Amrun on Grinding
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1101806561803894804/1101855140937474099
Successful people, regardless of how smart they are, grind harder than anyone else
AmrunAnyhow, to the question, which I take it was about “grind”. Grind is like anything else we do, it can be “good” and it can be “bad” and it is important to embrace the fact of life that those who accomplish anything, usually have done their fair bit of grinding to get there, whether in a game or in life. And I know that the word itself has become some sort of a boogeyman after a long catalogue of games full of inane repetitive grind has been published, especially games that intend people to spend a lot of time in them, i.e. MMO´s. But grind can be good. And fun. Good Grind allows you to do something useful over a period of time, while honing your automatic player skills and at the same time mind is free to do other things or just chat with other players. The important thing for a designer is to identify when he is making a progression path involving grind, embrace it and then focus on making the grind interesting and rewarding. Another thing about grind, it is very good for low intensity gameplay. In a game like this, you are not always wanting to save the world in a high adrenaline rush. Sometimes you just want to relax, kill a little time, say hi to people and log off again. Anyhow, yes, some grind will be here and there and we take the implementation of it seriously
Anyhow, to the question, which I take it was about “grind”. Grind is like anything else we do, it can be “good” and it can be “bad” and it is important to embrace the fact of life that those who accomplish anything, usually have done their fair bit of grinding to get there, whether in a game or in life. And I know that the word itself has become some sort of a boogeyman after a long catalogue of games full of inane repetitive grind has been published, especially games that intend people to spend a lot of time in them, i.e. MMO´s. But grind can be good. And fun. Good Grind allows you to do something useful over a period of time, while honing your automatic player skills and at the same time mind is free to do other things or just chat with other players. The important thing for a designer is to identify when he is making a progression path involving grind, embrace it and then focus on making the grind interesting and rewarding. Another thing about grind, it is very good for low intensity gameplay. In a game like this, you are not always wanting to save the world in a high adrenaline rush. Sometimes you just want to relax, kill a little time, say hi to people and log off again. Anyhow, yes, some grind will be here and there and we take the implementation of it seriouslyAmrun on People trying to abuse housing plots
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1081465860390146058/1099277811530862592
Making and not the least, playing MMO´s ad nauseam for over 20 years makes me too, think of a myriad of ways people will try to exploit a system like this. There is no question that it is the biggest risk to the plot system and as people have pointed out here, most games have either failed at this spectacularly, or have come up with systems that are so restrictive that there is no fun left in them. However, the idea of having a home in this world is beautiful, full of opportunity and the stuff of dreams. Making this happen is a task we think it is worth taking on, we take it on with open eyes and all the seriousness required to make this work.
Amrun
Amrun on Voice Chat
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1081436701404188803/1099272822037168178
“Hello, why wouldn’t you add a proximity textual chat for those who doesn’t use mic ?” This is a social sandbox MMO and therefore in-game player communication is probably the most critical element we need to get right. Of course there will be proximity textual chat. Of course there will be group chat, Clan chat and whatever-group-you-need-to-communicate-with chat. The question was though about voice chat and my reply was about the need people in general have for more restrictive rules about who get to be with them in voice chat and who don’t. It is much easier to laugh at and then ignore someone jumping around spamming stupid text messages, than ignoring an obnoxious voice in your headset.
Amrun
Amrun on tree regrowth and raising land
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1080882641529745438/1092493265414139935
Raising ground to flatten it for building or other things is viable. The regrowth of trees is dependent on where they are in the first place. Right now they regrow pretty fast, we are adjusting these rates as we go.
Amrun
Moving things around the battlefield response by Groke
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1105782684778762280
Sorry can’t go into specifics but there will be knockbacks but due the nature of combat we’re aiming for and networking, we need to be conservative with things that push entities around as latency will make it feel horrible and inconsistent especially when you have a large group or players and entities involved.
Groke
Groke on switching gear during combat
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1101142244888690701
Like we’ve said before; The decisions you make before the encounter are at least as important as the ones you make during the encounter so having knowledge about the encounter and how to ready for it has a huge impact on your success. While switching gear is possible, knowing which gear to have ready for that and when to switch is more important than having as much gear with you as possible.
Groke
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1101141047498772531
You can switch gear during combat but there will be some restrictions related to this which we’ll talk more about later. The main thing to keep in mind is that simply swapping a single weapon/wieldable in your hand isn’t enough to switch your “class”. It’s more multipronged than that and the synergies of different gears, traits and your skills is what defines your “class” so while you can have strategies built around some gear swapping, you can’t completely change your strengths and weaknesses during a single encounter and switching to gear that doesn’t fit with the rest most likely benefits you nothing.
Groke
Groke on soft lock versus hard lock targeting
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1093455259101315172
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1093456737580888084
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1093457162711339049
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1093458769175920691
We’re going to have bunch of options. By default – currently at least – you hit the direction you aim but we also have non camera relative targeting meaning you hit where your input points (wasd or left stick on gamepad) and also have been testing various helpers (target locking, “auto aim”/ soft snapping etc) for less experienced players. Also ranged attacks and spells have their own targeting / aiming modes.
You do need to aim but since we want to cater many kinds of players, we recognize there are people who have difficulties of controlling both the camera/aim and the character simultaneously. This just reduces the amount of simultaneous inputs needed but doesn’t give an advantage. Also we don’t have super precise hit detection more or less for the same reasons. The difficulty and skill isn’t on reaction speeds and accuracy – it’s on making decisions, selecting gear, reading the encounter and understanding what strategies work the best.
Also the auto aim I mentioned was for melee hits, not bows for example. Those still require aiming and the accuracy also depends on gear and character skills.
Off by default (and currently not even available) and won’t be aggressive. Many 3rd person games have similar by default and most people don’t even realize it (Assassin’s Creed as an example)
Groke on Pets
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1093095423293542470
Not confirmed and I won’t confirm them one way or another either but I can say we recognize the importance and desire for pets. It’s more about where they are on the roadmap.
Groke
Groke on why they are focusing on 3rd person
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1081498501357256714/1092712348202049616
It’s not only about not seeing the animations, it’s mostly about how the character turning and accelerations work. We’ve done everything with 3rd person in mind to make moving around feel smooth and natural and the same movement model just doesn’t work for 1st person at all but would feel unresponsive and probably even cause motion sickness to many. 1st person movement doesn’t really have a concept of character turning as your view and character is 1:1 tied to your camera direction which isn’t (always) the case with 3rd person view and locomotion and usually 1st person movement is has a lot snappier accelerations and the character is always in “strafing” mode (i.e. left/right input makes the character move sideways/strafe) whereas in our 3rd person we use strafing only in certain situations. The rest of the time the character turns to face your walking direction and it’s not instant but has an animation and natural feel to it. To have equally compelling experience with both, both need to be developed separately and that’s a massive undertaking and still we would have the issue of not being able to communicate the gameplay with character visuals. Having both made separately also introduces balancing issues because matching the speeds/accelerations is almost impossible. This is why in most games that have both views available, the 3rd person movement isn’t as good as in a game that’s made only for 3rd person movement as the locomotion / movement model is the same 1st person movement model but just using a different camera angle. Can’t actually name any game that has done both separately but there might be some I haven’t played. Typically having both work better for shooters as in a shooter game the character will face the camera aim direction all/most of the time (i.e. move with strafing when giving input to left/right) and the movement needs to be snappier regardless the perspective.
Groke
Consumables that buff crafting from Spire:
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1114125452274040862
Currently consumables don’t buff crafting, but we do want to have that eventually. The underlying RPG system does support it, we just need to find the time to do it. SO MANY THINGS TO DO.
Spire
Spire on building outside the heartlands
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1098284123388395581
We’re looking into how flexible we can make that. There are valid cases for building outside of heartlands we want to support, it’s just not there yet
Spire
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1Spire on PVP Building
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1098281550669418617
Ok so this has caused some confusion with what we posted earlier – right now we have no PvP building and can’t promise we have anything with the version of the game you’ll get to play, but we have a lot of ideas for PvP building we want to eventually have.
Spire
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1097973143211081728
PvP: Right now you can only build in Heartlands and there’s no PvP destruction of the houses since it’d suck to log in and find your precious house gone (for almost all players – yes some hard core would love that). We want to have PvP building eventually, but we’re not there yet. There will be other high stakes PvP tho, so you will be able to win/lose stuff in the PvP from the get go.
Spire
Spire confirms 20k per shard goal
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1097970188844023948
Ah right – yes we’re sharded. Exact shard size at first public alpha is still open, but aiming at 20k+ players / shard eventually. I think those tech responses are about the details of how the entire shard works, which obviously is handled by multiple game servers stiched together.
Spire
Spire confirms you cant build on top of roads
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1097838733572714527
I guess we weren’t clear in the answers – you cannot build on top of the pre-made road network and thus block others from being able to traverse the world
Spire
@]I[ FayreeOur irl children for in game free child labor? xDSpire on the scope of the game
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1077535952500699146/1097783935909503037
With the game we’re definitely assuming there’s no such thing as the game “being finished”. We want ship something solid at first and then continue expanding over time.
Spire
Wells are functional-Taika
https://discord.com/channels/1071081786962088018/1099222416200302622/1101146893305794570
Hey Dennis König, thank you for the question and yes, wells will be functional
Taika
No Daily Quests
No daily quests are planned – it would go against a lot of our principles 🙂
Iyas
But as Tuoni suggested, there could be some cycles (day/night, moon or others) that could impact the activities
It is easier to look for snails when it is raining”
Desert Biome
“The world has some deserts (especially if you think about sand deserts in the southern regions of Helios and Anatolia).
That being said, our first region is named Gallia and is inspired by… Gallia. To be clearer, it is mainly inspired by the South West of France (but not only), so there should not be any sand desert here. Though, some places are dryer and rockier than others.”
Iyas