'Cooking seems to be getting a huge boost with plenty of new fish to catch, and fishermen (whose skill will finally be able to exceed 100.0 Grandmaster and reach 120.0 Legendary level with power scrolls) will have plenty in terms of variety of new fish to catch.'
Uhm, no.
Cooking finally gets some recipes again which make it useful after they neglected it for the first 10 or so years. UO is one of the few games with fully systems cooking/taste id/forensics which are TOTALLY useless.
Actually, I meant to say "with plenty of new recipes..." Silly me was clearly thinking too far ahead in that sentence and didn't catch it on a second pass.
However, while I agree taste id, forensics, camping are totally useless skills, cooking is useful if tertiary to the skillsets. There are foods that offer buffs that are good in various instances. Now, can they do better? Yes. And my understanding of the town hall -- subject to change as the designs do -- is that there will be some useful recipes in this lot.
They added some small recipes to coking without ever overworking the fully system. We actually have hunger levels (not sure about thirst) but except for regaining stamina cooked food is useless (same as the peculiar fish which give buffs for 5 seconds)
Well, truthfully, no game should ever penalize you for not eating. Maybe give you a bit of a bonus perhaps (though then you'll have the reverse analysts who will say that it's the same thing because you don't perform as well when you're hungry). This is one area where game should not mimic real life, IMO.
Now we get some buffs only from the fish leaving the rest of cooking still untouched (probably)
Again, my understanding is these foods from the new recipes will provide buffs, but I won't swear to it either.
Cooking could use its own booster with harvesting/brewing and so on (check out what freeshards have on ideas and steal it if you cannot come up with anything)
Well... harvesting/brewing/et cetera are certainly good ideas, and I agree, a booster that focused solely on minor systems and giving them some love would be just fine with me.
However, I advise mostly against checking out free shards for ideas. Maybe check them out to see what they're doing and work from there, but honestly, just because something's done on a free shard doesn't make it a good implementation, a proper implementation, or even a good idea. But that's a whole different debate.
As for longetivity I see the booster more like a paid enhancement of gameplay and not as in eq2 a fully system. It adds to the gaming experience, but is just something which should have been added anyway.
Certainly there is that side of the argument... is what we're being presented "expansion" quality material? I will say that on one hand, the smooth movement being all-or-nothing (meaning we all benefit from it regardless of expansion) is a good thing. I am curious if it affects the current boats, but I'm going to presume it does.
The sea quests, sea encounters, and so on... honestly, I think the scale of it is probably a bit more than live-patch material. Now, I know we've had live patches in the past that have offered tons more, and I'd love to see us return to those days, but for the here and now, if they can perfect the booster format, I'll be okay with that too. As long as they don't completely abandon live content in favor of boosters.
How to keep boosters updated .. uhm .. you don't.. you just add to the game without forgetting what systems are there and instead of throwing new ones on top of each other enhance the old ones. (how many different questsystems do we now have ? 2 or 3?)
I'm not suggesting keeping it updated per se, what I mean is keeping the stuff added with expansions (booster or otherwise) open ended so that they're easy to add things to.
How many systems do we hear "It's not as simple as copy and pasting?" for? I know they said that frequently about gardening. In all honesty, once a core system is in place, it absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, should be nearly as simple as copy and pasting. The balance issues should be playtested and adapted, but any core system should have the ability to be updated and added to with a fair amount of simplicity. If someone wants to add a new recipe to cooking, it should be as simple as ingredients needed, product produced, add the recipe to whatever spawn system, and voila (obviously there'd be a proper check-list in place to ensure all aspects are handled).
There should never be a core system that adding new things to should be a huge process. Huge processes should be things like new AI systems, new types of quests (not new quest systems, which should all come from the same core -- which, as you rightly point out, they don't currently). UI revamps.
As for keeping it fun and interesting.... MMOs are now here for 13+ years and most of them are still static garbage with one static spawn after the other. Why not have different set of spawners in some places. For one week it could spawn Lizardmen. If a certain number is killed, with next serverup undead could have taken control over the area and so on. Add some 'bosses' (unknowns) sometimes to those spawns. Make the world more unknows instead of a static farming game.
I agree with you, which is why I even went to suggesting adapting the champ spawn system to boat encounters. Now, I haven't laid out a full design doc on it -- and maybe I should as a future feature on GameBlog -- but essentially it's to allow for some more dynamic spawning going on, and to keep the system challenging and interesting.
Themeparks cannot change their spawns at willb ecause of quests, but UO which does not have such things is way too static still.
Completely agreed. What I'd like to see them do over time is to go through the dungeons and make them more dynamic feeling. I have some suggestions in mind, but I'll save those for another day.
If we only have those few developers then be more innovative even with the small ressources. If a system they introduce is messed up, that is nothing new and players are used to it anyway, but at least try....
Well, I'll tell you, the new treasure hunt system is an excellent example of a dynamic system (that needs to be fixed, but makes the system truly random). I agree... they should look for creative ways to make it seem like they've done more and provide systems that allow them to either provide excellent content through dynamic spawns, or put systems in place that are easy to add to.
I mean, let's take SA for example. It *should* be easy for them to add new items to either of the puzzle rooms to encourage use out of them. Right now, they're both pretty well dead because most everyone is done with them. Me, I still think I should do them more often, but, you know, I don't. However, if they swapped out, or added new stuff, or changed puzzles, or whatever every now and then, there'd be renewed interest.
