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Old 07-31-2016, 02:14 PM
Jacksparow Jacksparow is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: United States
Jacksparow has just set foot in the Tutorial Tower
Default End Game Content

Quite often a lot of video games I have found fail to retain their end-game correctly and I would like to have a discussion on what I feel would make Wyvern have a very successful endgame in itself.

End Game in multiple games I've played is done very differently. I wont delve into Player vs. Player (PvP) as I don't feel PvP to be a true end game ideology because anyone can create an environment where PvP is acceptable at any level or stage in a game.

This is how a few games do their endgame and the flaws I see in them.


World of Warcraft
I'll start with the game I have been currently playing. World of Warcraft revolves it's endgame around increasingly difficult raid bosses. They release a new raid roughly every 4-6 months give or take. This is nice because it gives a stable new content release periodically to keep their player base interested. But the major flaw in this is that because the armor and weapon increase from the new bosses is so significant that any previous boss is made obsolete. This is even more significant when a new expansion is done. This make doing older content unnecessary aside from those who like how gear looks or wants a mount. I find this to be the largest flaw of WoW as the content creators for those older areas have their hard work essentially sidelined for people to not care about anymore.

Guild Wars
Guild Wars (this is the original not GW2) is a game I also played quite a bit. It was a game that had it's max level being 20 and no higher even with new expansions. Which I feel was the right way to go about a video game. However it had no increase in how gear was done, and getting the strongest stats and items could take a day or less worth of effort. This made it so there became no challenge in the game. But content from all expansions was worth doing because it revolved around getting more cosmetically appealing items from each expansion. The final area form each expansion had bosses/zones worth doing because the materials you collected from them were still seen as valuable.

Runescape
This is the game I feel does endgame correctly. Every boss in this game is worth killing because all the items from them are seen as valuable in their own sense. I wont delve into the skilling aspect of Runescape because that's where it does MMOs wrong in my opinion. I don't think you should have to play a game for 100+ hours to reach the end game content but I don't think you should be able to do it in 1 day as Guild Wars is. But I digress. Runescape has an excellent way of making it so that newer bosses buff up older items instead of replacing them. By doing this you essentially make it so that players of all skills are able to have a previous end-game that isn't obsolete.



How I would do an endgame for Wyvern.

My idea on how an endgame could be done.

Create an item that is wanted but not compeltely over-the-top powerful. An example I'll use is resistance rings because they are commonly used by everyone. My thought is that if an area was made challenging enough and into a miniquest requiring multiple aspects of work. I've suggested before a boss that needs both melee and magic users to kill. (I don't think creating a ranged (Archer type) required boss would work due to how resistances are done on monsters from my understanding). But making a boss need a ranged attack and melee attack to kill is doable. This would make a group miniquest area. The reward would be resistance rings that go up to 30% resistance. It's not groundbreaking different but enough to make the min/max players happy to have an upgrade. The Boss in area 1 would drop a random ring from fire/water/air/petri/acid/magic. This would make the bosses loot be randomly good because one of these rings would end up being more valuable then the others creating it a chance reward. Then further along the road there could be another boss area or a secondary boss for this area that requires you to go deeper in the cavern and do a more complex map. The reward here would be a single non randomized item that would upgrade your ring to 35%. This would be a more stable reward but unlike the previous boss which could have an item worth more but as a 1/6 chance of dropping.

There are many more ways an upgrade type system could work. But I feel this is the best way of retaining old content and keeping everything viable instead of having players see older content as something they can skip to get to new and better items.


Feel free to give your own insight on how endgame should be done and what it is you like about other games and don't like about them.