the experienced characters typically teach and guide the inexperienced ones in how to do their trade or skills more efficiently. Whether it be a thief teaching a mage about lockpicking, a pair of seasoned warriors teaching their young charge, a lore keeper passing his people's history to the next generation, or an arch mage becoming outclassed by his own apprentice, most of the stories start and end with these relationships being a major focal point. In literature this means 'you should pay attention to this element.'

Many games have tried Mentoring systems before, including EQII, but with the artificial number deflation/inflation it just feels wrong. In EQN the 5 Tiers are supposed to represent player skill rather than the levels of character power in most MMOs. Tier 1 content will not be a cakewalk for Tier 5 characters because they are not just 'weaker versions' of what the T5 takes on all the time. The T5 will have a relatively easy time simply because they have the skills and abilities to deal with it more efficiently. While playing with a T1, the T5 can teach the T1 player better skills on how to player the game so they can increase in Tier and gain access to more options for how to play. I expect that T5's will regularly take their T2 & T3 friends into T4 zones to teach them what it takes to earn their T4 rank.

If you see someone who is higher Tier then watch them, see what they are doing, ask them how they do what they do. That's how you learn. If you see someone who is lower Tier, then watch them, see what they are doing, give them advice, that's how you teach. Together, these moments form lasting friendships and bonds that hold a gaming community together.

I also expect that some players will be stuck at one rank or another for along time and some of them will whine and complain about not having a 'normal leveling system' or that 'it's too hard to get T5.' It comes down to learning the skill as a player for how to use your character, and for each class that will be very different. Some people don't want to do that, and for those who don't want to learn and prove they deserve higher, they should still be able to have fun staying at T3 or wherever they want to stop.

Personal Perspective
Reading The Fall of Bastion and Last Stand of the Tier'Dal shows very strikingly that the same events can be viewed very differently depending on which character you are seeing them through. Given the personal nature of the Emergent AI I expect this to be very true for players as well. We might be going through the same encounter or dungeon or whatever, but we will each have our very own experience with it. This could be anything from having to go different places in the same encounter, having different tasks and conversations, to things as small as each player 'sensing' different aspects of the dungeon. In Landmark we already see a little of this with the personalized settings for detecting claim boundaries and seeing other people's tools in use as well as with the Gem Seeker's Broach and personalized loot. We don't all see the world the same way.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles had a wonderful mechanic with this on the Game Cube. While each player was playing on one screen if they were using GameBoy Advance's as their controllers then they could look down at their own little screen for a personalized map and each player was set to detect something different so the players would have to work as a team to find everything. I believe EQN will take such concepts to a whole new level.

Magic
I don't just mean 'there is magic in the books, so expect magic in the game'. No, I mean the system of magic is being presented. In 'The Fall of Bastion' we see several details about the magic system the Arch Mage and his apprentice use. Aside from the various categories of magic specifically named (Illusion, Pain, Coercion, and Death) there is also quite a bit of 'drawing on local energy.' The Archmage and his apprentice apparently do not store most of their energy for magic within themselves, rather they pull in what is around, focusing it within their body before releasing it as a spell. Sustained magic is a constant drain on a 'spell flinger' both in terms of magic energy and physical stamina and limits their tactical options.

Unfortunately, something I have not yet seen that would be quite telling is the interplay of different elements of magic working together to do something quite different. This tells me that the developers probably do not see the mixing of elements as an important world mechanic. Whether this means will won't see such at all remains to be seen, but I won't be expecting it to play nearly the role I had hoped.

Races
EverQuest has always have quite a myriad of races available for players to choose from. So far we know that EQN will be starting upon the Combine's return, and according to the books the Combine consists of Elves, Dwarves, Ogres, Humans, Kerrans, and Gnomes. I would expect that all of these races will be available to play from the start. Whether or not any of the traditionally 'evil' races will be playable is not yet indicated in the text, though I believe Dark Elves (Teir'Dal) were officially announced as playable.

Good Vs Evil
In the past, EQ has used a stark contrast between Good and Evil but the have allowed us to play on either side. EQN we are already told does not hold to such a limited view. They said very clearly during the Dark Elf Workshop that there will be no such thing as an 'Evil Race.' This is also evidenced in the books. Elves are seen as All Evil by their Oger and Dwarven slaves but are proven otherwise. The Elvin Arch Mage Corelon is by no means Hard Core Evil like Ithiosor, but he is quite selfish in almost all respects and utilized Coercion magic with extreme skill. The Elvin Prince Keramor is unarguably a Good Guy figure but also holds his own views which many would consider to be more on the 'evil' side. Dragons are diverse in opinion and method even as they rally to destroy the mortal races. Rather than an arbitrary distinction, how our character is perceived in EQN will come down to personal action and inaction.

Cartography & Maps: An EQN Proposal by Thornbrier

Summer blocks at UVU run fast and I've been cramming for finals. While I finish up my research for my next big article I'd like to share with you another of my older documents. This is one I believe is just as valid today as the day I wrote it.

Far too commonly games have their maps automatically available to the player for the entire world at once. If the world you are playing is supposed to be well explored and heavily documented with easy availability of information, that’s not a problem. But EQN is supposed to be a new discovery of this ancient and changing world. If I understand the released lore our peoples have only recently come back after generations of captivity, we have little information about the world around us. Given that information networks are not vastly established I would think our maps should reflect this.

Our map should only initially reveal areas we have already seen with vague indications based on what our character has heard about. But even when the landscape is mapped out, you will still need to find out the places name(s) from the locals or others who have found out before that information will display on the map. They might be able to point out on your map, “Oh, yeah, that's Mulborn Forest, good game hunting there, and that one is Winsor Peak, where Lady Winsor calmed the five year storm.” This motivates exploration of the unknown and asking questions, lore immersion, and opens up the possibility for a crafting profession, Cartographers. Not everyone wants to be an explorer, they want things and locations already mapped out for them. Cartographers could use their crafting skill to make maps of specific areas as they travel them, then sell those maps to other players. When the other player uses the item it fills in their in-game map with any information they didn't already have.

These maps could include not just the base map of the game, but also anything the cartographer has discovered about the area, such as locations of secret items/doors/passages. Current (as of crafting) known locations of mob camps. You could also leave special notes in the map which might be clues or your very own ‘quest’ in the world that you write for people to follow. This system would be similar to the current Player Written books in EQII.

In other proposals I have already said that Quests should change, practically be done away with for everything but social structure initiation style events (such as an NPC guild having you do specific things to prove yourself before they let you join or increase your rank). I would even say there is basically no reason to have a Quest unless it requires the player to pay attention to it and think through how to accomplish it. As such, you should also never have the location just show up on the map for where you need to go unless the NPC is willing to indicate that for you. Some groups that would give you a mission might have a map of where they want you to go, awesome, that’s a way a player might gain an area of map they hadn’t already purchased or visited.

There might even be several locations in which the mission could happen, and when you do it the location is picked randomly for you and your group (so you don’t have to do it in different places when playing together) or can do it at any location any other member of your group has the same quest at too. These locations should scale in difficulty for the number of people going into them as well, either by increasing the number of enemies or their intelligence.

If you want an easier time of doing the Thieve’s Guild quest then you could check online to see if anyone has posted the information for your server’s version of it, or you might check the Auction House for a map some cartographer has created detailing the quest. Such a map where they show all the possible locations, with markers, notes about mobs and what you need to do, maybe even hints about things you should take with you. This would be like having a mentor in the Guild who has passed the test before and is willing to give you advice.

How might Cartography work? You would need to craft or purchase the paper and ink, the larger the map you intend to make the more paper and ink you will need. You travel to where you want to make the map and start recording, remembering to give it the settings you want to use (such as recording known place and Point-of-Interest names, visited NPCs and their observed routs, current mob camp locations). Anywhere you travel from there will be recorded until you run out of paper or ink. You can open the map and add markers and notes at your current location and set these notes to be visible on mouse-over or on character’s arrival in the area (useful for player created quest maps). Eventually you will end the recording or run out of paper or ink and it will end automatically. A cartographer can learn to duplicate any map they have in their possession for distribution to friends, which will take more paper and ink of course, but the map’s original creator earns most of the money when they are sold on the Auction House/Broker.

Some classes might have abilities which can grant them additional options for recording on maps, like recording scent trails they come across, or divining resource locations or weather pattern effects. Other classes might be better equipped to unlock specific types of information, such as places of magical power or which deity is currently infused to a specific house of worship. In many of these cases a friend traveling with the cartographer could supply the information for recording.

With the constantly changing nature of the world explorers will always have new things to find in old places, and cartographers will have reason to update their maps for sale. As such, maps should always show when they were created as well. It is easy to envision a few ambitious cartographers making daily runs in a given area on a given server and becoming well known for supplying them on the market, ensuring that anyone willing to pay for it has accurate and up to date information available to them.