An impact Crater with a city in it to explore ; kind of like Ries in western Germany ( Bavaria ? )
A underwater zone comprised of creatures living on and in a Giant Hydrothermal vent in the ocean floor.
Maybe a zone with a large fault line running thru it and you have an earthquake now and then, and an Orc city where they talk about " The Big One"
Most of all I would like to see a Zone that causes a little friction between players and some interaction with people helping others and arguing over bad pulls and trains, getting suprised by the rare named spawn now and then . In the old days of EQ the Hill Giants of Rathe Mountains dropped really good money and everybody was crammed into little areas to camp along a little valley, some nights it was pandemonium and it was great. One of the best mixtures of economics and terrain that was ever put in a game. It only lasted a few levels but it was fun.
Fulton said:One thing I always found lacking in games, is the forests are usually nothing more than a bunch of trees spaced rather liberally apart. Seldom is a forest so thick that one must really stay to well traveled paths.
I would love to see this sort of forest where the trees are so closely packed that it actually hinders movement. However, I think this would only really work for first person view. Third person view in environments like that get crazy on the camera as you wheel around and your camera line gets blocked by all the trees behind your character.
I'd love a nice fire/ice zone, like a glacial zone with volcano that causes steam vents that can cause damage.
Or even an active volcano that throws magma that you must watch out for, of course while fighting armored creatures that are immune to the heat.
Maybe an extreme heat, cold, or poisonous zone where you have limited time between safe areas.
Woodsy areas, low hills and jutting boulders with some areas of thick underbrush, that slowly emerges into a dessert that seems to go on foerver with small hamlets and towns in pastel colors and eventually ending with the soft *whish* of the ocean waves against a shallow shore.
If underwater is done...use currents and eddy's.. I'd love to see Ogres swirling downward into the mouth of a the Kraken or even better some fiendish gnomish invention!
Also, don't make every lil movement interrupt casters underwater..otherwise you will get every fingerwiggler crammed in a corner or complaining....even more than usual!!
An entire zone located far into the sky. Perhaps touching the mountaintops in places, but almost other-worldly, floating land masses, some tethered together by bridges, others completely seperate and far off. Flying mounts to include enormous ships, flying carpets, etc...
Open expanses of land. Just flat land with limited changes in terrain and with scattered settlements and landmarks a la the Karanas in EverQuest.
Some others that have been mentioned in here sound pretty unique and interesting... One of them, somewhere with a Bermuda Triangle kind-of-thing going on... And a gaseous/acidic/toxic type area -- acid rain, anyone? (EQ's Plane of Disease probably qualifies for the latter)
This isn't really a 'region', but how often do you see a maze? EQ's Skyshrine had a big one -- maybe too big. A downsized version of that could fit in somewhere. Frostcrypt had one as well (this one was ever-changing, so maps had limited usage).
1) I'd like to see a dungeon which is seriously 3D... not just levels, but one where your Z axis is hard to understand, where you suddenly find yourself looking up at something you thought you climbed up from! Humans don't think 3D naturally - it would be interesting watching people have to learn a 3D maze.
2) How about a zone where scale was changed, where you moved faster in one axis than in another?
3) How about one where lighting changed - magical areas of darkness and light spawning. This could mix well with underwater - maybe squid ink? Maybe water pollution? Maybe overhead cover/shadow?
4) How about one where the walls of a dungeon move like in "the maze"?
5) How about one where the walls are see-thru - you have to bump your way around because every way looks open?
6) How about magical terrain? A tesseract that unfolds in different ways depending on what you do?
Pantz said:Kilsin said:Awesome stuff folks, keep it coming ;)
Are you going to relay any of these ideas to the dev team? Lots of good ideas here for expansions if nothing else.
No, I was just going to hide them all under my bed! :D
Quick Fact: A core part of my role as CM is chief liaison, and for the last 2+ years I have relayed more information than you can imagine between you folks and the correct developers and the dev team and you folks, lot's of it has already made it into the game and we still look at this information and use it as needed to add to our own ideas, so when I say keep it coming or ask for input it is always for a reason ;)
I don't really have any favorite regions, but would like to see more interaction with environment. Take the legend of Huma for example. After huge battles Knaak explained the area devestated by spell and weapons. Trees broke and torn, burnt earth blackened, scorched. Broken bodies and equipment clouds of crows.
So what I'm trying to say but doubt it will get in there is if you're fighting in a forest and you have mages or druids or elementalists you should almost make a clearing of distruction. So here is too hoping one day we get fast enough enternet and comps and the ability to do that stuff, though it would probably distract me into spending lots of time in a forest destroying it.
Kilsin said:Name a region / climate you would love to experience in an MMORPG setting that isn't typically offered.
I want a dungeon created by and constantly affected by the delirious and incoherent thoughts of an insane wizard. Give me this:
Give me a dungeon where gravity isn't always pulling in the same direction everywhere, or even with a consistent strength or direction. Ceilings become floors that become walls. Tunnels and hallways reachable only when gravity just happens to make getting there possible otherwise it is completely inaccessible.
Think about the possibility: You enter a room (and for the sake of simplicity, that room is a cube. In each face of the cube is a doorway. This means 4 hallways share the same gravitational 'down', allowing you to walk acros the floor and enter those doorways. You open each door and see a hallway stretching out in front of you with other passageways further down the halls. The remaining doors though...one is in the ceiling and the other the floor. You open the door in the floor and you see a straight hallways stretching straight down, down further than you can see with no 'floor' in sight. You could jump 'down' into the shaft where you'll reorient yourself to the new 'down' in this hallway. As you continue moving around you see other areas you cannot reach because their 'down' is not your current 'down'. Maybe if you went back to the first room? Or maybe somewhere further on is another nexus where you can switch orientations?
Or what if just randomly gravity just decided to switch. Imagine if you're in that same long hallways enjoying the adventure when you notice gravity reorientating..but 'down' now is along the length of the hallway. You need to find a hallway fast or an outcropping on a wall or get that levitate passed around so you can float down the hallway until you reach a suitable floor.
A region of past magical chaos, where the land itself is a twisted version of different regions. The regions could possibly be from Terminus, or from other worlds. Large chasms criss-crossing, separating the disparate parts into large islands.
Jungles where the trees themselves have become twisted, and the vegetation dangerous. Deserts where the burning ground have scorched away what life was once there. A high macchia, with rivers flowing through it, with gravity distortions; perhaps the largest river flowing through it hits a gravity distortion and flows upward to a floating, upside-down (due to inverted gravity) island high above, like a reverse waterfall. A large lake, fed by a waterfall that appears to fall from nowhere far above. A mountain range that has become the home to squirrels that have become sentient. Each island being a twisted version of what it represents, although not always twisted in dangerous ways.
Over the years, a race of beings has been able to occupy the seamingly bottomless caverns, creating cliff dwellings and occupying caves that run from the depths the caverns.
In the center of all of this is an island, surrounded by chasms, which contains a large keep. Once the home of a great magician. Perhaps the secret to what happened here lies within the keep...
--
Another landscape I haven't seen is one of a land that has been scorched by underground fires, with the ability to enter cave systems and have to deal with constant burning fires in the underground. The characters would have to deal with the constant heat in general, above and below ground (obviously worse below ground). They would also have to deal with parts of the cave system being completely on fire.
Brax said:What about a low gravity region?
This. I've been playing Wildstar since a while, and I really like the areas where you can jump to places due to low gravity. There's also other means like whirlwinds which throw you into the air, allowing you to get where noone usually could get...or floating stones...I love those puzzles! There's also real "off world" areas with low gravity, and its just super fun to jump around there! I think having such areas in Pantheon would be great fun, and make sense too, looking at the lore of the game.
Here what i would love to visit:
1) Alpine zone : most of the time when we have montains in mmos, it is snow everywhere. I would love to have montains without snow, but with high altitude lake, rivers, alpine terrain, rocks, hanging bridge, etc...
2) Swamp zone : not just a little swamp in a forest or whatever. A real large swamp zone with only few trees, few hills, where moving is slow.
3) Calcined ground zone : not a lava region, but a region where the ground is full of ashes, trees and cities are burned, maybe some smoke, etc... With some isles of preserved nature.
4) Hilly zone : a nice healthy grassy region with small hills, flowers, etc...
5) Cloudy zone : A region of montains peaks above clouds, with sometimes some fog.
I would like to see a very VAST underground domain. Similar to the Underdark in the Forgotten Realms world. It would have its own main races, culture. There would be only a few routes back to the surface. There would be cities that can be either neutral or outright hostile to players. Such a region would add a lot of variety and new design areas, adding to the overall land area of the game. Some major encounters could take place in the dark.
HUTT BALL from SWToR... http://www.swtor.com/info/media/trailers/huttball
(waits for the gnomeball jokes from the Ogres)
or sort of the same quick hitting feel that is molded into the Lore of Pantheon. This subgame kept me hooked on that game longer than I otherwise would have.
AlannaTheFair said: Tropical jungle!
Can we make it dense? Really dense. So dense you have to actually chop your way through it! So dense you cannot often see the sky unless you climb high into the canopy! And wet... it is tropical after all. And noisy with critters that never shut up! .... until it suddenly goes silent. oh oh, methinks a predator is about!!
Failing that, a petrified forest. One where the very trees have eventually petrified over time. An ancient forest containing (maya-like) ancient ruins. Really, really ancient.
Many of these have already been said and done before, but my favorite zones are:
There really isn't much that hasn't been done before that I can think of. One thing I'll say though, I really love zones that have interesting and meaningful factions as well. Also, please put lots and lots of pullable camps in open zones.
On the topic of weird wizards creating mazes of changing gravity and bending space/time: Warhammer Vermintide did a surprisingly good adaptation of this in a relatively low budget way. I can completely understand how changing the physics in an area might be difficult (it also might not be, I aint no dev), but what they did was combine two things:
1) They reskinned areas based upon what race/class (there were limited choices) you were. Some classes would see woodlands, while others would see burning fire-scape, and others deserts. When talking with others and realizing that you were all seeing a different landscape, it was a pretty unique experience. It really just flooded your imagination wondering how your experience differed, why the illusion was there, and wondering when/if it would end.
2) They had you leave and re-enter areas, which looked like the same room, but you would be seeing it from different direction. This had you walking along the walls and seeing rooms you had already been in from a new perspective. Interactive things were not persistent between the rooms, so it wasn't the same space with altered physics, but just a surface level trick. Despite that, it provided the effect.
This was a fairly roller coastery game in most places and so there were only some few variations on the path you could take, which all ended up in the same direction. I'm not sure the illusion would be as easy to produce in an area intended to be "open world". Anyhow, that for me is what comes to mind with the wizard's tower done well.