f13.net

Emerging into the world at large, I've started feeling something I haven't felt since (/force), SWG. This feeling is not one of being part of a living breathing world, but rather, a movie set.

Two things at the root of this:

• NPCs, or lack thereof. I am not convinced any of these towns can sustain themselves with the 5 or 6 NPCs I see standing around them.
• Buildings. For all I know, all of them are cardboard cutouts.

There's no life. SWG felt the same way. A billion buildings, only about 10 of which were accessible, and only about two of those worth entering at all (starports and taverns). Doors are mostly just different textures over world objects. It's pretty and all, but really makes the place feel rather dead.

Compare this to EQ2 or WoW. Now those worlds you felt like lived and moved while you weren't around. Sure the NPCs all just stood around there too. But there were a much higher density of them, many more of them had some function, and you can at least walk into almost every building. So what if you questioned the purpose of having a room with a bed and a nightstand and nobody around. It was something else to the world, another corner to turn, another stone to pick up.

I get none of that here so far. The problem with this is that it'll be up to other players being around at all to make a zone dynamic and interesting. That works ok for a time, until players outlevel the place, as is inevitable in a diku. On day one, lots of newbie facades will be interesting for the dozens or scores of players running around. Come day ten though, hollywood sets is all they'll be.

There's not one magic bullet in my opinion. In my opinion, it needs:

• Places that matter. Why have vendors standing out in the cold all year? Put them in a building.
• Doors on such buildings. That open and close.
• More NPCs at all, even if they just have dialog that helps define the purpose for that town being there. Not all speech must be linked to a quest. One-up WoW here. Take the lore of the world and sprinkle it across the domain. WoW did that by taking parts of the Warcraft lore (http://www.darniaq.com/wordpress/2006/01/mmo-live/wow/wow-lore/) and putting them into interactive books within the game world. It's just another way to define the depth of a place, add immersion, and it's cheap/free!
  

Thoughts?

I think most of the early game towns feel fine (I haven't been to the level 25+ areas). Bree has lots of stuff going on all over the place. Thorin's Hall, however, is a glaring exception but that whole area suffers from the typical MMORPG problem where the areas that are worked on later lack the "stuff" that the initial areas have. Having all the vendors standing around with nothing around them looks bad and the place feels empty because it's so large.

There actually is a vendor building in one of the early Man towns (the one with the well quest) that a lot of people don't know about. One problem with that idea is that the current engine implementation requires a load and reload moving in and out of buildings unlike WoW which doesn't have doors for its vendor shops.

With the exceptions of Humans, nothing in WoW feels "lived in". I'm surprised you'd hold that up as the right way to do things. In my mind, it's a prime example of a "movie set" world. Elves, Dwarves, Goblins, Gnomes, Trolls, Tauren, Orcs....All of their towns are built around shops and services. Where the hell do they live, eat, drink, or sleep? I never see Orc children as much as Humans, and never see the spawn of any of the other races at all (only Elves have an excuse).

At least SWG has the Raph excuse --- The players are the life of the cities.

Err....Well, at least it felt OK before player cities were implemented.


All that being said, I agree, LotR doesn't feel like a world.

-First off, I recommend Turbine does not add anyone else to beta until things are more hammered out, assuming things **will* get hammered out.  The world is too young for non testers to really be in just yet- though I do understand the need for load balancing and whatnot.  
-I agree about people inside buildings, but it should make sense as to why they are.  Currently, in Bree (for example), Strider (sp?) and Gandalf are met within an inn.  This makes sense, and the technology to show that an NPC is needed within a building is already implemented (mostly, there is one bug I have found where a quest NPC does not show on main radar, and I forgive them).
-Inane NPC chatter is annoying since it looks like player chatter.  Head to Bree minstrel and see what I mean.  I love ambience, but I would like to know if it is a player making comments about shit.
-I am giving Turbine some good credit, assuming they have working resolutions to fix obvious bugs (I have found lots, and have pen and paper ready to document for next wipe); things are much improved and we are seeing a weblike effect begin to unfold across the land.  

No work and no play makes Cheddar examine things in detail.  I am tempted to make this game my pet project (I love engineering!).  


Staddle.  Main issue is that it has no stable; this makes it a pain the in ass to even swing by.  Its like the wart at the end of my cock, not noticable when I am getting it on.  There are some awesome fun quests here, but the moment anyone finds Bree they will forget about it. 

I actually prefer that I can only enter a building when there's a point to entering the building. Saves me from wasting time spent looking inside a building just to see generic_layout_14.

Hey, ever notice you never see toilets in these games either? Because it's a game.

Toilets are cool, man. Don't knock 'em.

Centerpoint of Fahrenheit, yo!

We agree, but I did want to point out that it was the Human part of WoW I was holding up as the model. The only race I've played to any real degree is Human :) I did feel Night Elf's also had a great deal of density. No roaming schoolmarms and kids, but there's a lot of "life" in the Auberdine area specifically. Gnome, Orc, Troll, pretty much nadda. Even BE and Draenei are mostly just minor outposts... including the cities.

So not WoW in whole. WoW Human.

When are they expected to launch? A lot of my guild (from late 90s to WoW) is getting invites now. Are they ramping too quickly into load-balancing when so much of the world is not yet something that advertises itself well?

Otherwise, I did see a difference between the Human area and the Elven one, with the latter a bit more dense. I have to (and will) progress some more. It'd be ideal if they could get all the races to be as completed. I always felt that was the major miss of WoW (and probably was the case with EQ1 at launch). While I think EQ2 went too far by making everyone start in either one or another area, I do think it at least looked more complete across the board. The disparity between WoW Human and WoW Troll is very very huge.

The first thing my wife said when she first watched me wander around Michel Delving and enter the Bath and Baby (or whatever) was "Is that the only building you can go into?  What's that about?"  She was disappointed from the get-go in that, and she's never played anything like a MOG.

I've always disliked fake buildings.  Some of the ones in LOTRO don't even have doors.  The first time I saw one, I bugged it.  The second one just made me sad.  Now they kind of piss me off.

In AC2 it was lame, because there was no point to any of the buildings. Here, I don't really have a problem with it.  I don't need to go looking in Frannie Longbottom's  knicker drawer. If she wants to lock the door and keep me out, so be it.


This idea came to me this weekend. My little boy was sitting in my lap as we were touring around the  farms NE of Staddle. I tried to open the door and found that I couldn't. I wondered why it wouldn't let me in this building, when I could get in the others. He looked at me and said, "Silly daddy! It's locked!"

Made sense.

Of course, I had him sign the NDA as well. I'd hate for Turbine to cart him away. :)

Hehe.

The part that bothers me is when there's vendors standing outside a building you'd think they'd want to be inside of. Why have all that weaponry rust?

But it's not a huge deal, just more noticable in some areas than others.