Imryll
1733
From what they said a year or so back, they didn’t think an AH would work well with the megaserver approach. I think they went the route they did because of that and to make trade more personal. Sadly, I think it’s fair to say that in closed beta the economy is non-existent. Their solution to this seems to be to keep reducing the vendor price of anything one can farm. Apparently, they believe that keeping us poor will motivate us to sell items to each other.
Maybe, though, we’ll be a bit more free-spending now that they’ve increased initial inventory and bank sizes. To date any money my characters have had has gone to bag and bank slots.
Economy is probably one of the most difficult part of an MMO to implement and, IIRC, none of the MMOs in the past got it right at launch, it always required lots and lots of changes. Hopefully, ESO will get it right sooner or later.
Imryll
1735
I agree, Strideregg. I think it’s particularly hard to tell how the ESO economy will play out at launch because at least part of the problem with it is that the player population has been too small to sustain a more social approach to trade.
Crafters with rare recipes will always be sought out, through forums or in game when someone knows someone who knows someone who can make it has it. As it was in WOW and every other game.
If they wanted people to be ‘named’ they should allow you to possibly ‘crit’ in crafting, as well as name the items you made AND possibly have the items “tagged” with the crafters name should it be a especially well done piece (and the crafter isn’t named Lei go Lass or something like that…) like you could in UO and Asherons Call.
This “Guild Store” system, max number of guild members in guilds, minimum 50 members to open guild store, just makes it tedious to get materials/items so you might as well gather and craft everything yourself and ignore the fact that the store exists at all. It will be useful for a few well run guilds and their friends, and everyone else will ignore it.
Teiman
1737
I like more sci-fi games where access to things like a AH would make more sense. People is squizofrenic for asking medieval worlds with quality of life standards from the future. I just make as much sense has medieval armies where 50% of the soldiers are women.
I totally agree, the gameplay should be built around things like the time it takes to get to a shop in town, and the fact that the shopkeeper might specialize in magic and have no interest in steel plate. It works a bit like that in Skyrim and such, but it ought to be part of mediaeval fantasy MMORPGs too. Slow things down. Especially with modern graphics, it’s possible to experience more fully the sense of being out in nature. And giant rats ought to be bloody difficult for a newbie :)
I’m all for more “realism” in that kind of gameplay. When I argue for it people say it’s been tried and nobody likes it, but I have a feeling they’re just wrong (witness the popularity of “realism” mods in Oblivion and Skyrim). There’s a market for it, maybe not huge, but it’s there. Real life rules, truncated and compressed, are already familiar to us, they don’t have to be learnt as special gamey rules. Look at how many comments about these types of games revolve around “but that’s not realistic” (in fact a good deal of banter in groups is laughing at the AI, and the like). Well, it used to be a limitation of the kinds of abstraction necessary due to technical limitations, but that’s becoming less and less of an issue.
More sim please. I want to feel the sun beating down on my face as I go to the market with a big heavy bag full of stuff that actually fits in the bag realistically, that I had to use a horse or mule to get out of the dungeon. I want to have difficulty tracking across non-road terrain, unless I have an actually useful hunter/druid type ability to move faster across rough ground (and it not be just a slowed down anim, but a special anim for trudging through mud or high grass). I want GoT-type grit and people intrigue in the game. I want magic to be special and the difference between just heroic and really uber; not ubiquitous and cheap.
I want every moment to feel precious, and a newbie monster to be utterly terrifying, like it would be to a farmhand trying his fortune out in the wide world.
Etc., etc.
No, there have been quite a few games that have tried to bring back the “good” old days of UO. The people that like them just happen to be an extreme minority, because what actually happens in a sim MMO is more like: “I feel the sun beating down on my face as I go to the market with a big heavy bag full of stuff that actually fits in the bag realistically, that I had to use a horse or mule to get out of the dungeon. And then a bunch of naked men come running out from the trees at the side of the road and beat me to death, loot my corpse, and then go sell everything they took off my body, my bag of stuff, and my horse, leaving my naked body by the side of the road.”
Teiman
1740
That sounds like DayZ. Except in DayZ you actually dies.
But you are right, of course, the most people want a huge dose of quality of life on their medieval simulator.
Oghier
1741
I would play this.
TESO is closer to that end of the spectrum than any of its large competitors. They’re shooting for “immersion,” which is at least in the same county as realism. It’s certainly distinct from the zany cartoon grinders (WoW and Wildstar). But they’re not really shooting for a sim here, and it’s still relatively high-magic.
I think our best shot for a gritty, low magic medieval sim is Warhorse. In fact, that’s our only shot, unless there’s something else out there of which I am unaware. If there is, please someone say something :)
One last stress-test beta this weekend. This one seems to be fairly transparently a marketing thing - they make a lot of noise in the email about opening up the Imperials Edition and Explorer Pack for beta testers to “try out” before early access begins.
It might work with me - I’m close to wanting to pre-order.
Teiman
1744
20% discount on preorder would’ve been nice for the physical edition. Still not convinced that the pre-order key I used will get me anything from the CE at pre-launch, and I suspect the game will arrive late. :)
I am a bit worried about the pre-launch, considering Diablo 3 is out at the same time… Need to get those legendaries before they patch the drop rate.
So, Someone just posted on guild forum stating that TESO will launch with 32-bit only client for the PC, guess the massive PVP will be a lot less massive now. Guess there are pieces of HERO engine still in there ;D
Hi,
Apologies for the delay in responding back to you again, but as I said in my earlier email, I wanted to make absolutely sure I had the correct information for you before contacting you. It has been reviewed by management, and I have an update for you.
The information I have at this time is that a 64-Bit purpose made client will not be available at launch. This is not to say it will not be available ever - we are looking into the viability of it, and just how much demand there is for such a client. Be assured I have added you name to the list of people who desperately want to see a 64-Bit client become a reality. I know this may not be the information you want to hear at the present time, and I appreciate that - the feeling is that the game is so highly optimized that a 64-bit client would improve things only minimally.
I apologize that you were previously misinformed about this, and understand your frustration at that. As a gamer myself, I can understand where you are coming from. We will look at all feedback we get about the game, and the management are already aware of the current situation regarding the demand for such a client. They will be monitoring it closely as we launch, and beyond.
Again, thank you for your concerns and I can see the passion you have from your emails - they are perfectly crafted and very well put. If things change we will post an update on our website and forum pages.
Valve hardware survey shows 70% on Windows 7/8.x 64-bit. With the plans for massive PVP – certainly there would be a lot more options, less loading, more caching and whatnot if they had a client that could “hog” 4-8GB of the RAM instead of being limited to juggle everything within 2-2.3GB… Aren’t they aiming for a console launch with 8 core 64-bit 8GB SKU as well?
WOW certainly became a lot more stable once they switched to 64-bit client.
Anyway; We’ll see this weekend I suppose…
Underachieving game underachieves.
Wonder what “a 64-bit client would improve things only minimally” means.
KevinC
1749
Why would it be less massive? The massive battles were already running on the 32bit client in the beta, no? It was a 32bit executable when I played, anyway.
LOL, well of course that’s a different aspect, I’m talking about PvE. How to incorporate “realistic” PvP with internet anonymity is another story. Essentially, you’d need identity to be as trackable, and absolute anonymity as difficult to attain, as it is in the real world, and I don’t think that’s possible. PvP in games is always going to be either the kind of nonsense (albeit fun for some) that you have in these types of games, or a more structured PvP with PvE and PvP kept distinct.
IOW, ideally, what an RPG player would want from simmy PvP is that the system would work to provide a possibility of real risk and real danger, but all held within the context of a social system, so the possibility is within realistic bounds (and minimized a bit even more by gamey compression) - i.e., the option and possibility for players to fight against each other, but the same amount of risk as that would bring in real life (with trackable identity, etc.). Also, of course, when one thinks of a “realistic” human social system, one is thinking of a system that’s already evolved to eliminate “ganking”. In fact, “ganking” for human beings was already controlled way back in prehistory, when communities were tiny, everyone knew each others’ asses, and anti-ganking behaviour already internalized - hard to see how that can be modelled in a game, other than by very strong reputation systems. (One possibility might be to temporarily up the stats of a victim of the initiation of violence, to the level of the aggressor - “righteous fury” or something. So you’d still have whatever skill difference existed, but at least a fighting chance, and more of a fight for the aggressor too.)
Plus also, UO is still quite abstracted, and things could be done much better today. Mortal Online is a game which tries to copy more or less exactly UO gameplay on the PvE side (as well as the full loot PvP aspect, of course), but the trouble is there isn’t enough “sand” in that sandbox. When you have more realistic graphics, but with the same level of abstraction as UO, and not enough detail in the world-building, what you get as a result feels even more “gamey” and less sim-like.
It means that the bottleneck is something that wouldn’t be resolved by moving to 64-bit.
KevinC
1752
I love the thought of having access to oodles of memory as much as anyone, but I wish more people would realize this before going into hysterics when a game isn’t 64-bit (I’m not referring to anyone on this forum, it’s just something I see frequently). Depending on the game, it sometimes isn’t worth the jump, especially when you’re dealing with third party libraries and tools which are often immature on 64-bit.
