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[Column] Crowfall: Who Wants to Build a Crappy Character?
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
I'm a bit torn on the concept of a "ruinable" character in Crowfall. The folks at ArtCraft Entertainment have said a few times now that it is possible to build a character that is just outright broken from the start, but I'm not sure if everyone is quite ready for that yet.
Read more of Shawn Schuster's Crowfall: Who Wants to Build a Crappy Character?
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Comments
I love this concept of being able to mess up in character creation. There's more than enough "can't fail" MMO's out there.
Also, with the interwebs today, anyone really scared about screwing up can look up a guide to character creation.
Ruined characters were pretty much the way things were in the olden days. I played D2 on battle.net and it was pretty common to think you had found a good build in the early days only to realize you couldn't kill Diablo (or later Baal) in the last act. There was nothing for it. You had to start over.
But that was 15 years ago. Today, I simply wouldn't bother. I'd just go on to another game. I've played plenty of games where I feel the developers built in "gotchas". Where early talents or skills looked good and performed well, enticing you to spend points in them, only later to find out that they did not scale well, or later mobs were immune to them. So I tend to do a lot of research when playing a new game on best builds. But honestly, that too sucks up my game time.
So playing a game where at the outset you need to know how the devs want the character played in order not to waste your time . . . well, just no.
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It has yet to be seen what they mean by "really cool or really crappy". In EQ, you allocated points when you created your character which arguably helped more so in the beginning than in the end because itemization made everyone fairly equal with player skill being the determining factor of who is better. If they go that route they will be fine, but if they go more hardcore than that they may get some backlash because as you said. No one wants to invest time (and money) into developing an 100+ hour character only to find out they screwed up when they knew nothing about the game and could miss out or be discriminated against in the end.
Let's face it I'm all for a good challenge which is why I kicked into the KickStarter, but I still want to have fun in the end.
This will only work if sufficient information is provided at character creation to allow players to build a character that they know will work at endgame. If guess work is required then people will just turn to google and create cookie cutter builds.
Few people have the time to waste on a potentially bad or experimental character.
What if you look but think yours is worse.
And you don't have the 100+ hours to re-roll a better character.
Your only choices at that point are to continue playing a character you know could be better but can't fix or quit the game.
If someone invests anything over 10 hours they shouldn't have to completely delete everything because they hit a proverbial wall and have no tools to get around that in game. You can make reallocating points the biggest pain ever but as long as the player can still actually do it that's fine. Anything else is just lazy development that rewards those who check the forums to min/max their characters and punishes those that experiment.
If the game allows players to be ruined then the game design is just a bad one.
go look at how FFXI does class/character design.You can build ALL classes and skills up ,you can play EVERY class on the same player,it offers a ROLE so grouping becomes viable,you can change that role to meet your goals.
You should have SKILLS to raise,that way the only time your character is weak is if you have a poor skill with a certain weapon or perhaps a healing skill or buffing skill or enfeebling skill etc etc.
With the design i just mentioned,you have a LONG lasting goal of progression,your player never feels broken.
The ONLY time i ever feel a discussion is warranted is on racial stat/builds.Using the same example FFXI imo only went half in but felt really good for the lower levels.I believe in this area games should go further to make sure races feel different while of course still offering options ,example with gear or food to bring up stats in areas you so desire.
Bottom line is yoru character should never feel BROKEN.Imagine in real life,you could be a fat body,eating too much Ice cream and doughnuts ,it doesn't mean your life is broken forever,you can fix that.A game SHOULD be aiming for plausible realism.
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I had fun once, it was terrible.
This is NOT an MMO. The knight also looks like a total loser. Seriously, could they have made him look much more dorky? He looks like a Donnie Darko wanna be douchebag.
This game is crap anyway. They spend most of their kickstarter money advertising. Plus, they even have a lay away system for in game items already.
Then they don't understand what Risk vs Reward really is.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
Yep - totally agree! Was hoping they would have a similar system for Crowfall and am glad it's in!
You know, if they said they were giving players lots of choices in how to build their characters while trying to design it intelligently and at the same time provide players with all the data they need to build good characters and then later some problems with gimped characters came up which they hadn't foreseen that would be one thing. But the way they talk about it it's like they are intentionally planning for people to end up with crappy characters.
To me they come across as a bunch of immature jerks who will be sitting around snickering about how various players gimped themselves because they simply didn't know enough not to.
If they are actually stupid enough to think it's a good idea to play dirty tricks on their customers then fine, let them do it.
I believe that the player should be able to make informed decisions with what information he gets ingame. This *can* include ending up with a broken character, but that should be really rare when you actually read skill descriptions etc.
One problem ist that most RPGs, MMO or otherwise, do not offer the full information. When you take two weapons that are the same according to the image, the name and the stats, and one does 50% more DPS, consistent through several exhuasting trials inluding several players, than something is wrong. Either show the full stats, best with numbers, and not just "slow" or "fast", especially as it's easy to hide above described differences in such categories, or at least name the items different, make a new image and a slightly different name.
Same with skills. Sometimes, class A has a skill that does 200 damage over 5 seconds, and class B has a skill that does 200 damage over 5 seconds, but somehow, class A's skill proves to be superior. Reason? Hidden damage types, or other modifiers using a different base damage. Like, for class A, the full 200 damage is used for calculation of all further modifiers like when applying damage buffs or vulnerabilities, while for class B the base damage without the INT modifier (which is not displayed anywhere and different across skills anyways) is used instead, which is obivously less.
This is the reasons guides became so popular. It's far easier to have a totally broken character with so many hidden or even wrong information and inconsistencies than with a useful one.
We'll see which kind of game Crowfall will be.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
Many players will of course use guides but the cutting edge builds tend to stay hidden so people can keep those templates to themselves. Those who risk going off the beaten path and even failing to build something powerful can come through this to create the amazing.
Case in point on the first servers the vast majority of people were following guides building defense based characters while myself and a friend developed the resistance based damager dealer instead which dominated. Then when the bandwagon started catching up to that through trial and error the proc based character concept was develped. Still remember my friends very first proclar templar which actually won a 1v1 duel with Ashen Templar a dev character.
Taking that risk at failing may allow you to have a edge over the pack of other players.
Sure - great idea, as long as they manage to create a perfect system right at the start and never touch it.
You might (stressing might) get some buy-in from people that make bad decisions and accept that it was their fault. You will never get buy-in from players who make perfectly rational decisions based on current information, only to have their character "ruined" in front of them by an overzealous designer with a nerf bat.
It's a two-way street. If these devs think they can get it right out of the gate, then having possibly steep penalties (depending on the levelling curve) for making bad initial decisions is workable. However, experience tells me that this game will not somehow be different from every other MMO ever and the devs will again engage in the never-ending cycle of nerfs and buffs - which means your character could easily be wrecked overnight and stay that way for a long, long time.
All character in my Pathfinder Pen and paper campaign are kinda broken, crappy stats on some farmerboys who are starting on the path to become adventurers (yeah, it is a origin story). It is actually really fun there at least.
Then again, part of the fun is that they all are broken, might be far less fun playing with min maxed characters. And not all fun things in P&P are fun in MMORPGs for that matter.
Still, it is pretty interesting and new thinking for a MMO.
Originally posted by jakin
This.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
That's the problem with the kids playing today. They can't handle not meta gaming the game out to the endgame from the start.
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FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
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