Quote:
Originally Posted by Tecmos Deception
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I don't like you anymore Tom.
Saying nice things about instancing. Get a load of this guy! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
They may help fix a problem, but god damn they ruin my immersion! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] |
Eh, it's just the truth and most people don't realize it. Everyone hates it when a zone is packed and you're not getting mobs. The only upside is that the item camps are 'hard' to get into and you have a forced rarity of item. If you can emulate that while enabling everyone to enjoy leveling, then you have the right idea.
I absolutely loved WoW instancing back in the day. BRD took a solid 3-4 hours and gave me purpose to my grind session without relying on quests - a true dungeon crawling experience. Often times in EQ you get to a camp and just sit there and that's fine and all, but doing something with purpose can be way more rewarding.
SoE realized this w/ LDoN. WoW popularized this and is the most popular MMO to date. Instancing was integral to that success, because everyone could do Wailing Caverns, everybody thought it was somewhat hard, and everyone thought it was fun. A lot of what Classic EQ brought to the table was a lack of technological innovation. You just can't support a large playerbase without instances. The only reason EQ lasted as long as it did with as high subs as it did is because the world spread out so bad and the top end content was so hard, whether it was the content itself or the keying process, that not a lot of people had contention in the top end. I remember raiding VT while other guilds were in PoP, others in eles, and others in Time. I remember climbing that ladder and thinking how much it would suck if there was fierce competition - there just wasn't because the world had gotten so huge and stratified.
A new game, with the appropriate amount of players, can't survive uninstanced. It just really can't. GW2 tackled this problem by having phasing instances so zones could expand and contract based on how many people were using them - everything was an instanced zone. I didn't like that method because you didn't really get to know people that way. I want a persistent world, that has dungeons that are instances, that's all. I just hope it gets done right.