For example, in an instanced area you can design quests with defined start and victory conditions that don’t require that you account for hundreds of other people wandering through that have nothing to do with the adventure.
The cool thing about instanced areas is that we can do a lot of neat things in them that are not practical in common areas.
We also have special areas (such as Guild areas) that are somewhere between common and instanced in their nature, and quests take place there too. There will be quests that occur in common areas, and there will be quests that start in common areas and wind up in instances. Will there be quests in common areas (non-instanced)? After that, it’s just a matter of communicating “the story so far” in a convenient and entertaining way. In this manner we involve as many of our players as possible, and provide a variety of types of activities – so everyone can have fun. It’s the sum of these events that come together to become the overarching storyline, and how successful each group is determines the next chapter of that story. You may have an invasion in one area of the game, some live interactions in another, and a special adventure sequence running at the same time. And don’t think that these smaller events are simply mirrors of each other, either. The best way to handle this problem is to break up the population into much smaller groups, so that an event may be run for all of them simultaneously. In fact, one of the biggest problems in non-instanced games is running live events without making 99.9% of your population feel like they’re being left out. Instances actually lend themselves well to developing live events that many players can be involved in. Some events will take place in common areas, others in instances. Event types are varied: one-on-one role-playing interactions, epic quests that span for months, invasions, merchants and festivals where players can purchase never-before-seen items, social events, contests, and more. Our staff of hundreds of GameMasters will be creating live events on a daily basis something not possible without the unique and powerful toolset we’ve created. Hero’s Journey will prominently feature live events.
0 kommentar(er)
