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. 😀
for flavour!
