Talents: The Engine of Epic Conflict?

Archlyte

In watching some of the dev videos on youtube I got the impression that one of the uses of the Talents system is to make some players into content. There was a mention of a Player being able to become a great wizard and other Players breaking into his castle to steal his gold.

First off, if you can't carry around a fortune in your pouch that is amazing. Long have I wished for a game to make goods/riches have volume beyond a single inventory slot. 

Second, this has the makings of a great way to have player driven content as long as someone is willing to play the part. 

I'm sure some people will not want to be content, or a big ass target, etc. But I have to say that if the right player was to become said wizard and really got into having a Tower like that then the game would be amazingly fun to follow as well as play. I think I might log in just to hear tales of the group who attempted to ransack Thogroms Tower. I hope that they develop this system to take advantage of the Local, Regional etc event system so that conflicts can come about that are somewhat led by players. Would be great to see conflicts that are not relegated to two sides, but involve intrigue and betrayal as well as heroic sacrifice and loyalty. 

I think the 1-5% mark is perfect because it should keep magic/shapeshifting/etc. pretty rare while driving play to unlock. Anyone else think it may work like this?

drakeordanska

I am sure they said inventory will have a weight and slot system

Grelf

I really like the idea of talents, despite the controversy that always follows it, but it seems talents won't be in the game at launch anymore. By this point I think there is a good chance that developers will go back on the idea and change it to make it more palatable, which would be a shame.

Archlyte

drakeordanska said:

I am sure they said inventory will have a weight and slot system

I read this wrong the first time. So they are going to use the same old system?

Archlyte

Grelf said:

I really like the idea of talents, despite the controversy that always follows it, but it seems talents won't be in the game at launch anymore. By this point I think there is a good chance that developers will go back on the idea and change it to make it more palatable, which would be a shame.

That is awful. Probably the thing I liked the best about the game and I didn't even want to have a talent, it was enough that it would be out there. Did that get tossed out because too many people complained about not being the 1-5% special snowflake?

drakeordanska

Archlyte said:

drakeordanska said:

I am sure they said inventory will have a weight and slot system

I read this wrong the first time. So they are going to use the same old system?

No a limited slot system with a weight system included.

So you can stack some things that make sense to stack. Seeds etc.

But you will also have a limited weight sonyou couldn't carry 100,000 of said seeds like in other games.
You may find you could only carry 5 swords. And who is to say how much space each sword takes.

From what I undrstand a shortswords will take less space than a great sword.

But I'm not the expert that's just how I understand it

drakeordanska

Archlyte said:

Grelf said:

I really like the idea of talents, despite the controversy that always follows it, but it seems talents won't be in the game at launch anymore. By this point I think there is a good chance that developers will go back on the idea and change it to make it more palatable, which would be a shame.

That is awful. Probably the thing I liked the best about the game and I didn't even want to have a talent, it was enough that it would be out there. Did that get tossed out because too many people complained about not being the 1-5% special snowflake?

As far as I am aware talents are not mentioned as a cut item on update 13 so they are still in.

Grelf

Archlyte said:

Grelf said:

I really like the idea of talents, despite the controversy that always follows it, but it seems talents won't be in the game at launch anymore. By this point I think there is a good chance that developers will go back on the idea and change it to make it more palatable, which would be a shame.

That is awful. Probably the thing I liked the best about the game and I didn't even want to have a talent, it was enough that it would be out there. Did that get tossed out because too many people complained about not being the 1-5% special snowflake?

Note I'm not sure they'll change it, that's just conjecture of mine, and I may well be wrong.

@drakeordanska
I thought I saw that mentioned before somewhere. Never mind.
Edit: found the source. It's almost certainly cut from launch.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qr8BJDfNZlApkr6bIZyTZ4QewxGJf6t-LedBz4NMDjI

Caspian: and we had good reason for that. We were trying to disassociate ourselves from bigger media because the lure of having a show similar to the one you had before will be high, and having Nakari on the show was hard for me to see because I knew she had the knowledge of which features were hard to cut and I was hoping she wasn’t baiting you guys and say “well what about this” and just kind of work her way down the list, but there was some things you talked about that were definitely on the list of things cut that were very painful, some I think were obvious, talents for example are one of those people from the very beginning have said “hey we’re not really sure about this there are some people with talents, some people who don’t and for us they’re very important to the story but we agree with you. We don’t want them available at launch honestly even if they hadn’t been cut, they wouldn’t be there at the beginning, we want people to get into the world to feel it out, start to develop their organisations and guilds, even beyond the world building phase and then drop the story on top of people with those talents starting to be present.

Day 1, everyone is walking about and 5% of the population has talents they’ll feel like they’ve been cheated. So that’s one of those things that in all likelihood will be cut, we won’t have talents in at launch. But with pre-orders once the sales of the game starts happening and there’s actual launch and we start drawing revenue for that and we start adding them back in, nobody's going to know when we add them back in they’re just going to be there 1 day.

So whether we cut them or not is probably not going to have that big of an impact.

drakeordanska

Yeah I have just double checked the Kickstarter campaign and there is no mention of talents which means they were cut from the base game.

*note*
I didn't rewatch the video though so if they are in there I am sorry

Octagon7711

With that projected due date and the amount of money being worked with I won't be surprised if everything that's been talked about takes at least a year after launch to fully implement.  

Grelf

Octagon7711 said:

With that projected due date and the amount of money being worked with I won't be surprised if everything that's been talked about takes at least a year after launch to fully implement.  

From what I understand almost everything will be in, except for those previously mentioned as not viable or assigned as pledge goals. The kickstarter goals themselves are not core features, so I imagine if they had anything more important risking a cut, it would be there.

I don't really expect them to deliver at the due date though, and there's always a chance they'll look for publishers, which is something they have mentioned.

Archlyte

Damn that sucks. There is always someone better, someone bigger, tougher. One of the nice bits of verisimilitude that the original idea was this idea that there are Mozarts in the world. I guess the Salieiris won the day.  

When everyone is special, no one is

Dagon13

My impression from that quote and their statement on early access is that they need/want the world to be developed by players prior to initiating any large scale story content that possibly would have relied on player talents anyway.  If it's going to be a significant amount of time before such a mechanic becomes relevant then they don't necessarily need to use kickstarter funds to realize a fully functional mechanic by launch date.  I think this falls in line with the final paragraph of the quote about adding the talents back in without even telling the players.

If this logic is sound then I think it makes sense to cut talents from the list of launch features.  If talents are still considered when building the core design it can be implemented at a later date without having to make other launch feature cuts.

drakeordanska

Agreed 

Timberhick

If they would do a Birthright type of event for talents I think more people could get behind the concept.

Archlyte

Timberhick said:

If they would do a Birthright type of event for talents I think more people could get behind the concept.

I think that they would need to stick to a small percentage of people with talents to make it work. Otherwise it becomes common. If they want the player activities to be magical then by all means open the faucet, but if they want people to do more mundane stuff as a whole then they need to keep those abilities rare and random. 

movindude

In EQ1 the more strength you had the more you could carry. Warriors used strength  for there weapons damage so they could carry the most. But if you sold something to someone for allot of gold and they made the trade you could be so heavy you could not move and would need the help of a friend you trusted to carry some of that gold so you could move again to the bank  )

Morwynn

Caspian has said on many occasions that the world is not fair, and either will Elyria. Some might be stonger, faster, smarter, and some might have special gifts, so it goes in Elyria and so it goes in the real world. And the talents at launch has been explained so that no one knows if/when/who will get talents. They are not at lanuch, and since they can patch on the fly, no one will know when they will be addded to the game.

Grelf

Morwynn said:

Caspian has said on many occasions that the world is not fair, and either will Elyria. Some might be stonger, faster, smarter, and some might have special gifts, so it goes in Elyria and so it goes in the real world. And the talents at launch has been explained so that no one knows if/when/who will get talents. They are not at lanuch, and since they can patch on the fly, no one will know when they will be addded to the game.

I'm just hoping they stick to that idea. A lot of things happen as a game is developed, and developers often end up losing touch with what they originally wanted from the game with time and when money is involved.

Archlyte

Yeah I want to second that. I hope they keep that original philosophy in mind. I also hope that they do eventually add the Talents. It would be quite something to have players unlock a talent and realize that it means that they now could have a destiny that helps drive events. It would be more of a responsibility than a boon if they do it right. 

Octagon7711

I hope they won't be blind sided by things a lot of games get thrown off by.  Gold sellers, bots, radar, hacks, whales, dominating guilds, exploits, unexpected OP builds, the list goes on.