What “Class Changes and Cross Cluster Guilds and Alliances”. This is “Prettier Cotswold” patch! REJOICE!
Mythic is pushing out patches on the test server at an incredible speed, so the week isn’t ended that we have already the third part just two days after the previous.
Most of this patch focuses on more class changes to the assassins and some adjustements to the previous changes to the hybrids. I noticed they moved the proc heal styles to the enhancement line instead of the healing one, solving at least one of the problems I pointed since the other line usually doesn’t have a lots of points into it, making those skills too weak to be worth the space they take on the quickbar and still not enough to justify a respec. I won’t comment further the other class changes and fixes because I don’t find useful to try to explain those changes if I cannot offer worthwhile comments. I just don’t know the classes well enough and instead of gathering some superficial comments I decided to just shut up. I’m also having an high degree of frustration writing here in the wider context and not being able to say anything incisive (I’m at loss about this site for some reason. I cannot gather my thoughts, I find hard to explain things and even writing a few lines is a pain and takes me too long).
All the changes appear to be solid, though, and make sense.
On the other side there were many changes behind the scenes to the recent overhaul of the starting villages. Some of my complaints in the other post were solved and running around the village to check all the minor changes made me remember how much I love this game and how much I’d like to see it more popular, successful and evolving. In fact the main reason why I hate to write about the class changes it’s because I always feel that six months from now we’ll still be at the starting point. You seem to never achieve anything and most of the class redesign are circular movements. You never make a step forward, it’s all redundancy.
Instead the little things and fixes, the graphic updates, the reorganization of a zone, streamlining the newbie experience, enhancements to the UI, client and controls… All these are small, always understimated changes that instead always go in a positive direction. They are always definite improvements without the gain/loss scenario of the class changes where you always gain some and lose some as if you can never achieve anything satisfying and are stuck permanently in a sort of “meh” status.
Running around Cotswold makes me content and I wish that these types of enhancement would never stop. The place is so cozy and pretty now. They added “pathway” textures to lead to the various places and this alone makes the zone so much better. The newbie Darkness Falls dungeon now has a path leading to it, even if it’s still located outside the town. It’s still hard to spot but I changed my mind on the critics I made. The orientation of the cave entrance, away from the village instead of facing it, is good after all because more coherent with the sense of story. You move out of the village to find a place that doesn’t belong to it like if it was just another building or the entrance to SI. They added a new NPC that is easy to spot. It gives a funny quest (ooh, “spin the elixir”) that will drive a new player naturally inside the dungeon. So this NPC along with the new pathways on the ground will do a very good work to direct the players without making them feel lost. I truly approve these changes :)
These pathways added really add a new dimension to the game. No, I’m not crazy. This is the major difference between how the great zones in WoW are compared to those bland and dull in DAoC. In WoW each place is planned and modeled to have its own identity. You can take a screenshot and I’m able to recognize the exact spot. These zones build a seamless world with its own consistence and this is one of the things that WoW did better. In DAoC, instead, the zones are usually flat and featureless. There’s “terrain” but there aren’t really “places”. Pretty much all of the starting zones are about a mix of hills and plains bundled together just as a “space”. A “case”. It’s a box for the players to move within, but it doesn’t really have environments or “places”. There’s the grass, the hill and the trees, mixed together at random and failing at creating an immersive environment. It’s only a simulation of an environment without an actual content that gives it a quality.
The pathways instead are a perfect example of that dimension that DAoC missed. It was enough to add a few textures to create paths and some wood fences here and there that the game space acquired some direction and personality. It’s hard to explain in words what I mean but it’s enough to look at the new path that now connects Camelot with the housing zones that you easily understand what a big difference it makes (Mythic, consider this while developing the zones for Warhammer, these are the important “details”). See how the trees now border and follow the road instead of just being scattered randomly? See how this is already enought to bring some life to the place? It’s not anymore just a space connecting two points (the capital and the housing zones), but an environment with its own consistency. It’s not anymore “filler” space (see how it looked before) with a bunch of hills and trees distributed randomly, instead it becomes an handcrafted environment that has something to offer. A quality that gives a new dimension to game space. Making it interesting and helping the players relating to it (both for the immersion and to not feel lost in the continuity of the randomness of trees and hills). The terrain cannot remain just terrain as a space to hold something. It must be modelled and created. Shaped so that it can acquire its own quality that adds to the rest of the game. The terrain isn’t just a functional backdrop, it’s the fabric of the world. And that world need consistence and value already on its own.
Beside the paths I think they added some more objects inside the houses and slightly tweaked the lightmaps (they look more consistent now even if still not perfect). About the lightmaps: I hate DAoC’s engine but one thing that it does wonderfully is the rendering of the lights and colors (Morrowind is the same). I would really suggest this truly revolutionary idea. Why not get rid of the faked player torches in the game so that you could build an environment without having to tune it for both possibilities? This could even join another idea I suggested a while ago. This is another of those innate qualities of the game that could really be better used. Removing the player torches as a triggerable, artificial light could make all the zones and dungeons much more immersive and good-looking. As a compromise between a place too dark and one too bright, so that the colors would *really* come to life. Adding then dynamic, colored lights to all spells and effects (like the glowing weapons) would transition the game into a visual MASTERPIECE. Of course this isn’t a simple task and would probably require a huge work on the programming side, but then you could take advantage of the Warhammer fork to justify this work and integrate it with both games. It would be really an unique feature that no other game will be able to mirror in a long time.
Finishing the comments about the latest changes to the new starting village layout: I think they added a new tree type that looks nice and adds some variety and it’s now possible to see outside the buildings through real windows. New players now spawn in the world near their class trainer instead of inside an empty house (as I ranted about in the comments to the previous patch), and the Shrouded Isles portal has now a new look. It looks better in fact and, as I said above, contributes along with all the other tweaks and changes (pathways again!) to make the village so pretty and welcoming. If you try to log in the old version after getting used to the new changes the difference seems rather big.
I so love it! You did a great work Mythic.
(I collected some more screenshots)
P.S.
Make some of the emotes reset if the player moves. /worship while moving looks just too silly.
