This is edited from a conversation I had on AIM with Juztin, mostly me just rambling although I have kept questions asked and comments made by him where applicable.
As you can see i’m trying quite hard to take a good look at what works and what doesn’t and make Graal Reborn into a good world, even though we haven’t done anything in development I believe it’s vital we plan what we want to achieve with our world. Starting with other worlds is a good approach as they can be used as good examples on what we do and don’t want our world to be.
Managing the official Graal Reborn Playerworld is something that I am going to take seriously and would very much like community support from. Please suggest any ideas you have, any at all. No matter how crazy. Hell the only reason I played X Online was because an admin gave me an NPC called “Cow Transform” that made me into a cow, I seriously spent hours on that thing even though there was only 5 levels and there was hardly ever any players on it. So even a simple thing like that can be something great that shouldn’t be overlooked, simplicity is a good approach to things. Once you get complex you encounter much greater difficulty which is why I believe it is important to plan this out now before we reach that stage.
Thank you,
Agret
[spoiler=What Makes A Good World?]
It’s great to say these were good worlds and to host them in the hopes they’ll bring players, but really what you should do is to look at what exactly made the world good and then try to bring that into a new world.
Era was good because it was fresh, the first futuristic graal server. it added a sense of realism to the fantasy of Graal. It was an exciting new thing.
Unholy Nation was good because it had a small overworld and was based around pking and sparring and it did extremely well. Even though they hardly changed, like npulse. They were popular because of the way the server was built.
Graal 2001 although it was p2p it offered a lot of stuff you could do and had a sense of real economy as it had the new gralats instead of rupees and you couldnt just get them from bushes, you had to do work. Plus it had the draisine, that was so fucking cool. The other cool part about Graal 2001 is the diversity of the environments, you had the dark mining caves, the snowy mountains with Skis, the underwater fishing, the gravity cave, that huge island in the middle of the world and the forests all over the place. Graal 2001 is an example of an overworld done well.
I think the reason Doomsday was popular was because even though the kingdoms sucked besides Haven (No offensive Davio :P) it had some pretty decent quests and a lot of them at that, plus had a lot of cool npcs you could get.
Juztin: but its kind of risky to spend all that time on a server that someone may never play
Well that’s the thing, I want to develop this server with input from the community and since its not official Graal we can host the server from the very start of development and all changes are live. It’s not like the old days how you built your world and then you had to get it approved before anyone could even give you input. Reborn offers a new sense of freedom, it’s not like “hosted” servers where nobody will ever see it.
Basically we will do something and if it works it works and if it doesn’t work we will look at it and say, why doesnt this work? How can we make it better?
If you look at Doomsday I believe the original aim was to put focus on the variety of different kingdoms, i’d say that it failed at that because the problem was that the kingdoms were guilds. You actually had to talk to a real person and the leaders of these guilds weren’t very active during my time so nobody really saw anything of the kingdoms. Everyone just ended up hanging out in Haven, not to mention that the kingdoms were poorly designed.
Now i was originally thinking that Graal Reborn, to keep it focused around the world rather than everyone in one town - you would be able to form little parties up quickly and then take over towns and then you could defend the town and have it as yours for awhile but now i think maybe that’s not such a good idea, because what advantages can we offer players for taking the town?
Aside from a few possible epic guild battles trying to take them there’s not really much we /can/ offer. So then you look at it and say, ok guilds as kingdoms dont work, players in small parties may not work too well, what if every player gets to pick a kingdom like on Delteria? But, unlike delteria your choice actually means something as your kingdom can control these towns.
Juztin: Yeah, I dont mean it as no one will see bc we wont get approved, just no one will come on the game to see it…
Well that’s true, but i’m sure if you do make a kickass world then you can surely get people attracted to it. I mean it’s still Graal, we can mass forum email the userbase when the sever is at a good place and a lot of them will come back and check it out
Juztin: Well, there could be like, little perks on taking over a town… Money, maybe like a Weapon for certian days of the week or month - like a mix with Del and that thing NP tried with Kelton and that other town they had.
Well I never really played N-Pulse so you might want to try explain that one to me.
Juztin: Well back when Geo had it, before Moon God took over they changed the server COMPLETELY! 100% but everyone HATED it compared to old NP. They had Kelton (The popular one) and another one… and you could travel across the world and fight the other world. But Kelton was SOOO popular… the pros had to go on other accounts to start intresting wars with the normal people
Well that’s an issue too, if you’re going to have multiple kingdoms: you have to be sure none get an advantage or people won’t even bother joining the others. I know on Doomsday they tried something like that with different weaponsets for different kingdoms.
Also, there was a guild called Illuminati which got the ability to steal Gralats
Juztin: Yeah, but Nym was the real heavy weight of the worlds. Well, other than haven. idk why but players stuck to Nym a lot
Well Elderan was really hard to get into, Davio wouldnt let anyone in. Which is another reason why you shouldn’t have the kingdoms as guilds - because on those servers its really up to individuals about who gets in or not and that’s just not very good from a balance perspective, numbers wise. I mean sure its great to have a stuck-up elitist group of good players, but what happens when they stop playing? Once Davio quit there was nobody left to take over Eldaran and you’re effectively left with a dead kingdom. I don’t even know who ran the other kingdoms as they weren’t even active during my time.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Singleplayer Quest Design]
One aspect of Graal that a player (Awakened) remarked about was singleplayer quests, now this is an area that I’d like to explore within Graal Reborn. Other Graal servers have touched upon singleplayer quests but the quality of the quests vary in high degrees, I don’t want to cop out and make a riddle quest which a lot of servers did in the past. These were basically one-room quests where you got teleported to the next room that looked identical by answering a riddle. The problem with these quests is that sometimes you couldn’t figure out the correct answer and other times you had people who would just PM you the answers removing the entire purpose of the quest, if it had one to begin with. I personally see riddle quests as an incredibly slack way of making a quest. I believe for an enjoyable quest it must offer a variety of challenges for the player to overcome, unfortunately the default Graal baddies are very stupid and the built-in generated NPC players are glitchy and tend to get an unfair advantage over the player (Don’t even mention Ace’s ones when looking at advantages :P).
So anyway, the design process we’ll be using for Graal Reborn is:
- Does the quest offer a challenge fitting the reward?
- Does the quest offer variety?
- Is the quest fun to play?
- Is the quest well designed (layout wise, detail can come later)
- What sort of problems will the player encounter during this quest, are they too difficult to find solutions to?
Essentially, what we’re aiming for is to offer variety and still keep it accessible yet fun.
[/spoiler]
