Immersion

[Zouls]

I imagine this game being entirely player driven since they said they would not make any npc quests and that seem to be their point.
I’ve been thinking about ways to do it, they may seem annoying but i’ve been looking around on internet and been trying to figure out what makes games immersive and interactive and what doesn’t

NPC Auction house. Pro and cons
http://mmo-play.com/mmo-blog/mmo-auction-houses-necessary
this article describes really well on what the pros and cons of auction houses are

Pros:
Convenient for buying needed things fast and without hassle
if you can play the auction house right you can make money
Sure to get thing the cheapest way
Just a thing of the usual mmo mold now a days

Cons:
Its makes crafting less valuable because you have to compete against all the other people price wise ingame
it takes away the player to crafter interaction from the game
it takes away the need to make your presence known or being famous because you are just one of million crafters

Own opinion: I wouldn’t want to see an auction house in this game since its about player interactions, because if there is no action house you will need to find specific players to help you and that way the players would actually have a reason for setting up shops, and if players need to set up shops you give a reason to make cities or villages to gather them up.

Crafting:
i already discussed this a lot on another part of the forum and apparently i’m outnumbered but i also feel like that would help immersion because then there would be diversity in shops instead of anyone being able to make everything http://oortonline.com/forums/topic/crafting-pick-one/

Global chat.
This is something that i have been thinking about and i’m pretty sure that people are against it but i think a step closer to immersion would be no global chat. i know this sounds horrible and unthinkable but i think that would make people interact a lot more than they do now, so you have to physically meet other people to interact, finding groups and making bonds whatever. so that way we could make some sort of town square or taverns for people to meet

Pros
With no global chat people could make inns and common areas for people to interact face to face and that way make money
It would make more immersion and make towns more lively because they have a reason to go there other than just to get gear from crafters

Cons
It’s going to be a lot slower to find people to help you with the things you need help with
its going to be a pain for people who just wants things done quickly and solo the rest

Furniture:
Simply put. we need interactive furniture such as chairs to sit in, doors to open and so on.

Trading:
This is taken from another post an idea that i really like that i would like to build on to.
So the post talked about putting out your hand with the item when you trade instead of a trade window, what i would like to see is the general item, say sword, axe, whatever.
the general color, so if its a red rope you would have a low or high res red robe hovering over your hands
a stat/desription window floating next to it, i imagine something like how borderlands 2 stat window looks when looking at an item so floating beside it
and a preview button to be able to look at the item more closely

I apologize for the long post and for any mistakes in grammar i may have since english is not my native language

[SevenBanditt]

Man I’d love if some of these features make into the game *-*

-The auction houses… maybe will be a decision of the players to make them? Not NPC runned, but player runned if wanted. I mean, if they’re not in game, players will be able to do them too, that’s the beauty of player driven games, thay usually came up with awasome self features.

-As it is right now in the other posts, the skill tree would be a cool feature to encourage players to level up their trees in a unique way to make some things that others can not.

In Minecraft, when plugins facilitate shops, it’s difficult to make them work simply because there’s few things that players may not have by it’s own… the nether materials, mob drops and maybe diamonds. The system you came up with will garantee at least some players buing high skill objects. But there’s a problem with that: What will occur when someone master all the skills? Will many players reach that level of power?

Maybe the key resides in allow all the craftings but disperse materials arround various wourlds, make that in one world will not be possible to make an armour when in other world that armour is common and superior than yours, but in your world have a material that makes weapos stronger than the others. The more different materials OO have, the more the shops will be useful.

-Global chat off… yeah, totally! Maybe that way you can craft some walkie talkies to talk between buddys at great distances! (You hear that Devs? Show yourselfs!)

I just loved when Ben said about chat bubbles!

-Forniture PLZ!

-That way you describe would be a kick ass way to make trade immersive and unique, rather than just useful. Just loved the idea… reminded me about SAO xD

Keep the ideas coming!

[Kuma]

The auction house “problem” could be solved simply with just player shops. It’ll be more like a market than a global auction house. Like you said players will build it if they need it in their town.

About the skills: I’m one of the people who outnumbered him^^ I think it’s better to have skill system in which it takes really long to master one skill so even after a few years there will be no master of all skills at all than having restrictions in what I can skill and what not. That’s the reason I hate other MMO’s so much. (beside their stupid quests^^)

And global chat shouldn’t really exist. Maybe something to communicate with friends you know the name of even if you didn’t meet once.
Maybe chatbubbles that get smaller and smaller the farther you go away^^

Same here instantly thought of SAO with the hovering stats beside the item^^ I were for a hovering inventory too but that’s maybe not what the devs want.

[kristakis]

Auction House

I love the idea of player-based shops/vendors but they come with the downside that the player needs to be around or somewhere you can get to. AHs exist because players want to log off and you don’t know who has what, where. If players can stock a storefront and have an NPC manage the transactions then you get half the problem solved but you still need to communicate over long distances.

I think the best result is something that takes a little from each end of the spectrum – small separate auction houses. This is how EVE works and it adds the whole new gameplay of arbitrage and ultimately the more different things there are to do, the more interesting your game is.

As for people undercutting people, that comes down to how items are created and destroyed. If your crafting system requires you to make a lot of items just to skill-up then you are going to have more garbage items taking up space on the AH and/or you are going to make raw materials worth more than the crafted items they are used in.

Crafting

I think we all have much thoughts about this, I have dumped some of mine here and here. Ultimately the crafting will make or break this game for me as I am still looking for something that even remotely resembles SWG. Note that since writing that post about Firefall it has launched and the crafting system is the same Ambrosia trade skills garbage seen in every other MMO 🙁

My thoughts are that if everyone can craft everything, or the outcome of crafting is variable, then crafting is pointless. If you have to sacrifice something to craft (like combat ability) and it has its own gameplay (that does not include more combat) then there is a reason to do it and you have my attention.

Global chat

This probably comes down to personal preference. I personally dislike chat bubbles and disable them in every game. If a game doesn’t have a global chat system then I’ll just use IRC, Steam chat or something else instead so you are only making the game less immersive/interesting if I have to alt+tab away from it to do anything.

Certainly it makes more or less sense in various genres to have global chat – in a sci fi game it’s easily explainable but in a fantasy setting you are going to have to assume that the text in chat is stuff your character has heard other people around them saying. You are going to have to suspend disbelief somewhere along the line.

Trading

I’m not a fan of skeuomorphism and would prefer not to see it if it’s not necessary. When you are trading items you don’t always have them right there in your hands and I’d rather the devs spend time working on a crafting system that has a reason to be present than getting the graphics right when I’m holding a 2m long poleaxe in my hand vs the 2 cubic meters of iron ore that I’m trading it for.

As with chat, you are going to have to use the representative rather than the literal to show what is happening in the game. Everyone has a different line between the player and the character and I’d rather the devs get the player side of things right before they work on the character.

Furniture

Previous section aside, I love usable furniture and would love to see chairs and tables!

Immersion

The most immersive game I’ve ever played was Minecraft. Immersion for me is about losing myself in a game world and feeling what my character is feeling. In a game with “realistic” graphics or a third person perspective you are always reminded that you are not present and that you are watching your character play. In Minecraft the graphics are so “unreal” that you look past them at what they represent instead.

That’s not a 1M cube of stone, it’s something that represents 1M3 of stone and you “know” what stone is, what it does and what you can do with/to it. Because of this you stop “seeing” the world and you start existing in it. It’s the ultimate meta. Accordingly when you are deep in a dark cavern mining and you hear a noise behind you, your skin crawls. You turn around and nothing is there. Later a creeper explodes behind you and you yelp and jump out of your seat (my GF still laughs at me when this happens).

No other game has that response because you don’t play those games in your head, you play them on the screen. Becasuse you play Minecraft in your mind, in your imagination, it’s very powerful and immersive. Well for me at least. EVE is also immersive because I feel sick in my stomach when I get ganked and quite euphoric when I gank. It’s a game of feelings – well it was until PLEX came along and removed all the risk 🙁

So, I think immersion is what you make it and the most important thing is that a game has systems that are fun and complex rather than “realistic” or accessible. 😀

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