Well, this past weekend was spent getting a little EverQuest 2 in. Came home from work Friday and saw a small postcard in the mailbox from SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) saying my EQ2 account was reactivated and that I should come back and check it out (the fishing bit, naturally I decided to give it a nibble). So the downloading of the client ensued, taking till Saturday to complete.

I had stopped playing EQ2 some months ago, Octoberish of last year, and had missed out on the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. This expansion was now enabled for me so I got to check out the Fae and their evil counterpart (added in later, I think in May). Being a fairy might not suite most guys, what with the fancy wings and all, but I really liked them. The glide racial was a lot of fun, don’t think I can stop using it now that I have it. But as far as playing goes, I just don’t know if I can hold on – the only way would be to find a young guild with a lot of low level players to hang out with. I could play on my older character, but the time away has made him a real stranger to me – I no longer remember what I was doing with him, or why, or where I was going. Starting over seems the only real option.

Aside from some EQ2 play this weekend, I tried coming up with more ideas for character development in RPGs. The main focus was growth of power, and how to display it. The most widely used examples today are levels, skill points, and equipment. There has only been one game (I think two actually, the other being a smaller MMO, but I don’t think it has lasted?) that has added to this type of growth, with aging. That game is Fable and while merely cosmetic I think the physical change of your character based on the growth they have achieved is very powerful. I think Warhammer Online is going this route too, and I think I even remember EQ2 was going to try that years ago before it’s release. Equipment has usually been the basis for visual power, sometimes spells that give off visual effects, but it should be the physical appearance of your character that grows – for it is the character that has become powerful, not just the equipment.

Now, the equipment I can see staying as a sign of power, but what about skill points/levels? This is the part that really needs addressing, but how? Levels and skill points have become a staple of the RPG – players have to gauge their progress somehow. I could say something like experience takes over, is gained through doing all sorts of things, but that would just be skill points with another name (essentially). Going back to one of my previous posts, why have them at all? Players gain their abilities through adventuring about, helping or hurting people and things. As they gain their abilities and equipment they begin to visually appear stronger, both in physical growth and in equipment. As I heard on one of the Warhammer Online trailers, if someone looks like they can kill you – they probably can. That is how it should be.

Taking on the no levels/skill points theme – how would players know if monsters/quests were appropriate for them? This is something I’d like to see solved by ability based encounter spawns (internally we’d have a measure of ‘levels’ based on number of abilities/types of abilities to try and best suite a ‘level’ of encounter to the player), so the player could naturally adventure about and not worry – they should always have a challenging encounter, but not one that’s too hard or too easy. I think that works similarly to Oblivion, where spawns are based on your level – more or less. Which brings me to something else I’d like to see, dynamic spawning – spawns based on the players in the area. Static spawns may be great for farming, but that’s not something I really want. When a player is adventuring about they shouldn’t be able to see all the monsters standing about in a field. What should happen is rustling about in the underbrush near the path, followed with an ambush by wolves or something. I’m sure something like this is possible, and would be great. I can imagine traveling down a path, just to have some merchant running and screaming toward me, bandits on their heels – just to have the bandits see me and decide to have some fun, after dispatching them the merchant rewards me with an item they were going to keep — or perhaps I join with the bandits and kill the merchant, taking all the money he had left on him. That encounter would be more or less one time only per character I think, maybe encounters similar to it in other areas, or encounters stemming from that one (meet the merchant again later, meet the bandits again or have the bandits rat you out as well and gain punishment for your crime, etc). Vanguard had planned on doing something like this earlier I think, but unfortunately it didn’t happen, Wish too had plans for more dynamic spawns. I’d like to see the same for instanced dungeons, no static spawns. Once you clear out a dungeon you shouldn’t be able to go back and see the exact same enemies you killed. There should at least be different monsters, with a story behind it (after you slew the last gang of thieves, a pack of wolves came and decided to make the cave their den). Having flexibility in the spawns and stories behind areas would really add to their re-playability and longevity I think.