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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

QotD: Factions and PvE

World of Warcraft has single-handedly made me hate the idea of factions in MMORPGS.
I was reading this post on Corgi Island about the idea of cross-faction raiding in WoW, using RealID. (Fun new WoW blog, BTW, if you're interested.) I posted a comment which I am re-posting here with some elaboration.

Gloria mentioned in her post how silly it is that she can't muster all of her Real Life friends together to run a raid, especially given declining populations in WoW, added to the fact that the "War" in Warcraft has been largely absent for the past couple expansions anyway. World PvP is dead, partly because of the population and partly because of changes made by the development team. *cough* Southshore/Hillsbrad *cough*

I've heard The Secret World has (will have) inter-faction PvE. With three factions, supposedly PvP can be more easily balanced because the weaker sides and always gang up on the strongest sides. (Can we call that the DAoC Doctrine?) But then, when the shit hits the fan in the PvE story (Lovecraftian horrors consuming the world?), players of different factions can put aside their differences and work together for the greater good. This is something I've always felt was missing in WoW; and it was worse in Rift, where I always felt the two factions had no business fighting each other when their world was facing an existential threat.

3 comments:

  1. Agree on the Rift thing. That's always been the Achille's Heel of the storyline, imho.

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    1. As someone who lives for the lore and story in these games, broken, or even just thin, lore can be a real deal breaker for me. I love the Rift soul system, with its mix-and-match abiliy trees; but I had no real sense of my characters while playing it, the way I did with my WoW toons or my STO captains and crews.

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  2. Agree that despite it's mechanical polish Rift just lacked a certain something. I never really cared about what I was doing when I was on quests, even less so that most MMOs. The whole "We are in the middle of a freaking apocalypse, but hell let's keep fighting anyway" nonsensical premise for the factions pulled me out of the lore from the very start. But more than that, very few of the NPCs I encountered had any real personality.

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