They vaguely talk about the DF trade mechanics. Really the only info you get from it is that they keep talking about carvans and trade via ship so they must really be coding the game to force players to do trade this way. Which opens you up to being attacked by pirates or land bandits. Hopefully it's a good idea that leads to a lot of fun times protecting and stealing loot from enemy guild's caravans.
http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/719/719331p1.htmlAlso one of the screen shots you'll notice a guild emblem painted on the back of the guy's plate armor. Question is, would you notice it on the battlefield and be able to avoid hitting a guildmate because of seeing it?
Time to wear uniforms again? If emblems are such a pain then maybe we can have our guild blacksmiths and tailors craft the same helmet/chest/legplate combination for all our warriors, and the same robes for all our casters. Same color and all. That way unless the enemy decides to dress like us to confuse us in battle, we can usually tell right off the bat who's KGB and who's dead :P
maybe the specific KGB emblem will automatically appear on the guild members, and not on others - like in Shadowbane and Guild Wars?
I'm alittle unsure what your question was Crim but I think the answer is that the guild emblem is created by the Guild Master for only his members. He'll have a massive list of possible icons to use as well as colors and then once an official emblem is chosen it's forever linked to that guild charter.
At this point only KGB members can have that emblem on their stuff, but at the same time I think it's optional if a member wants the emblem or not.
Just a side note, the emblems will show up on a lot of things... the sail of a ship, a long narrow banner hanging from the side of a building, armor, clothes and flags. Kind of a cool thought to imagine that the clan stone KGB claims for itself is connected to a near by mine shaft, and once we make that mine shaft operational a KGB flag appears at the cave entrance. Letting everyone know that they are entering a KGB owned mine shaft, or shipyard, or lumbermill, or quarry....
I also like the idea of uniforms being a real part of our army's dress again. Back in UO we all had to wear a blue apron with a red sash. Or a red cape. Some combination like that. It made seeing allies easy and even more important it makes us and KGB look bad-ass... not hard to recruit when you have public scenes like this....
Im pretty sure they stated that you would be able to see health bars or hovering names above your guild or group mates only. Not 100% sure though. This would make it a bit easier in large battles.
Im preety sure thats not true Chez. You can only see names when you right click on a avatar.
He may be right about Only above groupmates heads. We really haven't heard jack about groups in DFO so I couldn't say for sure. Only thing I do know for sure is that in general you don't see names or health bars above people's heads.
I personally would like for groupmates, and even guildmates to have some kind of indicator above their char. DFO will have friendly fire, which makes life hard enough as it is, they really could help us out alittle by marking who our friendlies are.
It might help in holding back the zerg factor. Would really need to play it to tell if it was to much trouble or not.
If these hardcore pvp features stay in through beta then DF is going to really require organization to win at. AE dmg spells kill friendlies and AE heals heal enemies as well. So the days of just spamming an AE blast or a healer spamming group heal are gonna be for the most part gone.
When the battle starts, and both groups haven't engaged yet you'll use the AE spells but once the two armies engaged eachother in hand to hand combat either you only get single target heals or you learn to train all heavily injured people to fall back and stand by a healer for an AE heal.
Hahah, I'd love it even more if AOE heals healed everyone within the radius, including enemies.
Melee 4tW!!
Healers creating AE heal bubbles, and AE healing will quickly become targets. With the advent of player-collision and FF, things will get interesting. Seems like the battles will liekly revolve around the healers, unless ranged plays a large part.
The ratio of toughness/damage , toughness being how hard it is to kill someone, versus the effectivness of ranged will be a huge indicator on how battles will go. We might see an RTS-like effect, of massed range units. Possibly with some meatshield support, and of course healing units interspersed.
In any case territory use and ability to maintain the discipline to move promptly and stay with your group will be paramount to success. I expect it will be an exciting time for the groups and guilds with the wherewithal to field and organize 60+ people.
The main reason I don't see everyone going range is because of there being no auto-targetting. In DF you'll be in first person view and just have cross hairs to aim with. You shoot a fireball from far away and the warrior on horseback that you shot it at will actually see it coming and probably be able to side step it pretty easily. Anyone who's played paintball knows what i'm talking about; seeing that paintball flying at you and actually having time to lean far to the side and avoid it.
Going to depend on speed of the missile of course, but I wouldnt necesarrily assume all the missiles will move slowly or be very visible. Plus when 40 people shoot arrows at someone, unless the 40 really suck, you can assume that several will hit.
If people mass up at a AE healing bubble, you can assume there will be hits. If they all spread out, it will be harder, but still... if you focus fire, how fast can you bring someone down vs time it takes for them to close to melee distance?
These factors will have a huge impact, but we wont know till beta.
(This isn't really a reply to you Derid just a general rant)
I personally liked how healing was done in UO. Basically there was no "healer". Everyone and their pet dog had a healing skill, whether it was bandages or magic heal or hell even just alot of heal pots. Everyone took care of themselves and once in an awhile a guildmate would cure someone if the posion was real high lvl or res you.
This really made the game skill based. Did you have the mental ability to juggle healing yourself and dealing dmg to your enemy at the same time... EQ and now all these EQ type games have just screwed things up by making the idea of dedicated healers the norm. So now instead of everyone taking care of themselves and having fun and only having themselves to blame, you have stressed out dedicated healers that get blamed for "letting" people die and then you have berserker melee types that have no understanding of what restraint is 'cause they figure "hey someone will heal me so I can keep being a dumbass."
I agree with your general observation. It may also be possible that in DFO that many characters will have some degree of healing, but I would think that given precedent in other MMOS, plus for balance reasons that non-heal dedicated characters will have signifigantly reduced abilities for healing.
In any case, if someone gets called primary during a fight, theyre likely going to have a hard time surviving without other people healing them.
Given that DFO is based on skills rather than classes, I'm certain there will be quite a few people using heal. Although I'd rather focus all my energy into Shout/stuns, melee damage, and attack rating.
I prefer full offense Melee characters. I go into battle dependent upon the current situation. However, I totally despise it when leadership ONLY uses strategies based on sitting back in defensive, using ranged attacks and not on melee. Chances are, I will charge right into the enemy leader regardless of consequences for my own life ( I don't care if I die, big deal it's a game) in order to create chaos amongst the enemy ranks. Sitting around as a tanking meatshield is a no-go for me. In fact, I doubt anyone will ever see me roll a straight-up tanking type character. Heck, the charge attack + aoe fear worked great for me as a warrior in WoW. In fact, before WoW battlegrounds, I was with a lot of KGB and allies as we attacked the horde in the Badlands. The horde kept hiding in the same hut, so I charged into the hut and AOE feared all the horde out into the open where they summarily got slaughtered. Funny thing was, I was new to KGB at the time, and only a few people had actually grouped with me besides Malphas, Elph, etc. So after I AOE feared the horde out of the hut, some idiot over Teamspeak gave the credit to some other warrior who'd been in KGB longer (although I'd beta tested the warrior in WoW since april of 2004). I was like WTF?
Speaking of people getting their due credit, DF has all the elements needed to allow us to return to giving out the service medals based on number of people you have killed.
In UO we had people take screen shots of each person they killed and for every 10 they got a medal. In DAoC I based it off honor points, or whatever they're called it, since people could get 10 kills very quickly in that game.
But DF seems to be building a world where small groups will often run into solo people or other small groups. Much like in UO. So if the devs are so kind as to keep track of our kill count we could just take a screen shot of that count and email it to the faction leader. Then medals could be awarded. Though I'm sure it'd take more than 10 kills
Somewhere I recall reading something where Tasos said DF will have some stun, etc- but that DF pvp wont revolve around crowd control, and stuns/snares will even be mimimal in effects and duration.
Extreme DPS melee will probably be uber, especially if you have good riding skills and are mobile. Mounted polearm wielding Knight 4tw.
Quote:
Extreme DPS melee will probably be uber, especially if you have good riding skills and are mobile. Mounted polearm wielding Knight 4tw.
Oh HELL YES. Crim uses polearm and offense ALL THE WAY. Barbarian on a mount? Move over Genghis Khan, here comes Crimthan Mawr!
Quote:
Speaking of people getting their due credit, DF has all the elements needed to allow us to return to giving out the service medals based on number of people you have killed.
In UO we had people take screen shots of each person they killed and for every 10 they got a medal. In DAoC I based it off honor points, or whatever they're called it, since people could get 10 kills very quickly in that game.
But DF seems to be building a world where small groups will often run into solo people or other small groups. Much like in UO. So if the devs are so kind as to keep track of our kill count we could just take a screen shot of that count and email it to the faction leader. Then medals could be awarded. Though I'm sure it'd take more than 10 kills
What happens after we get a medal? Do in-game rewards come along with it?
Some people like getting ribbons and medals and such attached to their record. Theres never been in-game rewards that I recall. Traditionally, everyone involved with the kill / group could get kill credit and while in say UO, this was probably a good thing UO pvp was relativly small-scale compared to a Siege-warfare type game. Giving individual kill credit for army size engagements would probably be alot of unnecesarry paperwork.
On the other hand, I think for smaller scale engagements officially recognizing good squads and groups that perform well, take out enemy raiding parties, raid enemies territory etc should definatly be recognized.
Personally, I've never really concerned myself with kill-pic medals even in UO. Crushing ppl in-game is its own reward.
Quote:
Crushing ppl in-game is its own reward.
Yap, those are my sentiments. Plus having the enemy driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women. I'd call it a day.
Quote:
The main reason I don't see everyone going range is because of there being no auto-targetting. In DF you'll be in first person view and just have cross hairs to aim with. You shoot a fireball from far away and the warrior on horseback that you shot it at will actually see it coming and probably be able to side step it pretty easily. Anyone who's played paintball knows what i'm talking about; seeing that paintball flying at you and actually having time to lean far to the side and avoid it.
I read that you have a choice in going first person or not.
Only melee have a choice between first person or slight overhead view, and even the latter only lets you see alittle bit behind you. So people could still sneak up behind you and knife you in the overhead view.
They said it made the game more enjoyable to be in first person but that melee had more of a need to see alittle around them so they gave them the option.
Casters... melee people... it sounds like im talking about a game with rigid classes. I'm not sure but I think how they are working it is if you have a melee weapon equipped then you have teh option to switch views, but once you equip the mage staff then you're forced to be in only first person view.
On the matter of medals for kills. Derid is right, we've never given in-game rewards but that's only because leadership just didn't role play it enough (I'm as guilty as the other past leaders). But I think DF is really gonna allow us to fun role play like we did in UO. Where we can call meetings in the guild hall and hand out awards. We did those kinds of things all the time in UO, but in games like WoW they lacked any of that role playing feel to them so that fun was lost.
"Jonus has been awarded this shiny titanium helmet crafted for those worthy of donning it. As it is, He is the only one worthy."
//Signed//
DFO Leaders
Jonus can also ride the short bus....