Citan Forum Posts
The following are not all of Citan's posts, but just ones thought to be important for the future, sharing his vision, and clarifying some things. Please note that newer posts are listed higher in this list. Older information may be outdated.
Economy & Work Orders
- "As I've said before, guys, we WILL have more methods for players to manipulate and interact with the economy.
- However, that would be 100% a waste of time right now. There are not enough players to even BEGIN to form a TINY BIT of a player economy. Please stop insisting on it. You can't have it without players. Hundreds and hundreds of active players.
- How many players you think need to buy level 20 stuff right now? Not very many.
- I've done this before, and I know the bare minimums necessary to make a player economy run. And we can't just achieve it right now.
- Work orders are a way to help crafters earn money while leveling up their skills. That was their goal and that is all they are for. Their existence doesn't mean there won't be other systems. If you don't like work orders, that's good feedback, and I'm interested in whether you think there needs to be other ways for crafters to make money from the game or not!
- But do not fool yourself into thinking that other players will buy your junk and give you money. They aren't there. The players we have don't need your low-level crap. That's a fantasy that can not come true at this time. Hopefully we will make it happen in time, but pining for it right now is a distraction.
- That last post came off pretty harsh, and I meant it to be ""firm"", not harsh. Let me explain why by way of example.
- Two years ago I was trying hard to figure out how to make group combat work. But nobody was grouping. There were like 15 people online. They didn't want to group. I tried making it more appealing, polishing, but there was very little action.
- You might assume that was because grouping wasn't working well, but actually it was just a lack of players. When more players came, more grouping happened, and it's letting me improve the group experience a thousand times faster than when I was working on it without feedback. I was wasting my time earlier, I should have been focusing on other things until there were enough players.
- Player economy is similar. You may think that it's not working because it's not good enough yet. But that's not the case. I can tell because there's so little feedback about the mechanics that already exist. If there was enough energy for a player economy, I would see constant complaints about how shitty the consignment system is and what I need to do to make it work better. Players would be organizing among themselves to work around my limitations, too, like doing ""craft fair days"" as they do in large MUDs. :But nobody is doing that. The consignment system sucks, yes, but almost nobody even wants to try it. I get more feedback about CHEESEMAKING than I do about economic mechanics.
- It's not that I think we're in a good place with player economic systems. It's that this is not the time to work on them. When there are players chomping at the bit to make an economy, it will be 1000% easier to get it right. In the mean time, it's a distraction.
- That isn't to say that I'm pissed or annoyed at people bringing it up. I just mean to say that I am intentionally ignoring you for now. :)
- ---
- In terms of crafting, my current concern is that it should be reasonably compelling and not seem like a huge waste of time. Because I have enough players who want to craft, mostly for personal gain, that I can kind of iterate on that and see how it's working. Will crafted items ever be the most amazing stuff in game? No, never. The high-end goal of crafting is not items, but augments that improve any kind of gear. You will eventually be able to craft super-rare augments that any player will want, regardless of what kind of gear they have.
- The actual act of crafting weapons and armor is not supposed to be better than looting. It's supposed to be more or less on par. A different way to achieve the same results. And a way to level up your skills."
Non-lethal Kills?
- I like this line of thought, and I'm mulling how to work nonlethal "kills" into the game. Thanks!
- Citan
Instances?
- "Zergs are ruining the game we need instances naow" : well, there will never be instances in Project: Gorgon for the simple reason that the game server doesn't support instances.
Killing broken mobs?
- "Yes, we do consider it an exploit, though it's understandable that you can't always tell what's happening, so we don't get upset if you just kill a few before realizing they're broken. It's when you kill broken bosses that it gets problematic.
- The broken AI subservers will eventually be auto-detected by the main server, and fixed automatically (and you won't get any loot/XP from broken monsters in the mean time)... but we haven't gotten that implemented yet."
- Citan
Messenger Bird Skill
- Messenger bird skill is in fact in the works
How to Pledge after Kickstarter?
- Short answer is We're Working On It! Should have a solution within a week or so. Thanks!
8/4 Character Limit & VIP time
- "By the end of the month, the most important thing to do is to get your account down to 8 (that's the VIP max-character limit). The only immediate action we'll be taking is to delete characters beyond that point. (Some players have 50+ characters on their account, and it's woefully unfair to let them keep all of those when other players have a cap.)
- At a future point, probably another month out, we'll implement the part where you only have 4 slots available unless you have VIP time on your account. At that point your other characters would get ""locked"" (but not deleted).
- The issue of VIP time is a little tricky. That's because the other perks of the VIP plan won't be available for quite a while, so spending your VIP time now would be pretty crappy -- you wouldn't get all the benefits, just the extra slots.
- I'd be tempted to say ""screw it, everybody who pledged just gets 8 slots until launch"" but I feel like that really screws over people who pledged generously. Giving the $25 pledge 18 free months of pseudo-VIP time seems like a dick move to people who actually paid hundreds of dollars for lots of VIP time!
- So I don't know of a ready solution that's fair to all parties. But I'm open to suggestions. Maybe we let you ""spend"" our VIP time early but at a better rate (so one month becomes three, since the other VIP features aren't done yet). Something like that?
- In any case, if you are at 8 characters or under, you needn't worry about your excess characters being deleted -- they'll just become ""locked"" and inaccessible. And if you're at 8 or fewer, you won't actually lose access to those characters in a month"
Tombstones
- "Your tombstone will last for a while. It may eventually disappear but you can still get your stuff fixed by going to where the tombstone used to be.
- Right-click on your broken items and it will tell you if you are in the right zone and how far away you are from the spot."
PVP?
- "We're not a PvP-focused game, so we're not planning to have forced PvP, or PvP areas that PvErs feel obligated to go into, or anything like that.
- I suppose we might have a PvP skill or skills, but they'd be PvP-oriented, not something that PvErs have much use for."
Steam Early Access?
- "If you get the game during Steam early access we'll have a way to tie your Steam account to your existing game account. (Though it may involve emailing us to tie it together manually for you.)
- We'll probably wipe unclaimed accounts right before the official launch, in late 2016."
Mentalism
- As has been mentioned a few times, though (including on the forums and in yesterday's live chat), Mentalism's high damage isn't intentional and will be addressed soon, so I wouldn't go into Mentalism with the plan to be super-high-damaging. It's primarily a support skill.
Kickstarter Lord Tier
- Each qualifying account will be able to create their own title, and you'll have a special chat command to give it to others, like "/bestow Bob" or something like that. However your exact example of "Earl" is already reserved by the game. But that's the general idea, yeah.
Vocabulary
- Vocabulary - unfortunately it's so easy to cheat at word games with the internet that I don't want to add much reward to raising vocabulary, because of the achiever-oriented nature of many MMO players, I'm effectively encouraging players to cheat. So I don't expect to tie a ton of intricate things to Vocabulary. But a modest Vocabulary skill is a prerequisite for the upcoming Bard skill.
Breaking Builds.
- "The unfortunate truth is that all your builds will get broken three or four more times. I'm sorry, but that's the way it will go. Every number on every piece of gear you own? It'll change. Your gear will become useless trash overnight and you'll have to find new gear. Ask veteran testers -- it's happened many times before.
- And it's absolutely fair that this is rage-inducing, but I can't do anything about it. I can't deliver perfect balance on the first try. Or the second, or the third, or the fourth, or... it will take me another year before I have all the different attributes in some semblance of balance.
- And if this is going to make you really unhappy, then alpha-testing is not a good experience for you, because I don't want you to be this mad at a game, and I don't need the stress of people angry at balance changes that I simply must make. So I hope you'll wait a while until late beta when combat balance is more hammered out than it is now."
Spawn Camping, Stomachs, Frustration.
- "It's not an exploit to camp a spawn. Remember that levels are very fluid (a level 60 player may have level 1 skills they're trying to raise) and the content resources are intentionally widely distributed.
- Do I want level 60s camping a level 20 dungeon? No, but if that's what seems like the best thing for them to do with their time, okay, I need to know that. We can fix up the content when it's problematic. (And in fact I lowered the drop rate of stomachs and spleens from 10% to 5% in this bugfix update to make it less worthwhile to farm the corpses.)
- When I set up the loot tables on those corpses, I'd forgotten that stomachs are rare right now.
- That's a temporary thing, by the way. It's just a side effect of how the butchering and anatomy skills work. When the skills can be raised above level 50, it'll become easier for high level players to get organs from kills. Stomachs won't ever be as common as dirt, but their current extreme rarity is just an accident of how the game's content is being added.
- The point is that I don't always realize the ramifications of new content. Please communicate with us about these things! I make lots of mistakes, so please don't assume I ""must have a reason""... maybe I do, but I try to mention things in the update notes if I think they'll have a big impact on the economy.
- And please try to keep an objective view about this sort of stuff. Calling him ""greedy"", ""lazy"", ""exploiter"", etc., is over the top. I mean, he's picking up some crap that spawns on the ground.
- Now I'm NOT saying that people shouldn't be frustrated by that behavior, or by any behavior, really... if you're frustrated, that means other players will probably be frustrated too, so I want to know that. Please report what's frustrating you. We act on that kind of feedback all the time.
- What I'm asking is that you avoid getting into heated in-game arguments about whether people are playing the right way or not, especially when it's something as minor as camping a solo spawn spot. :It just can't end well."
Just for Old-School players? (No)
- No, the game isn't just for old-school MMO players -- the game won't be successful unless there's room for a large audience with many ages and backgrounds. My goal for the game is to have 500 concurrent users daily. That's not at all a large number -- hell, there are a couple of text MUDs bigger than that -- but it's still a lot larger than we are right now. So obviously we will need to appeal to more people than the ones playing right now. And also obviously, there will be growing pains as we figure it all out.
Racism
- Despite there being in-game racism, you are still not allowed to use real-world racist terms in General Chat (or Local Chat, for that matter). And if your "fantasy racism" is intentional callbacks to real-world racism ("make the deer pick our cotton!", "gas the deer!", etc.), that's over the line too.
Non-Steam Version?
- "I can say confidently that we'll have a non-Steam version at least after launch... but that's a ways away. We plan to launch at the end of 2016 so a non-Steam version might be as far away as 2017.
- It might happen much sooner -- I just can't promise that at the moment."
Necromancy
- "Thanks for the feedback! We do have some changes planned for it down the line. There are just so many things that need attention that it will be a while until we get to it. But one thing that we're failing to convey in-game is that Necromancy is not supposed to be a skill for newbies.
- Its current position is basically just a stopgap. During early testing, we had the necromancy altar out in the fields of Serbule where anybody could pick it up and help us test it. When that started to lead to newbie confusion, I moved it to the bottom of the nearby dungeon, past an encounter aimed for a couple of level 30-ish players. The goal there was that you wouldn't stumble on it until you returned to this dungeon in your late 20s, already having some other skills under your belt. I might be better off moving it to another dungeon entirely, maybe one in Eltibule.
- On the one hand, I can definitely see the fun in struggling to get the skill early. And it's fine, and fun, for higher-level players to help newbies get the skill early in their careers. But I need to find a way to show that it's a little bit more advanced of a skill.
- Brand new players are going to have a harder time with Necromancy's requirements than people who've got a few dozen hours of play under their belts. Everything from bone collection (at higher level, it's much faster to get femurs when you need them... or just buy them from newbies who don't care about necromancy!) to graveyards (you find ways to get much faster as you progress through the game) to just knowing how some things in the world work.
- The skill's early power levels are also set up for the idea that you're already level 30 in one or two other skills when you get this one, and will likely want to keep fighting stuff around that level. Maybe you don't rush back to fighting level 30 monsters with your brand new level 1 skill, but : I figured you'd not want to drop all the way back to fighting pigs and such. I figured that with the aid of your other skill (which is already level 30) you'd have an easy enough time in Eltibule.
- So the very first power you get, Death's Hold, is INSANELY overpowered against newbie monsters in Serbule. And that first tier of skeletons are ridiculously powerful against deer and such, because I expected you'd be putting them up against fey panthers and I didn't want them to be instantly slain!
- This design might have been a mistake, because newbies who get a hold of this power will perceive it as being comparatively more powerful than their other combat skills... for a little while. (And provided they aren't fighting undead.) And then it can lead to disappointment when people run into the sorts of convenience issues Dirtnap mentioned.
- (And I'm not saying the skill will always work the way it does now... maybe we'll drop all sorts of aspects of the skill, maybe we'll rework literally everything. Maybe it ends up being a starter skill for orcs! I dunno yet, and your feedback will help guide that. But right now, in the current builds, it's hard for newbies.)
- So anyway, I think it might be smart for high-level players to mention to newbies that the skill is a little more advanced. It's not as hard to get the hang of as Battle Chemistry, which is probably the most difficult skill for newbies to try to use, but it's tougher than sword or unarmed etc.
- And I might see if I can move that Necromancy altar somewhere else for now!"
Item Inscription & Crafting Marks
- The creator's name shows up on items and isn't removable. You can also inscribe a message onto items, which can be removed by someone with equal or higher Calligraphy skill than the inscriber. But that doesn't remove the creator's name, just the inscription.
D&D + Pathfinder
- "Hah! Well, I'm a big D&D nerd, yes. I play Pathfinder most weeks via Skype -- our table top group moved around the country so we make do with internet play, but it's still fun!
- As far as affecting the game's design... eh, not too much, but I'm sure there's some stuff that has been borrowed by osmosis. One of things that I can most easily pinpoint is something that came from 4th edition D&D. That game has a monster-encounter model that's a bit like ours: your heroes fight a bunch of different monsters at once, not (usually) just one big dragon or something. And each monster has a couple of unique tricks that make it stand out, and those tricks often synergize to create different combat scenarios. I didn't intentionally ""steal"" that idea, but we'd been playing a lot of 4E at the time when development started, and I did like the feel of combat, so that probably bled into the game design from there.
- RE: the face in the logo, that's Destriel, the demon lord, who we talked a lot about in the first Kickstarter, but I just realized we haven't mentioned in quite some time. Suffice it to say that he plays a big role in Project: Gorgon's main story arc!"
More PVP
- "On PvP, we've talked about it a bunch in the past, so people who've been here a while already know the plans, but I guess we haven't discussed it during Kickstarter. This isn't really anything secret so I wanted to explain it before the town hall, so that people aren't unnecessarily disappointed.
- In a nutshell: it's just not going to be a PvP-centric game. The social experience I'm hoping to cultivate isn't improved by PvP (in my opinion), and the game isn't balanced around the idea of PvP. And due to the low-structured nature of the game's combat, it will already take a LOT of work to make the game reasonably balanced for PvE... adding in good PvP balance just isn't happening, there isn't room in the schedule.
- That said, there will be PvP... it just won't be a big focus. There's already a little PvP dungeon that you can find in the back of Serbule (in the mantis house IIRC). And I expect we'll eventually have basic game mechanics like duels, and some sort of simple PvP rewards mechanics (like arena events or dungeon scoreboards).
- And while we won't be balancing toward PvP, I have already set things up so that I can nerf/change PvE abilities that are insanely broken in PvP without affecting their PvE effects. So my expectation in terms of PvP balance is: stuff will be very unbalanced and it's up to you to find a workable build, good luck, but I can nerf stuff that the PvP community agrees are more detrimental to the PvP game than they are helpful.
- Will there be open-world forced PvP? Definitely not.
- Will there be an opt-in PvP flag (like the Hardcore flag)? Maybe... I'm not ruling it out, but it's not in the plans at the moment. If we have enough people to form a viable PvP community, it might make more sense to open a second world with its own rules. (e.g. a FFA PK world, or maybe an honor-system world) We'll see what the community looks like as we get into beta and will decide then!"
Can I rename my character?
- Sorry, we don't yet have a way to rename characters. Eventually! Just not yet.
Gambling
- Lore-wise (so to speak), the Red Wing mantis gang is supposed to own a casino near Eltibule. We do intend to add it eventually! You're free to gamble as long as it doesn't result in the transfer of real-world money or items.
Character Races at launch?
- "The existing three races are the always-available ones. If you unlock the other races during beta, you'll keep those characters at launch, so it wouldn't make too much sense to re-lock the races on you.
- So my immediate thought is that they'd stay unlocked indefinitely."
Gourmand
- For level 50+ content, Gourmand and food consumption is supposed to be increasingly important. You're supposed to basically always have a food effect on (unless you're using two healing skills... then maybe you can recover health without needing food, but you might need extra Power regen instead).
Equipment balance
- " This is for newer players that don't know: despite being in development for years, I've done very little equipment balancing. Most numbers are just guesses, and most balancing is just putting out fires (fixing stuff that is grossly over- or under-powered, fix it!) That will continue to be the case for a while.
- I know that combat numbers can change everything about a game. They can make a dungeon fun or un-fun. They can make or break entire play-styles. Good numbers can keep players playing and bad ones make them quit in frustration.
- But unfortunately, ""getting the numbers right"" is literally the last part of the systems-development process. So expect lots of ups and downs in the coming year-plus of development! I really need your patience, open-mindedness, and vocal feedback to make it all work. Which you're delivering in threads like this. Thanks!"
Linux
- "We do plan to support Linux! Earlier, Unity for Linux was just too buggy to justify foisting the game on players. But I've heard that Unity for Linux has gotten better now in Unity 5, so the big bottleneck now is my time: I haven't had time to get a decent Linux gaming system setup to figure out why our native patcher program broke a year or so ago. (My old linux machine died.)
- We still generate Linux binaries every time we do an update, which is what shardragon's patcher is downloading, so that should keep working until we do Steam integration. After that we'll need to do the Steam for Linux integration, which is a little quirkier than the the Steam for PC integration, so I don't know what the time table will be there, but it will happen."
Skill wipe at launch?
- Yep, we'll have a way to map your current alpha game account to your Steam account. (Edit: and we don't plan to wipe skills for launch. We may reset some skills during development if needed, like we did for Fire Magic a while back, but that'd be a special case.)
Animal Forms
- "For people who haven't been here for years (when I blogged about the design goals), I wanted to explain the original intent of the animal forms. The ""pig potions"" and ""deer potions"" (and the curative potions!) were intended to be alpha-test items only. (That's why they say ""test potion"" on them.) As originally designed, pig is supposed to be pretty hard to stumble into ... until you reach the first boss in the late-game area, the Crone Hegemony. At that point, it's supposed to be an out-of-the-blue thing. ""Ohhh shit. We screwed up fighting that boss, and we're totally screwed unless somebody can help... and if nobody can help me, I guess we'll have to make the best of it."" I hadn't intended many players to stay in animal-curse forms for long-term. They also weren't especially deep. I implemented cow, pig, and deer all in three days. They had a half-dozen abilities each, just enough to fill the ability bar.
- The cow curse was in the tutorial cave because I was testing the curse system and needed a convenient place for it. I hadn't really intended the cow curse to be a low-level animal curse at all. But because it was so accessible, lots of players tried it out, and they liked it. So we added custom gear and did several tuning passes on the abilities to make them more fun.
- However, now that the cow curse is out of the newbie dungeon, a lot fewer people seem to be ending up as cows. Which is fine! (Out of sight, out of mind.) But it may mean that these curses would work better as originally designed: a surprise ""gotcha"" curse to foist on high-level group players.
- So that's a third possibility: maybe these animal forms don't go past 50 at all. They might just be tuned so that they are useful around the range the curse comes on. (For instance, if the cow boss is level 30, then the cow's power would effectively start at 20 or so, so that you have enough range to level up and break the curse, but not a full game's worth of levels.)
- The up side of this is that they AREN'T commonplace. That's okay -- not every player has to experience everything in the game. And because they aren't commonplace, it'd be a lot more shocking, funny, memorable, and concerning when your friend gets turned into a cow after a party wipe.
- I'm not saying that's the thing to do here -- I'm not even really leaning that way. But it's another thing to think about.
- And a FOURTH thing to consider here: we can always make these ""races"". Players are generally okay with making permanent decisions during character creation, so we could just have a Cow race, a Pig race, etc. To unlock the race, you'd need to level the curse form to 50, or something like that. Then you could roll an alt of that type.
- Just another option to consider.
- Lots of people here say they don't want to roll alts, but I also get a fair amount of feedback from people who WANT to roll alts, and think the current game doesn't do enough to encourage it. Alt-aholics are not uncommon, and new variant ways to play aren't a bad thing..."
Animal Forms 2
- "I'd kinda been imagining the animal-curse forms as something for alts, really, or for players who only want to experience the game in an ""outcast"" state. To me, the attraction to the animal forms is NOT being a human. It's basically playing the game on hard mode, to some extent. Maybe that's the fundamental problem -- maybe people are attracted to the animal forms for different reasons than I expect. I kind of got that impression when I heard people asking to make cow form a toggle ability.
- I think permanence is a useful step toward making the animal forms fun, because it gives me more balance room to be creative. I want to be able to give these forms some crazy powers and abilities, like giving cows the ability to let other players ride them... sure, why not (when we eventually have the tech for that)? But I can't do that if it's trivial to switch into/out of cow form. It's one thing for somebody to play a cow to high level and get that as a reward, it's another thing for literally every player to be able to carry other players as a mount.
- Or a less dramatic example -- I want to let player-spiders waltz past monster-spiders, even bosses. But if anybody can just poof into a spider, that's less a spider-player-reward, and more a trick to avoid spiders that any player can use. It lessens the impact, and just becomes a potential balance problem if everybody can do it.
- I'm not sure if I'm being very coherent here, but I guess to reiterate: permanent choices are useful in a game where you can otherwise have all the skills. It's a way to gate powers so that they aren't available to anyone else.
- So the reason I haven't added a lot of unique stuff for the animal forms (aside from lacking tech for a lot of my crazy ideas) is because those animal forms are too easy to get at this point. (And I kinda regret giving Druids the Deer form -- it makes the deer ""curse"" much less unique. If I give deer cool special tricks right now, I'm also giving every druid those tricks. Which in turn means I can't give the druid line itself as many cool tricks, because then they'd have too many. I may end up taking deer form out of there... or not, I dunno.)
- But yeah, the down sides of not having hands are pretty severe. I'd assumed that perma-animals would have a method to become true humanoids for a few minutes at a time (so they'd have hands), but that wouldn't be a viable way to e.g. level Carpentry for more than a few levels. It would let you fix small mistakes, though.
- Oxlazr - thanks for the ideas! Good stuff there. In that vein, I also want to eventually give the animal forms specialty movement tricks. Deer will have ridiculous jumping power as they level up higher and higher. Cows will (someday) be able to act as mounts. Spiders ... might be able to walk on water. (I'd like to let them walk on walls, but the tech just won't be happening, I think.) For pigs, I'd been imagining a power called Piggieport -- a short-distance teleport. These tricks may not be completely unique, but the animals would have the easiest access to them.
- Yes, there will be a couple other skills that don't require hands. Dickweed skill is the pure-taunt skill (which I'm not sure if it'll ever actually make it into the game... other skills like Psychology kinda stole its thunder). Dark Geologists just need special headgear, which could be available in special form to animals. And there may be others."
Lore Levels
- "One thing that surprises me is the concern about Lore levels... on paper here, most players should have a lore < 10. There have been exploits and bugs that let you get repeatable Lore boosts, but those are irrelevant for balance purposes. Are people really grinding Lore @1xp to the point that it's an important stat?
- Speaking of which, I think the Lore XP for doing words of power was probably a mistake. Lore is supposed to be a reward for interacting with items as you explore, and really that's the only way I want people to level it. So I'll probably remove all repeatable sources of Lore (just as there aren't repeatable sources of Notoriety, for instance). It's tricky to fix old accounts, because Lore is one of the oldest skills in the game and wasn't coded in a way that lets me easily recalculate it. I realized my mistake in time for skills like Notoriety -- if I want to recalculate Notoriety levels, I can do so pretty easily. But for now, broken Lore levels will have to stay broken, until I have time to fix things up more. (I may end up just wiping all Lore levels, if that's what it takes -- but even that isn't completely seamless, because you wouldn't be able to re-get some of the existing Lore sources, so I have to find a way to fix all of that.)"
Group Roles?
- "On group roles -- I don't have a ""vision"", a hard and fast rule on group composition. I think the trinity is not very popular among players -- except the DPS part. I also feel like Project: Gorgon is the sort of game where things should be more fluid than that, with different tasks being important at different times.
- So I've tried a lot of different things in different dungeons and encounters. Tanking for bosses is definitely supposed to be useful, and healing others needs to be a useful role, but in dungeons I also want Rage management to be an important group role, and dedicated crowd control to be important too. (People do have two skills each, so theoretically a three-person group could handle six roles, right? ... theoretically, anyway!)
- I also think there's lots of other roles that might be fun to emphasize in the game. For instance, in Borghild there's very intentionally a role for a high-DPS ranged-attacker (fire magic or archery); the floating death heads are cake for a fire mage but very dangerous to meleers. In Winter Nexus I tried to make it more obvious that you need Rage management. And so on.
- But there's so few people running the dungeons in level-appropriate groups that I haven't usually gotten a good feel for how well the mechanics work. The problem with having high-level players try stuff out is that when you crank the DPS up enough, all roles are irrelevant because the monster dies in 2 seconds. (This is exacerbated by bad equipment balance, etc.) So it's been hard to get much test data for those ideas, not only to see what works mechanics-wise, but what players think would be fun roles."
Power Levels & Balance
- "In the mid levels, balancing around blue gear is actually supposed to be tough! I mean, does the average player find nine useful 40s-level blues? Without buying used stuff, I kinda doubt it. But they'll have some purples from their 30s, say, which they keep using for 20 levels because they're so awesome. And they'll find that one combination of three blues that gives them a huge leg up.
- It's an organic process, or at least it's supposed to be, with several ""eureka"" moments when you get gear sets working together and suddenly you feel amazing. I think that's a really important thing, and something that a lot of MMOs miss out on because they have such smooth gear progression that you barely notice the difference between one piece of gear and the next. In Gorgon, as you're leveling up, you're supposed to power up in leaps and bounds. That means at some levels you'll feel underpowered and need to rely on auxiliary powers (mushroom bombs, glyphs, etc.). At other times you'll be kicking ass and murdering things well above your level. Because that's fun!
- So really ""balancing for blues"" is kind of meaningless. The real goal is to balance it so that you have that fun moment of finding synergistic gear, every few levels. My guess is that at level 50 a lot of players will be using purples they found in their 30s. That's fine -- gear intentionally has a long shelf life that way."
Hand-me-downs
- "And this is a generous community that has been willing to help each other power up, often giving away gear for free. And the NPC vending system makes hand-me-downs very easy to come by. And the more powerful you get, the easier you can get your own gear.
- Now imagine that the game has launched, it's reasonably successful, and there are 500 players online at any given time (that's about half of a single WoW server's population). The quality of hand-me-downs will drop dramatically! There will still be lucky players who find amazing stuff in the Used tab, but more often than not they'll just see other newbies' junk. And even the most generous veteran won't be able to provide hand-me-downs for everybody.
- Plus, the game will go to level 125, so most high-level players will be farming stuff in that level range. That means their excess items won't be helping newbies anyway -- the level requirements would be far too high.
- So the question is, how powerful would you be right now if you never got any help? If you can get past a certain power point, it becomes a lot easier to get gear. (When you can solo the Nexus, for instance.) But would you have gotten to that point? I don't think so."
Max Levels
- "You'll raise skills up to 125 eventually, but the monsters will go all the way to 150. Those extra 25 levels come from finding better and better gear. And you'll likely be giving hand-me-downs to your guild mates at that level, helping them build sets and catch up in power just as you are now.
- So yes, the end game IS in fact balanced around purples! But the mid-game needs to be balanced around what I expect will be the average loot haul, which is blues."
Will Dancing be linked to performance?
- It will be! Just haven't gotten to it yet :)
Necromancer Bone Form, Vampirism
- "There's a bone-form planned for late-level Necromancers, which is technically an undead form, but nothing too exciting in terms of crazy rules.
- I'm hoping we have time to do Vampirism too, and possibly others like lichdom, with more intricate rules. I agree that doing something like ""you die if you go outside during the day"" isn't really playable. Though catching on fire during the day sounds hilarious. But it'd need to be weak enough that you could overcome it with equipment or fire-resistance potions etc. You'd also probably have a damage debuff outdoors in the sun, and maybe be repulsive to some NPCs.
- My current plan for the whole ""blood drinking"" thing is to do it offline. (Your ""hang out"" is always ""prowl for blood in a psychotic frenzy"", which means you can't ever do NPCs' hang out options... that's just a weakness of the skill set.)
- After you log off, a monster version of your character can appear around town at night, trying to kill hapless players. (It would look like you, but not necessarily have all your stats and equipment... probably would scale depending on where you logged off.) If your monstrous version gets killed, you'd log in with a Headache debuff or something. If it managed to kill somebody, you get a buff when you log in instead.
- This might have other effects, too. For instance, sometimes NPCs might give you the cold shoulder some days because ""I saw what you did last night... you're a monster!"" and you have to use Vampiric Hypnotism to be able to interact with them again. There's lots of places to take it... depending on what ends up seeming fun.
- But I don't actually know if/when we'll get around to undead forms... it may be something that ends up in an expansion after the game ships."
Community Stat
- "Humans have an internal stat called Community. (Well actually all players do, but it only has gameplay meaning for humans right now.)
- If you're around other players (real players, not NPCs), your community stat will slowly go up. It doesn't matter if they're human or not, just that they're real players. Going into dungeons together or just standing around in town with other players work. When your community level is high you earn +1% XP. You'll see a little icon on the top right of your status bar.
- When you play by yourself for a while your community goes down. If it gets to rock bottom you earn -1% XP. There's a little icon for that too.
- Human NPCs know when your community value is low, and if they're Friends, they'll cheer you up a little, just high enough that you don't lose XP anymore for a while. (This is a special case of the rule that it has to be real players!)
- The XP amounts are so tiny that it doesn't really matter at this stage, you can ignore it. But at higher level you'll have the ability to opt in to more racial options, one of which is higher bonuses/bigger penalties for high/low community score"
Exact Crafting Results
- "First off, I have to say ""no"" to one suggestion here: we're not going to add the ability to dial in an exact set of enchantments when crafting. That would make random loot obsolete. It wouldn't matter how slow or tedious it is to craft, either. This is just the way that players think: they'd see the perfect ideal, realize it will take hundreds of hours to craft it, and either give up and quit or start grinding away... but in neither case would they work for loot gear if there's a way to get non-random gear. To players, random is always less appealing than non-random. It's not logic, it's psychology.
- Random loot is critical to the success of the game, so we'll never be obsoleting loot by making crafted gear completely non-random. The AMOUNT of randomness in both looting and crafting, however, will go up and down as we tweak things.
- I had a long post explaining how looting and crafting are intended to live together, but I just don't have time to polish it up right now. Let me try to summarize. The basic idea is that crafting has two advantages: crafted items can fit niches better than looted items (for instance, evasion gear might be ideal for certain combat roles... when those roles exist), and crafted augments work on both looted and crafted items.
- The niches are problematic because I haven't managed to make any of the niche armors compelling yet. It's hard to make some of them interesting at this low level (for instance, the Evasion armor has mediocre evasion chances at level 50, but much higher at level 125). Others are just victims of how the game's combat meta keeps evolving. I honestly don't know if I'll be able to make any of the niche armors compelling until late beta, when the combat is more locked down. But if you have ideas, I'm interested!
- Augments are a big deal. Not just the oils, but all the ways that will come. There will be a lot of different systems to alter, adjust, and repurpose items. This is a place that crafting can really shine without detracting from random loot, and I intend to make heavy use of it. I suspect that for most players, crafting new items will be less important than crafting augments and modifiers (at high level -- again, it's hard to make those augments useful at low level).
- That's not to say that I want the crafted items to be useless -- and really, they aren't useless now. They're quite powerful! And if you've crafted a few hundred recipes, I'm 100% confident that you'd be able to defeat any existing solo content in the game, including the werewolf den. It may not be what you want, but I don't consider it junk, is my point.
- I realize junk is in the eye of the beholder: it's garbage to you unless it's better than the best looted item you've ever found. But that will only be possible when you haven't found really amazing loot items. (That's randomness for you.)
- It's also important to realize that some of the bosses, like Sedgewick, have given out really overpowered stuff in the past. For many months, the major bosses were dropping legendaries like party favors. And before the last update, the werewolf matriarchs were dumping out 300% more treasure than intended -- and all of it magical. That's not indicative of the intended balance... people aren't supposed to be walking around with a half-dozen Legendaries at level 50! I haven't worried about this boss-equipment inflation, though, because level 50 is just a mid-tier in the game. It will work itself out as we add more levels.
- I also don't want crafting to be boring, but it's hard to fix that. It already takes less time to acquire decent gear with crafting than farming solo monsters (except for some buggy monsters that gave out too much loot! And ignoring grouping, which is supposed to be more efficient than any solo activity)... but it's tedious. I don't have an easy answer for that.
- I don't want to make it faster to craft items -- it's already fast enough in general. I just want to make it more fun. But I don't want to add timed mechanics to it, and without timed adversarial mechanics it's hard to make it more engaging. (I don't want crafting to be timed because it's supposed to require less attentiveness than combat. In other words, it's a thing to do during down time, not Combat version 2. I think that ""combat-crafting"", as it's called in some MMOs, is only fun at first, and then it bogs down the socialization and relaxation aspects of crafting.)
- So I'd love to get people brainstorming on how to make crafting more engaging, without it taking more time, and without turning it into quick-time-event type stuff.
- The original intent of the survey system was that people should work together to do them. For instance you and your guild mates would all crank out maps while chatting in town, and then you'd sort them based on which quadrant of the map they were in. Each person takes all the maps for one quadrant, and you'd really reduce the amount of running-around-time. I don't know if this idea works yet, because 1) we don't have guilds yet, 2) trading items is tedious without a trade GUI, 3) inventory management still sucks, and 4) there aren't a lot of players online to work with. So I'm not saying it's a failure... I just don't know. It's too early to tell if the social aspect can be fun or not. But it's something to keep in mind.
- I have some more explanation and examples that I'll post when I can. I've dumped a lot of stuff in here without a lot of details, for which I apologize!
- Oh, about random resource drops, those are used for inventory and cash control. Right now deer have about 1-in-4 chances of giving an antler (combining the chances of getting one as a drop and finding one when butchering). If they dropped antlers every time, antlers would be worth 1/4th the current amount and recipes would require 4x as many! Even if they stacked quite high, that sort of proliferation of resources puts added pressure on inventory management, and inventory management is already tight enough.
- There's some interesting pros and cons to random resource drops, though... but I've already gone off on enough tangents. Bottom line, I think random drops are fine. The devil is in the details, though. Some random drops are too rare, and some recipes require way too many of them for no good reason. The fur coat shouldn't require six tufts of fur, for instance!
- So I talked about a dozen things here... let me sum up. The following things are especially helpful to brainstorm and discuss:
niches/builds/setups that specialty crafted gear recipes can fill. (These are hard to pin down while combat is still so fluid, but brainstorming is always helpful so I have notions of where to take it.) ways to make crafting less tedious, WITHOUT making it take significantly less time, and without adding time-sensitive mechanics.
- please feel free to point out recipes that have seemingly-absurd resource requirements!"
Text Objectives
- At this alpha stage players are just going to have to look past some things like muddy text objectives. The landscape of Serbule has changed so many times, and will continue to change several more times, that the careful text directions (and even cardinal directions!) get obsolete VERY quickly after I add it. It makes no sense to add that sort of detail now. But it will be added when the landscape is finalized.
Dragons & Racial Traits
- "If you can be a dragon, it'd be a temporary form. Dragons are so large that they would need their own towns, and would have the whole ""cows can't talk to NPCs"" problem at an entirely different scale. I know there was that one game that let you play as a dragon, did they let you be full size ones, though? I mean, dragons in the Project: Gorgon world are bigger than most of the houses in Serbule...
- Each actual race (human/elf/rakshasa/fairy/orc) will have their own racial mechanics. You can see a little bit of that already for the three existing races. They have very small benefits and weaknesses to start, but as you level there will be more opt-in chances to dig deeper into their racial background, unlocking more racial benefits but also taking on new racial requirements.
- The other two races, fairy and orc, will have racial features too, but they won't be optional. They'll just throw you into the deep end with all the racial stuff active immediately. For that reason, they won't be available to newbies -- you'll have to unlock the races by completing quests in-game."
NPC movement
- NPCs will have the ability to do different things at different times of day, but I haven't decided what they'll actually do differently yet. Most vendors and shopkeepers will stay in their store through the night, ignoring the day/night cycle. But NPCs like Blanche and Rita might head to their homes and sleep. Or, head to Joeh's leather party... or whatever. I'll have to experiment and see what behaviors are fun and also cost-effective to implement.
Potential Skills & Player Feedback
- "You mention the skills, do you mean how individual skills will play out, or more generally how skills advance?
- I'm hesitant to give the specifics of too many upcoming skills because they tend to get merged and altered as I implement them -- sometimes becoming multiple skills, sometimes (really, most of the time) getting condensed down into fewer skills with more meat. I want to have hundreds of skills, but I want them to be more than just a number. We do have some ""just a number"" skills like the various Anatomy skills, so it's obviously not a hard and fast rule, but when I'm adding new skills I'm trying to see what abilities, recipes, and special features can be tied into it. And vice versa -- when I add new gameplay features, I try to see what skills can map to it!
- So in that way player feedback does drive the skills. For instance, players have mentioned a few NPC features, like being able to see what's in their various storage chests without having to run around the world. Or to see what Hangout options are currently available to them. I plan to add these sorts of features and tie them to new skills -- skills I haven't really invented yet.
- But for others, I have a list of skills I want to see happen. Most of them are not very fleshed out until I start implementing them. I had more design docs years ago, but they're all obsolete now since the game has changed so much as it's developed, so all that's really still around is the ideas. To show just how little is really designed about some of these skills, here's the notes for one of them:
- - Illusionist! You could shoot fireballs, but only sentient monsters would believe the illusion and catch on fire. And of course there'd be a Mirror Image ability -- description would say ""creates a duplicate so similar to you that only a shrewd observer would notice the difference"". But actually the mirror image would have some random difference from you, like a different skin tone, different armor, different sex, etc., so often it would be very obvious they aren't the same person. If you select them, their name would be the player's name, but just one letter changed. They would run around behind the player shouting one of the comments the player recently made in chat, like an annoying parrot.
- That's all I've got for Illusionist -- a couple of cute things that would be fun to see in game.
- When it comes time to work it up, I'll sit down and figure out how it fits with other skills. That's if it ever gets into the game... if there are other better ideas, they tend to come first. And ideas like the one above often get merged in with some other skill -- I'll grab these old ideas when I'm trying to flesh something out. But lots of them just won't make it into the game before launch because there's only so much time!
- Sometimes I add new skills specifically to help me flesh out part of the game engine or gameplay experience. I'm thinking of adding the Osteomancy skill -- bone magic -- as a useful low-tier skill that leads you to other skills like Necromancy. So in that case it's not because Osteomancy sounds more fun, but that it fits a need.
- Speaking generally about skills, the basic idea is that most skills go to 125, but after level 50 you need to unlock further advancement by completing various quests. So you'll do a quest to unlock 50 to 60, and a quest to unlock 60 to 70, etc. Most skills will have branching sub-skills that unlock after level 50. For instance, at level 65 or so, a Staff Fighter could unlock Spear Fighter. Spear skill uses many of the same abilities from Staff, but also some new ones. That's also how dual-wielding swords would work, and magic-wand usage, and lots of other stuff: sub-skills.
- There are also going to be sub-skills for the craft skills -- skills like Leatherworking let you create some basic leather suits, but the fancier pieces of equipment need more specialized skills. For instance the best leather helms might be made via Haberdashery.
- The point of sub-skills is to help players differentiate themselves from one another. I expect to have so many skills that it's not really plausible to have all of them maxed out. At least, not for years! The first part of each skill (up to 50-ish) is pretty fast, but advancing beyond that takes more time: the XP requirements are higher, and you also have to do quests to unlock further advancement. So this is why high level sword fighters may be extremely different from one another, and high leather armor crafters might have very different products for sale, etc.
- Hmm, hard to give too much in the way of specifics without more idea of what you're asking. If you have specific questions I can try to answer them!"
Equipment slots for Pets
- "Heh! Well I would love to do equipment slots for pets, but it's mostly an art budget thing. They can't wear normal armor so they have to be crafted per pet. And the store-bought 3rd party animals we use aren't actually rigged for wearing armor anyway (the cow and the wolf are custom models and can wear armor, but the deer and pig and cat are store-bought and can't really be augmented too much). So it will depend on how much of an art budget we can drum up when we're on Steam to see what sort of things like that are feasible for launch.
- That said, we do have a bunch of plans for pets. Animal Handlers will be able to practice animal husbandry, breeding animals to get stronger and more interesting offspring. And sometimes discovering entirely new art styles for pets.
- We'll also probably end up with some non-visual equipment slots (tail rings?), and possibly something silly like hats. (We can ""glue"" some items onto the models, like the top-hats on the mantises, if the art is very carefully done so that it doesn't intersect with the animal's animations.)
- Some of the other ""pet"" skills that haven't been added yet will also work a bit differently. Demon summoning, for instance, involves a live sentient demon from another dimension. When you summon your demon they'll be wearing whatever they happened to be wearing when you summoned them -- usually some armor but sometimes you catch them at a bad moment! And some have better fashion sense than others..."
Group XP
- "Yep, group XP is split amongst nearby group members, and the XP should already be getting a bonus based on the group size. The current numbers are:
- 1 person: 100% of the monster's XP value
- 2 people: 125% total (split two ways)
- 3 people: 133% total
- 4 people: 150% total
- 5 people: 166% total
- 6 people: 175% total
- 7 people: 190% total
- 8-10 people: 200% total
- So it's not a huge amount, but should be noticeable! Instead of further raising the percentages, I've been thinking there might be a support role in there, like the bard class might literally boost that XP group bonus, or something like that.
- Only nearby group members count, so people that are far away from the combat shouldn't get a split (and shouldn't count towards the number of group members, above)."
Behavior Badges.
- "I think they've all been mentioned at one point or another in the patch notes, so it's not exactly a secret... I mean, it's never mentioned in-game, but it's something that could find its way into the wiki.
- I like the notion of keeping them secret so players can have the fun of discovering them, but I also need people to test the badge system, so... at this moment, the possible behavior badges are:
- Pacifist
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
- Hunger Artist
- Teleportation Denier
- Nudist
- Jewelry Refuser
- Hatless
- Shirtless
- Pantsless
- Shoeless
- Beltless
- These have all been in game for many months, but I've never gotten any feedback on them. This makes sense, given that most of these are voluntary ways to make the game harder, and this being alpha, not a lot of people want to do that. But if there are people who want to try them out, let me know when you have the badge on your character!
- (I might keep the next batch of badges a secret if these seem to work without a hitch.)"
Roadmap Goals (Before Kickstarter)
- "In terms of big-picture details:
- the eventual game will have 125 levels (the current 50 levels are the newbie levels, basically)
- there will be at least three times the number of dungeons and land areas (and hopefully a fair bit more than that)
- over 200 skills (we have 100 now.)
- There are six playable races planned, including some unique racial skills and other content for each
- Many user-interface elements are slated for overhaul, including the inventory and chat windows
- The game will also have day/night cycles and dynamic weather, among other niceties that haven't made it into the game yet!"
Bipedal wolf
- "RE: bipedal wolf form -- I don't have plans for a bipedal form for player werewolves. I feel like the Skyrim-style wolf form is kinda overdone, personally. But more importantly than that, it makes it much harder for players to understand the drawbacks of the form. ""What do you mean I can't chop wood?! These hands could easily hold an axe!""
- The wolf-form also helps reinforce the benefits of pack behavior, because we have images of wolves hunting in packs, whereas bipedal werewolves tend to be ""lone wolves"" in fiction.
- I could definitely imagine adding a bipedal form for top-level werewolves as unlockable expansion content, but the ""vanilla"" werewolf experience is going to be a quadrupedal form."
Full Moon
- "my goal for the full moon has always been for it to become a time of celebration, not a time of being pissed off. One step towards that is howling -- werewolves who Howl together in a pack get much better bonuses than ones who Howl alone, and naturally it'd be easiest to get a large howling group together during the full moon. But given the small number of players online right now, that sort of mechanic doesn't really come through too well yet.
- I'm working out the details on another full-moon mechanic which will be for level 50+ werewolves.
- Basically, during the full moon you'll have access to a bunch of tasks. Things like ""kill 50 orcs"" or ""eat 100 corpses"" or ""kill the Scion of Norala"". For each of those you complete, you'll get a point to spend on special werewolf buffs that will last until the next full moon. So, for instance, if you have three points you can buy ""+25 Max Health""; if you have 5 points you can by ""+50 Max Health"" (or if you have 8 points you could buy both!). Other things ""for sale"" include some run-speed abilities, enhanced versions of a few werewolf powers, and similar things. Maybe the ability to be ignored by monster-wolves would be something you can buy, too.
- I think the fun part of being a werewolf during the full moon is hunting together with other wolves, running in a terrifying pack of doom. So this change is intended to give werewolves something to strive toward during the full moon so that they have reasons to hunt together.
- When you can run around as a large pack and take advantage of Howling and Pack Attack and these special quests, then hopefully it will start to be a uniquely fun time, where you stop doing your usual things and start doing special werewolf stuff with the other wolves.
- That's the goal, anyway, and we'll keep iterating things until we get there!"
High Level Gear w/ Low skills
- BTW I have a to-do list item to make high-level gear not work when you're level-cap-exceeded (so that you can't use level 50 sword items when you're raising a level 1 combat skill). That will be a stop-gap solution, and eventually the items will "degrade" automatically when possible, so that your gear effectively becomes a lower-level piece of equipment when possible. But that part's way down the road.
Vendor Sorting
- We'll eventually have some more tools for refining the list (e.g. filtering by equipment slot, etc.), but in the short term, the suggested "is it wearable at all" checkbox was pretty easy to add, so I added it for the upcoming patch. Thanks for the suggestion!
Animal Forms
- "We don't want to make it easier to switch -- in fact it will become harder to switch animal forms eventually. Keep in mind that a lot of the stuff like pig/deer potions are temporary. And the cow curse won't always be as easily accessible as it is now -- it won't always be in the tutorial dungeon!
- I know werewolves and druids have it ""easy"" with wolf and deer forms, but they've taken on permanent character-altering obligations that can never be undone, which is the down side of those skills. So we might add more tools to let the other animal forms change, but only if the player makes a permanent decision that's related.
- And actually, the spider one is planned out -- players will be able to complete a ritual to become servants of Akhisa, the god of spiders and patience. For cow and pig forms, I don't have anything planned... and none of the 37 gods is particularly cow-themed. But if you have ideas, I'm all ears!
- Lastly, as Mortitia mentioned, we've been slowly giving the animal forms more accessibility. NPCs that are outside of towns are generally okay with talking to animals in any form, and I've been adding animal-form access quests to newer in-town NPCs when time permits. There will always be some NPCs you just can't talk to, but in the final game you'll be able to talk to more of them than not."
Asheron's Call?
- "Sandra and I worked on it, yep! We weren't on the original development team -- we just loved the game and so we dropped everything and went to work for Turbine. That led to working on the AC1 expansions and live updates.
- Sandra became the live-update producer for Asheron's Call for many years. (She was ""srand"".) I instead wanted to ""save"" Asheron's Call 2, and so I'm mostly known for my time with that game.
- (I was the live-update producer for AC2 for a year or two.)"
Dungeon Chests
- I think the chests are important for solo players, because they otherwise have very little motivation to explore solo dungeons (rather than wander outside where it's generally much safer). There needs to be "stuff" for them to find. But it's not my intention for the chest content to outshadow other sources of equipment.
Crafting & Balance
- "On randomness -- there will never be a ""make your own perfect item recipe system"". A big part of Gorgon is working with the equipment you find, which is often imperfect -- and which may lead you to use different abilities than you otherwise would, for instance. So crafted items will always have a large randomness element. At higher levels you'll have lots of ways to guide the randomness, much as you do with gems in the existing recipes, but not remove it.
- On grinding -- the thing is, the early game (including level 50) is balanced around fairly low gear standards, compared to what you're talking about in this thread. If you make it your goal to find a piece of gear with exactly x, y, z, and w attributes, then yeah that's going to be insanely tedious because of the randomness. But, of course, that specific piece of gear would likely make you INSANELY OVERPOWERED for the existing content, so that's kind of intentional. :)
- This is a tricky thing to talk about because a lot of people do have insanely overpowered gear sets at the moment, because they've been at level 50 a while and there's nothing to do but find better gear. But in the final game, level 50 is not a level where people are going to stay for months at a time. (It's a slow level, because you have to complete quests to unlock level 51, so players may be at level 50 for, I dunno, a week? But not months.)
- So I'm not balancing these low-level crafting systems around making super perfect gear. (Level 50 is ""low-level"" in the larger scheme of the game.) I don't want level 50 crafting recipes to be useless, but I also don't want it to be easy to get perfect equipment out of them. I want it to be pretty painless to get ""good"" gear, maybe with a couple of specific abilities. (In other words, good blue gear -- items with two relevant powers on it. That's what I balance level 50 content around: players wearing appropriate blue gear.)
- If you're saying, ""then what's the point of crafting?! I already have good gear, I want PERFECT gear!"" ... well, to be really blunt, you've basically reached the game's content limit at this time. You've run into part of the reason I still call this an alpha, not a beta! You've already reached an extremely-grindy part of the game, not because I want people to be grinding thousands of gems at level 50, but because... there's nothing else to do.
- I wish I could add more levels instantly, but I have to do a bunch of other stuff before rolling out the next batch of levels, so it will be months before the level cap is raised. In the mean time I'm trying to alleviate some of the grind by adding some of the higher-level skills now. The new augment oils are a good example -- they were originally slated for level 75, but I added them now to help people who are seeking ""perfect gear""."
Food Spoilage (Not going to happen).
- "Yeah we wouldn't do food spoilage, that's just too tedious. But it would sometimes be fun to do ""fresh ingredients"" recipes, if there was a way to do it without breaking stacking.
- For instance, suppose you kill a dragon and get Fresh Dragon Meat -- if you grill it right there in the dungeon, in a makeshift barbecue celebration, the meal would be super fresh and give bigger rewards. But if you just wait a while, the ""Fresh Dragon Meat"" would become ""Dragon Meat"". It wouldn't degrade beyond that.
- But as mentioned, I don't have a good tech approach for doing this that isn't annoying (due to breaking stacking), so that idea is on the back burner."
Dungeon Chests 2
- "The chests in group dungeons (e.g. Nexus) are rewards for a group. People who can solo these dungeons, even surviving long enough to train to the chests, are simply overpowered. This will take care of itself in time! I can't balance everything at once, please bear with me. (In some cases, players are overpowered because they have gear that makes them level 60-equivalent... in those cases, the problem will be alleviated when the level cap is raised.)
- The new crafting skills are intentionally diversifying. There will be a lot more craft skills in the future and you simply won't be able to do it all. That's just how it is, sorry."
Swapping Gear In-Fight
- "Being able to switch your equipment during combat is just something I haven't gotten around to fixing yet, but it won't be possible in the final game. I made it very free form to protect newbies from frustrating scenarios like ""I'm trying to use Sword Slash, but my Sword isn't equipped... oh crap, and I can't equip it because combat's started! I just have to stand here and die!"" That sort of thing can be very disheartening. But I'll find a solution that protects brand new players without letting advanced players swap their entire wardrobe out mid-fight!
- (And yeah, the idea behind the presets is you'd only switch out of combat -- possibly with a cooldown timer or something if that ends up being necessary.)"
Limited Ability Slots & Presets
- "Not much to add except that I know not everybody likes having a limited slot system, but it's crucial to this game's design. With a game that's extremely free-form, where new skills and abilities can be added every month (and will!), it's only possible to even *hope* to balance it by restricting what verbs you have access to at any given moment.
- I like giving each skill a broad range of possibilities -- broader than many other MMOs -- so that you have lots of interesting things to experiment and build with. But if every single new ability was always available for everyone using that skill, I'd really be hamstrung in the number and variety of abilities I could add.
- In a few cases more slots wouldn't really make a huge difference, balance-wise -- like having another Wave ability available wouldn't really matter a lot; they are all tied to the same reset timer anyway. But in other setups (including some Mentalism setups), six is already stretching it -- and I kinda wish I'd kept it at 5. Not that I'm planning to take the sixth button back out again, but I'm definitely not adding any more!
- Sometimes you just have to reorganize your bars for specific situations, like when you enter a dungeon. At high level you often need to change gear to meaningfully use other skills anyway. (This is an intentional design element so that the small number of ability slots mirrors the small number of equipment slots.) At some point in the distant future I expect there will be several Gear+Ability preset buttons available for each player, so you'll be able to swap into your soloing setup, or your group support setup, or your exploration setup, etc., with the push of a button."
Why does Unarmed have knockback abilities?
- "Fighting more than one opponent. At mid-level and higher the game is balanced around the notion that you will be fighting at least two enemies at a time.
- Unarmed is also a nice combination with ranged skills because of its knockbacks. Remember, you are NOT using just one skill. Your ""class"" consists of TWO active skills, not one.
- Unarmed is a skill with many useful, cheap, but low-damaging abilities, which offer interesting combination points with lots of other skills."
Metal Armor Crafting?
- "There will be an Armorsmithing skill which is a sub-skill of Blacksmithing. It's a high-level skill -- gotta have some fun stuff for higher-level players to unlock! Various weapon-smithing skills will also be sub-skills of Blacksmithing.
- (Those skills won't show up until later this year when the level cap is raised.)"
Globalized Resource-House.
- "I wanted to mention another trading feature that's on the ""maybe get added"" list. The consignment system is sort of a boutique system for unique items, but that may become too tedious for ""resource"" type purchases. For instance, archers who want to buy thousands of arrows shouldn't have to go window-shopping. They should just be able to buy their arrows and get on with life.
- So if that sort of bulk-sale ends up being problematic, we can add a globalized resource-house.
- The unusual feature is that stuff you buy from the resource house can't be re-sold! The items will be flagged so that they can't be sold again. So if you buy a pack of arrows for $50, you can't turn around and put them back up for $100. This keeps super-rich players from manipulating the market too much.
- (In fact, we might end up flagging consigned items this way, too -- we'll see.)
- For people who want to do face-to-face trades, there'll always be a place for that (for instance, there'll be some specific crafted things that require face-to-face interaction), but I think ONLY having face-to-face transactions is too annoying for people trying to buy stuff at odd hours.
- The goal is to find a middle ground where sellers can make decent money, but buyers aren't overly inconvenienced in finding what they want. So we'll see how things evolve, and try to make that goal happen."
How do Golems work?
- "The golem does one command every 5 seconds. It goes down the list of commands, starting at the first one, until it finds one that's ready to go (and whose Conditional is met). So if the first rule resets every 4.5 seconds, and has the ""Always"" Conditional, it will always be picked!
- If you want to use the ""Always"" conditional for several different abilities, you should put the slower-reset command in front of the faster-reset command, so that the slower one gets picked whenever it's ready to be used.
- If you want the golem to randomly pick between different abilities, use one of the randomizing Conditionals on the first rule. (Like ""50% of the time"". That will mean that it only picks the first rule 50% of the time.)"
Favorite Recipes
- We'll eventually have a way to let you flag recipes as Favorite Recipes so that you can access them quickly, but that feature will be a ways down the road!
Auction House
- "RE: auction house; it's been discussed in the forums a few times, so I don't want to repeat myself too much (because it's long) but in a nutshell we're not adding a global auction house, we're going to rely on consignments, and later, player-owned vendor stalls. It's intentional that players have to search around a little bit for what they want, maybe travel between a few towns (and eventually visit player shops/stalls).
- This is a game that's supposed to be fun for crafters. (Not for auction-house junkies... for crafters. AH junkies have plenty of games to play, but crafters have very few.) It's also supposed to be fun for non-crafters, obviously, but those goals have to be more balanced than they are in most MMOs. An auction house isn't balanced at all: an auction house depletes the fun of crafters in order to give buyers an easier time. It forces every single crafter to compete with every other crafter in the whole universe. In most MMOs, this means that by year 2 or so, crafters literally make no money on most sales -- they just hope to recoup their costs. It's the antithesis of fun.
- Obviously crafters will have to compete at some level, but the consignment system at least breaks things up a bit by geography. As the world gets larger, that will add another angle to the shopping system. (We'll also be adding ways for crafters to compete on things besides price and geography... but those are big parts of the equation.)
- That's the short explanation.
- My hope is that we can evolve the consignment systems to the point where it's easy to use and understand, and players can use those as ""localized auction houses"" for selling rare items or expensive crafted things. Buyers won't always get the best price or have the entire world's selection at their fingertips, but they won't be stuck screaming ""WTB blah blah blah"" either.
- If your concern is that the reason there's not a lot of trade in-game right now specifically because of a lack of a global-type auction house... probably not. There's only one city in the game, so at this point, the consignment system is practically an auction house as it is.
- There are lots of things that need to happen before the game's trade economy flourishes, including:
- - having more levels (because nobody under level 40 is going to buy anything expensive on consignment... it makes no sense, the levels go by too fast)
- - having more players online (when there's like twenty people online, everybody knows everybody else, people are happy to just give their stuff away at this stage)
- - better consignment searching tools (when one NPC has hundreds of consignment items, the existing system will be completely unusable... but at this point, it's not a high priority task)
- - commodity-style items worth trading (and too time-consuming to just make all of them yourself)
- It's not going to happen overnight. And the upcoming changes aren't going to magically make trading happen (hopefully there will be *more* trades, but not a flourishing trade system just from this). That's okay... the game is a year away from being finished. This is just a step toward the final goal!"
End-Game & Why Eric is Awesome.
- "There will be traditional equipment tiers in group dungeons for level 125s to work through -- basically finding rare drops of items and hard-to-acquire special abilities -- so their effective level goes beyond 125. And presumably a dungeon or two of insane stuff for the ""effective level 140"" players to do. People who want to keep on keepin' on will be able to do so, albeit at a reduced pace. (And probably not very soloable, just because of the extreme difficulty of making ultra-high-level soloable content that isn't easily exploited, or an insane grindfest.)
- But that said, I do expect players to basically never run out of skills. Not even half the skills are in game yet, and the ones that are in only go to 50 -- the easy part of the advancement curve. As you get past 50 it starts to make more sense to focus on your favorite skills rather than trying to do them all, so that you're able to progress in those chosen skills at a good pace.
- And so players who max out their character can go back and start other skills. This is an intentional design goal because it pushes high-level players back into low-level dungeons and cities.
- There will also be content updates (think DLC or mini-expansions) three or four times a year. (I'd previously mentioned doing one a month a la Asheron's Call, but it doesn't look like that's a realistic timeline given my resources.) These updates will include new areas, new skills, and so on, and will also have ""story events"" which can result in permanent world alterations -- and possibly permanent character alterations. Think things like ""the volcano is erupting and we have to fight back the lava drakes or Sun Vale will be destroyed!"" These are PvE crafting and combat tasks that players can band together to accomplish, if they choose.
- I also intend to have a large number of minigames and other diversionary activities, so people who just want to hang out in game have stuff to do.
- I think most end-games fall flat because they are trying to change the game into something else. I'm happy to add some raid-style dungeons if players want to do them, but I don't intend to push players into raids or PvP or whatever else.
- And some times, you know... it's a good feeling to say ""I beat this game. In fact, I beat the SHIT out of it. I won!"" And then you go play some other MMO. Maybe dropping in on weekends to do some quests and say hi to friends, or perhaps just quitting completely and coming back in six months when there's new content.
- There are a million MMOs out there today, and I think it's naive to pretend that players will stick with the same one for years and years without interruption. While I definitely envision Project: Gorgon being a lot of players' ""main"" MMO, it can also fit the role of a ""side MMO"" pretty well. And I'm okay with that."
Character Wipe (From March 2015)
- PS: I don't plan to wipe characters. We'll probably wipe your inventories, but leave players and their skills intact.
Camping Bosses
- "Someone asked why I was so against camping bosses -- it doesn't make me angry or anything, but it's not ideal. In my experience, static camping burns players out. Imagine: you sit down at the computer for the fifth day in a row and think, ""time to spend another two hours standing in one room looting the same monster over and over, which poses no real challenge to me"", and... you decide to go play something else instead! A modern game needs to be more involving than that.
- At the very least, I want to make it so that groups are motivated to travel around the dungeon, going from boss to boss to boss, rather than standing in one place. That's usually how things worked in EQ2's early dungeons, and it was much less tedious than standing around idly. So that's what I'm working toward right now. I suspect I can make that work if I add enough bosses, though I will also probably have to slow down the respawn on each boss. (Because if it takes even 11 minutes to fight your way between bosses, the motivation to just stay put for 10 minutes will be very high.)"
Boss Respawn Time & "Dailies"
- "There's an old saying in MMO design: ""don't balance via tedium in an MMO, because players will do it anyway and then bitch about it."" What that means is that it doesn't work very well to make something super dull so that players won't do it. They'll do it anyway -- some even claiming that it's fun (because they're chatting with friends) -- and then get burned out and quit because it's too grindy.
- The ten minute timer is trying to find a balance between discouraging camping and also being short enough that other players have a chance to kill the monster. But that isn't working very well right now -- it's too short. But if I slowed down respawns to, say, an hour, then players would show up and be disappointed the boss is already dead.
- Chests are one way I can fix that, pushing players to move on, explore other areas, have fun, not just stand in one spot camping because it's low-risk-high-reward. (I can also make the bosses have a loot timer instead, so you can kill each boss and loot them only once -- that way I could respawn them even faster than 10 minutes. Or other variants of the same idea.) I'm trying different things to solve that problem. Right now I'm trying BOTH -- having bosses on ten-minute respawns with good loot, and also chests with good loot -- hoping that players will go do the chests, and only come back to camp the boss if they've run out of other stuff to do. But if that doesn't work, I'll try something else.
- I'm not trying to push people to do daily activities at this time. If you're perceiving them as dailies, that's just your OCD talking :) There's no way to avoid some OCD-like compulsion: ""I have to log in every day to pick a new Hangout Activity!"" Well, you can if you want, but the only person pushing you to ""have"" to do those things is you. The rewards of hanging out are intentionally low-impact so that you DON'T feel compelled to constantly log in.
- But maybe I will do dailies eventually -- I don't hate them, and if players want a log-in-every-day incentive I can do that. I'd use classic game incentives, like limited-time rewards (""get special dyes in the loot chests this month only!"") or score competitions (""who has the most chests opened this month?"") etc. It can be useful to do those things sometimes to drum up players when the game is in a doldrums -- gets people back into the game. But I'm not doing that here."
Two-skill Belts
- Crafting two-skill belts: my plan with those is to make them rare drops (like some of them are now). They're the sort of thing that would make good Consignment sales items. I could even imagine player-run shops full of just rare belts. But we'll see how it goes.
What is Cheating?
- Cheating does include "escaping" dungeons, using jump-exploits or transformations or camera bugs or whatever else. If people use it to kill monsters with impunity, that's something I'd have to ban people for. Cheating would also include using dupe bugs, NPC logic bugs, etc., although of course we don't consider it cheating if you find an exploit and report it (and then stop using it).
Notepad Storage
- "I like the idea of using some sort of offloading item to allow you to store your notes. Maybe I will add a cartography skill that lets you store all your current dots on a blank map, and anyone that uses the map will have their dots replaced with the ones from the map.
- There will also be items eventually that let you boost your maximum number of map dots, and other skills that increase the number of dots and also add other options to your map.
- I actually had a large set of features planned for the map, and technically I still do... but there's just so many other things that are higher priority right now! But eventually I hope the map will be a lot more useful.
- The maps may also be one of the few places where I can easily allow user-provided content -- people could load their own maps into the game, as was done with EverQuest 2 long ago. I haven't explored the details of that yet, but it's doable with the game engine, so that might be something we try down the road."
Elves and their Vices
- "There are definitely people who will not play the game because the NPCs say dirty stupid stuff. If those people would also refuse to play a game with ""lingerie model armor"", then I can't fault them for that: they have beliefs about sexuality, and as long as they aren't hypocritical about it, that's fine by me. (If they're the sort who like women in games to be nearly naked, but to keep their mouths shut about sex, then that doesn't sit as well with me. But still, whatever. I'm not here to lecture people: play or don't.)
- The design of the elves came from seeing all the prefabricated ""elf models"" I could buy when I was developing the game. They were supposed to be mighty archers and swordsmen, but they could never take off their high heels or wear a supportive bra... it was ludicrous. So I did the indie thing and dug into why: if they look like this when they're fighting, they must have a reason, right? They wouldn't dress this way just to entertain the game player. And it became obvious that elves would be pretty into sex.
- That artwork is long gone and elves are much more modest in their appearance (which is how I want it). But they remain very ""into"" sex. I find it a useful racial attribute. Most games have elves which are just ""humans but arrogant"" and dwarves which are ""humans but stubborn"". If we have to stereotype a whole race in order to make it work in a fantasy game (and we kinda do -- otherwise they just come across as ""humans with different appearances""), we can at least give them new stereotypes!
- That stereotype also helps explain racial animosity between humans and elves, provides backstory hooks, and gives roleplaying opportunities. (Although it also has created a few unfortunate ""roleplay"" scenarios, too, so like every design, it's a double-edged sword.) As the game goes on and we see how each race approaches sexuality, it will let me highlight the differences between the races in a way that few other games manage to do. I find it interesting, and that's basically my litmus test.
- If I had to change the elves in order for to be successful, I'd just remove them. I don't really need ""humans with long ears and no other discernible differences"" in the game -- I'm an indie, and artwork costs a fortune. I need every aspect of the game to pull its weight from a gameplay point of view. Elves weren't in the original design of the game, it was going to be only humans. So I have considered removing the other races and tightening things down -- but at the point I'm not planning to do that. It doesn't seem to be a deal-breaker for most people."
Ancient Coins & Crone Hegemony
- Lore wise, the three "ancient coins" are named after different greek coins because they come from the part of the game-world that's inspired by greek myths -- the Crone Hegemony is full of harpies, hydras, sirens, gorgons... and eventually there will be a substantial part of the game set in that country, where those old coins are actually still legal tender, but Councils are worthless. So they'll prove useful in those lands.
PVP, Again
- "For our purposes let's call PvE ""player versus environment"" and it specifically means ""killing monsters that are driven by the AI and not under the orders of other players"". PvP is ""player versus player"", which also includes ""player versus another player's AI-controlled pets"".
- It's also useful to point out that there's a ""PvP flag"" but not a ""PvE flag"" because PvP is a superset: you're always PvE flagged. (Otherwise you could wander through dungeons with impunity!) So when I want to use very specific terminology, I tend to say ""PvP"" and ""non-PvP"", because PvE isn't the opposite of PvP. They are complimentary game modes.
- Anyway, someone earlier asked why the game doesn't just have one set of numbers for PvP abilities and another for PvE. And the answer is that the game engine can already do this! But it's not actually very helpful.
- For one thing, equipment is a huge part of your character build, so I'd have to give different stats for both abilities AND every single piece of equipment. Basically, the problem isn't technical; it's time: that's an exorbitant amount of time to make it work!
- Let me try to explain how long it takes by comparison. This is a game with a fairly open character-build system, and those are already much harder to balance than games with strict classes and simple equipment (like WoW). And yet it's taken WoW a very long time to even come close to having both their PvE and PvP content semi-balanced. And they had multiple people working on it full time, for years.
- And to make matters worse, it's not just number tweaking. It often ends up that there's no numbers that can go into an ability to make it work. For instance, mezz abilities are just not fun in PvP. If I wanted to focus on PvP, it's not enough to make it ""balanced"", it also has to be tolerably fun, and that means being locked in place for 30+ seconds is not an option. Which means now there's a fundamental difference between PvE and PvP. I'd need to either make those mezz abilities do nothing in PvP, or else make them do some entirely different thing, inventing a new mechanic just for PvP. That's a very generic example, but it applies to lots of aspects of the game, from crowd control to damage to armor levels to well, everything.
- Also, I'm not really planning on the game being extremely well balanced even for PvE. I'm committed to doing a passable job of balancing the PvE skills against each other for a few common use cases (soloing, small groups, etc.). But I'm not under the delusion that this will be an easy thing, or a perfect thing. It will take literally years; the game will ship and I'll still have to make more changes periodically, just like every single other MMO in existence does.
- So given that, I can't also take on balancing PvP as well, because that will more than double my workload: I need entirely different numbers, but also entirely different scenario models (one-vs-one, two-vs-two, gang fights, etc.), and various different gameplay tweaks. I just don't have time.
- Plus, I want to be adding new content every month after the game ships. Which means new balance variables every month. I won't have time to make sure every new item or skill or pet makes sense in both PvP and PvE.
- Maybe when the game is on Steam it'll sell enough that I can stop ""thinking indie"" and instead hire a couple of systems designers to work on these tasks for me, but at the present moment, it just can't possibly fit into the schedule without throwing out other things that I think are more important to the game."
Griefing that's fine to do.
- "That doesn't mean there's no griefing! There are lots of places in the game where players can grief each other, and that's okay. For instance, even in its early state, you could:
- - trick newbies into saying horrific words of power
- - give them poisoned food
- - convince them to drink pig potions and then laugh and laugh"
Is this a Beta (No).
- "We've never been in beta; we're in alpha.
- We had a pre-alpha version during the first kickstarter in 2012; that was ""pre-alpha 2"". When that kickstarter didn't succeed, we closed down for a while, and later came back as ""pre-alpha 3"". We went into ""alpha 1"" earlier this year, and we're still in alpha 1. There will be at least one more alpha stage before we go to beta 1. But it's an indie game, so the terms are kind of wishy-washy anyway. MMOs are insanely big projects; we'll get there when we can get there!"
Valiance?
- "Yeah the wording here is unfortunate. Valiance isn't being done by Elder Game (my company). We're just part of a collection of indie companies that help each other out when possible. I'm letting them use my toolset and server tech, because their game design fits my engine's capabilities very well.
But Gorgon itself doesn't have anything to do with Valiance. Though there are a few things in the game that were added to help them out. For instance the Valiance team needed flying and super-jumping (since it's a superhero game), so I added basic versions of those to the engine -- and then promptly added them to my MMO too, because who doesn't like flying and super jumping!
I don't have any day-to-day contact with the Valiance team, though -- I just don't have time. Haven't for many months. The team has their own client-side engineers, and hopefully if their Kickstarter succeeds, they'll be able to pay for a server-side engineer to add some engine improvements -- which should benefit Gorgon too, since they share the same code base. Fingers crossed for them!"
Feeling Dead Inside?
- Stop killing sentient beings for an hour or so and you'd stop being dead inside. (For instance, the Serbule crypt has pretty much no sentient beings.) There will be racial jewelry which makes this much less of an annoyance / work differently.
Why Unity Engine?
- "This game's first prototype happened over four years ago, and we've evolved with Unity since then, creating elaborate custom tools for MMO content creation. Unity also got MUCH more vibrant as a community, making it easier and cheaper to create quick content.
- But it doesn't really matter, as switching engines isn't feasible. There's way too much to rewrite, and I don't have a spare year to do it! Neither game engine has anywhere near enough ""built in"" functionality to make an MMO, so I've done a lot of custom coding, some of it quite fancy, to make Unity work as an MMO.
- About Unity doing poorly: I'm not really worried. At this point it would take a MAJOR misstep to do them in. They have a strong market share and a vibrant community. So any screw ups would be due to a serious management blunder. The asset store alone does tens of millions of dollars in sales. Contrast with Unreal's community, and Unreal seems like a ghost town.
- If they really do screw the pooch, I'm sure there will be paths forward, probably by buying maintenance contracts from a second-party company. That's how the Gamebryo engine continued to be viable after its parent company died. Unity also does offer a source code license -- it's just insanely expensive -- but that would probably drop in price if people started freaking out and demanding source as a safety net.
- But bottom line: I frankly believe Unity has a healthier ecosystem than Unreal. So I'm just talking about speculative futures there."