Maybe SOME Open-World Missions?

Please, don't spear me! Hear me out!

All the big MMOs out there have it-- that certainly doesn't make a feature good-- but one thing that all the MMOs out there have, that I can name, is an 'outdoor' feeling to missions.

"But, Sig, we do our missions in instances!"
Yes, but why can't we be given a choice?

Why can't we have a mission in Brickstown to either infiltrate the Crey base, or to go looking around the city for a bit to find some boxes that might hold their valuables? Why not have a few more missions beyond 'Hunt [Gang]' and 'Patrol [Zone]'? Why can't we have some un-instanced missions that could just take place in the same zones that we love oh so much (Here's looking at you, Striga )?

Would it really be the end of times if we were to put an occasional EB, and maaaaybe even an AV in some key points throughout maps? Like inside the Striga 'Volcano' or near the Storm Palace?

All I'm saying is that some open-world content in terms of a few missions spread throughout the zones, like some simple collections wouldn't kill off the population; ESPECIALLY if it were optional.

More mission variety? Sure!

/signed.

I'm all for this, I love options! Even the people that would hate something like this wouldn't have to do it. I see no downside. /signed times 1000

I would not mind this provided that two conditions apply to it:

1. No player is OBLIGATED to do it. And by this I mean that you have every option to ignore the mission without having to use an auto complete (like speak with Lt. Wincott in the Hollows) and by ignoring it you are not trapping yourself in a dead end mission thread because you didn't do it.

2. No other player would be able to interfere with your mission in any way. Until recently when I joined in on CO's beta testing, I had never experienced the phenomenon of "ninja-ing." That is, another player hanging just close enough to steal your rewards from a fight. I'm not very fond of it.

Besides, as i've just been reminded, we already have something like this. All GM's/Rikti invasions/Zombies are basically open world encounters. Anyone can join in.

Now, having said that, I would like to see some more content and adding a bit more to the "dead" zones would be a very good thing so I would give this a /provisionallysigned

I wouldn't want it to be too common, though. I don't want it to be a WoW or LotRO where you plan out all the quests to do in an area at once... I rather like the mission system as is o.o.

I think Kitsune covered things pretty well.

As for collection items? I think making them only available to the collector would benefit well... Just me?

I'm pretty sure outdoor missions can be designed so they can't be stolen, griefed, camped or tampered with in any way by other players. It might limit the choice of possible missions a bit but that might be the price we have to pay.

For example, missions to take out Archon X would have to be partially instanced so that only the mission holder's team can fight the target once he's been "flushed out".

I wonder if it would be possible to create an instance on an outdoors map which would basically be a cube formed of war-wall forcefields. When you enter it, you are in an instanced part of the larger map where enemies only appear for you. Other players can't even see the forcefields and won't enter the instance spawned for you if they move into the same area. Hm. Difficult to explain but I hope the general idea is clear enough.

If that is impossible we could get a small door mission instead, to take out the target. Basically just one room or so - preferably relatively unique and relevant to the mission. For example, if we are hunting down a Vahzilok who is kidnapping people we'd find him in a sewer room with cages filled with his still-living victims. If we're looking for a "rogue" Crey scientist suspected of experimenting on Rikti technology, we find him in a small laboratory map with lots of Rikti technology lying around. Etc.

I encountered the netiquette of camp checks in Everquest, which was my first MMO. I came late to the game, I will say.

Spawns which dropped popular loot, or simply spawns hunted for xp, were all public. Instanced dungeons came along later, and were a specialized case to boot. Everything was "open world" - that is all dungeons, opponents, missions, etc. were visible to everyone and anyone could interact with them.

So it became typical to wait at given points on the maps and wait for opponents to spawn, or especially rare spawns involved in quests for very rare loot. It was good etiquette, when entering a popular map, to broadcast "camp check" - ie requesting that players camping specific sites reply that they were camping such and such a location.

Mind you, this was all player-developed protocol, so you had to know the slang for said sites. And similarly, you had to know the spawn sites, so if the southern end of the gnoll mound in the Karanas didn't show up on the list, you had a fair chance that you could go hunt there without someone claiming you were infringing their camp.

Of course, there was no enforced rule that one had to respect camps, but most players went along with it, and storms of controversy would break about the heads of those who didn't.

I have once - and once only - been street sweeping in a given zone (Terra Volta, forsooth) in this game and had someone try to argue that I should not hunt there because he was camping the area. I responded that this was not a custom in CoX and that if he looked around he would see more spawns popping up than either he or I could deplete if we fought non stop and never lost. This was many years ago, and I assume he came in from a game where camping was the norm.

Hated it in EQ, and would hate to see it sneak into CoX.

With COH being the only MMO I've ever played I can't really relate to spawn camping.

Back in the day I used to sit on a specific rooftop waiting for the Paladin construction to begin.
This was back when people would complain that it wouldn't spawn if someone was close by. Even though that was proven wrong, the sentiment of Anti-Camping in this game was strong.

I'm going to borrow an idea a friend of mine had, and put it here.

The scenario follows normally, you get a mission to coax that big bad Boss, and you go on a hunt, or a series of open zone hunts or instances, finally spawning your Boss on the open zone map. What everyone else sees when they look at him, is simply a named Boss, but they cannot unintentionally defeat him because to engage him in battle, you must click on him, talk to him and be taken into your personalized instance to actually fight the Boss.

When you click on the Boss to fight him, you're "pulled" into an instance that essentially looks like the open zone you were just in, however because you actually spawned the Boss and did all the hunts/instance that came before and were meant to spawn the Boss, you get some advantages for fighting the Boss that others who may fight him will not get.

You will also get the quest-bonus when you finally defeat the Boss which other people will not get if they simply fought a Boss that was not spawned for them through the quest itself.

Heck the Boss itself could be "masked" by wearing a "normal" and innocent costume up to the moment when you "spawn" him, so that essentially to everyone who does not have the quest and who has not yet spawned the end-Boss, he'd look just like a normal civ.

I remember being rather trashed for suggesting this. Nice to see some more positive people this time around!

It's really just a question of how you design the missions. I think there was several examples in CO that showed off how it CAN be done and the same goes for a lot of other MMOs. Entering an instance when you're "supposedly" in Steel canyon or whatever feels VERY outdated and breaks the rather weak illusion and immersion of the game. You might even go as far as saying this isn't really an MMO, it's an 8 player game where you choose "servers" (e.g. missions) to play on in a game-like world.

Funny thing is, some people that don't like this idea are the same that claim they actually like hunt and patrol missions (and apparently THAT crap is ok to force upon the rest of us).

Also, it would definitely force the devs to come up with some new game/mission mechanics instead of the oooold defeat boss OR click glowie OR lead hossie out OR combined. We definitely need more mission variety even if I admittedly hate talk-to's and other none-action missions.

I think this would be a awesome idea to perk up dead zones like boomtown, dark astoria and creys folly.

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I was talking with somebody about this a bit ago. It would be nice for zones to be a bit more "alive," more than just stopping a purse-snatcher or such. The reason I love the steel canyon firefights, no matter what level, is that it's a way to do something to "help" the city, do something heroic, that's totally spontaneous.

Some that I'd wanted to see: enemy group is doing a 'lookout' emote outside a store. defeat them, and you get a pop-up offering you to go inside and help the clerk. This spawns an instanced mission at the door. You go inside, and find a robbery in progress: rescue the clerks, defeat the robbers, and save the day!

You see a lone NPC boss crossing the city using a travel powers. If you engage them, they run to a hideout: if you are nearby when they enter, you are offered the chance to follow them inside. Inside, you engage in a fight- if they get hurt, they call on some hired goons. Defeat them, and cops show up to recover the loot they'd stolen.

You see squad cars in a circle, cops in the middle, defending themselves as waves of foes assault them; wipe out enough waves, and they thank you.

Hostage situation: you see a negotiator on a megaphone talk to him, he asks you to help. The building door becomes an instanced mission available. You go inside: aggroed foes run to an alarm, which fails the mission. Stop the foes without sounding the alarm, and you can get to the hostage, where a foe goes to a switch that can zap/explode/whichever the hostage. Finish with the hostage in good shape, and they thank you. Outside, the cops cheer as you exit.

Redside:

You see some armed guards escorting a rich dude. take out his guards, and he runs to a building. You can go inside, wipe out more guards, and he offers to bribe you, which you get in a mission end bonus.

You see a heroic NPC outside a building, in a bad disguise. you attack them, and bomb placements spawn outside the building. NPC's run out do stop your bombs...wipe them out, with your bombs intact, and the building 'burns' ala steel canyon. Waves of foes run out of the building as you are awarded for shutting down a secret base.

You see bouncers outside a door. take them out, and you can get inside the building. Inside, you find some rich folks at a party, and guards. Defeat the guards, whilst kidnapping all the guests, and you are rewarded.

You see a mad scientist snooping around. Engage him, he runs inside- you are offered the chance to follow. Inside, you fight his robots/monsters/etc, and face him. take him out, and his invention glows. You can collect this for a reward.

Anyways, that's the kind of thing I'd like to see. Stuff where you react to the environment, rather than just clicking that static guy, going to a place that could be instanced anywhere in the game. Something where instead, it's all visibly tied to something happening at that moment in the city.

It was called street hunting or street sweeping. People used to do it all the time, to the point of neglecting the mission content the devs had written. The devs didn't like that, so they offered a couple of carrots (mission-complete bonuses, half debt in instances). It worked so well that no one does the "open world" missions anymore.

Maybe if they removed the increase in debt for dying outdoors more people would sweep.