More immersion, please !

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

Hello,

I'd like to have far more immersion in the game, immersion which makes the player feel more drawn into the game's world(s).

One easy way to achieve that would be, for example, to adress the player's character *individually* in dialogs.
Some earlier quests (nowadays : low level quests) Adress the player's character directly by using his or her name or his or her class or his or her race to speak to the character. This feels much, much better tha having more "generally speaking" dialogs.

My second point is the placing of the quest givers. These half circles like in Saltmarsh or in the Keep of the Bordelands just looks and feels unnatural. It is good for those who are lszy and want everying in one place, but it still is unnatural.

One example : The last quest giver ("Total Chaos") of the Keep could have been placed upon the top of the Keep. (Where the ballistas are situated.) It is reachable via a set of stairs. He is a "war master" (my words), so he'd have to have an overlook over the land beyond the Keep. That would fit to his role, and give people a better feel of the Keep as a building. Nowadays, nobody goes up there, and thus doesn't realize how much artwork has been put into that part of the Keep building by the art development artists. That this upper part of the building even has a small room is also unnoticed by players.
The quest giver of "Caged Beast" could be sitting within a tent, for example. She is a hunter, and because of that, it would be fitting, imho.

In Saltmarsh, the "Town Historian & Grave Digger" quest giver could be placed within that chapel up the hill. That would be fitting so much better and encourage exploring even more.

Within Stormreach, this diversity of locations of quest givers is something people are used to. Nobody is complaining about that anymore. Even on Korthos, quest givers have mor "natural" places.

Of course, if quest givers would be placed with more diversity, the forums would soon be full wil people complaining about that and demanding that quest givers should be so much more close-knit together. To me, this would only be a sign of laziness, imho.

I don't know if that's feasible, but I could even imagine 2 different instances - one for Epics and one for Heroics - of the "quest giver area" with quest givers being placed differently, according to instance.
Assuming that pics are played mostly by people who don't care about immersion, the quest givers could be placed as a half-circle, and for the Heroic instance, they could be placed with more diversity/variety, assuming that Heroics people might be more interested in immersion.


A last note about immersion : Depending on the settig of the pack or expansion, I could imagine a greater variety of "fluff" NPCs also. A Dwarf talking to a Gnome, for example, or a Dragonborn to a Tabaxi. A Dragonborn as a sentinel over a camp. A Tabaxi playing a lute. A Satyr playing a fiddle. A Halfling showing a pet dinosaur, a dwarven pirate showing a pet mimic, and a Pseudodragon floating in the air, next to a Tressym. I love the dance of those young mini iron defenders within the House Cannith enclave.

Of course, this all depends on how much work is needed for that.

Alrik

[Annex]

One easy way to achieve that would be, for example, to adress the player's character *individually* in dialogs.
Some earlier quests (nowadays : low level quests) Adress the player's character directly by using his or her name or his or her class or his or her race to speak to the character. This feels much, much better tha having more "generally speaking" dialogs.

To my knowledge, modern quest givers already do this. For example, in Saltmarsh, you start off speaking to Eda Owlans, who has no idea who you are. Then you speak to Krag, who also has no idea who you are. By the time you speak to Anders Solmor, the people have heard of you and he addresses you by name. That is good dialog design.


My second point is the placing of the quest givers. These half circles like in Saltmarsh or in the Keep of the Bordelands just looks and feels unnatural. It is good for those who are lszy and want everying in one place, but it still is unnatural.

With regards Borderlands, Flimsy and crew bunched all the quest givers together because players like me asked them to. Quest giver clusters make it very easy to find, take, and turn in quests. It also makes questing much easier on less time invested players.

Saltmarsh features 4 quest givers in the tavern, 4 in the wilderness, and two from objects in the wilderness. In my opinion, Flimsy and crew did a very good job mixing it up. This arrangement was probably introduced as a compromise between players like you and players like me. If so, it was a good one.


Within Stormreach, this diversity of locations of quest givers is something people are used to. Nobody is complaining about that anymore. Even on Korthos, quest givers have mor "natural" places.

I see complaints about this regularly in the forums. Just last month, a new player who tried the game with 8 friends commented on this. He stated it made no sense and confused everyone.


Of course, if quest givers would be placed with more diversity, the forums would soon be full wil people complaining about that and demanding that quest givers should be so much more close-knit together. To me, this would only be a sign of laziness, imho.

How many Past Life Feats have your characters earned? How many Reaper Points? Let's compare those numbers to those of some of these lazy people. Let's see how you all stack up on time investment, then we'll have this conversation about lazy.

I don't want to call you out. I am trying to get through to you that you are making a silly argument. Players still here are super dedicated. They are far from lazy.


I don't know if that's feasible, but I could even imagine 2 different instances - one for Epics and one for Heroics - of the "quest giver area" with quest givers being placed differently, according to instance.

This is an interesting idea, but would you rather have Flimsy and crew making dungeons or creating more elaborate quest giver areas? I would rather have those developer hours invested in dungeons.

I don't know. I really do not know. You and I actually have very similar sensibilities when it comes to 'immersion'. On the one hand, some guy playing a lute on a rock with some interesting dialog makes the game more fun and alive. On the other, three dungeons were released during the last 8 month period. That is _horrible_. The Isle of Dread will only have 12 dungeons. As developer time becomes ever more limited, we must use it extremely wisely. Certainly, a fantasy game needs immersion, but do we have the luxury of spending a bunch of developer time on expansive immersion with little play value? Can we afford to spend that time revisiting old areas to move some quest givers around and add some dialog?

[ahpook]

...
My second point is the placing of the quest givers. These half circles like in Saltmarsh or in the Keep of the Bordelands just looks and feels unnatural. It is good for those who are lszy and want everying in one place, but it still is unnatural.


I can get behind more immersion. I think they should do some work to make both you (immersion fan) and "lazy" people happy. They should get rid of the need to talk to quest givers entirely. Run to the quest entrance and enter the quest. People on there 10th life don't need the quest givers. Now that people who don't want to find quest givers don't have to, you can place them in ways that enhance immersion. People that want a story can get a better one. Quest givers (and other NPCs) should also do a better job of telling you where the "next" quest giver is.

Other areas of more immersion I could get behind:


Trade halls: I would like is to get rid of the leveler NPC groups and instead create trade halls to represent each class. 36 point builds don't need to talk to quest givers and can level from a menu.
Smiths and repair shops. If you go to a such a shop you get lower breakage chance and lower price. Repairs at bartenders are doubled and breakage % is doubled. Some may think this pointless but it would give the town some life and purpose vs making the bartender your only point of contact. This would not affect people on the TR train because they soon get to the point they are looking to throw away money and are mostly dealing with unbreakable equipment.
More salt hay in quests. ... Ok that was just a joke. But it is a reminder that people with different opinions on some things and can agree on others.


For me the trick with adding immersion is to also remove it for the TR grinders who are past the point of wanting immersion.

[Artos_Fabril]

Assuming that pics are played mostly by people who don't care about immersion, the quest givers could be placed as a half-circle, and for the Heroic instance, they could be placed with more diversity/variety, assuming that Heroics people might be more interested in immersion.I don't think it is a fair assessment that players in epic are less interested in immersive gameplay. To me, this seems more like a symptom of the problem that DDO doesn't offer immersive epic content. After repelling multiple extraplanar invasions (Shavarath, Dal Quor, Khyber) and foiling the plans of Dragons and Arch-liches, "epic" content still involves inordinate amount of killing rats, spiders, and wolves, and bugs. This is inherently immersion-breaking, no matter how much you would like to dive into the story.

A last note about immersion : Depending on the settig of the pack or expansion, I could imagine a greater variety of "fluff" NPCs also. A Dwarf talking to a Gnome, for example, or a Dragonborn to a Tabaxi. A Dragonborn as a sentinel over a camp. A Tabaxi playing a lute. A Satyr playing a fiddle. A Halfling showing a pet dinosaur, a dwarven pirate showing a pet mimic, and a Pseudodragon floating in the air, next to a Tressym. I love the dance of those young mini iron defenders within the House Cannith enclave.NPCs showing off cosmetic pets isn't a terrible idea for sales, but I fail to see how it provides a more immersive environment. The immersive content I'd like to see is the environment responding to your character's actions and the events you've been involved in. It will never be as good at that as a single player game, but you would think major world changing events would provoke a response from the greater powers that are aware of them.

[Annex]

Having thought about this some more, if the World Builders feel they can add more Set Dessing without reducing Quest output, go for it.

[Pandjed]

I don't think it is a fair assessment that players in epic are less interested in immersive gameplay. To me, this seems more like a symptom of the problem that DDO doesn't offer immersive epic content. After repelling multiple extraplanar invasions (Shavarath, Dal Quor, Khyber) and foiling the plans of Dragons and Arch-liches, "epic" content still involves inordinate amount of killing rats, spiders, and wolves, and bugs. This is inherently immersion-breaking, no matter how much you would like to dive into the story.

Real problem is, that we basically have no epic content, only rehashed heroic one, which I mentioned in another thread (https://forums.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/523020-Epic-how!).


For the topic on hand: Immersion and simpleness are two things that are hardly compatible. Simpleness in this context means to have quests easily available so that new players can find quest lines, that vets can shiv some hours of running around during their reincarnations, that there is less retracking (which is why Total Chaos doesn't require flagging, despite the narrative; similar SM, FW, you call it), etc.
Would be great, if VIPs had an option to just accept quests via the quest window, as this would make ppl feel like VIPs and would open up some mind-space for placing quest givers in more fitting positions again.

Btw, about story: How do you handle, that you're killing hundreds of mind-bended civillians every time you run through the Korthos Storyline? ;)

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

I don't think it is a fair assessment that players in epic are less interested in immersive gameplay. To me, this seems more like a symptom of the problem that DDO doesn't offer immersive epic content. After repelling multiple extraplanar invasions (Shavarath, Dal Quor, Khyber) and foiling the plans of Dragons and Arch-liches, "epic" content still involves inordinate amount of killing rats, spiders, and wolves, and bugs. This is inherently immersion-breaking, no matter how much you would like to dive into the story.
NPCs showing off cosmetic pets isn't a terrible idea for sales, but I fail to see how it provides a more immersive environment. The immersive content I'd like to see is the environment responding to your character's actions and the events you've been involved in. It will never be as good at that as a single player game, but you would think major world changing events would provoke a response from the greater powers that are aware of them.

In my opinion, part of the problem is the fast levelling in (A)D&D. I mean the amounts of experience points.

In contrast to that, in my personal favourite offline SP RPG, Drakensang 2 "The River Of Time" [from the TDE setting of Aventuria], the amount of experience points is ... estimated from my memory, I haven't played it for some years nnow ... for example 20 xp. Per quest.

this is a so much slower levelling rate. It's almost starving with xp and with money there.

In DDO, this goes so much faster. And the prices are also high (healing for 100 gold. Quite an inflation for people coming from the TDE setting).

If DDO wouldn't give out so many xp points, levelling would be so much slower, and so much more meaningful. Every quest would be something more important.
Everything is so much faster in DDO.
And that's why we are getting into Legendary levels so fast. Instead of rather staying in the content below that. Because if we did, we wouldn't have that problem with the relative lack of Epic quests, because we wouldn't get there that fast.




NPCs showing off cosmetic pets isn't a terrible idea for sales, but I fail to see how it provides a more immersive environment.

It would add to the illusion that the world was a living, breathing environment. And, frankly, who doesn't have pets ?

One of the few moments where an environment really feels alive is that "message runner" from 3 Barrel Cove harbour.
Or the moving bar wenches inside of taverns.
Or NPCs turning their faces towars you, the player's character (they sadly removed that with 2 quest givers on Korthos).





Btw, about story: How do you handle, that you're killing hundreds of mind-bended civillians every time you run through the Korthos Storyline? ;)

That's the curse of the Action-RPG sub-genre on which everything else is built nowadays. Everything must be acton.
In Action-RPGs, you kill thousands of enemy NPCs. Without explaining why they are enemies of you, without explaining why there are so many of them, and without explaing why they even constantly respawn (the original sin of the Action-RPG genre in the first place).

The development team of DDO merely followed that overly successful formula of Blizzard's invention, the Action-RPG.

Maybe games like Genshin and so are the counter reaction to the Action-RPG, a reaction against the overwhelming success of it, driven by the wish that "oh, there must be something [i]else[/i than this !"

Every game these days built on he overwhelming success of the Action-RPG formula ("follow the trail of money") has to cope with this problem . That people probably do wnt to see "something else" than Action.
Action-RPGs and "Souls-type" games are - imho - incompatible with one another. If people are going more & more into the "Souls"-type, then every MMO based on Action-RPGs gets a huge sales problem. Because they're stuck in one genre.

[Stormraiser]

In my opinion, part of the problem is the fast levelling in (A)D&D. I mean the amounts of experience points.

In contrast to that, in my personal favourite offline SP RPG, Drakensang 2 "The River Of Time" [from the TDE setting of Aventuria], the amount of experience points is ... estimated from my memory, I haven't played it for some years nnow ... for example 20 xp. Per quest.

this is a so much slower levelling rate. It's almost starving with xp and with money there.

In DDO, this goes so much faster. And the prices are also high (healing for 100 gold. Quite an inflation for people coming from the TDE setting).

If DDO wouldn't give out so many xp points, levelling would be so much slower, and so much more meaningful. Every quest would be something more important.
Everything is so much faster in DDO.


In Zimbabwe, bread costs 10 million Zimbabwean Dollars. Why does it cost so much? - Because it's a different country, and their costs and salaries and inflation is different.

You're comparing a different world, a different game and arbitrary numbers there without seeing the bigger picture. What if in DDO , all experience numbers (gained and required to level) were divided by 1,000? Would that make any difference?

Are you able to grasp that different worlds have different settings? I bet TDE has a different reward structure vs DDO. Why are you even bringing it up?

[Pandjed]

I bet TDE has a different reward structure vs DDO.

Severals. First, it's not called XP, but Adventure Points (design idea: You go out on adventures, maybe survive them, become better adventurer) and in several editions they can be directly spend on stats, just like in systems like World of Darkness. Drakensang works on such a system, therefore smaller numbers are kinda easier to manage.

In TDE, the first reward is for the character to leave the bed, as every challenge consists of 3 ability checks on a d20, and with starting stats, you're sure to regularly fail on some tasks that D&D would consider mundane (in Drakensang you save before picking up any herb, because you need 6-8 reloads on an elf to pick up a herb successfully). There is the tipping point (around half the game, when you did sidequesting) where you transform to a demigod and the game becomes very easy and only very specific elements can kill you. The rest is super easy, barely an inconvinience.




That's the curse of the Action-RPG sub-genre on which everything else is built nowadays. Everything must be acton.
In Action-RPGs, you kill thousands of enemy NPCs. Without explaining why they are enemies of you, without explaining why there are so many of them, and without explaing why they even constantly respawn (the original sin of the Action-RPG genre in the first place).

So the genre is fault for being the genre? That's like horror movies would be better with big chunks of romantic subplots. It also doesn't answer my question in the slightest and I feel offended to be quoted for you prattling on something totally unrelated, which has nothing to do with what I've written. You can ignore it and I'd accept it, but that puts everything I said in a wrong context.


EDIT: MMORPGs have that MMO thing going. If a studio wants to make a game for "massive multiplayer", it has to find a common ground. DDO with is text-heavy storylines which makes sense and give immersion when you read them, while also being mostly skippable for those who want to go to the action, the wide variety of puzzles and places, enemies and strategies, traps and hazards, etc. is already going some extra miles imo.
I'd leave the "give more immersion" tidbits to single-player, story-driven games. There are a ton of them as well and each one can enjoy them in their own pace without any need for consideration for people with other playstyles, time-restrictions, interests, etc.

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

From an immersive point of view, I still find it such a bad decision to allow sentient gems only for end game. I hate that.

I would have liked to have them as an immersion tool in early levels. I really do not understand why this decision was made.
I fear that the team just did not look at the "imnmersion factor" but merely looked at them as tools for inserting filigree for end game. Or, in other words, to support more grind.

Why no purely cosmetic sentience gems ?

I ask, because end game is so ... unfun to me.
At least for soloing.