We need more exploration

Forum glitch ate my long reply to this thread - no time now to pen another - but enough to say Sam, great post - worthy read, interesting, well-written, and thought provoking.

Nice read Sam I have done that run myself once but it was a long time ago. Now head to the Hollows with a lowbie and see what the Trolls have done with their tunnels.

//Jack

I wanted to quote so many people that if I replied to each individual I'd probably double my post count. Let's see if I can't freehand a response to everybody and get it right. If I seem to be referring to something you feel you said, I probably am

On the note of exploration having more novelty value than replay value, I have to agree completely. You can't really re-explore the explored, that much I agree with. There is something to be said about having so much to explore that, by the time you circle around to the old, it feels new again. The Abandoned Sewers Underworld always has that effect on me, as do the entirety of the Shadow Shard, but that's largely because I go there so very, very rarely.

I think, however, we're getting two different versions of exploration being mixed up in here. On is the version of exploration that badge hunting promotes, where the player is placed in a familiar, "in-control" world which nevertheless has lots and lots of hidden easter eggs for the player to find and enjoy. The Developers' Lounge in Faultline is a perfect example, but hardly the only one. Plenty of CoV rooftops have an old chair, a barrel with a TV on top of it and loads of beer bottles strewn around as though a bum were squatting there. Places of that nature are fairly widespread. This is, to call it that, urban exploring.

There is, however, another type of exploration that we actually lack in a big way. This is what I'd call the outdoorsman style exploration, where the player goes to a place that isn't simply hidden just off the side of the beaten path, but going quite literally far away from civilization. In fact, plenty of backpackers do just that in real life - pack their bags and head off into the forest or into the mountains. There doesn't really have to be anything particular to explore or see (though untamed nature usually provides regardless), but rather it's the sense of being far away from anybody else that is the real draw. Now, I'm too much of a sissy to do something like that in actual real life, but I can certainly appreciate the sensation in a virtual world.

There's also something I think no-one has touched on, and that's the road trip factor. When I was a kid, my family would take me to the sea side every year, and it was a 500-600 kilometre drive that took quite literally all day, from dawn to early dusk. It wasn't ever any fun, mind you, especially for a little kid of 6-7 years of age being cooped up in a car for 8 hours straight, but there's an odd kind of serenity to it, once you get into the spirit. In fact, one of by FAR the most fun things I've done in GTA: San Andreas was to punch some poor sod off his Harley and and just take the thing out onto the freeway and travel around the county. It didn't have any point, but I just enjoyed the serenity and calm of the trip. Which is funny in a game about running over hookers and shooting cops, lemme tell ya!

To me, my trek through the sewers was a little bit of the latter two paragraphs. I enjoyed the sense of being far away from civilization, probably a full mile underground, alone in a wild place. Honestly, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if the Abandoned Sewers entrances were deeper towards the middle of the regular Sewers so it felt "deeper," but that's besides the point. And then on the other hand, I really did enjoy the trip. I tell it like an adventure with interesting events popping up around every corner, but to be honest, it WAS long and monotonous, with battle after battle deconstructing into the same basic parts. And a few times I lost my groove and thought about giving up. But, you know, the feeling that I CAN'T give up was part of the fun. It's a job that has to be done, and if I can fall into the groove of it, it actually goes by quickly and it is a lot of fun. In essence, my trek through the sewers went like the world's most disgusting road trip

Of course, trying to sell that to people will not work. As was mentioned, this IS a very personal experience which isn't replicable. With people focused on rewards and efficiency, with content just there to get in the way, how can I really hope to do something like this? Well, to my eyes, if such a thing should be done, I don't believe it should be put BETWEEN people and their missions. For those who like the convenience of an urban environment and pick speed over trudge, the game really SHOULD NOT change. I'll be the first to admit that wanting to get somewhere and facing a ridiculous trip to get there sucks. I climb a 50 meter hill with lots of sections of over 30 degree slope on my way to work every day. If anything ought to be done, it ought to be done either as "outer reaches" zones or, ideally, as instanced missions.

A point was raised about a planned route not being exploration. Well, to a point I will agree and to a point I will disagree, but let's say I agree for the purposes of the discussion. How do we make a mission that has to do with exploration and hiking more so than with fighting bosses and rifling through crates? Well, I'm no game designer, but here's how I see it:

You have a large outdoor instance, fairly larger than the ones we have now. Say, about as big as the flooded Boomtown map PLUS the water. However, you are in no way expected to visit the whole map, or even much of it. You are expected to get to a certain point. Why use checkpoints, then? Well, when exploring, one of THE worst things that can happen to a player is being defeated and carted off to a hospital back in the city, or even at the start of the mission, having to re-trek what he's already trekked. Not only does that KILL, but it also ruins the atmosphere. But still, defeat has to be planned for, so what do we do?

Enter checkpoints. A series of checkpoints are scattered throughout the map. The player isn't required to visit any of them, but visiting the checkpoint will then allow the player to respawn to that location if defeated.

Let's look at a vague example to give you an explanation. You have to get to a villain's mountain base, but you have to stay under the radar or the villain will explode the bomb, so you walk. You start off from your dropoff point, and then a while in you find a hut. This is your checkpoint. If you are defeated, you "drag yourself back to the hut" to recuperate. Moving on, you find a large, convenient cave. This is your next checkpoint. Later on you find an abandoned camp site. It goes on and on.

In fact, I wouldn't mind such a mission being linear, as without travel powers, defining allowable area should be fairly easy without the need for "emergency forcefields." Of course, a large open square map with various paths and approaches isn't something I would refuse, though I fully appreciate such a thing might be TOO costly to make (leaving us with blandness like "Canada" or "The Desert"). In fact, I suspect a vaguely branching path reminiscent of the original Dungeon Siege (I'm talking about the forest stages, NOT the one dungeon stage) might be relatively cheaper to make, and thus allow for a greater variety of these.

Of course, I realise these things have nothing to do with reality, but they are interesting to think about nevertheless, specifically because it seems that they should be at least mechanically possible for the most part. More than anything else, though, this sort of approach would make getting to an objective into the objective itself, and if rewards were tied to that, then perhaps even reward-driven players could be enticed to try this.

But, really, it's just that it's nice to get out of the grind for stuff from time to time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I actually agree wholeheartedly Sam.

When I first started playing and accessed a new area i wandered around it for hours just checking stuff out. Everything was new and (metaphorically) shiny. After having been here for almost 4 years I don't even notice the landscape anymore most of the time.

I love Badge-Hunter.com, it's helped me out with a lot of the badges I couldn't find on my own....but it has sort of killed the thrill of finding a badge on your own that you didn't realize was there. The first character I had that I took fly on I actually discovered several badges just because I wanted to see what was up there, and there happened to be a badge. I'm the only person I know that found the badge at the top of the bridge in IP by accident, just because I was exploring with flight for the first time. I found Keen Sighted and Silent Sentinal the same way.

Another thing the game needs more of is challenge. Even the most difficult Task Forces have gotten so routine that you can almost autopilot your way through them. I ran a Kahn TF last night with 5 team members. As it turns out it was a perfect pentad: tank, blaster, controller, defender, scrapper. We fought Reichsman for almost 2 hours and couldn't beat him, because we just didn't have the damage for it, but for the first half hour it felt EPIC to be engaged in this battle with a powerful foe. We could hurt him, but it was slow going. It didn't get impossible until we had him almost dead and he started using MoG and Unstoppable every 30 seconds it felt like. We eventually called it a bust, but it reminded me of the old days before everyone had figured out the most efficient way to do things, you engaged in an epic battle to achieve you objective and got a sense of accomplishment when you succeeded. My first Synapse TF was a PuG, and no one on it had ever done it before. The wiki didn't exist yet, or was still relatively unknown, so no one was looking up how to go about things. No one on the team knew about Babbage, so when he showed up we were all like: "WHOA! What the HELL?!!" Completing that TF is still one of the most satisfying things I have done in CoH to this day.

It's sad that the game has turned into "How fast can I get stuff with the least effort?"

It's lost most of the feeling of accomplishment. Everyone wants to speed through TFs for the merits at the end, using the quickest method possible. The all scrapper ITF I ran last weekend was a nice change of pace. We didn't speed through, and we fought a LOT of stuff that we didn't have to. No one had overwhelming debuffs for the AV fight, so it actually required strategy to do. it was a nice change of pace and I hope to do more stuff like it in the future.

I really hope when Going Rogue is released that there are things in it that there IS no easy way to do, you either do it the hard way or not at all. CoH has turned into easy mode grinding and I don't like that about it. I have characters that can handle the toughest challenges currently in the game without batting an eye, I just wish there was something for them to do that felt difficult. It's kind of sad when scrapper players start making up rules for things just so there's some challenge to it. That challenge should be there in the first place.

I read the title as 'explosion'.

Which I would approve.

I think the "checkpoints" idea is a good one, and it would seem easy to implement. Essentially, they'd be SG base med stations with different appearances. For an added thrill, perhaps you wouldn't come back at full health.

That might allow there to be more incentive for exploration. As it stands now, exploration is completely voluntary, and I think that's as it should be.

Well, I guess I'll have to disagree, somewhat. To me, exploration is all about the unique places you will find in the game world. This is something that the game lacks (on both sides) mostly due to its setting. Exploration is about finding things you wouldn't have found if you had simply kept to the tracks that missions/quests lay out in front of you. I think one of the reasons I loved Everquest (and the only MMO to date that I played for 5 years) is that despite its name, the quests weren't clearly laid out. You had to find them, and most people didn't bother. Because of that, you were free to go hunt where you wanted, not where some NPC sent you.

The first time I went to their newly released Stonebrunt Mountains on the already out of the way Odus continent, I was in awe. They hadn't done an environment like it in the game (at that point in time). Sure I had to kill my way through some kobold tunnels in order to get there, but after the initial slaughter, I could explore without hurting a single NPC. To me, the accomplishment was reaching the Kejek village in the snowey peaks after starting out from being underground. Not how many enemies I had slain to get there. I didn't earn a single point of experience or loot, but I still felt accomplished. That I still remember the names of both places after an almost 5 year absence speaks volumes for how that made me feel.

In Guild Wars, I avoided most enemies despite being able to easily slaughter them to get more exp. I wasn't interested in progressing my character, I was interested in seeing what I could find. When I first laid eyes on the floating castle in Nebo's Terrace had me wonderstruck. Sadly, I couldn't reach it, but simply gazing at it was fun, and here comes the important part, for me. As others have stated, a sense of exploration is very much personal and the hardest to inspire within your playerbase. Eventually, the majority of every MMO's playerbase will be reward oriented.

Some of my characters

One thing that might be fun would be a set of Oranbega maps similar to the sewer network, which you could use for travel. Just rework some typical Oranbega maps, make all the hallways 50-100% wider (!), and have portals in them that take you from one map to the next. Then have maps that break through into the sewer system or something, allowing egress to a Paragon zone.

Obviously this would not be the best mode of transport, but it could be a sneaky way of adding a new story zone that underlies many of the other zones.

Diablo II.

EDIT: To clarify, Diablo II generated random maps, and if it was considered a bad game because of this, that'd be news to me. I certainly liked it a lot.

Last night for some reason I decided to check out Recluse's Victory with my warshade. I was killed by a villain (I hope he got a recipe for it) but prior to that I got to get a Heavy and liberate some bases. That was a lot of fun because it was new to me.

I think tonight or tomorrow I am going to explore the Shard.

This game completely succeeds at offering so many choices of things to do. And I am dying to check out their plans for Going Rogue. More to see, more to do. What a game!

Wow! That must have been an epic adventure!

Sam I couldn't agree more. I love doing stuff like this and did something very similar with my Claws/Regen scrapper when he was that level. Heck I even did it with my archery/devices blaster who could stealth about and cherry pick her targets all over those sewers. Although Rikti drones would cause some pause.

I will aimlessly wander around Eden hunting DE. I will run the tunnel in faultline. I will start at the bridge in Nerva and see how much damage my brute can dish out as he goes to the far side of the longbow base and back. I will do the same thing in the Fab (I love the fab) but I always take the tunnel across and fight my way from the bottom to the top. Dark Astoria can be an absolute blast to run around in.

The best part for me is that in a lot of these places you just don't know what is going to be around the next corner or up ahead in the fog. There is a combination of challenge and change of pace that I really like. Are the spawn points as predictable as a scanner/paper map, probably, but I do not do these things near as often so the newness has not washed off for me yet after more than three years. I just wish there was more of it red side as that is where I spend most of my time.

I think they missed a real opportunity to put a Roman style sewer map under Cimarora (sp?) but there is nothing to say that won't be added later and I will not bemoan what we do not have when there is still a ton of stuff to do. I can't wait to see what they have in GR. I have high hopes for all kinds of new places to explore. I may do a little tonight now that I think about it.

I love exploring in MMOs - admittedly my Bartle-type is heavily skewed towards Explorer - and even though I know the layout of every zone in CoH/V, and wish we had some even larger (and newer) zones I could explore, I still find new details quite often in our existing zones that I haven't seen before and which make me smile.

Just a month ago I realised that one of the buildings in eastern St Martial has a garage/pavement sale outside, with lots of items (mostly junk) individually priced - I've been through that area dozens upon dozens of times before and had never noticed it until then. There are also amusing signs in some shop windows (again, St Martial is quite good for this) and the funny outdoor NPC chat (thanks War Witch!) rewards exploration too.

It's little details like that which really reward you for just wandering around - and being set mostly in urban cityscapes, CoH/V zones are comparably very dense with detail compared to most other MMOs. Also those kinds of atmospheric details, plus all the little easter egg details hidden throughout the game, just make the game feel as if it has been lovingly crafted by programmers and artists that really adore their job and this game.

But I also totally agree with the people who say that forcing players into slow or long distance travel is the wrong way to encourage exploration, because nobody likes repeating slow/long journeys that they have experienced before (and some people just hate long journeys altogether - sometimes even I feel like that) - there's no added value there, especially when you just want to go do a mission or meet friends - it's just a timesink.

So I can say that I like larger zones and (more importantly) lots of detail in those zones, but I also like having fast travel available from the start - you can't force exploration, but it's great to see a game encourage it - and adding interesting details to the world is the best way to do that.

So while CoH/V doesn't have the most expansive MMO world, it's still very dense with detail that rewards exploration (CoV more than CoH zones, I find) - and while I can't really say that this game ever gave me the same sense of "adventuring in the wilds" that I got from exploring zones for the first time in EverQuest or World of Warcraft, there are still plenty of rewarding details if you look for them.

Roll on Going Rogue - for me it's the most exciting thing that has happened to this game since CoV/I6 because we'll be getting multiple new outdoor zones that we have never seen before - I can't wait!