Take on the Trinity

Maypocalypse

This morning I am struggling to get my act together and actually start writing.  Why you might ask?  Well I have been sitting here dwelling on just how much crap has to get done this month.  My wife is a school teacher, which means there are two absolutely hellacious times of the year for their spouses…  the beginning and the end.  Right now I am trying to make myself available for whatever she might need to be done, which means I am going to miss a lot of regularly scheduled playtime.  Additionally we have several landmines in our schedule throughout the month as we are expected to attend various weddings, graduation events, and mothers day all lumped into the mix.

This weekend for example I really deeply need to crash hard in a vegetative state on the sofa.  However instead we are going to run all over half of the state as we attend a big graduation event on Saturday, and then attempt to juggle our Mothers Sunday… making sure no one feels slighted in the process.  Thankfully I already have my Mother taken care of gift wise, but at some point soon… likely tonight we need to go shopping and figure out what to do for my wife’s two mothers.  I expect to end up a rather grumpy man by the time everything is said and done.  Right now I am just hoping that I am back Saturday night in time to record the podcast.

Take on the Trinity

Screenshot_20140411_214633 Yesterday I spent some time chatting with Syl and among the many topics was scattered in a brief discussion about roles in MMOs and more specifically the trinity.  I have long been a defender of the trinity, but even I fully admit that it is deeply flawed in a few ways.  The problem is that the game that try to completely remove it… end up with a chaotic mess when it comes to group based combat.  Games like Elder Scrolls Online have tried to blur the lines a bit, but it still very much requires a handful of things to get through a dungeon successfully.  We have not really landed on an ideal solution to replace the trinity with something else.  The moment you replace it however… you more than likely end up with a new kind of trinity.

Somewhere in this conversation I had an idea.  In a game like the Elder Scrolls Online you meet along the way a cast of really interesting and varied characters.  What if you collected these a sort of unofficial followers within your sphere of influence.  Games like SWTOR do this sort of things, but very much in a subservient “pet like” manner.  What would happen if you could call upon them for assistance, but instead of them following you around in a zone…  you assumed control of them.  The idea is that basically you would be able to become any of these characters temporarily, assuming their abilities and hot bars and by extension the role each of them fills.  Where I am getting at is if the party needs a tank, you just rummage through your NPC contacts and summon the spirit of the one that is a tank.

In Everquest 2 they have a very similar system to this, but it was put in place specifically for the dungeon maker system.  It allowed you to collect a series of avatars by adventuring out in the world and then run player created dungeons as these characters.  This would take this same concept but apply it to every place you might need a specific kind of character.  The idea is that each of the avatars would be a balanced but not quite optimized version of that role.  Essentially just “good enough” to get by with, but nowhere near as good as a player could craft the same role.  But it would serve a lot of purposes.  Firstly anyone could truly take over and heal, tank, crowd control or whatever role happened to be missing from a party.  Secondly they would serve as a kind of “try before you buy” for interesting mechanics.

For players familiar with the MOBA genre, this would be very similar to the Champions that you collect or purchase.  Each one would have unique strengths and weaknesses, and be able to fill specific roles in the party.  However the idea is that each one of these while interesting to play can be easily improved upon by the player.  However each one would be able to showcase a specific game-play mechanic or style, allowing players to see if they like that sort of thing before going through the lengthy and expensive process of recreating it themselves.  You obviously would need to have a smattering of character to tail to different player tastes, but it would almost become a new meta game as you go around the world influencing NPCs and collecting them into your “stable”.  There is a moment in the original Rift cinematic trailer where they visualize a player switching specs… and I figure switching avatars would have a similar look and feel.

Incoming Obsession

image I woke up this morning and saw an email waiting there notifying me that I had been added to the ArcheAge alpha.  I have been watching this game evolve with great interest, but have been on the fence about taking the buy in plunge.  Right now I have lots of games that I want to be playing, firstly I still have so much that I want to do in ESO.  However now that I am in I know I will be playing this as my “off night” game.  For awhile I had been dabbling with the notion of joining the Alliance of Awesome people in their Dominion Wildstar guild, however with this new game being piled on I doubt I will at this point.  In related news… the transition from Reddit to Anook for the Alliance of Awesome community site has been pretty seamless.  Folks are slowly starting to pick up momentum and trickle in.  I have done a piss poor job of promoting this on the Stalwart site but that will be changing.

For a bit I was considering just trashing Stalwart Online entirely and going to a Nook for our site, however I have backed away from that notion.  For starters I think it might be a bit too traumatic for people to have a second forum ripped away from them in a year.  It was around this time last year I think that I made the transition from the original Stalwart forums to the new Vanilla based one.  Secondly…  I really want people using Anook, but all directed in the same place.  As a compromise we have considered carving out guild specific areas on the Alliance of Awesome site, that way we are all in the same shared space and not fragmented off on a bunch of individual sub sites.  The big step in unifying the guilds will still be to transition to all using the same voice software…  but that has been a hill I was not ready to die upon.  However it is still very much one that I need to address.

ArcheAge definitely gives me something to look forward to tonight when I get home.  If you are in game and playing, ping me and let me know how to get a hold of you.  I feel like there is already a significant population of people I know in game right now.  I have severe reservations about the game, but after reading Liores post about what exactly can pvp flag you yesterday… I feel a bit more at ease.  I am still a damned dirty care bear, and as such try to stay the hell away from PVP.  That said I still very much enjoy my time spent in Cyrodil and want to get more of that happening soon.  Now that we have this handy dandy event calendar… thinking maybe about penciling in next Wednesday night for a grand Cyrodil excursion.  In the mean time I will be horribly conflicted as to what game I will be playing on a given night.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #ArcheAge #Trinity #AllianceOfAwesome

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