Heh, sitting on a tree and sniping helpless victims, one by one, would be great fun…except for your targets :)
I mean, the main problem with fancy stuff such as building bridges across the sea (say, from your island to enemy one, 3:00 AM…) or climbing walls or digging beneath or sniping from a tree… is emergent gameplay aka balance and especially abuses.
To make it more complicated, trees in CU are supposed to be choppable and “lootable” for fruit, or even to grow over time (growing is not confirmed yet, I guess!? I might be wrong on that), that is - not just nice, static objects as in “normal” games.
They “might or might not have stealth classes in before launch, depending on circumstances” - translated from PR talk, stealthers (six classes, see below) certainly won’t be there at launch, same as three shape-shifters and three summoners aka Spirit Mages.
Being in distant(ish) future makes the stealth concept, well, less rigid. In other words, they changed their Kickstarter vision roughly a year ago, and then they changed it again and…OK, let’s focus on what seems to be persistent in that story.
“Stealthers” are divided into Stealthers (three classes, one for each Realm) and Scouts (same, class per Realm), all of which you can find here - seek Arthurians for Specter and Veilstalker, Vikings for Shadow Walker and Arisen, and Tuatha Dé Danann for Red Cap and Wisp.
Scouts class trio will be more “invisible” i.e. sneaky, more mobile and oriented towards infiltration, sabotage and, well, scouting. They should be extremely annoying, but much less physically dangerous - they won’t be killing much, but are sometimes referred to as the ultimate troll class !?
Stealthers trio will be more physically aggressive, closer to the classical assassins, but they will likely rely more on interrupts, silence/spell locking and making their targets hurt themselves through backfires (these are supposed to be very painful) than on burst or hard crowd control. Say, they shouldn’t be able to 100%-to-zero in 5 seconds, or to CC someone to death; On the other hand, they’ll be able to wear heavy armor - in CU anyone can wear anything.
Heavy armor trade-offs should be less damage and more noise in the Veil, thus lower sneaking capability and so on. There is more, but you get the idea I hope!? And I can’t guarantee that none of this will change. For example, there is strong “public” pressure for more burst and/or more CC, as you can imagine :)
I started out as a mid healer yah (which was the spec that had the AOE stun), but ended up playing every class in the game to at least 45 on all 3 factions. There were several examples of seriously …questionable game balance elements. My hib chanter that could keep any melee class perma snared, my group of mid runemasters that could all bubble at different times and be literally invulnerable for entire encounters, my Albion Sorc that held off a 50 person keep siege solo for an hour with AOE dots…the list goes on.
I had a great time in DAOC, and put an ungodly number of hours into it, looking forward to anything that would give that kind of RvR again, warts and all. Tooling around on the open field, in a group of 6, before it became a complete zergfest, was really fun.
The real problem I’ve had, in all of the games that have tried to do big RvR, is it inevitably slows to a slideshow. I have yet to play an RvR game that didn’t bite off more than it’s engine could chew. Warhammer was such a great game, in so many ways, but the slideshow nature of that RvR is what tanked the game for me.
Man, the development timeframe of a MMO is a long one when you hear about it right off the bat due to crowdfunding. I know they’re making good progress every time I check in, but it seems like I backed this an eternity ago. :)
Love to see how far the art has come though. Pretty enthusiastic about this and Crowfall, it would be remarkable if either one of them could reignite my interest in online games again.
I alluded to it above, but I get a LOT of emails from them (bare minimum is a livestream schedule and development update each week). As such, I don’t read them too closely.
That being said, Jacobs said last week that there are 4 upcoming big announcements, starting Thursday (which is today). It looks like today’s announcement is the additional funding secured that Telefrog linked. I don’t know what the other three announcements will be exactly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them is finally announcing a start date for the Beta phase of development. That’s when a lot more people will start piling in to test the game.
I would be very shocked it if released this year, but that’s just my gut feeling.
They will be announcing the beta, but not yet - Soon. And it will be a real beta,not a soft launch. They say there is realistically very very little chance of releasing 2018, but 2019 the game will absolutely be released.
Source is the interview Mr Jacobs just did last night.
I don’t know either, but then again, tools have improved vastly, making one and two person studios more feasible - Perhaps the same can be said with MMOs?
I know for a fact there is a two person studio making an MMO that works, and is very well recieved so far - Project Gorgon. So, with 14 times the resources, quite a lot could be achieved I’m sure.
I’ll try to give as brief as possible (thus likely too simplified) answer:
1)As mentioned, new wave of hires should bring them to 40ish team members, I guess 50ish in later betas closer to launch.
2)Per Gordon Walton (Crowfall, ex exec producer of UO,SWG,SWTOR), PvE takes “up to 70% of MMO budget” - mostly spent on PvE raids, quests and such, none of which CU will have.
No quests? No monsters to kill? You can only advance by direct conflict with other players? Sounds tricky.
If they are not going to have PvE they are clearly aiming for a low-subscriber game. I think they will struggle to have six figures after a few months.
A game without PvE content would be massively cheaper to make. PvP re-uses resources like no tomorrow. I say this as someone who has played about 1000000000048384837 warsong gulches.
/shrug. The best part of DAOC by far were the battlefields, it’s just a question whether not being able to take a break from that and work on your character in other ways with sit with people. If it catches on as an “e-sport” they might have a shot, I’d say the odds are about 1 in 100.
A subscription based PvP only game, in a world full of FTP massive content, best of luck! They may pull it off by being small enough that niche is ok, I’m sure there will be an audience for it.
Yeah, there’s a ton of games that are very popular where PvP is all there is. The hook with MMOs is character development. Players like to see their characters become more powerful. The problem I see with character development requiring PvP is that there will be winners and losers, and losers end up unsubbing.
It wouldn’t be hard to put in boring, static PvE. Just go old school and populate an area with monsters who aggro and give XP when killed and respawn.
Shadowbane had some very basic PvE. It served to help players level and learn their character abilities.
