Curse

Keure · Jun 12, 2005, 11:37 AM // 11:37

One of the suggestion posts made me remember how much fun Aeon of Strife-type maps were in Warcraft 3 (famous ones were Defense of the Ancients and Tides of Blood). I then thought that some ideas from these maps could work to provide a base for a new (recycled? stolen? Whatever.) way to PvP. Before I do that, though, maybe I ought to explain how these maps worked.

Two factions battle it out on an evenly divided map. Each faction has a heavily-fortified main base that constantly pumps out waves of troops whose sole purpose in life is to make a suicide rush towards the main base of the opposing side. These bases cannot be taken solely with the efforts of the constantly produced troops - offensively and defensively the bases are way too powerful. Your character is allied with one faction and your goal is to help your faction obliterate the opposing faction's base. In general, as the game progresses the offense increases much more than the defense eventually allowing enough momentum to let the fully-powered characters and a faction army to overrun the opposing side.

The pathways between the main bases take the form of lanes. You may have three lanes connecting the bases, you may have more - just not one lane. Lanes are large and far enough apart that most offensive spells cannot reach from one lane to another. Lanes have outposts that belong to a faction. These outposts are strong defensively and offensively - in particular, a small number enemy troops wandering alone into an outpost are obliterated. These are also destroyable and may produce troops.

Your characters do not start off at full strength. You gain XP by staying alive and in range of the dying units of the opposing side. When you die, you are automatically resurrected after a certain duration of time (what influences the duration varies depending on the map).

Your character also gets income as the game progresses. Income can be spent on improving your character with both temporary and permanent upgrades (permanent meaning for the duration of the game) or purchasing mercenaries. Some maps allow you to upgrade the power of your faction's constantly-produced troops.

Using the above as a base to make a Guild Wars PvP mode:

Yes, I didn't mention certain gameplay mechanics present in the above - namely those I thought shouldn't be implemented in those maps (like making player characters into one-man siege unit demigods through item whoring, having your kill rate affect your income, etc.).

However, I think we can get something nice and Guild Wars friendly by refining the above.

Because the idea I have in mind involves a large combat map with lanes that all need to be monitored, there has to be some way to shift the view away from your character to another point on the map that the character's faction should be able to see (You know how you can click on a party member's bar while you're dead to see what they're doing? It'd be the same thing, except with certain NPCs available for that viewing).

Bases and outposts would be manned by high-powered NPCs/mages standing in powerful obelisks/mursaat defensive thing/whatever you want. The idea is that these bases would *not* be trivial to take. Ideally, it would require both some large number of faction troops and a few characters to take these down.

Why this idea in the first place?

I'm a big fan of diverse ways of playing. Knowing that PvP is the endgame in Guild Wars, I would like to see more ways through which PvP can be conducted. This one, in particular, would be strategically quite different (not saying better) than the other forms of PvP right now. The inclusion of a) perpetually spawning allied and enemy NPC armies whose power is important in winning the game and b) the need for the players to split up in order to manage all the lanes really changes stuff around. A basic example would be that the effectiveness of fire elementalists skyrockets; another would be that warriors could actually tank usefully.

The gameplay/skill system isn't built for something like this, you'll force people into making builds a certain way...

Yes yes, this idea isn't perfect - personally I'd say it's pretty unrefined and I'm most likely missing quite a few things to make it workable (for example,
how does one easily control buffing/healing of faction troops? I hadn't really thought this one through...). Even if it's not the greatness of Tombs action maybe it can be made into something fun.

Heck, I'd be happy if this post makes some people could think more about possible gameplay ideas that are fun and strategic, yet different enough from the rest of the PvP and PvE.

Congratulations on presenting an overly complicated idea that'll probably never ever be implemented for various reasons.

Yeah, yeah, hush you.