Two features this game desperately needs

rebelscum58

Sidekicking, and instances scaling to team size. That is all.

To explain: Sidekicking, so named because it was first introduced in City of Heroes way back when, is what happens in all three of Cryptic's past games where you can join a team and then be scaled up or down to that team's level. Thus my level 53 GWF could go do lowbie quests with a friend who just joined the game without massively overpowering anything because of being high level. Or that same lowbie friend could come join me and still be useful.

Instance scaling on the other hand should be self-explanatory but I'll explain anyway. At present, if I have a full team of five and roll into any random instanced quest, it'll spawn the same group of 3-4 weak guys it'd get solo and my team will just trample over them without even missing a step. It needs to spawn more guys for more players, or upgrade some (or all, depending on team size) of them to elites like you get in 5-man dungeons, or something.

Let me do that whole 'multiplayer' part of the MMO whenever and wherever I feel like, please. I don't want to be forced into the same tiny fraction of the game's content all the time just because I like playing multiplayer games with other people.

lerdocix

rebelscum58 wrote: »

Let me do that whole 'multiplayer' part of the MMO whenever and wherever I feel like, please. I don't want to be forced into the same tiny fraction of the game's content all the time just because I like playing multiplayer games with other people.

So don't play theme park mmos and try some sandboxes.
WoW, this, Allods, Tera, Aion, all of them are about playing tiny fraction of games content all the time, because they are level dependent.

Go play proper sandbox mmo and do whatever you want, whenever you want with whoever you want. Mortal Online, crappy Darkfall, to some extend even fallen earth, mmos similar to Ultima Online, these are the games you are looking for.
And I'm pretty sure GW2 have exactly what you are looking for, except scaling someone upwards.

oghier

Some form of sidekicking would be fantastic. I am sure it requires significant dev time, but it multiplies the content available at cap. It's one of the many things GW2 got right (and one of the few good ideas they had in D3). Let's hope PW considers this.

Then again, I have no idea what the long-term development plans are for this game. It would be nice to see that laid out.

rebelscum58

lerdocix wrote: »

So don't play theme park mmos and try some sandboxes.
WoW, this, Allods, Tera, Aion, all of them are about playing tiny fraction of games content all the time, because they are level dependent.

What I don't get though, is why is this considered ok? Why is it acceptable that there's almost never a reason to actually play with other people in a game that's meant to be multiplayer? Especially when it was proven over nine years ago that sidekicking in a level-based game much like this one does work and is a good idea. And not just for the social aspects either, if they set it up right you could use much the same idea for things like scaling yourself down to play (or replay, if you want) content you've outlevelled.

Besides, it's not like it'd somehow damage the experience if you chose to not take advantage. You could still play it like the traditional mostly singleplayer game if you wanted to.


As for significant dev time, Both CO and STO have the feature and to my knowledge the base engine of all three games is the same so one would think they could use those as a jumping off point to get a headstart at least. Though personally I'd want them to not just copy from those games because the scaling in both of them is a little wonky.