New posting, but been a backer for a while - just now really beginning to follow the project and have some thoughts and concerns.
In many MMOs when there is an expansion, especially one that increases the level cap, large pieces of the earlier content, mainly raid content, suddenly become irrelevant. I come from a WoW background, and having been a player there from close to launch, I got to experience Molten Core, Onyxia's Lair, and later, with expansions, Karazhan, Naxxramas, and other end game content. Some of it was quite good. But with each expansion that increased the level cap that old content was essentially forgotten; especially by players new to the game who simply want to rush to the current maximum level and hammer at the latest raid content. That seems disappointing to me, and at the risk of sounding maudlin, a tad sad. Some of these were recycled and made higher level; but frankly it just wasn't the same.
As I recall in the early days of WoW, new raid content was added without an increase in level cap. Zul'Gurub and Ahn'Qiraj were added, which posed a challenge to high end raiders, while other guilds worked their way through Molten Core to finally secure the gear needed for those higher end raids. This seems to be a better model of expansion, and kept the earlier content relevant.
I know I'm looking ahead here, but what steps, if any, are going to be made to make sure that the raid content at launch isn't tossed into the dustbin with the next major expansion?
It isn't just raid content it is dungeon and landscape content - Pantheon is intended as primarily a group game with things thrown in so people can go solo or raid if they prefer.
We do not know how often there will be expansions or whether expansions will increase the level-cap but it seems extremely likely that this will occur far less often than in WoW. Because, if for no other reason, getting to level-cap and doing content is intended to be a *lot* slower.
As discussed when this topic comes up - as it often does - there are ways to add new areas without making characters more powerful or making their gear more powerful. Giving them an incentive to work for new abilities and equipment but *without* trivializing earlier content. Thus add a new attribute or make a fairly unimportant old attribute critical to the new area. Forcing us to suddenly build it up but without that unbalancing combat in any older areas. Or add new effects to weapons/gear that help against enemies in the new areas but are useless earlier. Forcing us to re-gear but with no trivialization. As in new enemies being from the plane of the void (of course I am making this up as I go) and new gear having +1 or +2 or +3 to damage void creatures or resist void attacks.
VR knows all of this, of course, but there is no reason for them to discuss the philosophy of expansions when we aren't even up to alpha testing of the basic game. So we do not know what they will do.
In a small since I blame some of this on the players. Even now, there are guilds forming on these servers to be " The First " To rush to the end and declare victory for being the first to kill the big bad boss. then they stop, scratch their head and look to VR and say " what else can you make for me " Answer should be Nothing. It is just gaming gluttony. VR is making a massive world here to take your time and explore and learn of the lore, not a machine pumping out new content for the racers every 6 months.
Sorry for my small rant there. From what I have seen they are making areas that have a mix of high and low level areas for one. They way I see it you go into zone A at lvl 15, Then Zone B at lvl 25...then back to Zone A at lvl 35. that is simplified of course. With expansions the key is to link quest back to some areas of old. Maybe not every place and everytime. I would think of it like this bandits fort is part of the original game, becomes a major camping ground for players coming up. Maybe in the next expansion this small group of the same bandits get some high backers and build onto their old fort a new keep. A few bigger and badder bandits, some good lore tied into the story of where they got the funds, maybe a political controversy the can lead to new areas. Players can grow with this, and still be tied into the old content.
Sure, I think those are solutions. Maybe also very high end items could be crafted from items dropped in a number of raids / locations (both old and new) to keep those locations relevant. I suppose that eventual level cap increases are inevitable, but, as you have suggested, the pace should be much slower. Perhaps raising the topic on the forums, which they hopefully review, flags this as a question of concern?
lothraem said: ... I know I'm looking ahead here, but what steps, if any, are going to be made to make sure that the raid content at launch isn't tossed into the dustbin with the next major expansion? ...
I'm answering this based not on just raid content, but any content that is lower level than max, and/or presuming it's a design goal to want to have players in zones other than max level zones, regularly.
Two options that could work are: 1) ingredients for crafting unique consumables by tier, and 2) colored mana by tier.
Problem is, for #2, colored mana hasn't really been talked about in the past ~year, so that could be.. not happening anymore. But #1 could work.
The success of a mechanic like this, in any implemention, though, does create the problem of either mentored, overgeared, or higher level players consuming content designed for in-tier customers.
Or put another way, the more success something like this has, the more you're going to see twinks steamrolling & farming that content, to the detriment of others who might be consuming it for the first/only time.
Not saying that's a bad thing, if it's a design goal to encourage that emergent behavior. Yet, it could be a negative experience for some paying customers.
Also, the sacrifice mechanic could keep all tiers relevant, unless there's anti-bottom feeding code that would only permit 1 & 2.
Similarly, things like 100% anti-bottom feeding code plus the ability to arbitrarily set your level to any previous level (self-mentor), with appropriate tuning of gear effects, would also work.
It's not that there aren't solutions to these problems. There are many logical solutions that would work. It's just that Visionary Realms hasn't shared their plans, if they have them, yet.
Warning! long post ahead, this is something I wrote about a few months back, but never posted because the game is still in development and there was no discussions going on about expansion content, but since you brought it up here is my 2cents.
"How to implement and expansions and keep the old content relevant? This is a decade old question, no single solution is perfect but here is my take on how it should be done.
Expansions should be an addon to the base game, not “the game” so they should attempt to provide additional content options for new players, low level player and max level players alike. Wow is the perfect example of how expansions should not be done, every single time there’s a new wow expansion the game gets smaller in a way, because everything else previous to the expansions becomes irrelevant, forcing the company to make basically a new game every single time they create an expansion.
My solution to this is having 2-3 types of expansions, journey expansions, Progression Expansions, and progressing journey expansions (shitty name don’t know what to call it).
Journey expansions are expansions that focus on delivering/creating content for players that are leveling, focussing mainly on improving/revamping the levelling experience from lvl 1-50, adding/altering existing zones, and also adding dungeons/raids content for all levels, but the main focus is improving the already established base game experience the 1-50 levelling, journey and lvl 50 content. These expansion type is rarer because the game doesn’t need a revamp every single year.
Progressing journey expansions, these are expansion that try to incorporate 1-50 levelling zones and high level content inside one entirely new continent 50-60 leveling and dungeons/raids, something like ruins of kunark where you got new viable option to level from 1-50, but you also got high level content (leveling from 50-60 and dungeons/raids of level 50-60) all inside the new continent.
Progression expansions are expansions that offer new challenges focussed only on High level content past the max level. It has all the generic stuff, new zones, new dungeons, new raids, new continents, and more levels (about 10 more levels) but there’s a twist, the levels, gear and items only belong/work inside that particular expansions, essentially making expansions a whole separate game that will not interfere directly with the base game but will require you to have gone through the base game and reached level 50. To access this type of expansions the player needs to be max level (level 50 being max).
Some more details on the Progression expansions.
- Gear “locked” to expansions, does not work outside that new continent
- Requires max level to enter (level 50)
- Adds 10 new level to grind (from 50 to 60), but these levels are expansions levels and only work on the expansion continent, so if you go back to the base game you’re still level 50.
- When new Progression expansions launch you’re still lvl 50 and will have once again have 10 more levels to grind ( that will stay “locked” to that specific expansion).
- There’s a separate character windows for the expansion gear to avoid filling up the bags with useless stuff.
- Gear from the base game works on progression expansions, to keep the base game items relevant.
TLDR: Leveling from 1-50 is the core of the game, some expansions revamp/add zones to the 1-50 content others add level 50 content. Progression expansions require you to be lvl 50 to enter the new continent, add 10 levels to the level cap, but everything is self-contained, so when you go back to the other continents you’re still lvl 50. Progressive journey expansions don’t require you to be lvl 50 to enter the new continent and provide a new levelling path from 1-50 and 50-60 (but just like the progression expansions those 10 extra cap levels stay within the new continent).
Pros:
- Expansions stay relevant/challenging even after a new one is released
- No ridiculous level gaps between players (ex: having to level all the way up to level 110-120 after 5-6 expansions.)
- Devs can focus on improving the base game because it will always be relevant, no need to worry about level inflation, old content doesn’t become irrelevant or an afterthought.
- If player miss and expansion they can jump right back in, no need to get “irrelevant” levels before they can access the new content.
- Player can go back and progress on earlier expansions that they missed or didn’t finish, because they are self-contained and will always offer meaningful progression to anyone playing.
- The high level content of the base game (lvl 50’ish) will always be relevant because it’s the “soft level cap” and VR can add to it and improve it without having to worry about it becoming an irrelevant part of the game later on.
Cons:
- Gear/levels from progression expansion might be devalued or unwanted because it only works inside the expansion, reducing the fun of the grind/gear hunt.
- Players might not fell compelled to play the expansion because they’re already the “soft level cap”. Even tough this kind of happens either way (but only when a new expansion is close to releasasing, 2-3 months prior progression stops making sense because the “next thing” is coming soon )
- Player might dislike that expansion progression (levels/gear) is self-contained because it breaks immersion and doesn’t’ make sense that they can’t use item they acquired outside of the expansion continent.
- Might split the community throughout the various expansions."
I like the main idea there Jdedrote. I think in a way you are saying the expansions can almost look like just DLCs. not every expasion has to move "forward" MMOs have always kind of done that in a way. New 5 lvls caps, 4 new raid mobs, 3 more higher end zones....oh ya, and for you slow guys a new lvl 20 zone. I would not mind seeing an expasion that has nothing to do with lvl 50 players, unless it does something with them revamping some gear in a small way, or just quest for different items.
Dont know if I like the idea of making the expansion equipment useable for the expansion content only, gets a little too ugly there.
If expansions that involve level caps are so good for a game, why all the excitement about WoW Classic and Everquest 99? A rhetorical question, since I think we are mostly in agreement here. I do like the "Expansion Levels" idea mentioned by Jdedrote. That is a clever way to deal with the issue.
not a fan of @jpedrote's idea, despite beeing constructed. I get it as a "Expansions are designed as a microclimate", and would work just as "crafting" in Wow today : Specific expansions's level allowing you to start from scratch withouth previous investment, because as further expansions would be added, different "level 50 to 60" area that would only be relative to this expansion's area would be added, or you would do a 60 to 70 area with required previous expansion's levels, or a 50 to 70, or fall in a hole due to messing with gear obtained at thoses levels...
Honestly it seems complex and artificial for the sole reason of fearing lower content to be irrelevant, but the true answer is not "make it a microcosmos" to avoid that. Just don't give gear and let characters have a linear progression that will end up logarythmic in feeling (Ie : same power gain every level, thus going from 50 to 51 feel less relevant than going from 1 to 2).
Gear is the true problem in the longevity of every MMO as it feels like it must allways be given with more ease and give more power. Which power in turn, will make content easier. Wow was based on the frustration of EQ to have issues with gear when not raiding and it got solved by giving a lot of gear to players throught quests, dungeons and rewards. While it was less frenetic than it is now in thoses games (litteraly, you get fully basic-geared in a day, and can't do **** if you aren't geared anyway), it's part of the big problem induced in difficulty : you constantly upgrade people's gear every few levels, so they can remain relatively powerfull facing adequate level content, and that forces the cycle to continue endlessly while making everything rather easy.
If you don't, and gear remain relevant sometimes for 10 or more levels, if not everyone get fully geared from feets to head in the span of an extension, there will allways be things to get in lower tier than remain usefull, either because they are good, better than other loots, or because you're forced to gear little for medium encounters and so, and so.
If wow classic T1-T3 were required to start, at least, the new content of an extension (close to what it was in EQ), then low level content would remain hard and relevant. They simply feared to sell less expansions and create an overtime of depopulation in lower tiers to follow that route, but frankly, that only culminated on current ilvl : gear of a specific tier start at 340 and end at 385. A whole 45 item level plus potential superforge, for every raid tier. Next raid will start 30 Ilvl more, and there will be 3 tiers which meanx it should go up to 105 ilvl at least from the entry difficulty of the first raid to the hardest of the last one, gear beeing around x% stronger with each x of ilvl you get, that means from a raiding perspective you get gear 105% stronger from entry raiding gear to ending one, majored by the interconnected stats making things even more bloating.
tl : dr, level is a lie, gear is the true problem.
And in the end, I like my character to be RPG based : it's power reflected from the rat area to the planes of the god, and not relative to it's surrounding.
SoWplz said:In a small since I blame some of this on the players. Even now, there are guilds forming on these servers to be " The First " To rush to the end and declare victory for being the first to kill the big bad boss. then they stop, scratch their head and look to VR and say " what else can you make for me " Answer should be Nothing. It is just gaming gluttony. VR is making a massive world here to take your time and explore and learn of the lore, not a machine pumping out new content for the racers every 6 months.
Sorry for my small rant there. From what I have seen they are making areas that have a mix of high and low level areas for one. They way I see it you go into zone A at lvl 15, Then Zone B at lvl 25...then back to Zone A at lvl 35. that is simplified of course. With expansions the key is to link quest back to some areas of old. Maybe not every place and everytime. I would think of it like this bandits fort is part of the original game, becomes a major camping ground for players coming up. Maybe in the next expansion this small group of the same bandits get some high backers and build onto their old fort a new keep. A few bigger and badder bandits, some good lore tied into the story of where they got the funds, maybe a political controversy the can lead to new areas. Players can grow with this, and still be tied into the old content.
I agree with this, if the player wants to rush to "end game" that's what they should find when they get there. The End of the game.
Expansions need to be in width to accommodate a never ending stream of new players coming of age.Not in hight in a futile attempt to accommodate a handful that will rush threw it and move on to the next new game that comes out anyway.
Pantheon could grow to be the game of games , from level 1 to 50 with endless repayability.
I like some of the ideas here, especially from jpedrote. I agree that this is a big problem. Nobody wants their special gear they worked so hard to obtain become irrelevent by common drops in the new expansion. Perhaps making non raid drops in the expansion, inferior to vanilla world raid drops makes sense. They might have some other good functions, but still be less powerfull than vanilla raid gear. Making expansion content not usable in the vanilla world seems like a partial solution. This makes sense, since the new content was not designed with the vanilla world in mind, traditionally. I also like the idea of being level 50 when in the vanilla world, so that your level 65 character doesn't tank raid bosses naked.
I understand the intention of these three expansion types. However, I am not sure if this solution will feel good. Having three progression expansions results in four (including base world) character statuses. Especially for casuals this becomes very confusing. Also it is not my understanding of an open world, since the new continents feel like some kind of instance. But i agree, that it can solve the problems mentioned.
I did not play WOW (just did some pvp on a friends account while he was watching TV), but I did not see this as a very big problem in EQ. Even if an expension brought up some new levels, the progress was that slow, that the old content was relevant for a pretty long time. Also the items did not get obsolete in no time.
If i understand the vision of VR correctly, the progress on items will also be slow paced, meaning that you will not be fully geared till lvl 10 or so, and upgrades will come rare. This means there is not such a big different in stats of items coming from a lvl20 mob compared to a lvl 30 mob, but it will still be an upgrade.
All of the problems already mentioned can be solved by an intelligent content management. And since VR states, that content is king, i hope they have this in mind ;)
Wow and eq raised the level caps at roughly the Same speed. EQ just had 3 expansions per level cap speed out 6 to 8 months and wow had 1 expansion (with 2 to 3 content patches) every ~2years.
EQ seemingly did a much better job at keeping older content relevant. But the #1 reason for this is the huge raid sizes. 40 man raids in wow were huge... but that's nearly half the size of an everquest raid. Larger raid sizes, larger guilds, slower time outgrowing content.
When I raided in classic eq, we were constantly farming 2 and 3 expansions behind.
When I raided on TLP servers, with more information, better players, and no competition (due to instances), we were split raiding content, meaning instead of taking 1 overkill raid of 72 players... we would split into 3 raids of 25ish players each, bring in some boxes and raid 3x the mobs, obtaining 3x the gear.
We didnt have to stick around into older expansions as much as we did in classic eq.
Wow is the same, when sunwell was released, guilds still raided black temple and hyjal every week... they didnt just stop.
Others have already mentioned the problem of replacing a top tier raid epic with a quest green in WoW...absolutely terrible design. The issue with MMORPG expansions in the past was having massive stat inflation along with adding levels on top of it..keeping the stat inflation low in expac content is one way to keep old content relevent. Of course eventually with enough expansions the original raids would still become obsolete but at least it would take several expacs to do so. Having super rare mount drops or cosmetic items is another way to keep bringing players into the old content but that kind of stuff does not attract every player the way gear does. I've seen suggestions of having the old raid drops be upgradable or used by crafters and while I like the idea this kind of thing would be tough to implement. Jpedrote that is an interesting solution you presented, not sure I'd like it but it's certainly better than what we have seen to date.
Sadly, MMO creators have this idea that every expansion needs more levels, and more zones, and having an ever expanding world. This will always result in dead zones and content becoming irrelevant. Probably why MMOs don't last long to begin with. Usually the trend of MMOs is that after the third expansion, from what I've seen, the MMO usually starts to decline in population. Even when this happens they still add more zones and levels spreading the population even thinner. Then they have to put in catch up mechanics so they can catch up to where everyone else is.
So the MMO formula has to change somehow. The way WoW did classic was probably one of the best methods I have seen with keeping the zones relevant while adding some newer raid zones for the higher end players over time. EQ also did a great job with Kunark, Velious, and Luclin not having level increases at all, except for AAs in Luclin. Only problem with that is the population was a little too thin and very fun zones ended up only having maybe a group or two worth of people in it and the new players getting into the game suffered in the long run because people were in the newer zones in Luclin.
Anyhoo my 2 cents.
I've never been bothered by the idea of replacing a raid epic with a higher level quest green, personally. But gear is generally entirely secondary to why I'm playing a game.
FFXIV solves the "how to keep all content relevant" problem by rewarding current-tier currencies for going back and running old content. It's a very vertically designed game, but I think some part of that is inevitable. Players generally want to see some kind of progression. VR could just add content that's all within the same "tier", expanding on options of where to get loot, I suppose.
As for keeping lower level stuff relevant... could still take a page out of FFXIV's book, I suppose - or Rift's - where you get level-appropriate rewards. This would be especially a good idea if there is some sort of level sync mechanic, so that if you choose to sync down to a level appropriate for the content, you can get rewards that would be appropriate to your real level (thus encouraging people to actually do the content, instead of just facerolling it at a higher level).
Naunet said: ... As for keeping lower level stuff relevant... could still take a page out of FFXIV's book, I suppose - or Rift's - where you get level-appropriate rewards. This would be especially a good idea if there is some sort of level sync mechanic, so that if you choose to sync down to a level appropriate for the content, you can get rewards that would be appropriate to your real level (thus encouraging people to actually do the content, instead of just facerolling it at a higher level).
An excellent example of why this is a solved problem, logically and in other games, already.
Level cap on dungeons.
Not cap as in prohibited from entering, but if your a lvl 50 going into a lvl 15-25 dungeon, you are scaled down to the dungeon cap.
So you wont have a lvl 50 solo farming gear to sell to everyone else.
Seems if mentoring is a thing with scaling down, this should be relatively easy to accomplish.
Fulton said:Level cap on dungeons.
Not cap as in prohibited from entering, but if your a lvl 50 going into a lvl 15-25 dungeon, you are scaled down to the dungeon cap.
So you wont have a lvl 50 solo farming gear to sell to everyone else.
Seems if mentoring is a thing with scaling down, this should be relatively easy to accomplish.
Seems a bit artificial to me...
Anyway, dungeons and other battle zones will typically have mobs of different levels.
I dunno, seems a lot of this is over complicating everything. You simply need to cater to man's basic instinct. If you make it, they will come. Basically, if the reward is there and worth the time and energy, players will flock to it and consume. Regardless of when the content was originally released. If you want players to return and utilize older zones, some maintenance of what is found there can be adjusted to bring players back. Being creative with what can be found there means it doesn't necessarily mean what can be looted there has to be a power increase per se. Novelty items, clickies or special cosmetic items will draw many players.
Players are pretty easy to accomdate on paper when it comes to loot based games. If you make it and it is worth their time, they will consume it.
lothraem said:In many MMOs when there is an expansion, especially one that increases the level cap, large pieces of the earlier content, mainly raid content, suddenly become irrelevant.
I know I'm looking ahead here, but what steps, if any, are going to be made to make sure that the raid content at launch isn't tossed into the dustbin with the next major expansion?
You described the problem and gave the answer at the same time: Don't design content that invalidates all the previous content.
EQ1's expansion were always outward and upward. New continents, new moon, new dimensions and everything we bigger and badder than anything before it. With EQ1 you saw each new expansion giving you complete sets of gear/weapons that were far and above that which came before. Mudflation unchecked. I think now you can find 1 piece of gear that, by itself, has more HP, mana and stats than a fully gear lvl 50 character had prior to Kunark.
VR has stated quite a few times that they want to avoid the 'ever outward' approach to expansion. New content can be built into and around the existing world such that starting cities will remain useful, if not necessary places to go, for a long time. Added to this is their avoidance of the 'Best in Slot' mentality. No item will be 'the best' for that slot for all occassions. To keep stats meaningful you avoid complete sets of gear that get replaced as whole with another complete set. Upgrades should be staggered where, at the initial level cap for instance, you might have a set of leg armor you get at 50 but the bracers or helmet might be something you've been wearing since level 38. There just isn't another, better, item out there for that slot (or slots). In the next expansion though you might see that helmet finally get replaced.