Monday, February 25, 2008

PvE for BS + why we trashed the ship system

So there I was playing Tabula Rasa defending the the Arieki Landing Zone control point and thinking: "You need a bunch of tier 3 players to defend this place properly it keeps getting overrun and I can't do my quests properly if it keeps getting taken over."



I also thought: "Hey we should have something like this in Battle Stations where players can defend and assault a control point. It's like the clan wars but it's PvE and you can do it frequently instead of waiting for the clan fort to rez."




So basically we can set up control points between certain ports. The Imperial City is at war with Al Amraan so it's not unexpected that there'll be a blockade of sorts. If you travel between these cities while the blockade is up you'll encounter NPCs which will attack you. If you survive you can still get past the blockade.

There'll be a fixed number of NPC ships in the blockade (maybe a mobile fortress as well) and if players manage to sink all the NPCs the blockade will be removed (for a while) and players can travel between the cities freely once again.

Why we trashed the old ship system

There are gameplay reasons (trying to remove the huge power difference at level multiples of 5 and 10). Another reason we got rid of the old ship system because this is how we want to render our ships from now on:



... and we can't make 50+ of these ship designs which is why we have the new ship system to make all ships last longer. I've yet to assign this design to a particular ship (yes this what it'll look like in the game).

7 comments:

str4vag^ said...

cool idea for the blockade..cant wait to try it later on..

nice ship..which one is that?

Anonymous said...

cool...dun mind having all those reset if the new ships n interface as shown...
muahahahha.... hope ya guys gonna finalize it asap....

transition period suxx alrite

*sigh*

all da best

Anonymous said...

Couldn't agree more. That would be awesome.

Though the main feature I'd like to see is some sort of storyline.

A central character that goes around the ports, as some sort of hero, I guess, with bad guys chasing him.

Maybe the odd quest where you have to escort Jin and his group to the Imperial Island between MW1 and MW2, maybe?

Or even something like in AdventureQuest and DragonFable where there's some main bad guy that everybody has to fight off, with waves of baddies before the main boss. Friday the 13th Events are cool, too. Tiered baddies, where you can only fight the baddies at a certain level, so everyone can participate would be great.

A storyline is something that would make this game so much more enjoyable to me, as there would be a more definite reason to log in every day other than to just check the rankings and level up a bit.

Anonymous said...

On another note, have you guys ever thought of sticking MW1 on Facebook?

Cervantes de Leonard said...

@Chris: We'll need to resize MW1 to do that. I'd rather just redirect players to mobileweapon.net to play MW1.

We do have a story of sorts for BS. We have a tutorial for new players which will introduce some of the story and give the players a purpose to level up and explore.

We'll need to get the mercenary guild up and running too if want to introduce more story elements.

Crafting a story for an MMOG is quite different from doing one for a single player game.

Anonymous said...

check out what happened to knighthood on facebook today:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=5541055185&topic=22227

a whole schwack of players protested, and it's back up now, but it looks like you saved yourself a shipload of grief ;)

Unknown said...

I could design you some more ships? That'd be fun! I'm a graphic designer so I know what it entails.