Asros
Gazillion Staff
3:16AM@thorindarkheart said:
Right now there are only 3 pieces of content that require an opportunity cost to access: Cows and Bovineheim, and Doop Sector. Why cant we have more zones like this? It seems like a win all around...the zone itself can be made more challenging and/or rewarding than "open" content because its limited-access, so players feel like its something special and more worthwhile than just grinding in Patrols. The acquisition of access to the zones (however that's earned) feels like an accomplishment itself, even though its only value is as a gateway to other rewards, so you're double-dipping on rewarding the player - once on getting access, and then again on completing the premium zone. And because its gated by an opportunity cost, there's less of a danger of it being over-farmed and unbalancing the overall value of rewards, the way Hightown quickly devalued Uniques.
Just to be clear: I'm not talking about P2P content that's only accessible with a Store purchase, but special "loot cave" content that's accessible by fulfilling some requirement in-game.
This is something we have been talking about a lot. After we ship the talent update, some of us will be moving on to doing a nose to toes review of our different endgame modes. There has been a small team I've been a part of that has done some initial reviews and proposed some changes to give our end game modes more direction, purpose and replayability.
As for the "we want more content" statements, we know that this is something players want. However, our old method of content creation just wasn't cost effective. We would have content content spend months working on content that players would churn through in a few minutes. Secret Invasion/Chapter 10 was in development for the better part of a year and players pushed through it in a half hour or so and asked "Whats next?". Even smaller pieces of content like Dark Dimensions required several weeks of designer time, not to mention environment art, vfx, etc. For a small studio like us, it is not a quick or cheap process. It is why you would see us pivoting from talking about things like Red Axis or Thanos Raid because they are bigger/more expensive pieces of content to things like Danger Room. Danger Room was planned to be more modular content that we could more easily maintain, but due to staff turnover and other prioritization, we weren't able to support it as we originally intended.
The key things we need before we can even start to talk about creating new content are pretty big. First, better hero functionality and balance, including movement changes. Infinite dashes and teleports makes the game so fast that so much of the environmental work or encounter design we do is completely lost to the player or has to be done in a way that is super annoying and spammy/one shotty. Slowing the gameplay down to be more tactical is a must in order to make the gameplay more enjoyable and require actual thought/strategy. Zerging might be fun for some things and some people, but think about some of your favorite bosses or levels from all the video games you've played in your life. I'm pretty sure bosses you could zerg and ignore mechanics aren't on that list.
Second, we need to build a framework for the end game. I've talked previously about a gameplay loop. A loop is something to always give players something to do when they log in. It can be something as simple as "Farm this zone for keys to zone 2, do zone 2 to get gear for zone 3". You go through that loop and always have things to work towards. Doing something like that requires and overall plan and structure that gives all the different modes(of which we have MANY) a purpose rather than just a different way to farm the same items, or hell, even new items. Once you get all the new items from a new zone, why go back and replay it? That is the kind of sustainability you need to get a good content system put together. We have some pretty awesome designs in place that I hope we can do, because it is stuff that no other MMO has ever done before and I think could be really huge for us.
We have plans for new content, but right now the main focus is getting heroes feeling more modern and getting the Difficulty Slider tech in and balanced well. With those 2 things, the pipeline for content creation becomes much clearer and smoother.
I know i've said it recently, but since having
@TheArtofRawr and our new Creative Director(who worked on MH previously) and most importantly the Lead Content Designer
@JZB (who is made amazing content for many big name MMO's) leading our (much larger) design team over the course of the last 6 months, we have some really good things in store.
We have a real bright future ahead for the team and the game. I'm stupidly excited to come in to work every day and see what we will be working on next.
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