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Solo? Group. Wait– Solo? Group. No, solo.
By Cameron Sorden | November 16, 2007
Tipa is irked by the zone design in many of the new zones in Rise of Kunark, and understandably so. What’s her beef?
The Fens, like the Kylong Plains, is covered with solo mobs. There are no mobs grouped with one another. There’s no heroic mobs. I’m not sure if even the nameds were heroic.
When EQ2 launched, overland zones were a mix of solo, heroic and group mobs — they were mixed-use zones. If you wanted to solo, there were mobs you could grind on. If you were in a group, there was plenty for you as well. Everyone got great experience according to their playstyle, and while you were soloing in a zone, you could be looking for a group in that zone as well. I loved the Thundering Steppes for this.
MMOGs are supposed to be social games. WoW has driven the industry further and further towards solo play, and zones structured like this are the result. It can be terribly frustrating when you’re trying to play through an old zone or an old expansion designed for groups and you’re the only one there, but it can be just as frustrating to be in a zone where it’s so crowded that it’s hard to get XP because there are only solo mobs and there are enough people for everyone to be in small groups.
It’s a problem that’s been around forever when designing zones (even if they didn’t necessarily recognize it back in the day): how much group-only content are you going to put into your game?
A closely related problem is the issue of mob density in your zone. Too many, and the zone will be a death trap once it stops being popular with the playerbase (which will happen eventually). Too few, and no one will be able to find anything to kill when the zone is new.
One way to address this is to have games start using dynamic spawning of mobs based on how many players are actually in the zone. It seems like that would solve a number of these issues. It wouldn’t be too complicated– as the number of players in the zone increases, respawns of mobs get stronger, denser, and more group oriented. Have a standard, randomized loot table in the zone that the harder mobs give better rolls on (with special items on named mobs, of course), and make the mobs despawn after six hours or so to make sure that they’re being recycled properly. You could even have small pocketed areas within the zone that were marked as “always solo” or “always group” to make sure that you could find stuff to kill for your playstyle even if the zone was populated in a way that you didn’t like.
There were rumors that LoTRO did something like this for mob density in the first few weeks of play, but I don’t know if they actually did or not. I wonder why more games don’t try to implement something like this?
Topics: Random |
November 16th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Seeing mobs despawn would kill realism and enjoyment. If could could depsawn them when players can’t see them that would be great.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Okay, okay. A player being within view distance of a mob prevents respawn, then.