World full of master terraformers!

[Gamefreak]

Eve online is a example of a sandbox with a good system. It appeals to casual gamers because you read books and gain your skill levels offline instead of while your ingame. Your ingame time is spent doing meaningful things like gaining money and having fun.

The effectiveness of a player shouldn't be based on their characters skill level, but rather the actual ability of the player.

Of course people who spend more time on the game should be better than people who do not, but not because they have higher skill levels. They should only be more relevant because the time they have dedicated to the game has made them more skilled as a player.

Darkfall is an example of a game that is horribly based on stats and skill levels. You don't have the skills or stats, you're useless.

I can tell you right now if this game turns out to be a monotonous grind, such as darkfall, I will not be paying for it.

[mrcalhou]

Eve has done so many things right, with regards to developing a player-driven sandbox, that it surprises me that other developers don't use it as a model.

I love the skill system in that game. Instead of making your character over-powered, the skill system opens up new things for you to do. It's also a great system because a character can only effectively be one thing at a time.

Where Darkfall went wrong is by making the game skill based based on usage (hit: skill increase. You don't even have to kill something), making damage, health, and defense too dependent on character stats and skills, and by making character growth too linear. Interestingly, Darkfall is now implementing an offline character progression system. The other thing Darkfall did wrong is that they allowed characters to go out as a melee/mage/archer hybrid. This sounds like it gives the players freedom, but to be viable (it is a pvp game), everyone became or work towards being the exact same thing.

In Eve, just because you are able to fly different types of ships (support, harvestor, slow-heavy damage, fast-light damage, etc) doesn't mean you can. You had to choose this before you left your station. This system wouldn't be difficult to implement in a land based game either. Espicially in a game that doesn't allow for mob dropped items that can be equipped by the player. You can have it set so that you can only take out one set of armor and one set of weapons (or two), and until the player gets back to their base of operations, the way those weapons and armor interact define their role. This also puts a heavy, but neseccary, burden on the developers to make sure that every piece of weapon and equipment would have a viable reason and purpose to be used.

[VeryWiiTee]

prokop15 wrote:

Luculus wrote:

Gamefreak wrote:

Slow skill gain could be bad and good at the same time. Look at darkfall, that's a perfect example of a skill gain system that is way to slow. The gap between the usefulness of players should not be made large only because of skill gain.

Personally I don't think I can dedicate 10 hours less than what I work in a week to this game.

This is exactly the point.

IMO the pace of skill gain simply separates people with a life from people with none.

The game itself should be designed so that skill gain is achievable by a casual player and the gap between 1 and 99 is not huge. Large skill gaps are for level based games, not sandboxes.

I would like to repeat though: Terraforming skill gain speed is a moot subject. There is no difference between 1 and 99 as far as I can see. So what difference how long it takes?

To address the first point, what sandboxes have you been playing? Difficult leveling curves or some other mechanic is what makes the game, as the entire basis of the game is progression. Darkfall has some progression components, but there is also a fun pvp system.

To your question, because there are benefits to gaining quick skill levels.

You don't really progress in a true sandbox game, as the progression is completely player made, furthermore you can't compare a pre-made quest game content with Xsyons playermade quest content.

Whatever your focus is in the game is your progression alone and that progression is not linear and it is not a single-branched progression but a multitude of progression branches that you follow.
The content is up to the players to make.
But that is just my view on it .

Aaanywho, back to the topic.
- Terraforming might be giving a bit too much experience and maybe they should reduce the amount of skill gain per x amount of actions a bit.
Still remember that every skill will decay and thus there will never truely be an end to when skills hit the hardcap. Also, I'm quite sure we'll be able to exceede the max skill once the game goes live. At least we should be able to hit 175 skill with trades (competition to make your own in-game weapon?)