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Would You Like to Be a Legend for a Day?
By Cameron Sorden | March 14, 2008
Massively writer Akela Talamasca proposed an interesting suggestion in an opinion column the other day:
Let’s indulge in a little thought experiment. Let’s say that your favorite MMO has enabled the salvage of an entirely unique, singularly powerful weapon/item. And by ‘unique’, I don’t mean ‘Legendary’, I mean ‘only one person per server may have this thing’. It binds on pick-up for 24 hours, then disappears from your inventory, to become available for the next person to find it.
Let’s say that for those 24 hours, the wielder of this object is untouchable. Would such an item help or hurt your favorite MMO? Sure, it’s an unbalancer, but it’s also a goad. If it can only be found, then everyone gets an equal chance for it, no favorites. And who wouldn’t want to be GM (or the combat equivalent) for a day? Of course, we know what passions uber items can arouse in the hardcore, but what do you think? Good or bad idea?
Whether you think it’s a good or a bad idea probably depends on who you are and what game we’re talking about, but it’s certainly an interesting idea. The obvious problem that comes to mind is that patient players with the right tools would identify all the spawn points for such an item and monitor them on a regular basis. Of course, you could fix that by making the spawn truly random and giving it thousands of potential spawn points in secluded areas throughout the game.
How cool would it be to be exploring some random cave or secluded forest glade when you chance upon the Sword of Legend which, when pulled from its resting place, announces to the entire server that you are the new champion of the game for 24 hours? Suddenly, no monster can withstand your power. You become invincible, untouchable, and you look amazingly awesome (of course magical armor with neat glowy effects would accompany the weapon).
Using WoW as an example, there are already scenarios where you take control of a different character for a limited amount of time (the Chess Event in Karazhan for example). Finding the legendary weapon could be a lot like that. For one day, you take the form of the Avatar of Azeroth. Your level is set to 73 (raid boss level), you become practically invulnerable, and you deal massive damage. You also become flagged for PvP, of course, but it literally takes a 25-man raid to kill you. The one restriction is that you can’t enter raid instances while flagged as Avatar, but you can do anything else. Would it really be so game breaking? Sure, you could farm like a madman for a day, but what would that really net you? 500g-1000g? It’s like winning the lottery. If that’s how you want to spend your day as a real hero, that’s your call. Of course, it might be more fun to storm an opposing major city by yourself.
Maybe once per day is too common. It would probably be even more fun if you gave it a random 1-7 day respawn timer after it left a player, so that in addition to not knowing where the sword would respawn, nobody knew when the sword would respawn. It would be as likely that a level 7 newbie would stumble upon it at a level 70 veteran (probably more likely, actually).
Of course, the 24 hours is so fleeting, that you’d have to get something special to prove to others that you had the legendary sword for a time. My suggestion? You get a title called “Hero of Legend.” Now, that would be cool. Talk about a status symbol. Everyone who saw you would know that at one point, you had been an avatar of the gods.
A system like this might even be a way to partially address that no one can really feel like a hero in a world populated by heroes. I think it would be really intriguing.
Topics: Random |
March 14th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
It is an interesting idea, though I think in a game like WoW it would be nicer if it had (as you suggested) a 1-7 day respawn timer, but simply made you an uber character rather than a raid boss, AND gave you access to any instance in the game. It would give players who might never otherwise have the chance the opportunity to see raid instances and go on a high end raid. Guilds would be beating down the player’s door begging them to participate in their raid and the player would get lasting memories and maybe some high end gear for their trouble.
I’d rather have the opportunity to do something I can’t normally do (I’m not a raider) than do something better that I could already do if I wanted to (farm, pvp, etc.)
March 14th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Archlord (one of those F2P games from Codemasters) has a similar concept: one player on the server may achieve the status of Archlord and gain the dragon mount with its special attacks, archlord armor, weapons, etc. but he immediately becomes a pvp target for anyone else who wants to be the archlord.
March 14th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I was actually discussing an idea very much like this earlier today with my girlfriend. As she’s very much the explorer type, we thought of some kind of game which outright rewarded exploration through items, skills, whatever, and what I called ‘hot-potato’ items: not as powerful as what you’re suggesting, but that would drop when you were killed so the person who killed you could pick it up, and would despawn after a certain length of time.
Set all of the things to spawn randomly over, say, a few thousand spawn locations, and let the explorers go wild!
March 14th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Lineage 2 has something like that, however because the game is pvp and clan-centric, the person who gets one of these items is usually really quickly killed unless they are from dominating clan(s).
While this is nice concept in theory, i don’t believe it is all that good in game. People generally hate the random factor, so the random respawn would lead to massive amounts of whine. You could use something like this to ressurect world pvp, but still it is very risky and players would probably end up abusing it. And everyone would hate being stomped into ground without any chance to retaliate.
One idea i have been playing with is that anyone who got the most honor in one day would get a special weapon/title/skill for the next day, to prove his deeds against the opposing faction. It wouldn’t be random, it could be timed to fit your playing schedule and so on.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
When it’s not a player, the invulnerable or near-invulnerable enemy is obviously a great idea. When Sauron sends a dozen soldiers at a time flying with one swipe of his flail in the first LOTR film, I doubt there are many people who don’t think that’s cool. Epic/legendary enemies are a shoe-in when they’re truly rare and placed in the right context.
The tougher question is how popular the idea would be if that enemy’s a player. Personally, I think Trials of Ascension had a great setting for that sort of gameplay. SWG proved what a strong motivator a chance at gaining epic power can be. But such a thing can work in games like that because they’re world-focused games (true RPGs)… games in which players can get their asses kicked and laugh it off, because it’s fun being even the little guy in that sort of environment. In a more arcade-like game, one that’s more about achieving preset goals and one-up’ing your fellow players than about experiencing fresh content, giving some players epic power wouldn’t work so well.
Plus, there’s probably a difference between Western and Eastern games. Americans and Europeans care more about individual gain and equal footing than Asians. So a game like Archlord wouldn’t catch as much flak from its primarily Asian audience when certain players dominate.